Literacy for All

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of attending Lester Laminack's session on flipping reading workshop into writing workshop. This topic is discussed in his new book: Writers ARE Readers. Of course I had to purchase his book and he signed it! I'm getting quite a collection of signed books in my collection. 

If you ever get the opportunity to see and listen to Laminack do it!! He doesn't disappoint. While he makes you think and reflect on your teaching, he also makes you laugh! He should have an act as a comedian. His session did not disappoint and was one of my favorite sessions so far!

I can't wait to read his book and try out some of his lessons in some of my colleagues classrooms.

More to come....

Literacy for All

I'm so excited to attend Literacy for All Conference in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm currently surrounded by hundreds of teachers of literacy. I can't wait to see many of the gurus of literacy present! I'm ready to push my thinking forward. I'm taking the stance of a learner. ALL teachers should always have this stance, once they quit thinking of themselves as learners, we must remove ourselves from the classroom. We must put our best selves in the classroom each day for our students, the future of our world. So, I ask you...what will you be learning more about this week? 

Literacy Centers

Independent Work Management..."centers" or "jobs" in the K-2 classrooms seem to be quite overwhelming for teachers. I have learned that it is very important to take your time introducing centers to your class BEFORE you begin your work with Guided Reading. This will pay off later as far as behavior management and working independently is concerned. Use a Work Board and teach your students the rules and expectations from the beginning. 

Teach one center at a time while being explicit with your teaching. Revisit this center for a few days. Once you are certain your students can control the center independently, add on a new center. Repeat.

It is important that your centers are meaningful and authentic. It's not just busy work. It is meaningful work that supports their learning about literacy. NO WORKSHEETS! They fail you time and time again. Learning skills in isolation does not teach a reader how to read. There are SO many great center ideas in the Fountas and Pinnell Phonics books! Use them to back up the skills that you've already taught. Don't overthink your centers. You can keep many of the same centers just change out the principle for the week. I'm looking forward to incorporating poetry and technology in my centers this year...more to come on that! 

 

What are your favorite centers to use with your students? Some that I think I will start with this year are:

*Independent Reading

*Browsing Boxes

*Read Around the Room

*Listening Center

*Poetey Center

*Magnetic Letters

*Various Phonics Centers

(Start simple...)

Things to Remember:

1.Take your time (go slow to go fast...)

2. Be explicit with your teaching

3. Retech

4. There is nothing too small to teach and revisit

5. Don't teach a new center until you are certain your students can control the previous one(s).

6. Keep them meaningful and authentic. No WORKSHEETS

7. Don't overthink them

Starting again...

This past week, I started my new endeavor to become Dual Certified as a PreK- 6 Literacy Collaborative Coordinator. I already hold my Intermediate Cert focusing in grades 3-6. The intermediate kids are where I've spent the majority of my career through AIS services and LC. I'm quite intimidated by the little ones, but they sure are cute. 

I never thought about working with the little kiddos until this past school year when my district decided that they were going to hire back 2 more coaches, but we would stay in one building (last year I was in all four buildings concentrating in Intermediate). This would mean that each coach would have to go back to Lesley University in Cambride, MA to learn the other half of their specialty. 

Training started this week with 4 jam packed days of intense instruction about literacy in the primary classrooms. I found myself a few times saying not only in my head, but also aloud, "What did I get myself into?!" 

A lot of the time was spent discussing the theory behind LC in primary concentrating on the work of Marie Clay, as well as many others. While the theory is grounded and very similar in both the primary and intermediate settings, there were some big ideas that we needed to dive into to understand the preK-2 world.

We discussed Writing Workshop and spending a lot of time practicing storytelling and making books. This is very new to me, but I'm looking forward to trying it out this year (I will share our work here this year). 

Interactive Writing was a huge undertaking. I've done Shared Writing with my students in the Intermediate setting, but Interactive is a whole new game. While it is powerful for students, teachers must be careful observers and know their students. It is all about the Zone of Proximal Development and nudging students to learn an aspect of writing that as individuals they need to focus on and incorporate in their independent writing. I will post a video on this once I try it out this year.

More about this last week to come....

Any thoughts on Interactive Writing or Writers' Workshop? 

Writing Professional Development 2015

During this past month, I travelled to each of my four elementary schools offering 3 hour professional development workshops to my Intermediate teachers on writing. When I surveyed the teachers, they all said they would appreciate PD on writing, but they weren't very specific. That's a HUGE subject. Where should I take them? Where should I begin? Last year we discussed the 6 + 1 Traits (see previous post). I knew that I would have to revisit that topic as it was just an overview and I don't think teachers were feeling very confident in that area. So my colleague, the Primary Coordinator, and I started researching and decided we would focus on the implementation and launch of the traits in writing workshop. 

Visit the links below for more information on the 6 + 1 Traits of Writing. 

http://www.smekenseducation.com/

http://www.culhamwriting.com/mainstreet.html

Grammar instruction has been a bone of contention for many teachers. I have been on a quest the past few years trying to figure out the best way to incorporate grammar into the classroom. I have read and learned a lot from the work of Jeff Anderson, the Write Guy. He has written many books, such as Mechanically Inclined and Everyday Editing. However, it wasn't until I saw him at Literacy for All Conference this past November in Providence, RI, that I felt as though I could bring his work to my colleagues. He encourages teachers to show students mentor sentences from real authors and discuss what they notice. It's all about function and application. Students learn why grammar works, how to use it, and apply it to their own writing to reinforce the skill. This would be part two of my training. 

The final aspect of my training would focus on Writing about Reading in reading workshop. I've noticed that often students primarily summarize the book that they are reading and don't share their thoughts about what they've read. I've wondered, why is this? Well...we say share your thinking, but what does that really mean? Students need concrete examples and they need them modeled. Another colleague of mine and former LC shared another great resource, Readers Writing by Elizabeth Hale. In this text she offers 91 different strategies to teach students how to respond using different sentence stems that promote different types of thinking that target specific comprehension skills. 

You can purchase both Anderson and Hale's work on Stenhouse! 

What are you looking to learn more about in writing workshop?

Close Reading in Action

I had the pleasure of pushing into a 5th grade classroom to try out a Close Reading lesson mimicking the ideas from, Falling in Love with Close Reading (see my previous post). I took the mini lessons that my colleagues and I brainstormed while in Cambridge and applied them in Reading Workshop. I used a common text that the class previously worked with through Focus Poetry, "The Abandoned Farmhouse," by Ted Kooser. (see Focus Poetry through Scholastic: http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/top-teaching/2012/09/focus-poetry-create-poetry-pros-less-ten-minutes-day)

The first day's mini lesson: Readers notice how an author uses words and phrases to visualize a strong image. As a group, we went though the poem and annotated some of the strong images that we noticed while we were reading the poem. Students did a turn and talk to discuss with their partner what they noticed about the imagery. Then, we discussed as a group what we noticed.

Day 2: We quickly reviewed what we discussed the day prior. Today's mini lesson: Readers categorize strong images in order to find patterns. We read the poem again and started making lists of different images that we noticed and started putting them into categories. We started together with the first stanza about the man...making this our first category (we changed it later). Students did a turn and talk to discover other categories that they noticed. They came up with the house. Through discussion they noticed another category: outside. They also wrote down examples of the strong images that the author created for each category. Independently their job was to continue to add to their lists and come up with any other categories.

When we came together on day three and reviewed our categories, through conversations we added the category: images. We also decided that we wanted to rename our first category to: family. Students discussed their ideas and backed up their thinking with evidence from the text. This led to my mini lesson for the day: Readers consider the patterns to better understand the author's purpose of imagery. Again, we made a list of the categories and brainstormed what the author wanted us to take away from the poem. What was his purpose? What was his bigger message? Close Reading is all about digging deeper...and digging deep was exactly what we were doing. After a lot of brainstorming, I was very proud of these students because they decided that the author wanted us to infer how & why the farmhouse was abandoned through the use of the imagery. The class started making their own predictions of what may have happened based on evidence from the text. 

(My charts aren't the neatest...) 

Have you tried out any Close Reading lessons yet? 

Close Reading

Close Reading...it is the "new" teaching approach that is all the craze now, but what is it? There are many different teaching philosophies out there that try to explain this technique. In New York, creators of EnageNY believe that children should be reading challenging and rigorous texts multiple times. Their idea of "challenging" and "rigorous" are texts that are often too difficult for children to read. As a Reading Specialist, I do not agree with this method. Put a frustrational text in front of a child and ask him/her to read it not only once, but many times, when they can't decode many of the words nor comprehend them, is only going to create more frustration.

Some ideas around close reading include reading the text once to get the overall gist. Reading it again to circle any unfamiliar words and derive their meaning. Reading it again to find supporting details to support the gist. Another reading for perhaps the author's message. All the while, students are jotting their notes all around the paper. I've tried this approach with students and I have to say that it doesn't create a deeper meaning of the text. Students...especially struggling students get quite frustrated and have a difficult time. Can we scaffold it? Absolutely. But, the question I raise is when is there too much scaffolding? Surely, if we are spoon feeding children the information they aren't really reading, are they?

While in Cabridge at Lesley University during my week of Ongoing PD as a Literacy Collaborative Coach, we spent a day reading and discussing the text, Falling in Love with Close Reading. While this text is geared toward MS teachers, I think that we can bring it down to the level of elementary teachers. The thinking is to take a common text, i.e. a read aloud (excerpt) that has already been read to the class, and use it to practice the art of close reading. Teachers would have mini lessons around a specific skill that they would like their students to focus on for a few days. We practiced this skill together while focusing on word choice, more specifically imagery. Here are some of the mini lessons that we created:

(Please excuse my messy handwriting and the scribbles!)

The idea is that on Day 1- students will just notice specific language that the author used to create an image in their mind and we'd discuss and chart those noticings. On Day 2- students will then categorize the images that they noticed to find patterns in the text. For example, we used an excerpt from Ray Bradbury's All Summer in a Day, and we noticed that the author created imagery around specific aspects of the text: the weather, Margot, and the other children. These images would be categorized. The next day, students would look at those patterns to create a deeper understanding of the text: what is the author's purpose for creating these patterns of imagery?

By using this method, students focus on a specific skill and a piece of a text to understand the whole. Students are engaging in a deeper thinking of texts. We are building thinkers and that deep thinking that students are doing through inquiry creates rigor by thinking about a text in a complex way. It is not about taking away the love of reading, as other methods seem to accomplish.

I will leave you with a quote from Lehman & Roberts (2014):
"Rigor is less about how challenging a text or task is, and more about what knowledge a student draws on to reason deeply."

What are your thoughts on Close Reading?