Tweets about Reading

It's been a while since I've done any blogging, and I think part of that is because I'm not sure I've done anything really new and different to blog about. My fifth graders are moving along, and we've been working on writing realistic fiction stories, and reading responses, and creating posters with nonfiction text features just to try and mix up the way they write about their reading. But it's now the middle of February, and things that were once fresh seem to be not so fresh, and I think both students and their teachers start looking for ways to mix up the daily work a bit.

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed, and found a link to a poster called "101 Ways to Show What You Know." I squinted at it on my phone, but I was intrigued. I needed some new ideas for students to write about with their reading, but the standard one-paragraph response was old for all of us.  (Here's a link to that poster.)  And then it hit me: it was a short week, and the kids wouldn't have had as much time for reading, so they needed something short. Like a tweet. Even though I don't have a class Twitter page, the kids could still write a couple of 140-character tweets about the plot, the setting, characters or character change, or if it was nonfiction, something interesting that captured their attention about whatever it was their book was about. I assigned them the job of writing at least two tweets, and they could include an appropriate hashtag, probably using the book title.

They seemed to love it. For one thing, they were thrilled it wasn't 140 words, just characters, including spaces between words. Then I had them type them into our Kidblog page, so they could see what other kids had written. I was taken with how funny I thought many of them were, but also how much information they could put into a short response. Below are some of the results:

The ring: twist it once or twist it twice, but think twice before you twist it #Monster Ring
Big Gruff is totes too big for the troll so Gruff throws the troll off the bridge #Fat Billy Goats

Just Hates Ms.Godfrey because he just hates her #Big Nate

Monsters, Nightmares, Dangerous Gods, Can't I have a normal life#Percy Jackson

He paid $5.00 for a kiss? o.m.g #kissing booth #Dork Diary

The Story Of Helen Keller Was SO SAD Cause Helen Keller Was Blind And Deaf # SO SAD

I don't want to go to another school next year, I'm going to fail school so I can stay with my teacher #failschool#mrteruptfallsagain

I've got a request in to see if I can set up a class Twitter account, so more families could see some of these ideas, but for now, the kids can read them on Kidblog. I will certainly try this again this year, because it made writing a reading response a bit more fun. 

Talking and Writing About Reading

My best friend since eight grade happens to be a middle school librarian, and whenever we get together, we eventually talk shop. She's got lots of great ideas about book titles and writing about books, and this summer when we were traveling together to celebrate a milestone birthday (we're two weeks apart in age), she mentioned a book they'd gotten in at their library called Getting Beyond Interesting: Teaching Students the Vocabulary of Appeal to Discuss Their Reading by Olga M. Nesi. While it's aimed more at middle school, I figured that I could use it in fifth grade, and boy, have I ever.

The first or second day of school, I had students do a writing response to a picture book I read. I gave them a few guidelines, but I really just needed a baseline sample for what kinds of writing they could do about their reading. Most wrote a couple of vague sentences, and none were in any way outstanding in their analysis. The day after, I started introducing the terms that Nesi uses in her book: tone, pace, characterization, and story line. I had the students write down a general definition of each in their reading notebooks for reference, and then I handed out a "bookmark"from Nesi's book with the different terms and some examples of each. For tone, students could choose from bittersweet, humorous, melancholy, etc... Pace included gentle, lively, or fast. Characterization included describing characters as believable and relatable, or quirky, among others. Story line asked students to think about whether the story was more action based or character based, and we discussed what that might look like in a story. As I read the day's story, students were given time to check off terms on their bookmarks that they thought fit the story we were reading.

After a group discussion of what they thought the story was in each category, we proceeded to write a short paragraph using these terms. What a difference having some language to use made in these paragraphs! Students were talking about why they thought the pace was gentle, or why the tone was bittersweet. Having some terms to use made them analyze their reading more closely and made their discussion more specific; instead of saying, "I really liked the book," now they were able to tell what it was about the book that made them like it.

Eventually, we moved to writing a paragraph about one of the terms, instead of all of them in one paragraph. This has allowed students to deepen their thinking, giving several examples to support their thinking rather than just one. Their final writing project this trimester is a literary essay, and for that, they will need to pick three of the four terms, write paragraphs to support their thinking, and include an introduction and conclusion. We have talked about what happens if you didn't like the book, and how you could say, for example, that the pace was slow, which did (or did not) fit the story, and that you don't like books with a slow pace because they don't capture your attention (or whatever your reason is). As the year goes on, I hope that the usage of the terms becomes more automatic, and that kids will be talking about them when they recommend books to one another. Having some vocabulary to discuss their thinking has really made a difference in my classroom this year.

Word Art

One of the areas we know we need to work on as a school is vocabulary. With a number of second language speakers, this becomes even more important, and with the increasing academic vocabulary as the students move up through the grade levels, knowing the meanings of words is critical.  While I love learning about words, this love isn’t always shared by my students, and I’ve given a lot of thought to ways to make learning new words more engaging, and not just a “drag out the dictionary and copy down the meaning” exercise.

One thing I tried this week was “Word Art”, another idea I got from the book Learning in the Fast Lane, by Suzy Pepper Rollins.  Kids take the word and use it to draw something that represents the meaning of the word but still incorporates the letters. I used the vocabulary words from our first social studies unit on First Americans, and gave the kids a choice about which word to illustrate. Many chose “migration”, and used the letters to show the word “moving” across the paper. One student illustrated “nomad” by having all the letters walking with feet. One of my Muslim students chose “stereotype” and included a picture of a woman in a headscarf using the letter “o”. I think this would be a fun activity to use in any subject area, and I plan to have it as an independent activity during guided reading and intervention times. I posted them on the wall so students will have a chance to see how others illustrated each word, and also so the current unit’s vocabulary is on display while we are in that unit. My colleague found a bunch of adding machine tape and we cut up long strips for the kids to use, which they also enjoyed. I’d recommend this if you’re looking for something a little different to do with vocabulary!

Six-Word Memoirs

The school year has begun, and this year I’ve looped up to fifth grade with my two groups of kids from last year. So far I have loved coming back and just starting in – it seems like we just had a long weekend, and we’re back at it. But one of my concerns was making sure that fifth grade didn’t just feel like a repeat of fourth grade, so I knew I had to alter the routine a bit, and start with something we didn’t do last year. 

The May 2014 issue of The Reading Teacher featured an article called “Every Word is on Trial: Six-Word Memoirs in the Classroom,” by Jane M. Saunders and Emily E. Smith. Students work to come up with six words that describe them or something they are interested in, and then find an image to enhance their memoir. That sounded like something doable (six words isn’t many), fun (computer lab), and it would be a great way to start and finish a writing project the first week.

Following the suggestions in the article, we first looked at Ernest Hemingway’s famous memoir, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”  It was a great place to start, as we did a lot of inferencing about what he could have meant. I then pulled up some examples on brainpickings.org of elementary six-word memoirs (www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/09/six-word-memoirs-students), which gave my students some ideas for their work. I was careful to stop at the middle school level, as some of the examples are a little racier than I wanted to share with my class.  Then students all worked to come up with several examples, discussing with classmates if they were short a word or had too many. It was fun to see the discussions of how to condense ideas, or how to change words around to get the best effect. Punctuation also becomes important if you aren’t writing complete sentences, so some students experimented with colons and commas.

After choosing the memoir they liked best, we headed into the computer lab. The article gives many great suggestions of how to present the memoirs, but in the end, I just had students open up a Word document, and then we searched for images on Flickr as they did in the article. Once an image was selected, students dragged them into the Word document, and then typed the memoir below the image. We printed them off in black and white, and then students had the option of using colored pencils to make them more colorful. 

I hung them all up outside our room, and students have really enjoyed reading what others have written. Several staff members have also commented on how nicely they turned out. One colleague suggested doing this periodically throughout the year and using them as a chronicle of fifth grade, which I really like. I also think students could do this as a short way of synthesizing information from other subject areas. I’m going to experiment with this writing form throughout the year and see what I think. For now, it was a great way to start our new year off together.  

Here is my example that I showed the students. 

Standards Walls

Standards Walls

Earlier this spring, a co-worker loaned me a new book called Learning in the Fast Lane by Suzy Pepper Rollins (ASCD).  It has a lot of good ideas for helping all students succeed.  One of the suggestions was to create a standards wall.  At our school, we’ve been encouraged to post learning targets, which I dutifully did, but they’re in small font and there are so many of them, that they were basically meaningless for both me and the students.

Sorry - I can't figure out how to rotate this image!

Rollins suggests posting the standards and learning targets as a concept map up on the wall. As you move through the learning targets, an arrow tracks your progress. Instead of standards written and posted where nobody can see them, now everyone – both students and teachers – can see exactly what you are learning, and where you’ve been, and where you still need to go.

I decided to try this with our last social studies unit on the West, and also for our narrative writing unit. I found it was very helpful for social studies, because it really helped me tell the kids each day what our learning target was, and then I could point out what we had already done and where we were going. The narrative chart was helpful, but I found that in teaching writing, there are often many things going on at once that kids need to be aware of, and moving the arrow was less helpful. However, just having the “I can” statements that go with the learning targets posted on a readable poster was very helpful.

Rollins also suggests posting examples of student work by the learning targets, and I did post my own examples of what we were working on for the narrative unit. I liked being able to show kids who were absent what the rest of the class had worked on, and showing examples always helps. I will try to post more student work next year. 

I’m definitely going to do this for social studies next year, because those units change, but I’m thinking that I may be able to do one concept map for reading and one for writing, since those subjects have a different structure than social studies does. At any rate, having a big, readable poster really helped me to chart our learning progress. And luckily, I have all summer to try and plot out the standards walls for the fall. 

Revision: A Guest Post

Tom is one of my oldest professional colleagues. He's younger than me, so not that kind of old, but we've both been at the same school for over twenty years, making us some of the old timers now. For the last decade or so, he's been teaching mostly math, but when he's not doing that, he's writing. His writing career started at an early age, and he's been writing ever since. I knew this about him when I decided to take on the National Novel Writing Month challenge a few years back. I am going to take credit for convincing him to give it a try, and he has kept going with it, long after I quit. He knew he had some good stories to tell, and for the last couple of years, he's been pursuing finding an agent for one of his NaNoWriMo books. Happily, this is the year for him, as he signed with an agent who is excited about his middle grade book, FOLLOWING INFINITY. We decided to do guest posts on each other's blogs, and I asked him to share some thoughts on revision, which is a challenge for most of us, no matter what our writing ability. 

Our district began specializing in intermediate grades ten years ago, which means I haven’t formally taught anything to do with writing since 2004. There have been times I’ve missed working with a curricular area I’m so passionate about, but when I read Betsy’s blog and learn of the strategies she incorporates into her classroom, I’m reminded of what an uphill battle it can be to engage elementary students in writing. Then it seems that maybe working with numbers and shapes isn’t so bad after all.

In a post Betsy wrote about revision, she described how she had students pair off to share their writing and offer each other suggestions about how to improve their work. Too often the students would report back to her that the writing was already good enough so no changes were necessary. Speaking as a teacher, hearing a comment like this would have me mentally roll my eyes and redirect the students to try digging a little deeper, and give them some direction of what to look for. To hear this comment as a writer could quite possibly drive me into pulling my hair out. To put it simply, a lot of what people would think of as writing takes place in the revising. I’ve made the comparison for people that drafting a manuscript is a lot like a sculptor getting their hands on a massive lump of clay, and the revising that follows is when that clay is gradually molded into art. To highlight my point I decided to keep track of how many times I’ve made changes to this post you’re reading before I decided it was ready to send to Betsy. Updating this paragraph will be the last thing I edit before I send it, so I can now say I’ve read and revised this post in some way at least twenty different times.

I thought it was great Betsy was trying to get her students to work with critique partners, since that’s what many aspiring and professional writers do. The trick is finding people who will understand what you’re trying to accomplish, even if they don’t necessarily share your vision, and will be able to read critically and provide you with honest feedback. I’ve been lucky enough to have a small group of people over the years (Betsy being one of them) I’ve been able to rely on as some of my first readers. Collecting opinions from different people helps you identify any problems you might not see yourself because you’re too close to the work. If you have a lot of people identify how something about your story isn’t working for them, it’s pretty clear that needs to be addressed. But sometimes you’ll get contradicting feedback and you have to go with your gut on what to do. Example: Last summer a teacher friend read through a middle grade manuscript I had just finished revising. She gave me some great feedback, including points about one particular (and I’d say pivotal) scene that left her feeling so disturbed she had to stop reading and walk away from it for awhile. It made me wonder if I had pushed the moment too far for the age group of the target audience. Fast forward to eight months later when I received revision notes from my agent Carrie, who also had comments on that same moment but in the opposite direction. Hearing from different people, especially regarding a scene that could be polarizing, helped me clarify why it was important to keep it; ‘disturbed’ was the reaction I had been going for after all, and it worked. But without the benefit of outside opinions to consider I may not have reflected on that scene the way I did, and as a result I might have missed out on newer ideas that stemmed from that moment.

I’ll admit, when the revision notes came in from my agent I opened them with an equal mix of excitement and trepidation. We’d already discussed an overview of her ideas during a couple of phone calls so I knew what to expect. I was looking forward to seeing her specific notes and getting back to work because I knew she understood what I was going for and saw ideas to explore that would make the manuscript even better. But it meant a lot of revising to do on a project I’d already done a fair amount of heavy lifting on three or four times before. Her feedback wasn’t exactly “I love this so much, now go back rewrite the whole thing,” but some of the changes she suggested were big: edits that could result in removing entire chapters, developing characters she wanted to see more of, cutting some characters out, redefining the relationships between others, and expanding on sections of the story to develop the overall progression. This was no thirty seconds of us standing in the back of the classroom and then me telling Mrs. Quist that “my partner thought it was good so I don’t really have to change anything.”

But if I hadn’t gotten that kind of feedback, I would have been disappointed. For her to think about the manuscript so critically shows me how invested she is in seeing this become something more. And I have to say, it was both reassuring and a little scary to know just how dead-on her suggestions were. With the work I’ve been able to do on it so far, I can already see the new directions the story will go and what it will be like when it’s finished.

And once it is, you can bet I’ll be anxious to hear Mrs. Quist’s opinion.

If you would like to read more about Tom's writing life, plus a host of other topics (he has an extensive music collection, views a variety of movies, and is generally a reflective kind of guy), I recommend you check out his blog What I Did On My Summer Vacation. http://ernieyoureafool.blogspot.com

On-line posters

Next year I’ll be doing something new: all of our fourth grade teachers will be looping up to fifth grade, keeping our same classes that we’ve had this year. I’m very excited about this for a number of reasons. I’ve been in fourth grade for thirteen years, and I’m feeling like I need a curriculum change, and I’m glad I’m moving up as I like the complexity of the content as the grades move up. I’m also happy to be spending another year with these kids; we’ve had a great group and I’m glad I can continue on with them.

That being said, I know that I need to mix things up a bit for next year, and provide new opportunities for these students so that it doesn’t seem like a complete repeat of fourth grade. One area I plan to have kids use more often is technology in the classroom.  They need to be able to comfortably word process a page-length document by the end of fifth grade, and I know that much of their work in middle school will be done and turned in on computers, so I want to be sure that they’ve had opportunities to do that in my classroom before moving on.

I also want to hit the ground running in the fall, since I don’t have to take all the time to get to know them like I have all the other years, and to that end, I’ve started to introduce some things that we can practice now, and then hopefully just review a bit before putting it into independent practice in September.

One project we’ve tried is making multi-media posters using our district’s Discovery Education account. Each student has a user name and password, and once they log on, they can begin to use some of the tools Discovery Ed has. I had my students  make multi-media posters about the Dust Bowl, since we had just read a nonfiction text in guided reading. Using the Board Builder program, students were able to include text boxes, still photos, and maybe best of all, short movies from the Discovery Ed collection, all to give the best information they could about the Dust Bowl.

The posters are far from perfect, but the students were very engaged each time they had a chance to work on them. They especially liked selecting movies (no surprises there), and many included more than would be ideal on their posters. It would be great to have them look at each other’s posters and offer suggestions, and I may get to that this spring, but that would be a definite skill to practice in the fall.  They were also quick to pick up the basics, and helped each other out, making it much easier for me to get around to help on more difficult tasks. They could even access this account from home, and a few students did that.

I’m including a couple of examples of posters below; there could be all kinds of discussions about how effective or distracting the backgrounds are, if there is enough information in the text boxes, and what else is needed to make the poster more easily understood. But it’s a start for now, and will definitely be an option for “showing what you know” in the fall.