Written Conversations

Like teachers everywhere, I’m getting ready to go back to school.  While most of my thoughts these days are about the little things like nametags and book shelves, I know that once those early days pass, we can get going on more in-depth activities. So even though you may not be ready to think about more than getting your room ready right now, sometimes it’s nice to have a little something floating around that you’re looking forward to using in the near future.  And today, that little something is called Written Conversation.

I saw Written Conversations described in a great book called Content-Area Writing by Harvey Daniels, Steve Zemelman, and Nancy Steineke (look at the description here). It’s meant for grades 6-12, but many of their suggestions can be used in lower grades, and with all subject areas. I happen to love Written Conversations. In fact, I love it so much I don’t know why I don’t use it more often. It gives kids a chance to practice their writing, and to read what others have written and respond to it. As the teacher, you can see who is thinking and writing, and who isn’t. And another nice bonus is this activity is completely quiet. I don’t think quiet is important all the time, but it can sure be a nice change some days!

To begin with, you will need to pick some kind of text or even a picture that you want kids to think about and discuss. I’ve used poems, nonfiction selections, paintings, and photographs. That text or picture will be glued in the middle of a much bigger piece of paper; I usually just pull off pieces of bulletin board paper. Divide your class into groups of 4-6 students, and give each group a big piece of paper with the text on it. It helps to push desks together so the kids can walk around the paper. Each person in the group will also need something to write with.  I really like using markers, with each student writing in a different color. It is then very easy to see what each student has written.

Once everyone in the group is settled with a marker, I will either read the text out loud, or read a prompt for them to respond to. This is for the students who may not be as strong in their reading skills-I want them to be able to be responding right away instead of laboring over the text. Then I tell the students to write about the text. They can ask questions, tell what they think a particular line means, tell how it connects to them or something else they’ve read – but it all has to be done in writing. They can highlight the text, or underline parts they find confusing, and they can also begin to respond to what the others in the group are writing.  Many times students can clarify the questions that other students are writing about. They underline their proof in the text, or connect to something else they know about.  This may mean walking around the paper to find a spot to respond, which is fine.  However, I don’t let them wander over to another group’s work, and they can’t do any talking.

If things are slow at first, I will walk around and write questions to get the conversations going. The nice thing about doing this activity more than once is that kids get used to the format and it doesn’t take them as long to get started. I’ve had my quiet students tell me they really like this activity because their “voice” was finally heard – they didn’t have to wait for the chattier kids to stop talking. I will say that it is a challenging activity for kids who dislike writing, and it will be very apparent who has contributed a lot and who hasn’t when the activity is done.  But it’s a great record of everyone’s thinking, and the students and I love looking at all the comments when the activity is done. I know this year I plan to use Written Conversations more often!

Becoming a Book Whisperer

In early August, I had the very good fortune of taking a class with Donalyn Miller, the author of The Book Whisperer. Donalyn (I’m going to presume we would be on a first name basis with each other) has a new book coming out, called Reading in the Wild, and her class was geared towards helping teachers create an environment where all children are readers and where readers can flourish. I know I may not be able to implement every idea I heard about that day, but here are some things I’ve either tried or will try in starting out my new school year.

Just like teachers of writing should be writers themselves (hence my blog), teachers of reading need to be readers. This has luckily never been a problem for me, but once the year gets going, it’s harder to read as much or as often as I would like. My solution to this has been audio books.  I run in the mornings before school, and I wear a fanny pack with a portable CD player strapped to my waist. I know it isn’t pretty, but I “read” most of my children’s books this way.  At school, I have a “What is Mrs. Quist Reading” poster on the wall near my classroom door, and I print off a picture of the book cover as well as a short summary of the story. When there get to be too many of these papers on the wall, I three-hole punch them and put them in a binder for kids to look through when they need new book suggestions. Always having a book going allows me to tell kids about my own reading life so that they know I’m walking the walk with them.

This year I’m going to have the kids do the same thing. I’m going to laminate tags for their lockers that have space to record their current books. Hopefully other kids will read them as they pass by in the hallway, and get ideas for books to read from their peers.

Early in the year –either at open house or during the first days or weeks – I’ll have the kids wear name tags that say “Hello – I like to read about __________.” As they interact during the day, they’ll have a chance to make connections with other readers who share their same interests. At the very least, I’ll get some ideas for book suggestions for each student.

I’m also going to try a reading graffiti wall. This is a blank piece of paper where kids can write down their favorite lines from books.  I will have them show me what they’re going to write down first, as I can see this getting out of hand, but I really like the idea of building awareness of good writing by having students recognize it themselves. I plan to call my wall “Notable Quotables” because I’m a little worried that calling it “Reading Graffiti” might just inspire writing NOT connected to reading.

These are just a few ideas that I’m going to try on my way to becoming more of a book whisperer this year. I’ll post some more things that I try as the year gets underway. I’d love to hear what you’re doing to inspire more kids to love reading!

Close Reading

I took a number of professional development classes this week, and I’m happy to say that all of them were good. Of course, now my head is spinning with a lot of new information, book titles, and strategies to try in the classroom, but it’s a good kind of spinning.

One class I was particularly interested in attending was one on close reading. It seems to be the new “in” thing in education, and I have read a bit about it, but I was interested in delving deeper. Kari Ross, a reading specialist at the Minnesota State Department of Education, led the session, and gave us a good place to start learning. Much of her information is based on the work of Douglas Fisher and Nancy Frey, who have some good resources on their website. 

The gist of close reading is to get kids to struggle with text that is a bit above their reading level, using rereading and discussion to better understand what they are reading. Because of this, you wouldn’t want to use close reading all the time, as I think you would kill any enjoyment kids have in reading. But with a good choice of text, kids will have a chance to not only delve deeper into the meaning of the text, but to see how an author chooses words and text structure for maximum effect.

We used a short piece by Sandra Cisneros called “Salvador, Late or Early”, which would be a great choice to use in an upper elementary classroom (here is a link to a PDF ). Short text is key with close reading, as kids are going to be working with more challenging text than they may be used to reading.  Generally the teacher gives very little background information; the goal is that the kids do the work of uncovering the text. We began by reading the text with a pencil to annotate. We were asked to circle any powerful words or phrases that affected us, and to underline what confused us. After reading, we did a quick write about what our impressions were of Salvador.

Next, we chatted with a partner about our impressions. The discussion with others is important in close reading, as we want to see what others thought and why they had those thoughts.

The teacher does the next reading out loud. It’s a chance for kids to hear the text read by a fluent reader, and they may pick up something they missed the first time. The teacher then asks a series of text-dependent questions. Having students go back into the text to support their answers is critical. The teacher may start with questions designed to get at general understanding, but then moves to questions about text structure and vocabulary, such as “Why does the author use so many color words in this text?”  The last kinds of questions relate to author’s purpose or ask students to make inferences. Fisher and Frey have a nice Power Point on their web page about text-dependent questions that may be helpful for teachers wanting to try this.

It can be confusing to just read about how to do something, so if you’re interested in doing more with close reading, I’d recommend watching a couple of YouTube presentations of teachers doing close reading. It looks different in each classroom, but many of you have probably done aspects of this in your classroom for years.  I’m anxious to try it out and see how it goes!

Power Writing

Daily writing has been one of the staples of my classroom for the last couple of years, but sometimes I need to mix things up just to keep the kids (and me) interested. One thing my students have really enjoyed is Power Writing. I got this idea from Jeff Anderson’s book 10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know, which you can preview online. 

Power Writing consists of giving kids a pair of words (like duck and pickle), telling kids they have to use at least one of the words in their writing, and then setting the timer for one minute. The kids have to write as many words in one minute as they can. They need to be in sentences, but that’s about all I require. After the timer goes off, the kids stop writing and draw a line underneath what they have written. Then they count up their words. On the white board, I draw a chart with three columns and ten rows.  The rows are labeled 0-10, 11-20, 21-30 and so on (see picture below).  I stop at 91-100 because that’s virtually impossible to do, but maybe it will inspire someone. I ask the kids to raise their hand when we get to the number of words they wrote in a minute. I mark those on the chart, and then put up two new words.

This is repeated three times, and sometimes I have the kids add up all of their words just to see what they can do in three minutes. Some students who struggle with the daily five minute writing find they often write quite a few words during Power Writing, but students who are just slow writers, even when they're inspired, sometimes don't like the speed aspect, and I will give them a choice to just write freely instead of do Power Writing. Anderson suggests doing this several times a week to build writing fluency, but I find that it works better for me if it is once a week or once every two weeks. It takes longer than my regular daily writing, so it’s easier if it is a special thing we do. 

You could easily use words tied to curriculum content, but I find that since this is the first thing we do in our day, silly words are more fun to write about. I like anything goofy sounding, like "gargle", or strange animal words like "platypus." Some body part words are funny, like "nostril", but you'll want to be kind of careful about some other ones. And finally, at least in my fourth grade classes, any words that indicate that something could explode have been VERY popular. Play around with Power Writing and see if you notice more fluency in your writers!