Common Core and Content Learning

From Choice Literacy:

A new podcast with Georgia Heard, who discusses the surprising connections between nonfiction, poetry, and the Common Core:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/1708.cfm 

Persuasive writing is a key focus in the Common Core, and Heather Wolpert-Gawron has suggestions for minilessons to home in on persuasion skills:

http://bit.ly/sxOxPJ 

  

Franki Sibberson has suggestions for previewing nonfiction with students:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/818.cfm 

Happy Clicking and Learning!

Thinking About Your Thinking & Locating Lexile Levels

Intentional Naming = Vicarious Learning

A colleague of ours recently shared with me her awe of a first grader who used the word “infer” in context. Take a minute to create a mental image of the scene below.

She was helping another child read a book in front of the class, and she stopped her to ask the class if they could infer what would happen next in the book. She said, "Would anyone like to infer what might happen next?" and she called on lots of kids to share their schema.

While this teacher had not yet formally introduced inferring during her lengthy strategy studies, it was pretty clear that she had heard the word used multiple times in context. During her think alouds while reading, solving math problems, and engaging in science experiments, voiced how her schema and mental images helped her to infer. Real thinking. Said out loud. In context. Because of her teacher’s clear explanations about how the thinking tools helped her understand, the student obviously made meaning of when and how to infer—in order to use the word appropriately in a novel situation (i.e. transfer).


If you work under the assumption that children cannot “handle” hearing about a thinking strategy before you formally introduce it, research encourages you to reconsider. Bandura, a social theorist who studied how people learn proposed, “People learn not only from their own experience but by observing the behaviors of others. This vicarious learning permits individuals to learn a novel behavior without undergoing the trial and error process of performing it.” With that said, if you are looking to increase your students’ vicarious learning about our thinking strategy tools so that they can make meaning and possibly transfer prior to explicit instruction…


Try this strategy- Every time you say the word “thinking” in your classroom (when modeling, thinking aloud, in conversation, when conferring with students, etc.) try to follow-up by intentionally naming the specific thinking strategy you are using (i.e. using schema, inferring, visualizing, determining importance, synthesizing). See what happens. I bet you’ll be amazed at the vicarious learning and deeper understanding your students gain related to the thinking strategy tools.

Extra, Extra- Lexile Levels Made Easy!
Looking for a way to find the Lexile levels of those texts you want to get into the hands of your RTI, small groups, and individual readers? Just go to http://www.lexile.com/ and set up a free account. You can use this site to type in titles, passages, or simply find the appropriate Lexile levels for your readers.


Here is a very quick peek into what might be the most helpful Lexile website.


Lexile Analyzer-The Lexile® measure of text is determined using the Lexile Analyzer®, a software program that evaluates the reading demand—or readability—of books, articles and other materials. The Lexile Analyzer measures the complexity of the text by breaking down the entire piece and studying its characteristics, such as sentence length and word frequency, which represent the syntactic and semantic challenges that the text presents to a reader. The outcome is the text complexity, expressed as a Lexile measure, along with information on the word count, mean sentence length and mean log frequency.


Request a Lexile Measure for a Book-You can use this form to request that books be added to our list of Lexile measures. Please fill out the form with as much information as you can. You must supply the Title, Author, and Publisher. Submitting a book is no guarantee that it will be added to our list of Lexile measures. A publisher must ultimately add the book to their request, but submissions from this form can help get a book included.

Find a Book- Allows you to type in grade or Lexile level to generate a list of texts.

HOT new books for your professional library

Check out the latest from your favorite expert authors.

The PERFECT book to start the year off on the right foot" (Angela Maiers). In Teaching with Intention, best-selling author Debbie Miller helps you define your core teaching beliefs and put them into practice through classroom organization, lesson design, teacher language, assessment, conferring, and more. Click here for details!

Move beyond the "how to write" and get students thinking about the "why"—by focusing on the reader. Building on the best-sellingReading Power, Writing Power gives you dozens of lessons based on five thinking strategies—Connect, Question, Visualize, Infer, and Transform—to help students engage readers' thinking. Preview the entire book!

10 Things Every Writer Needs to Know by Jeff Anderson distills what makes writing work in any genre or form. You get a rich collection of mentor texts, tips, and launching points for a variety of writing. Filled with classroom dialogue. Click here to preview Chapter 1 online!

See how to make formative assessments a powerful part of your everyday instruction. In So What Do They Really Know?, best-selling author and English teacher Cris Tovani shares successful lessons and strategies for getting to know your students well, differentiating instruction, giving feedback, grading, and more. Preview the entire book online!

How can you make the most of small-group math instruction?Math Exchanges shows K-3 teachers how to foster rich discussions within a math workshop setting and help students construct new meaning and understanding as they establish themselves as mathematicians. Preview the entire book online!

In their first book, Mentor Texts, Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli demonstrated how teachers can use children’s literature to guide and inspire student writers of narrative fiction and poetry. Now, they have turned their focus to nonfiction, identifying a wide range of mentor texts and showing how these models illustrate the key features of good writing.

 

Lynne and Rose guide teachers through a variety of projects, samples, and classroom anecdotes that demonstrate how teachers can help students become more effective writers of good nonfiction. The Your Turn lessons at the end of each chapter use the gradual release of responsibility model to guide and empower student writers. Teachers will find especially helpful the information on how to select appropriate mentor texts from among the sometimes overwhelming offerings of children’s literature. Each Your Turn lesson encourages reflection and motivates students to think about what they’ve learned, the purpose of learning and practicing a skill or strategy, and how they might use this technique in the future. Additionally, An Author’s Voice provides encouragement and advice from published authors of children’s nonfiction. 

Happy Reading!!!

What other new professional books do you know about and want to share???

Amy Buckner Weighs In on Writer's Notebooks and NonFiction text

The way out of a slump for some young writers begins with trying different genres. In a new podcast, Aimee Buckner talks about the value of integrating more nonfiction reading and writing into student notebooks:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/1668.cfm

Aimee Buckner chats with Franki Sibberson about her new work on integrating nonfiction into reading and writing notebooks with students. Aimee's latest book is Notebook Connections: Strategies for the Reader's Notebook. A full transcript is available below the player.


Check out the podcast and then talk with your colleagues about how your your students are using their writer's notebooks to grow as writer.
Be sure to add your comments below. 

Family Journals- Setting the Expectation

K in May

 Family Journals provide one of the the most authentic ways for our students to reflect on their learning and deepening understandings and from the past week. They can put to practice all of the purpose and audience, word choice, and organizational patterns they know about. In this very real venue, even our youngest writers can transfer their learning about conventions (grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc.) so that their message is clear to their reader.

While we must set our expectations high for our students, it's equally important to set expectations for our parents. How do we do this? Simply inform them. Send home an example letter and some guidance about how you want them to respond to their child. Let families know that these journals are a conversation on paper with their child and model of real world writing.

Looking to set the bar a little higher? Consider writing a new model letter for parents to use as their model this year. If you find yourself stumped in this area, simply search the /S/ drive under my folder and check out the model I would have written in Keaton's this week (had he brought it home.) It's not too long, not too short, but just right for responding to a child's week of learning and sharing.        Good Luck!!

5th - Notice Paragraphing

5th

Examples, Examples, Examples

Podcast Clip about Reading Like a Writer with Lester Laminack

In this podcast, Franki Sibberson chats with Lester Laminack about how he reads as a writer, and what teachers might do to develop this skill in their students. Lester is the author of beloved books for children and teachers, including Saturdays and Teacakes and Unwrapping the Read Aloud.*

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/1545.cfm
Just push the play arrow on the bar before the transcript.

Whether you're just starting out, or have been teaching for many moons, it's worth your time and  you can even segment parts to share with students (after they have heard a book and establish a relationship with/context for him.) 


Lester talks about:

• connecting to text
• themes and messages
• the importance of setting
• detail diarrhea :) (the sister sickness of what I call "dialog-arrhea")
• reading like a writer

*I've got both books (and one more!) in my room for you to check out! Great memoir and teaching texts.

What's a Workshop?

It’s that time of year again! The time when we ask our students to think about the very important question, “So, what is a workshop?” We know most of them have experienced it and have plenty of schema to share with their classmates, so why don’t we find a new avenue for tapping into their background knowledge? Skip the 3 column “How does it feel, look and sound like?” chart this year and let them author their own book- The Important Workshop Book.

This year, as you read Margaret Wise Brown’s The Important Book, pose the question, “What do you think is important about a workshop? And WHY do you think that? By partaking in this meaning making experience, your students will be:


• engaging their brains a thinkers


• participating in a shared reading experience


• sharing their schema


• building community


• determining importance (key ideas)


• inferring readers’ needs


• connecting previous understandings with new understandings (making meaning)


• participating in the writing process


       o writing descriptively (vocabulary & details)


       o crafting complete sentences


       o considering words, conventions, and print features


       o practicing punctuation


       o publishing a class book


• illustrating to match pictures to written text


• exercising comprehension and collaboration through teamwork and presenting


• integrating the curriculum


• unleashing their creativity for a purposeful product


• …and the list goes on.


So this year, when you’re looking for a new way to tap into your students’ schema and set the expectations for your workshops, consider crafting a class book. You can refer to this text throughout the year when things are “not quite what they used to be”, or send mini-copies home to parents to inform them about how their child learns at school. Rest assured this is learning event is more than “cute”—it “counts” by getting at the understanding and meets our building code. * What more can you ask for? Oh yeah, it will be fun. ;)

Please let me know if you are interested in me modeling this lesson or coteaching it with you!


*ELA standards- RL.1, RL.2, RL.3, RL.4, RL.5, RL.6, RL.7, RL.9; W.1, W.4, W.5, SL.1, SL.2, SL.3, SL.6; L.1, L.2, L.3, (L.4, L.5) L.6