Communication

We’ve just finished up our “spring” conferences (with our below zero temperatures and multiple feet of snow, it doesn’t feel anything like spring), and I am part of a school team that is working together to move our school to Title One status next year, and both opportunities have left me thinking a lot about parent communication. It’s clear that both as a teacher and a school, we have room for improvement.

It isn’t that I don’t communicate. I do. In fact, I think I provide a fair amount of information about what is going on in my classroom. I send home a newsletter (we started with biweekly, but have moved to a monthly calendar, which my wonderful partner teacher also emails to families with email accounts), and I update my website each week, listing my homework requirements and providing links to copies of the homework, in case a student has misplaced it. I let parents know about this in each monthly newsletter, and I told each family about this at the fall conferences in October. However, I still found myself telling families this same thing again at our spring conferences, especially those families that said, "When I ask my child if they have homework, they always say no." Sorry to say, not all kids are reliable reporters, so I have my homework online. 

Our school sends home a monthly newsletter as well, but I’m pretty sure that like our monthly calendar, many families don’t have time to read it.  An additional concern is the language barrier that a number of our families face; long sheets in English don’t help if you don’t speak or read English.

So I’m trying to think of ways that would be more effective in reaching more families without putting in additional large amounts of time. Our school has a Facebook account, and a number of families have “liked” that, but our principal pointed out that a large number of the likes are from staff members. I think if we were to post things more regularly on that page, we might find more people checking it out, and I think our staff is interested in exploring that.

Another idea that we tried to start using this fall is Remind 101, a very slick text message reminder system that would have allowed us to send out text message reminders about homework due dates, field trips, or special days at school. The teacher can set up messages in advance on his/her computer or cell phone, set the time for them to be delivered, and the parent then receives the message in a timely way. The parent cannot send a reply back, so the teacher’s privacy with regards to his or her own cell phone remains intact. I would have loved to use this but our district has currently said no due to privacy concerns. It isn’t meant for emailing individual concerns about students, but someone needs to convince our district of that.

I’ve also read about a number of classrooms in other districts using a class Twitter page to update families. I think this would be fun, and I would train students to write something each day and then they could type it up. I don’t know how many families are on Twitter, but I’d be interested in exploring this further. At this point in time, I believe our district has said no to this as well.

Finally, I need to find ways to more effectively communicate with families who are not English speakers. I think there are translating programs or tools online that I may investigate for written work, and lately I’ve been thinking about writing up some kind of script and having my students who speak that language be filmed saying the script in their native language. I would then put it on my webpage and show all the students in my classes, who could tell their families at home to watch it.

What are the best ways you’ve found to communicate with families?

Cleaning Cotton

We’ve had a crazy winter here in Minnesota, and have so far missed five days due to cold, not snow.  It’s made getting back in the rhythm of school a bit challenging since our winter break, and I’ve found that I’m feeling like I’m constantly behind compared to where I was in my curriculum last year. I’m also  disappointed that I haven’t been as inspired to blog, since I don’t feel like I’ve tried anything worth blogging about. But this week I did do an activity I discovered last year, and maybe some of you will think it’s worth doing.

 In addition to reading and writing, I also teach social studies, and last year I got to attend some in-service training on using inquiry in the classroom. The two professors who taught the class were great, and gave me lots to think about in terms of how I could make social studies more inquiry-based, instead of just reading out of the text book the whole time.  I’ve never done the book exclusively, but I started to think about how I could incorporate more hands-on activities into our units. Our curriculum focus is the states and regions of the United States, and last year at this time, we had begun to study the South. I was digging around on the internet for something more interactive we could do to learn more about slavery, and I found this website called Cotton Classroom (http://cottonclassroom.com/) You can order a box of uncleaned cotton and they also provide a lesson plan to use. I decided to give it a try, and shortly afterward, received a box packed with cotton.

As a northerner, I haven’t seen a field of cotton, let alone worked with it in any form other than cotton balls from Target, so I was pretty interested. It comes with tons of seeds in it, and also bits of leaves and stems. I had the students create a t-chart labeled “I notice/I wonder”, gave them each a pile of cotton, and they got to work. I loved hearing their conversations as they worked to get the seeds out, and I had to remind them to put those good ideas down in writing so they wouldn’t forget them! It’s one of the best activities I do in terms of engaging the students, because everyone is busy trying to get those seeds out.  After a while, someone usually says, “Did the slaves have to clean the cotton like this?” It leads to some realizations about the difficulty of the work slaves did, and is a great segue into discussion of the cotton gin and how technology changed cotton farming.

Cotton Classroom also includes Solomon Northup’s primary document about slaves picking cotton, and it’s a great resource to help students realize how difficult and often violent the life of a slave was. Once the students have spent some time trying to clean that cotton, they are even more receptive to Northup’s descriptions of the work expectations masters had of slaves. There is no good way to recreate the slave experience, and I’m not sure I’d even want to try, but this small activity has been a great way for students to begin thinking about slavery and technology. I highly recommend it!

Revising with a Peer

I am not the master of having kids review each other’s written work. It isn’t that I haven’t tried it before. I have. Many times. And it invariably goes something like this: “Class, I want you to get with another person. I want them to read your story and offer suggestions about how to improve it.” I try to model and give suggestions about how this might work, and it always seems to go well when we do this as a class with something I’ve written. But once they get with a peer, it takes about 30 seconds before both students announce that they’re done. I’ll ask, “What changes did you make?”, and the kids will say, “We didn’t need to make any. My partner thought what I wrote was really good.” I will smile, and cringe inwardly, because I know that changes could be made. Revision is challenging for good writers, let alone ten year olds, and once something is down on paper, most of us don’t want to change it.

Happily, I was visiting with one of my very dearest friends, who is a teacher librarian at a middle school, and she teaches a writing workshop for sixth graders. She told me about having her students revise by having them ask each other questions. “They need to ask the other person something that will allow the writer to give more information,” she suggested.

I liked the sound of this because it was more concrete than other revision directions I had tried. My teaching colleague tried this a week before I did, and had really good results with kids writing short essay/opinion paragraphs. I tried it with our Slice of Life writings. As soon as the draft was done, they got together with a partner, and either read the slice, or had it read to them. I wanted them to write their question on a post it note, so that I could easily see what it was. I also wanted to see if the writer incorporated the answer to the question in their revision. (We did this as a class first before working in pairs.)  The pieces I’ve seen so far showed much improvement over their first draft, and the students seemed engaged and on task when they were working with each other, so I’m encouraged by this effort. One of the things I have to evaluate is whether they use the writing process, and making revisions meets this goal.

I’m looking forward to trying this more as we write more Slice of Life pieces and also begin working on our essays. Have you tried peer revision with any success? What strategies have been useful?

Beginning the Slice of Life Writings

This month I started having students write “Slice of Life” paragraphs, short commentaries on something they’ve done or something they’ve observed, and then I posted them in the hallways and invited our school staff and students to make comments on post-it notes. I’ve been very pleased with the initial response from everyone so far, and I’m excited to continue the project. I wondered if students might complain about having to write something, but because they are doing something like this every day in our daily writing, I haven’t heard anything negative. In fact, it’s been the opposite. Once the students saw their writing posted, and got a few comments on post-its, they wanted to write more. Some have three or four writings in their folders, just waiting for the okay to put another one up. I didn’t want to overwhelm the readers, so I had the first writings up for three or four days, and then we just taped the second piece over the top of the first piece, so readers could keep reading.  Every day, students ask if they can go out and read and make comments on the writing. I’ve had to monitor that a bit more closely since I can’t have five kids in the hallway unsupervised, but I’ve encouraged kids to respond in the morning when they have a bit of time. Other teachers and staff have been kind about reading and leaving a comment or two as well. 

            Is the writing perfect? Not so much. It’s very clear which students need to be more rigorous in checking spelling and punctuation, and some of them have a very loose understanding of what a paragraph is, so I’ve tried to address that as we’ve gone along. But I think as students see what their peers are writing about, that will encourage them to polish things up a bit.

            The part I think has been the most powerful, though, is reading about how a student is worried about her dad, who was taken to the hospital that morning, or the student who is concerned about the neighbors who are fighting. I wouldn’t normally hear all of those stories, but writing them down allows students to be heard. Some kids wrote about how they got their dog, or injuries they’ve received, or a recipe they’ve tried – the topics are all over the board. I think most people just need someone to listen to them, and if they can’t do it by talking, then writing allows them to share. For some kids, I think it’s easier to write things down than to say them out loud. By putting their writing up on the wall, they have a new audience. And the comments are often very compassionate, reminding the writers that they aren’t alone with their concerns. I’m excited to see how these writings evolve over the rest of the year!

Spirit of Endurance

I’m going to be starting our next reading unit, which is on questioning. My district curriculum has provided me with a couple of books about snakes, which are probably interesting, but I’m ditching them in order to use one of my favorite books: Spirit of Endurance, by Jennifer Armstrong.  The subtitle is “The true story of the Shackleton expedition to the Antarctic”, and if you don’t know anything about this trip, you need to read this book. One of the reasons I feel confident in switching out snakes for Shackleton is that in addition to teaching and practicing questioning, I can also use it to talk about theme and even character traits, even though it isn’t fiction. Ernest Shackleton is such an amazing person that it’s worth talking about what character traits would describe him.

I’m going to start by showing students the cover, and asking them to write some “I wonder” questions, which I’ll record so we can see if they get answered. We can talk about how some questions get answered as we read, and some don’t, or may require more research on our part. These kinds of questions are the ones that hopefully propel the reader further into a book as they look for answers to their questions. Jan Richardson, author of The Next Step in Guided Reading, calls these “red” questions, because you have to stop and think about the answers.  These are in some ways the most difficult to answer, but we often start any book with things we wonder about, so I’ll be dipping into the more difficult questions first. (A link to her resource page is here: www.janrichardsonguidedreading.com/resources-1)

As we read and find out more about Ernest Shackleton and his crew, and his desire to cross Antarctica by dogsled, then we can try “green questions”, which Richardson describes as being found right in the text. These are the kinds of questions we often ask to check direct understanding, like “Where was Shackleton from?” or “How many dogs did he take on his trip?” I’m going to model several of these, but then I’m going to have students write their own green (literal) questions to share with another student or the whole class.

The last kind of question I’ll be trying is a “yellow” question – one that you may have to look in several places for in order to answer the question. A great question to ask with this book would be “What factors caused Shackleton to abandon his ship?” Asking students about similarities and differences would also be examples of yellow questions.

About midway through the book, I use an activity where the students are given a list of items found on the ship that will either be taken with the expedition or left behind. Students work with a partner to discuss what they would keep and take, and then we go over what actually happened. I found this on the PBS website for the show NOVA, which has some great teacher resources connected to a show they did about Shackleton: www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/education/activities/2906_shacklet.html

The discussion that ensues is often interesting and impassioned, especially with regard to the fate of the dogs.

Finishing up the rest of the book leaves plenty of opportunities for more “red” questions that could start with “what would have happened if….” or “why do you think….”. This is when we can talk about theme (like perseverance and stamina, or never give up) and character traits we could use to describe Shackleton (bold, courageous, dedicated – but while a great leader, probably not the best husband or father, as his love of exploring meant he was always gone).  Through the sinking of the ship, travelling in the rowboats to find land, sailing one of them through freezing hurricane-force winds to finally land on South Georgia Island where an enormous hike awaited them, and finally rescuing all the men, and never losing one of them – Shackleton’s story is one of the greatest rescue stories ever, and it will leave us with plenty of discussion possibilities, such as “Was the trip a success or failure?”

I can’t wait to share this amazing story with another group of students!

Report Cards

This marks the end of our first trimester, so I’ve been working on report cards over our break. Our district has gone to a standards-based report card, and we’ve all been involved in many discussions about what each of the report card indicators mean, and how best to use the new reporting system. I think it would be safe to say that most teachers do not love doing report cards. It’s hard to reduce a whole child down to a number, when that child is so much more.  It makes me nervous knowing that with the new reporting procedure, there will be many questions, and I hope I can answer them satisfactorily.  I also know that many parents are not going to be happy when they see a lot of marks that indicate that their child has only partially met the standard, even though they have the whole year to meet it, and I’m fairly confident that most kids will do this. This process will get easier as we do it more, and as the district better aligns curriculum with the standards, but there’s always the first time for everything, and that just happens to be now.

I hope that as parents look over these new report cards, they keep in mind some things. If the report card grades don’t align with the standardized test scores their child has taken, it might be because standardized tests are multiple choice, and almost nothing in my class is assessed that way.  My students are asked to do a lot of writing and sometimes even the brightest kids don’t take the time to write complete answers. Of course, that’s what we work on all year, and I can see quite a bit of improvement already, but the standards ask them to be consistent, and at this point in the year, not all kids are in that place.

The report cards also don’t show that a child may be the one who is always first to offer a marker to the kid who never has one, or is the student who stops to help others clean up, or is the kid who helps stack the extra chairs each night. No report card grade can show that this child is the one who will include any left out child, or is willing to work with anyone. I’m glad I don’t have to give a grade for kindness, but I feel that is a great quality to have, and some of my students, whose report cards may not have the most stellar grades, are some of the most kind, well-rounded students I have.  One of my son’s teachers said at his conferences, “You can check his grades online. Let me tell you how he is in class and how he treats other students and me.” (Luckily it was a good report, because as a parent, I’m hoping that he’s a good person in a public setting.)

So as we finish this first round of new report cards, let’s take a moment to remember that report cards are just one aspect of our children. An important one, to be sure – everyone wants to know that their child is moving forward in their learning. But take another moment to see your child in the bigger picture, one that includes more than just numbers on a test or a report card.

First Trimester Reflections

It seems that the first trimester has flown by, except for a few days that never seemed to end. At any rate, we will have finished one third of the year by the time Thanksgiving rolls around, and I want to do a little reflecting on some of the things I’ve tried this year.

As part of our Q Comp performance evaluation, we have to set a goal, and I decided to connect it to both the standards and one of our report card indicators. I chose nonfiction summary writing to work on, and so I did something I don’t think I’ve done before: I gave a diagnostic assessment with the intention of giving this assessment again once we had practiced the skill for a while. I don’t know why I haven’t done this before; I certainly assess prior knowledge before teaching, but I haven’t done it this way. I gave the students a nonfiction article, asked them to list all the nonfiction text features that they saw, and then to read the article and write a summary. This didn’t actually take very long, because nearly all students had no recollection of what either of those things were. I had one student out of my first group who wrote a passable summary, but otherwise most kids just stared at me.  I collected these from both classes, but I only used my first group for my goal setting.  We then set out to read a lot of nonfiction and practice writing summaries that included a gist statement, 3-4 sentences supporting the gist statement, and then a concluding statement. I gave the exact same assessment again, and once the students were done, I showed them what they had done with the diagnostic. It was great to see the kids be aware of how much they had learned in the five weeks we’d been working on this, and my favorite statement was one kid saying, “I didn’t even have a gist statement!” Gotta love that. Only two kids still have no idea what either the nonfiction text features are, or how to write a summary, but only six kids wrote a summary that I feel would pass the standards. On the other hand, with a little tweaking, almost everyone else would be able to do a decent summary, and we have the rest of the year to practice.

Another thing I’ve really liked is the Socratic circle discussions. Kids seem to really like doing them, and it is very clear who can participate in a discussion, who only wants to listen to their own questions, and who is afraid to speak. My goal is to figure out how to draw out the quiet kids so we get more participation.

My five-minute daily writing has fostered writing fluency, and I’m now starting to see more consciousness about capitals and periods. I’m going to stretch this into some Slice of Life writing next trimester, and hopefully it will be easier because they’ve been writing about things they’ve been doing for twelve weeks now.

I had kids choose a chapter book out of seven books that I put out, and required kids to read a third of the book each week in November. This actually worked well, as it has in the past, and many kids finished their books in much less time, and then asked to read another of the books I had set out. I will do this again in January, and leave December for books completely of the students’ choosing.

I started the year doing a read aloud every day, and that, sadly, has gone by the wayside. That’s my biggest disappointment of the year, in some ways. I think reading aloud for pleasure is so important, and I just can’t squeeze in the time. Maybe I need to reexamine my schedule and see if there is something I can flex, but with only two hours to a block, and forty minutes of that in guided reading, there isn’t a lot of time left for reading, writing, and social studies. I certainly read books aloud as part of the instruction time, but it isn’t quite what I want. 

How has your year gone so far?