Reading Beyond the "Popular Posts"

Hey, friends!

I just want to remind you that there are MANY resources on the blog that don't appear in the right-side column as "Popular Posts." Below are some of my favorites.

If you want to make your science classes more effective, you NEED to read these three posts about inquiry:
A Private Universe - It will change your life!
A Private Universe - Second in a Series
Teaching Science Through Inquiry - Last in the Series

Thinking ahead to next year? Consider using Planbook as your very convenient online planning book/tool. I guarantee it will make your life easier with its pull-down lists of standards and its calendar format.

White Flour - the Book and the Video is personally meaningful to me, as a southerner and the mom of a missionary.

I think you'll love Booksource's Classroom Library Organizer to keep track of all those books that are so important to your students.

Staying with the book theme, ReadKiddoRead is James Patterson's initiative "dedicated to making kids readers for life." You'll find videos, lists of suggested books by level and genre, suggestions for lesson plans, discussion groups, and more!

I love the books I wrote about in the "Cures for the Common Core Blues" series: 

• Irena's Jars of Secrets
• Pink and Say
• My Name is Maria Isabel
• Tomás and the Library Lady
• Inch by Inch
• The Keeping Quilt
• Goin' Someplace Special

Be on the lookout for more of these!

Remember to use the "Labels" list to find posts related to particular ideas and subjects. Don't forget to follow the blog, and have a great weekend!

Book-Love

I've written before about my daughter's book blog; her latest post is one that warms the heart of a teacher/Mom/Gran-Nan who loves to read and wants the children in her life to love reading, too. 

Joanna describes how she read John Green's The Fault in Our Stars at school while her students read their independent books: "My students delighted in watching me read it, as I laughed out loud, (and) shared lines and paragraphs with them. (They) could hardly wait for me to finish so they could fight over who would check it out next from our school library. I finally felt, with my reading of The Fault in Our Stars, that I could at last show my students what it means to fall head over heels in love with a book -- with the characters, with their predicaments, with the plot ups and downs."

Of course, Joanna's blog is just one of many that review great books for young people and adults. If you're especially looking for teachers to follow who are dedicated to instilling a love of reading, I suggest that you start with:

Sarah Mulhern Gross, contributor at The Learning Network at the New York Times, who blogs at The Reading Zone, and is @thereadingzone on Twitter, and

Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer, whose Twitter ID is @donalynbooks. Her Facebook page is also called The Book Whisperer.

I'm looking forward to reading this book, and perhaps seeing the movie, which is currently in pre-production.

Roll ~ Say ~ Keep Games

So yesterday, at the school where I work as an Academic Specialist, I got yet another great idea FROM one of the teachers. She had been to a PD session and came back talking about something she heard there. A quick Google, and one thing led to another. Yep, another teacher theft moment! :)

I'm so thankful that great teachers share their ideas with the rest of us, and I'm especially thankful today for Kathy Gursky and her website, The School Bell. 

Kathy puts me in mind of the awesome Cherry Carl because her site is packed with so many good ideas for activities, graphics, games, and projects. I want to show you just one piece of her "Dolch Kit."

If you teach primary students, you know that a huge key to fluent reading is knowing sight words well. Kathy has downloadable sets of flash cards, phrase cards, and mini-flashcards that are perfect for playing "Roll ~ Say ~ Keep!"

I downloaded all 11 sets of Kathy's mini word cards and adapted the game board slightly. You can download my board below. I printed, mounted on construction paper, and laminated. Our 1st grade teacher and SPED teacher are all set to let their students play a new game practice essential sight words...shhh! ;-)

An Excellent Find: E is for Explore!

You are going to LOVE the site I have to share with you tonight! I came across it via a science activity posted to Pinterest, and was I ever amazed and delighted when I followed the link to Erin Bittman's blog, E is for Explore!

Erin blends graphic design, her original career, with her current path toward becoming a teacher, to "develop unique learning activities, search the internet and compile additional great ideas from other sources." Her site is chock-full of manipulatives and activities useful across the curriculum, from literacy to math and engineering, and she provides easy links to sites that she shares.

Since Easter is coming soon, I'll show you images from one of Erin's posts, wherein she shares activities from inferencing to fractions using Plastic Eggs: 

Great, huh? Click on over to Erin's blog, where "all 'E is for Explore' activities conform to state common core curriculum standards."

And you're welcome! :-)

Why Inquiry? RAD

I met Dr. Judy Willis a few years ago, when she presented her RAD ideas to science teachers and professional developers at Middle Tennessee State University. In order to share her research at later PD sessions, I summarized it, and I want to share the handout that accompanied my sessions with you. (It was sent to her for approval first.)

Her story is unique: "Dr. Judy Willis, a board-certified neurologist in Santa Barbara, California, has combined her 15 years as a practicing adult and child neurologist with her teacher education training and years of classroom experience. After five years teaching at Santa Barbara Middle School, and ten years of classroom teaching all together, in 2010, Dr. Willis reluctantly left teaching middle school students and dedicated herself full-time to teaching educators."

Why Inquiry? 

All children are born scientists who learn about the world around them through exploration and discovery. 

Inquiry learning is twice as efficient as “drill and kill.” It builds content knowledge, understanding, and reasoning. 

• It increases students’ engagement so they develop knowledge conceptually 
• Students construct understanding through investigations rather than by rote memory. 
• Students develop reasoning skills that enable them to handle open-ended tasks, to think creatively, and to make decisions rationally. 

Even when students are rigorously taught the facts, they don’t necessarily develop the reasoning skills they need to succeed.

I. Lessons should be organized to engage students’ brains in order for them to acquire content knowledge. 

Our planning should revolve around this question: “How can my students use inquiry to acquire knowledge and develop understanding so that knowledge can be applied to other areas of their learning and their lives?” 

During inquiry activities, YOU facilitate as YOUR STUDENTS make meaning for themselves; you may need to provide direct instruction at multiple points during an inquiry-based unit.

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The goal of our teaching is that acquired information gets to the conscious, cognitive brain so that new learning reaches long-term memory and becomes useable, transferable knowledge.

To reach the “conscious brain,” sensory input must be Reticular Activating System “selected.” The reactive brain responds to stimuli with fight/flight/freeze.

We must get past that filter with stability and familiarity, and then captivate R.A.S. attention/stimulate curiosity with

• Change, novelty, surprise 
• Prior knowledge activation 
• Advertising 
• Color, costumes 
• Music, movement 
• Discrepant events 

Some ideas to make your lessons R.A.S. selected:

• Walk backwards into and around the room before beginning a discussion about negative numbers 
• Put on a “thinking cap” to indicate that what comes next is very important 
• Show a book trailer to stimulate interest in a novel before reading it. 
• Use color-coded highlighters for labeling key words, important points, etc. 
• Set up a think-pair-share or a jigsaw so students know they will be doing something with information they gain during a reading/listening activity 
• Start with a current or local event – anything that promotes “buy-in” 
• Alert students to information that connects with their personally valued goals 

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The Amygdala responds to interest, relevance, and pleasure. Students (or people) who are in a positive emotional state have an open amygdala leading directly to the prefrontal cortex, where long-term memory resides. Students who are stressed have no passage to the prefrontal cortex. Brain scans show a direct path to the prefrontal cortex during a happy state and no activation of the passage to the prefrontal cortex during sadness, anger, or fear.

Causes of school stress include

• Being embarrassed to read aloud 
• Anxiety about taking tests 
• Physical and language differences 
• Bullying and cliques 
• Frustration with material that is too difficult – zone of proximal development 
• Boredom - many children have been robbed of the joy of successful learning because of boredom caused by teach-to-the-test rote memorization. 

The greatest fear reported by students is making a mistake in a whole-class setting. Supportive classrooms are those where students feel safe enough to take the risk of participating and being “smart”...and even risk making mistakes! 

Inquiry is de-stressing.

• It builds a classroom learning community that invites participation by all students. 
• It connects with prior knowledge. 
• It invites pleasurable engagement through prediction. 
• It provides learning practice where students learn to use their reflective rather than reactive brain networks. 

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The Dopamine response is inspiration, motivation, curiosity, creativity, persistence, and perseverance. Dopamine is released when we are given choices as well as when we are moving, collaborating, enjoying music, and feeling self-appreciation. The results are acting kindly, interacting well with friends, expressing gratitude, and feeling optimistic.

Choice = ownership on the part of the learner 

Group learning increases dopamine and builds pleasure-associated memories. 

Acetylcholine Bonus – When dopamine levels are high, acetylcholine is released and “...by enhancing the response to sensory input, high levels of acetylcholine enhance attention to the environment...by enhancing the response to external input, high levels of acetylcholine enhance the encoding of memory for specific stimuli, allowing more effective and accurate encoding of sensory events.” ~Michael E. Hasselmo & Jill McGaughy, Dept. of Psychology, Center for Memory and Brain, Boston University

Consolidation occurs in the hippocampus, where new information is encoded with previously stored related knowledge:

If it is isolated, 

it isn’t consolidated. 

It MUST be related! 

Patterning is matching prior knowledge to new information to encode new memory. Long-term memories are made through pattern construction in the brain – Piaget’s “schema” are mental maps or categories of knowledge that grow through pattern association. Good inquiries don’t have a simple, single answer (just like real life) - they encourage students to recognize and build patterns, thus connecting new information into their brains’ neural wiring. 

II. Unless something is done with a new memory, it is lost in less than a minute. Relational memories are turned into understanding (and stored in long-term memory) by mental manipulation in the prefrontal cortex. 

John Dewey said, “We don’t learn from experience, 

we learn by reflecting on it.” 

“Dend-writes” for mental manipulation 

• Draw a picture, diagram, or graphic organizer of what you learned. 
• React to the most surprising thing you learned today. 
• Reflect on how something you learned connects to something you already knew. 
• Predict what will come next. 
• Make a note of what is still confusing to you. 
• Write about a new/better understanding that you have. 
• Describe a strategy you used to solve a problem today. 
• Describe a “so what” – the one thing you’ll remember most about today’s lesson. 
• Write about how this lesson connects to things you learn in other subjects. 
• Compare/contrast, categorize, or summarize an aspect of the lesson. 
• Create an analogy that explains what this lesson reminded you about or how it fits with what you already knew. 

You can use your students’ dend-writes to:

• Know how accurately the lesson was understood 
• Correct any misperceptions at the next class meeting 
• Ask students whose responses were especially good to share those insights with the class as review or to promote discussion. 
• Post good responses as “back-pats” 

III. Inquiry-centered learning builds reasoning skills or “executive functions.” The prefrontal cortex is only about 15% of the brain’s volume; we have to make it count! Our goal is to turn information into usable, transferable knowledge. 

The brain’s executive functions include

• Judgment 
• Prioritizing 
• Analyzing information 
• Decision making 
• Goal planning 
• Organizing 
• Inferring 
• Synthesizing 
• Integrating 
• Problem-solving 

Call it HOTS, critical thinking, or whatever you like...this is our goal!

More Common Core Writing Practice at the New York Times

For your own best practices, here are two recent Common Core Practice Writing Tasks from The Learning Network at The New York Times.

An argumentative writing task about the late "technology wunderkind," Aaron Swartz: A Data Crusader, a Defendant and Now, a Cause.

Michael Francis McElroy/The New York Times

A narrative writing task about Richard Blanco, the son of Cuban exiles who was the 2013 inaugural poet: Poet's Kinship with the President.

Craig Dilger for The New York Times

I highly recommend not only these tasks, but also that you check out the Common Core Practice that appears each Friday on The Learning Network's page! And, as always, I ask that you leave a comment if you use Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen's great ideas.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

On this 57th Inauguration Day AND Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, here are some of the best online sources for teaching your students about Dr. King. And since there are only ten days until February, what a great lead-in to Black History Month!

The Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service

The King Center in Atlanta, Georgia

The Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University

The NAACP

Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 1964:

Lit2Go - FREE Audio Books

From Aesop's Fables to The Velveteen Rabbit, with Dracula, Jane Eyre, and Tom Sawyer in between, you'll be amazed at the number of FREE audio books you'll find at Lit2Go, an ongoing project of the Florida Center for Instructional Technology.

"Lit2Go is a free online collection of stories and poems in Mp3 (audiobook) format. An abstract, citation, playing time, and word count are given for each of the passages. Many of the passages also have a related reading strategy identified. Each reading passage can also be downloaded as a PDF and printed for use as a read-along or as supplemental reading material for your classroom."

Frankenstein

Around the World in 80 Days

The Invisible Man

Try playing these classics for your students during read-aloud time, and watch them start to appreciate books that haven't exactly been flying off your library shelves!

Storyline Online, from the Screen Actors Guild

How would you like to have 25 FREE read-alouds for your students to enjoy? What if all 25 of them were GREAT children's books? And if the readers were people like James Earl Jones or Jane Kaczmarek, or perhaps Ernest Borgnine or Annette Bening?

If this sounds amazing, then you are in luck! 

The Screen Actors Guild Foundation provides this great resource via YouTube or, for those whose systems block the site, via SchoolTube's Storyline Online channel. 

Here's Betty White reading Gene Zion's classic Harry the Dirty Dog:

As if the videos weren't enough, Storyline Online also provides a downloadable activity guide for each book that includes questions, suggested research extensions, internet activities, and biographical information about the author, illustrator, and reader, plus more book suggestions.

I know you'll enjoy all this site has to offer you and your kiddos!

Writing with Sentence Frames from a (Great) Blogger

Wow. I found a super-great resource for you this morning that I wanted to share right away!

Arlene Sandberg shares "best practices, ideas, strategies, information, and FREEBIES to help teachers make a difference for elementary students, low performing students, and ESL students" at It's Elementary. With 33 years of teaching experience, she has so much for us! I'm now following the blog and I recommend that you do the same.

Arlene's newest post is Using Sentence Frames to Help Struggling Writers Make Sentences, but I think every primary teacher could make great use of her free packet Writing Sentences with Sentence Frames, which includes a whole group activity, two Writing and Illustrating Sentences with Sentence Frames Activities, and a Writing Sentences Assessment. She even walks you through the process of using it, a valuable tutorial!

The preview above links to the packet at Arlene's Teachers Pay Teachers store, LMN Tree, where you'll find more of her creations, with none costing more than $7.50! 

I downloaded it to share with the teachers where I'm working as an academic specialist, and I'm letting Arlene know how much I appreciate her generosity in sharing her expertise. I hope you will, too.

Teaching by Questioning for the Common Core

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”

Socrates (470-399 B.C.) 

I like this quote attributed to Socrates, whether he said it or not - and I agree that the brains of our students are not empty vessels that we teachers are to fill from our vast store of knowledge.

From most accounts, Socrates did believe in and practice questioning as a means of teaching and learning. While students may find it easier to be given facts that they can regurgitate on paper-and-pencil tests, Rebecca Alber, in her Edutopia article "When Teaching the Right Answers Is the Wrong Direction" says, "...students are all too often on a quest for the Correct Answers, which has little to do with critical-thinking development..." 

Critical thinking, citing evidence, rigor and relevance...if you, like most U.S. teachers, are implementing the Common Core State Standards, you must incorporate skillful questioning in your teaching strategies.

Here's good information, paraphrased from the Science Education Resource Center at Carleton College in Minnesota on How to Use the Socratic Method in the Classroom:

• Plan significant questions that provide structure and direction to the lesson.
• Phrase questions clearly.
• Wait at least 5 to 10 seconds for students to respond.
• Keep the discussion focused.
• Stimulate the discussion with probing questions.
• Periodically summarize what has been discussed, on board or projector.
• Draw as many students as possible into the discussion.

Remind students that they are expected to do the following:

• Participate when called upon.
• Answer questions as carefully and clearly as possible.
• Address the whole class so that everyone can hear their answers.

For more information, LEARN NC includes an article by Heather Coffey on the history and theory of the Socratic method of teaching, with directions for conducting Socratic circles and seminars.

Finally, for a no-holds-barred article on why questioning is the way to critical thinking and therefore understanding, read "The Role of Questions in Teaching, Thinking and Learning" from The Critical Thinking Community:

Questions of purpose force us to define our task. 

Questions of information force us to look at our sources of information as well as at the quality of our information.
Questions of interpretation force us to examine how we are organizing or giving meaning to information. 

Questions of assumption force us to examine what we are taking for granted. 

Questions of implication force us to follow out where our thinking is going. 

Questions of point of view force us to examine our point of view and to consider other relevant points of view.
Questions of relevance force us to discriminate what does and what does not bear on a question. 

Questions of accuracy force us to evaluate and test for truth and correctness. 

Questions of precision force us to give details and be specific. 

Questions of consistency force us to examine our thinking for contradictions. 

Questions of logic force us to consider how we are putting the whole of our thought together, to make sure that it all adds up and makes sense within a reasonable system of some kind.

Cures for the Common Core Blues: BOOKS, Vol. 7

Like me, Patricia and Fredrick McKissack are Tennessee-born-and-bred. This teacher and civil engineer started writing because of their concern about the lack of stories written for African American children; since 1984, they've published a number of books set in the segregated South where we grew up. 

An author study on this writing couple would provide cross-curricular opportunities for learning about the Civil Rights Movement and Jim Crow laws, and Black Americans who have made great contributions to our society and culture. Researching primary sources and reading their biographies would offer opportunities for close reading of (and writing about) informational text, a major tenet of the CCSS: "Read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text."

Their picture books are wonderful; one of my favorites is Goin' Someplace Special, written by Patricia and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney.

The book is described by Barbara Bader in "For the McKissacks, Black Is Boundless," which appeared in The Horn Book Magazine in 2007: "Though she’ll be allowed into the downtown library, ’Tricia Ann has to ride in the back of the bus, finds that the bench in the nearby park is for 'Whites Only,' and has a real scare when she innocently follows a white crowd into an off-limits hotel."

You and your students will enjoy seeing and hearing Patricia and Fredrick McKissack talk about their work in this Reading Rockets video interview:

Kemp Elementary School in Cobb County, GA chose Goin' Someplace Special as its book of the month in February 2005, and provides reading and writing strategies and a connecting activity to Rosa Parks. In January 2010, the K-2 Exquisite Prompt on the Reading Rockets website was based on Goin' Someplace Special.

You can teach SO much, including vocabulary, visualization, making inferences, time line activities, mapping, US history, and cultural understanding using this beautiful book. Share it with your kiddos and let its important themes help cure your Common Core blues!

Building Academic Vocabulary

I just might have mentioned before that I love Ireland's NBSS site. There are actually many reasons to love it, but as a teacher, I especially love two things. One is the organization's understanding that academics and behavior are tightly interwoven. The second is that it provides truly great teaching strategies; not only are students' needs considered, but teacher support is also a focus.

Today we'll look at their collection of Academic Vocabulary Building Activities & Strategies. Every teacher knows that a student must be able to understand and use the vocabulary of learning in order to succeed in any content area. Our students need a deep knowledge of these words in order to "access information about them from memory as they read" and we must explicitly teach both academic words and strategies for learning new ones that they encounter.

You will appreciate the explanation of Robert Marzano's six steps to effective vocabulary instruction, and the suggested methods of implementing each one: 

• The teacher gives a friendly, informal description, explanation or example of the new vocabulary term.
• Students give a description, explanation or example of the new term in his/her own words.
• Students create a non linguistic representation of the word.
• Students engage in activities to deepen their knowledge of the new word. 
• Students discuss the new word with one another.
• Students play games to reinforce and review new vocabulary. 

You'll love even more the thirty-three vocabulary Graphic Organizers provided for your students with so many different activities that they'll never get tired of them! Here's a sneak peek of some of my favorites:

   

NBSS provides links to six Useful Websites for Vocabulary Activities such as Visuwords and Triptico, that have fabulous vocabulary activities for your kiddos.

      

Last, but certainly not least, are Games for Learning. From Charades to Pictionary to Taboo to Wordo, you'll find instructions, templates, and links to sites that allow you to create your own puzzles tailored to your students' needs.

Convinced? I thought you would be. Enjoy this great resource and see how much difference it can make for your students' essential academic vocabularies!

Common Core Practice | Life on a Coastline

The focus of all three of this week's writing tasks at The Learning Network? Living on a coastline, and the impact it can have on the lives of its residents. One of the writing tasks is informative, one is narrative, and one argumentative, providing plenty of variety for your students, even though the locations have their similarities.

After reading "Hopes of Home Fade Among Japan's Displaced," students are asked to compare the March 2011 tsunami and the resulting Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown to a natural disaster with which they are familiar.

The writing task for "Salvaging at the Shore, or Just Remembering" is to "write a narrative that includes figurative language and sensory details, (describing) what 'home' means to you."

The final task, an argumentative one, asks students to examine an op-ed piece, "Good Neighbors, Bad Border," and write a paragraph arguing who should be given possession of Machias Island and North Rock, tiny islands in the Gulf of Maine, whose ownership has been in questions for 230 years.

As always, I ask that you post a comment to Sarah Gross, Jonathan Olsen, and their partners at The New York Times if you use one of their prompts, thanking them for sharing!

Cures for the Common Core Blues: BOOKS, Vol. 6

As the granddaughter, daughter, and daughter-in-law of women who themselves sewed love into quilts that have kept generations of our family warm, I love The Keeping Quilt, and find it one of Patricia Polacco's most memorable books. It's been called her signature piece with good reason, winning the Sydney Taylor Book Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries in 1988, when it was first published.

From the dust jacket of the second edition: "When Patricia's Great-Gramma Anna came to America as a child, the only things she brought along from Russia were her dress and the babushka she liked to throw up into the air when she was dancing. Soon enough, though, Anna outgrew the dress and her mother decided to incorporate it and the babushka into a quilt. 'It will be like having the family in backhome Russia dance around us at night,' she said. And so it was. Together with her Uncle Vladimir's shirt, Aunt Havalah's nightdress, and an apron of Aunt Natasha's, Anna's mother made a quilt that would be passed down through their family for almost a century. From one generation to the next, the quilt was used as a Sabbath tablecloth, a wedding canopy, and a blanket to welcome each new child into the world." A unique family heirloom, indeed.

Multicultural books like Patricia Polacco's are invaluable tools for broadening our students' worlds, enriching their vocabulary, and giving them a greater understanding and appreciation of people who aren't just like them.

          

 Read this beautiful book with your kiddos, and then:

• create an "I Have; Who Has?" game or a card sort for vocabulary
• sequence the generations of Patricia's family
• compare and contrast the weddings through the years
• make a class collage of the varied uses of the quilt (in color, of course, just as in the book!)
• let them write about a tradition in their own family

And something that was a favorite of my students? A bookmark, with some of Patricia's fabulous artwork, as a reward after completing the book study!

Such a lovely little way to remember a jewel of a book, while letting it help cure those Common Core blues!

Cures for the Common Core Blues: BOOKS, Vol. 5

I'm a bit behind on this series because our son, daughter-in-law, and grandbabies who live in Tanzania arrived in the states last week for a visit. Oh, and we had a booth selling crafts made there by Holly and her Tanzanian friend Suzy at the local Arts and Craft Fair for three days...a busy and joyful week!

Today I want to share a book by one of my favorite authors, Leo Lionni. Having taught high school for 25 years, I came late to his wonderful writing, learning to love it during the 7 years I taught elementary ESL. 

Inch by Inch was the first of Lionni's books to win the Caldecott Honor, with three more following. It's a fantastic book for integrating measurement skills; Scholastic has a lesson plan on this page. Not only is the prose wonderful; his illustrations are as well. The iconic Horn Book Magazine praises the book's “...lovely colors...sharp definition of cutouts against white space...rhythm of the composition...simplicity of the whole...” 

Weston Woods produced an animated version of the book in 2006, which costs $59.95, but ArtsEdge has a story performance, by Mermaid Theatre of Nova Scotia, online and FREE!

You and your young friends can read more about Leo on Random House's website, which provides tons of information for an author study - seven short chapters and an essay written by his granddaughter Annie Lionni. Your students can also 

• watch him explain why he writes books about animals in a short video,
• see how he makes a paper mouse(and try one themselves) here,
• learn about his childhood and his imagination in this video,
• see many pictures, including one of him playing his accordion!

I have other favorite Lionni books (he wrote 40!) that I'll share later, but in the meantime, please let Inch by Inch and Leo's personal story help cure your Common Core blues.

I hope you're having a happy Thanksgiving week; many blessings from my family to yours! 

Common Core Practice | Bad Reviews, Elite Schools and Facebook Fakes

Do all of your students understand different types of questions? Is their questioning effective? Would you like to have a tool that would help them understand rhetorical questioning as a device for proving a point?

If so, one of this week's Common Core Practice writing tasks at The Learning Network is tailor-made for you! Sarah Gross and Jonathan Olsen's students loved Pete Wells’s less-than-stellar review of Guy’s American Kitchen & Bar, with one of them declaring, "This is the best article we've read this year."

The task that references this article asks students to write a letter expressing annoyance or disappointment through a series of rhetorical questions.

The second task is argumentative: students are asked to read an editorial about admissions procedures at a group of highly-selective high schools in New York City. "After reading the editorial, answer the following two questions in a paragraph each. Try to connect the two paragraphs using transitions. A) How should highly selective high schools select students? B) What do you think are the most accurate predictors of high school success?"

This week's final task, also argumentative, refers to people who set up fake Facebook accounts in order to hide their identity, and asks the question: "Do you think it is ethical for high school and college students to create a Facebook profile using a pseudonym, despite the fact the company expressly prohibits it in their Terms of Service? Explain your opinion in one paragraph."

Thanks again to Sarah Gross, Jonathan Olsen, and their students, for these great writing tasks connected to articles in the New York Times!

Reading Strategies and Bookmarks - Great Idea!

Today we revisit a site from a previous post, Great Resources From Ireland's NBSS, to look at some very cool bookmarks - but not just any bookmarks. These have purpose...wait, make that six purposes!

I visualize teaching a strategy, making a great anchor chart using the bookmark as a starter for organizing it, and giving each student a bookmark to keep in the books you are using to practice the strategy. Click on the image below to go to the pdf document and print it. There are three bookmarks per page, which you can print on card stock or mount on colored paper and laminate. (See if your kiddos notice the different spelling, using "s" rather than "z".) 

Addressing "key comprehension strategies - making connections, self-questioning, visualising, inferring, determining importance, summarising/synthesising and self-monitoring comprehension - can help students become more purposeful, active readers and learners."  

We all need to be more purposeful, active readers and learners. Enjoy this great tool!

Common Core Resources: RAFT Writing Strategy

"The more often students write, the more proficient they become as writers." 

Not only is this true, but writing with proficiency and sophistication is demanded in the Common Core State Standards.

From the CCSS Writing Standards K-5 and 6-12: "Each year in their writing, students should demonstrate increasing sophistication in all aspects of language use, from vocabulary and syntax to the development and organization of ideas, and they should address increasingly demanding content and sources."

If you teach writing and aren't already a fan, hustle over to the website ReadWriteThink.org, a joint venture of three great organizations:

  

One of the many resources you'll find there is a guide to using the RAFT Writing Strategy, which is designed to help a student understand his role and effectively communicate his ideas, and to focus on his audience, format, and topic.

Deborah Dean's book Strategic Writing is referenced, as is Project CRISS: Creating Independence through Student-owned Strategies, by Santa, Havens, and Valdes.   

So, what does RAFT represent?

R stands for “Role” – What is the writer’s role? (Ex: news reporter)
A stands for “Audience” - Who is the writer’s audience? (Ex: people in the community)
F stands for “Format” - How should the writer present the information? (Ex: news article)
T stands for “Topic” - What is the author writing about? (Ex: recent election)

ReadWriteThink offers several examples of the strategy in practice; here are two favorites of mine:

• Decide on an area of study currently taking place in your classroom for which you could collaborate with the students and write a class RAFT. Discuss with your students the basic premise of the content for which you’d like to write, but allow students to help you pick the role, audience, format, and topic to write about. 
• Have a class think-aloud to come up with ideas for the piece of writing that you will create as a group. Model on a whiteboard, overhead projector, or chart paper how you would write in response to the prompt. Allow student input and creativity as you craft your piece of writing.

Modeling is invaluable for teaching in any discipline; I am convinced that it builds confidence that many students need before they can even begin to write effectively.

There are seven lesson plans provided, from grades 3 - 12. I especially like the Raft Writing Template, a graphic organizer, to use as a starting point:

Enjoy using the RAFT strategy, as you work with your kiddos to help them become not just proficient, but great writers!