New Writing Teacher

For the last few days and over the next few weeks we will have a new writing teacher. Her name is Cynthia Rylant. She is the amazing author of some fabulous children's books. Here are a few of my favorite:

The class is going to study Mrs. Rylant and notice what she does as an author. They have already noticed that in the book The Relatives Came she used a circular ending (the first page was the same as the last) and she used a lot of ands in sentences like this one: 

They had an old station wagon that smelled like a real car, and in it they put an ice chest full of soda pop and some boxes of crackers and some bologna sandwiches, and up they came from Virginia.

I love this sentence. It breaks the rules but sounds amazing. It has been great to see the class recreate sentences just like this one.

Our students have also noticed that Mrs. Rlyant will thread a line through her story like in the book When I Was Young In The Mountains. When we read the book Long Night Moon, they noticed that she wrote about each month and started each page with In December or In November. 

I love these two books and I have loved seeing the class try out these Rylant-ish moves. We have had stories with the thread When I Was Young In Lebanon or When I Was Young On The Football Field. We have also had stories that mirrored the idea of Long Night Moon. Instead of talking about the moon, though, students are walking me through the holidays of the year or a vacation they took to New York.

The students are getting better and better and better at the idea of taking techniques from an author and making it their own. It is so much fun to watch them stand on the shoulders of other authors (a phrase a colleague once shared with me). I cannot wait to see their next writing project where they get to use all of these ideas that they are borrowing from Cynthia Rylant. 

I hope you are having a great week.

A New Book

Today we started our new read aloud book Absolutely Almost by Lisa Graff.

I love getting into a new read aloud. We get to meet new characters. We get to meet a new author. We get to get excited about another book. I also love this book because I have only read the first chapter. This book is a new book. It just came out this year and it has a chance to win the Newbery Medal. I love sharing new books with the class. Something they have not seen or heard about from their friends. It allows the students to make up their own mind about the book. Plus it gives us a chance to read aloud the Newbery Medal award winning book before the medal is given. The last two years I have been lucky enough to have read the book aloud before the medal was awarded. 

When these books were announced, my classes felt so cool that they already knew about the book that won this important award. It was like we had found the coolest thing before it became cool. Hopefully this year we will get to experience that feeling once again.

Today we also used a new reading strategy with our article of the week. I think this strategy is called a graffiti wall. The whole idea is that students share their thinking about an article they read with their group. Here are some pictures of the graffiti walls that some of the groups created. It is amazing to see this thinking going on about text. Each student used a different color highlighter to mark section of the articles where they wanted to share their thinking. Then others in the group would add their thinking to that part. I loved all the colors and the discussions that were happening on the paper.

Hope your week is off to a great start!

Book Talking

Today was a great day. The room was loud, but in the best way possible. Students were talking about books. I love book talk day. It is a chance for students to not only share what they have read but to find out what others are reading. Hopefully the day helps students find the next book that they will love.

I was amazed by the creativity that filled the room. We had tickets inviting you to a book, we had posters announcing a lost dog, we had sections of a book read in the character's voice, and it just kept getting better. The room was filled with a gorilla and a young Jedi and a famous author as students gave their book talk as a character from their book.

Not only were the book talks amazing the books that we were talking about were great books. Today we heard about:

• How to Steal a Dog
• Hatchet
• Flora and Ulysses
• Marvin Redpost Series
• The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane
• The Jedi Academy Series
• The One and Only Ivan
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid
• Big Nate
• How to Be a Perfect Person in just Three Days

On and on and on the great books went and this was just day number one. I cannot wait to hear the rest of our book talks tomorrow. 

Hope you are having a great week.

Reverse Visualizing

Another day another wordless picture book. Today the title was Good Dog Carl.

This book is a classic. I love the idea of a dog babysitter. In the book Carl takes over to watch the baby as his owner goes out for the day (I did warn the class this was a bad idea). The baby and Carl have adventures throughout the house sliding down the laundry chute, dancing to the record collection, swimming in the aquarium, and having a little snack. Luckily Carl is able to pick up the mess and get the baby back into the crib seconds before his owner returns. 

When the students were reading this book we wanted them to work on reverse visualizing. All week long we have been working on having students turn the text into a movie in their head. Today that was impossible because their were no words. The idea today was to have the students create the words that would go with the pictures in the book. We talked about how the amazing authors that we have looked at this week have created pictures with their words. They described the dog and the checkerboard floor and the outside of the house and anything else.

The writing was amazing. Hopefully now students understand that they not only have to visualize when they read but also allow their reader to visualize by using descriptive details.

Hope you are all having a great week.

A Quiet Goodbye

Today we finished the book Half a Chance by Cynthia Lord.

I had not read this book before I shared it with the class. I had only read five chapters before I decided I wanted to read it with the class. I like to read aloud a new book to the class. It allows me to show the class the real thinking that goes on in my head as I read. They get to see me make predictions that might not come true. They get to see how my thinking changes as I progress through the book. They also get to see my excitement build as we read. 

The last few days my enjoyment for this book grew. I wanted to know how it would end. Today I found out it would end quietly. A quiet vacation town empty. A lake empty of the loons that had filled it with their calls all summer. The quietest goodbye came from Grandma Lilah. I do not have the book with me tonight, but Grandma Lilah had an amazing quote today about goodbyes. I will paraphrase it the best I can, "Goodbyes do not have to be bad. Sometimes it is just time to go."

I know that is not exact but I loved the message. I hope our next book can match this book. If you get a chance, you could ask at home what the students thought about the ending or what they thought about the book as a whole.

Comments in the Middle

I got to school today and realized I had not posted anything last night. I am sorry. Here is what I wanted to write about yesterday but just plain forgot.

Over the last week I have been looking at the first drafts we turned in last week. These first drafts were amazing. I read I am From poems with lines that stopped me cold. These poems were filled with amazing little nuggets of writing that I could not believe. Some of the lines made me jealous. There were stories about fairies and birds and dogs and so much more. There were claims about the best ride at Kings Island or the best holiday or the best current Cincinnati Reds or the best cars on the road. Each project was filled with such amazing writing. Reading this writing was worth every second.

On Monday I passed back these first drafts. In the folder that held the first draft was a piece of paper filled with my comments. I love this idea of giving students comments in the middle of the writing process. I remember when I was in school the only time that I got comments on my writing was after the project was complete and graded. The comments that my teacher gave me were lost because I had already moved on to my next piece. I also remember writing a second draft and never knowing what I needed to work on in my piece.

I started to write comments after the first draft two years ago. My hope was that students would get these comments back with an opportunity to use the comments. Hopefully students will use my comments to help them make their writing on their final draft better. Working to make your writing better is hard. There is a quote that I love from X.J. Kennedy about revising writing, "The world is full of poets with languid wrenches who don't bother to take the last six turns on their bolt."

The work that our students are doing right now on their writing pieces is those last six turns. Our class has done all this amazing work on their first drafts, but now they get a chance to make them even better. Hopefully through my comments and through practice the rest of the year students will get better at these "last six turns." Hopefully they will start to see the value in working hard to make their writing as good as it can possibly be when they share it with the world.

I hope you are all having a great start to your week. Second post of the night will be coming soon.

Simulated Research

This week we have been researching an idea in class. The idea was whether or not fourth graders should have a smartphone. To start the week we read an article from Time For Kids where two students talked about whether or not children should have cellphones. One student supported the idea and one was opposed. Students used stick Post-its to mark the students claim and reasons. We had talked about this idea of claims already this year but I was still impressed how easily the students were able to find the claims and the students reasons. After we had looked at the articles, students made their own claims on a notecard.

On Tuesday we started our research. We read two articles that talked about the pros and cons of giving children a smartphone. While students read these articles, they used strategies to search for information. The strategies that the students used were strategies that we had already used this year when we read our Article of the Week. Tables worked on mining the articles looking for evidence to support their claim. It was great to see the tables working together to find information.

On Wednesday we had to spend a little more time looking through the articles but not a lot. When the class had finished we had the students create a pro/con list. No matter which side of the debate the students were on they had to find three reasons and three reasons not to get a fourth grader a cell phone. We had created pro/con list earlier this year when we made our back to school claims.

Today in class we looked at a group of articles that I like to call "List Claims." List Claims are just a claim in the form of a list. They have become quite popular in magazines and websites lately. The first List Claim that we shared was 8 Reasons that Frozen is Unstoppable. Then we looked at the article 7 Reasons Not To Buy Your Child an iPad. Students made a list of all things that they noticed about the list claims. We have done this idea of looking at types of writing and seeing what we notice a lot this year.

The whole week has been leading up to the students writing their list claim tomorrow in class. I love how little bits of what we have done all year long have allowed students to accomplish this work. What we asked students to do this week was not easy, but since we had practiced and played with the ideas already I think the students felt comfortable. Hopefully I will be proven correct tomorrow when we read some great List Claims.

Hope you are having a great day.