A Shift

One shift in my teaching the last few years has been trying to read different types of text. In the past I had relied too heavily on fiction. I still love fiction and it is usually at the heart of what we do in my room, but now we read all types of texts.

One way that I have really been trying to incorporate nonfiction this year has been reading an article of the week. This idea comes from Kelly Gallagher. Gallagher says that this weekly article exposes students to 30-40 articles a year. This exposure will help students have a better understanding of the world. It will also add to their schema when they read other articles.

This year we have already read articles about buddy baseball, Dreadnoughtus, wild horses on the island of Corolla, North Carolina, orca whales at Sea World, and the buddy bench.

I love reading nonfiction in my classroom. I think it opens up more chances for students to fall in love with reading. I might be able to hook some reluctant readers by reading these high interest nonfiction articles. Once we have them hooked we can show them the nonfiction books of Seymour Simon or Steve Jenkins. From there the sky is the limit.

I also love the article of the week because it allows me to introduce a way for students to "code" their thinking as they read. This year we want students to understand that reading is thinking. When students are coding a text, they are showing their thinking. Coding a text is a simple way to show your thinking about what you are reading. This year we have used two-column notes, a 3...2..1., a strategy where we look at the title only and ask questions we could answer when we read the text, and selective highlighting. We will keep exposing different strategies to the class. As the year goes on, they will have a treasure trove of different strategies they can use when they read an article.

I hope that you are having a great week.

I Prefer

Today we worked on having students notice something about a text. We gave the class a copy of two "I Prefer" poems. The class first had to infer which poem was written by me and which one by Ms. Cavallaro. When the students were done, we read our poems aloud. As we read, we asked the class to think about what they noticed. The class as usual noticed some amazing things. They noticed that both of us used the last same three words, that we always used I prefer at the beginning of our lines, that we made each stanza about something we loved, that we did not just say that we prefer bacon we described it, and so much more.

When students can look at a text and figure out what the author did, they can then try to recreate a text that is similar. I know this might sound like cheating or plagiarism, but I really think it is what we all do when we are producing something. If I am going to fix something around the house, I look up videos of experts and then try to mimic what they do. If I am going to play basketball, I am going to watch Lebron James and try to learn from watching his moves. Authors do the same thing. They read other authors and look at how they play with words. Then they try some of the same moves when they are creating a piece.

Here are the two "I Prefer" poems that the class looked at today:

I Prefer

I prefer the sunrise over the sunset

I prefer the freshness and sunlight a new day brings

I prefer the start of a new beginning and all the excitement that comes with it

I prefer the warmth of light streaming through my windows

I prefer the thrill of an adventure

I prefer the mystery and confusion of a different language spoken

I prefer getting lost and finding an unexpected place

I prefer the awe of seeing historical places for the first time

I prefer the warmth of the outdoors over chills of the winter months

I prefer the slight chill in the breeze during the fall time

I prefer sitting on my back deck staring out into the woods

I prefer corn mazes, apple spiced Yankee candles and all Halloween candy

I prefer the suburbs

I prefer the familiarity of the back roads

I prefer a blue-dipped rainbow sprinkle icecream cone from Whippy Dip

I prefer the overwhelming nostalgia for memories made in every place in town

I prefer the reverse breakfast for dinner any day

I prefer vanilla over chocolate anything

I prefer any kind of food that I can douse in hot sauce

I prefer ice cold water over piping hot tea

I prefer our traditions

I prefer Grandma’s homemade lasagna during the holidays

I prefer Dad’s laughter even when his jokes aren’t funny

I prefer the comfort and love of family to anything else

I Prefer

I prefer greasy-spoon holes in the wall and places not found on the map
I prefer gas station coffee burnt black and cake doughnut crumbles
I prefer the company as much as the meal
I prefer the heart of the mom and pops to the machine of a giant chain

I prefer being a fly on your wall 
I prefer sitting in the back
I prefer getting lost in the crowd 
I prefer the silence to the uncomfortable words

I prefer the night sky
I prefer the freedom of windows down
I prefer staying out in the storm
I prefer the cool crisp air to the choking repressive heat

I prefer music that never finds the radio
I prefer the skip of a record needle and the mistakes found
I prefer songs by George not John and Paul 
I prefer album art to the great works at the Met

I prefer the precision and sweat of a pitchers duel
I prefer the old fashion three-point play
I prefer tennis on the grass in the middle of July
I prefer the athlete who realizes his passion to the one who relies on his skill 

I prefer the city
I prefer getting lost in the maze of the streets and the masses
I prefer the sidewalks beaten down by millions
I prefer the hum and music to the dull drab of the suburbs

I prefer our barefoot nights in the backyard chasing each other
I prefer our cool morning walks
I prefer the screaming of your laughter
I prefer our chocolate blueberry flavored tea parties to anything else.

I think if you take a look at our two poems and then look at the poems in the writer's notebooks you will be amazed. You will also see that the students did not steal our work. They just used our work as a guideline to produce something that was entirely all their own.

I hope you are having a great week.

Another Wiesner

Today we read another wordless picture book by David Wiesner. I love his books. He tells an amazing stories without using a single word. In this book a young boy on a field trip is taken by a cloud to Sector 7. Sector 7 is the factory in the sky where clouds are made. The clouds have grown tired of the shapes they are forced to take each time they are sent out over the East Coast. The clouds brought the boy to Sector 7 to design clouds that are a bit more interesting. The boy starts creating "cloudprints" in the shapes of all the different sea creatures. When the could designers see the boys designs, they are not pleased. The boy is sent back to his field trip at the top of the Empire State Building. When the boy gets down from the building the sky has filled with clouds that are in the shapes of squids, fish, and many other sea creatures. I love the idea of this story.

As we read this book, the class worked on asking questions before, during, and after they read. The questions the students thought of after the book were quite interesting. Since the students had read two books by Mr. Wiesner, they started to ask questions about him as a writer. Does he always write wordless picture books? Did he grow up by the ocean? Is he interested in the ocean? We are going to keep working on asking questions the rest of the week and throughout the year.0'[

In writing we continue to work on the idea of getting our seed idea ready to draft. Today I showed the students how I was working on a letter I had written to my daughter. The class had let me know they did not like my second paragraph (the feedback was quite harsh but I will survive). I wanted to show the class how I would work to make this paragraph shine in my piece. I put my writer's notebook under the document camera so the class could see me write two different ideas for the paragraph. When I was done with the two new ideas, we talked about which paragraph would work best. Now as an author I had some different ideas of what I could do in that troublesome second paragraph.

Then the class went to work on their idea. I loved seeing students working on certain stanzas or paragraphs that they thought needed attention. One of my favorite moments of the day was when a student told me he had worked on his last stanza. He now thought this stanza that was not his favorite had become his best stanza in the piece. Working on writing is hard. Finding those spots that need help and making them better takes work. Hopefully as we continue to work on this idea all year long students will find different strategies that will work for them. I also hope they have that moment when that hard work pays off and they see that amazing sentence they reworked make their writing shine.

I hope you are all having a great week.

Questioning

Today we introduced our next strategy questioning. I love this strategy because asking questions is such an important skill. Both classes looked at quotes about asking questions and wrote down what they thought. Each quote could be summed up by saying that asking questions does not mean you are a fool it means that you are about to learn and acquire knowledge. I want our students to know that by asking questions about the world and the books they read they can learn. Hopefully this skill and desire to learn grows and grows as we work with this strategy and all our thinking strategies all year long.

After sharing their thinking about the quotes, the students came over to the rocking chair and looked at two objects that Ms. Cavallaro and I had brought in for the lesson. My object was a part of my keychain where I can keep glucose pills. A parent gave me the holder a few years ago and just like anything that ends up on my key chain it has stayed.

Ms. Cavallaro brought in a "clicker" responder that she used in large seminar classes at Miami. The remote allowed students to sign-in to class and respond to questions from the teacher. I could not help to think how much college had changed since my time at UD.

The classes made giant lists of questions they had as they looked and passed around our objects. The questions were great. They started with the questions as they looked at the objects, then added more as the object was actually in their hand, and then finally they asked more questions after Ms. Cavallaro and I told them the identity of the objects. These types of questions fit perfectly with one of our main goals of the week. We want the students to realize that when they read they can ask questions before, during and after their reading.

The thinking stems that we are going to use when we are sharing our thinking about questioning include:

• I wonder...
• What if...
• I don't understand...
• It confuses me...
• How could...

I hope your week is off to a great start.

Mining the Notebook

The students have been doing so many amazing things in their writer's notebooks this year. Earlier this week we did an activity called M&M writing. It is a great idea to get students to write. You just put a pile of M&M's on their desk. Each color represents an idea for a list. For example the yellow M&M's represented things the students did well. If they had four yellow M&M's, then the students would list four things they do well. As soon as the students came up with an idea for that M&M they could eat the piece of candy. If you have a reluctant writer, it is a great way to get something on the paper. Then we asked the students to look at their lists and find something they wanted to write. They starred the idea, turned the page, and started to write.

All these great ideas are adding up in our notebook. Some students have already produced thirty plus pages of writing in their notebooks. We thought this would be the perfect time to show the students what they can do with all of these great ideas. This week we have started to read aloud a book called a Writer's Notebook by Ralph Fletcher.

In this book Fletcher talks about all the ways that students can use a writer's notebook. One of my favorite chapters is called Seed Ideas. The chapter talks about how the writer's notebook is a safe place to keep infant ideas. But eventually you may get struck by an idea and decide to grow the idea. You will go back and add to it. Work the idea in different way. Play with the idea. Then when you think you are ready you will take the idea out of your notebook and share it with the world. 

This is what the students have been working on this week. Finding the idea that they are most excited about in their writer's notebook. Working on growing that idea. Now we are going to get ready to share that idea by creating our first writing project of the year. One thing that may be helpful during this time is to help out at home with mining the writer's notebook for those little nuggets of gold. Sit down and look through the writer's notebook and talk about which ideas might make the best projects. These conversations will allow you to get to see all of this great writing and maybe help the decision of which idea would make the perfect first writing project.

Hope you are having a great week.

Wordless Picture Books

I love wordless picture books. Today Ms. Cavallaro read one of my favorite wordless picture books Flotsam by the amazing David Wiesner. As she read the book, the class worked on making inferences. The pictures or the text provided the evidence that students needed to make their inferences. In honor of this wordless picture book I thought I would share with you some of my favorite wordless picture books:

I hope you get a chane to enjoy these great books! If you are reading them at home,  you could work on making some inferences as you read.

Hope you are all having a great week.

Making Inferences

On Friday we introduced our next thinking strategy...inferring. We started with one of my favorite activities. To start the lesson Ms. Cavallaro and I each showed the class a pair of shoes that we told the class that we had picked up at a garage sale. We asked the class to make inferences about the person who wore the shoes. The class quickly started sharing their inferences. They inferred that my pair was a man's shoe that was well worn. The also inferred that the mystery man played sports in the shoes and he mowed the grass wearing the shoes. For Ms. Cavallaro's boots they inferred that the girl who had worn them wore them a lot. They inferred that the boots might have been worn to ride horses or to go dancing. They also inferred that these boots were a favorite pair.

We kept track of all these inferences on the left side of a T-chart at the front of the room. When we had collected all the inferences, we made the class explain the evidence that they had used to make these inferences. The students used lots of different pieces of evidence like the green stains on my shoes or the worn toe and heel on the boots or just the style of the shoe to explain their inferences.

Today we did another lesson to get students to understand that to make an inference they have to use evidence. We told the class that Ms. Cavallaro had a new neighbor that was quite interesting. They never came out of their house and things just did not seem right. We continued the story by letting the class know that Ms. Cavallaro had become so interested that this morning she took a bag of their trash. We opened up the bag of trash and started to look through all of the evidence. Again we made a T-chart to list all of this evidence. Tables quickly started to turn this evidence into schema.

Inferring is such an important part of reading. We will continue this week to talk about inferring. Just as with all of our other thinking strategies we have thinking stems that the students are prompted to use when sharing their thinking. Here are the thinking stems for inferring:

• My guess is...
• Perhaps...
• Maybe...
• It could be that...
• This could mean...
• I infer...

You could try and prompt our students to use these thinking stems at home when they are sharing their thinking about their at home reading.

I hope you all had a great start to your week.