Schoolwide Blog

Teach Students to ASK

 

 

 

At the end of story time, just before we check out library books, my kindergartners and first graders clap their hands and sing with me.  . (song available on www.jacquelinejules.com)

It’s a ditty I made up with the expressed purpose of creating an ear worm—a repetitive phrase to loop in my kids’ heads and share with their parents. Many of the students I teach come from low-income families. Reading at bedtime may be something the adults in their lives haven’t even considered, with all the demands of making a living wage. More...

Linda Bausch On Mentor Texts

Staff Developer, Linda Bausch models a writer's workshop lesson on immersing students in fantastic mentor texts in a 2nd/3rd grade class.

 

Keep an eye on this blog for more videos from our forthcoming video site, the Schoolwide Network. For more on mentor texts go to www.schoolwidefundamentals.com

Why I love teachers and librarians. Greg Neri.

 

 

Once, at a reading festival before I was published, I saw a teacher stand up and, with tears in her eyes, practically beg a panel of middle grade authors to write for her urban hi-lo students. She pleaded that outside of Walter Dean Myers, there was no one who could get her boy students reading. I was moved because that’s exactly the audience I was writing for: urban teen boys who don’t read.More...

How do we get the parents involved?

Parent participation is considered an important factor in how well children enjoy and learn in school.  I am always searching for the right combination of parent involvement activities that will (1) be of benefit to children’s academic growth and (b) provide parental support for my learning structures and activities.More...

Why has literacy dropped so dramatically over the years? What’s gone wrong in our schools?

 

When I entered junior high school in the fall of 1946, everybody who had come from the sixth grade in our school was literate. We weren’t all equally literate, and we weren’t all equally in love with books. I was, but my best friend wasn’t. But we were all literate. Why was that? None of us were on Ritalin. None of us were in a remedial class, because there wasn’t one, and there were 40 people in the sixth-grade class with one teacher. How did they do it? More...

Does author study enhance student reading and writing skills?

 

I am a writer because I never had a teacher who said, “Write what you know.” If I had been limited to writing what I knew I would have produced in these 38 years one unpublishable haiku. I don’t write what I know. I write what I can find out. Fiction is based on research. If Ernest Hemingway really had fought all those wars and bulls, if he really had climbed all those mountains and caught all those fish, if he really had loved all of those women More...

Richard Peck On The Schoolwide Blog

This month we're thrilled to announce that Newberry Medalist and National Book Award Finalist Richard Peck will be participating in our blog community.   

Last month I had the privilege of sitting down with Richard in his Upper East Side apartment to discuss not only his esteemed work but also his experience as a teacher for thirty years.  Informed, insightful, and always interesting Richard and I discussed a myriad of topics as they pertain to reading, literacy, and the education system today.  I have begun transcribing More...

The Value of the Venn

Several teachers and I were discussing the value of teaching students to use specific graphic organizers to plan a written response to a question that requires them to extract information from 2 pieces of text. Of course, the Venn diagram leaped to the top of the list. 

I have always had a problem with using the Venn just to recognize similarities and differences between texts.  I believe that making text to text connections is a necessary comprehension strategy, but if we want our readers and test takers to stretch and deepen their comprehension they need to learn how to synthesize information and then come to a conclusion based on the evidence they find and use to fill in the sections of the Venn.  

For example, if we read two different versions of Cinderella, after deciding on the similarities and differences between the two fairy tales one conclusion might be:  

Authors can use the same idea to tell a story in a different way.  Another conclusion might be: 

Similar stories exist in different cultures. 

If we take this learning back to the test it will most likely enable our kids to fashion a better response to a question that requires them to synthesize information from multiple sources rather than just recognizing the literal similarities and differences across multiple texts. SOOO a good suggestion from the teachers for increasing the value of using the Venn is to pull out those diagrams sitting in a folder in your file cabinet and under those connecting circles write the word CONCLUSION!

Where are we going with this? The Making of a Vision

Vision

A vision is a clear image of what you are trying to create.In this case, when your school is starting a new literacy initiative, you need to be clear about what you want to be true at the end of a certain time frame.In other words, be clear about what you want to create. Make it as concrete as possible so everyone has the same picture in mind. Then communicate it.

How does this play out in action?

Scenario 

Since it’s National Poetry Month, we’ll create a simple vision for it. Keep in mind this is a short - term initiative that lasts only amonth.  This vision will describe what we want to see for students by the end of the month.

The answer to the question, "What do we want all students to have by the end of poetry month? " will be our vision.

Our vision for National Poetry Month- We want students to have evidence that they have read and created responses to 5 poems. 

Now we have to let people know what these responses look like because a picture is work a thousand words. 

In order to clearly communicate the vision we  (all the teachers asked to participate) will agree on sample responses to use as benchmark papers. We will share these benchmark papers with parents, consultants, poets in residence and anyone elsewho interacts with our students to demonstrate the type of work we are striving for.

 Once we have identified the vision,  we will refer back to our list of literacy initiatives and materials to determine how what we have in place will help us realize our vision and go to work!

If we do not have what we need, we will order a poetry collection that we think will best stimulate responses.

Applying this to other situations

You can use variations of the question above to create your vision for other circumstances. Here are sample questions to guide your vision planning …

·     What do you want all students to have by the end of third grade Readers and Writers Workshop?

·     What do you want all students to have by the end of Honors English?

·     What do we want all student to have in their literacy portfolio after completing K-12 in our school district?

Remember to refer to the lists of Instructional Initiatives and materials to see what you can use to accomplish your mission. Let me know how it goes.

Are you Going to Read to us Today?

…is what my 6^th graders would say to me everyday when they walked into the room.  That year, I had taken over a maternity leave of a teacher who never did interactive read-alouds with her students.  That was “baby stuff”.

I started reading to these students from day 1 in that middle school classroom and the ate it up!  They looked forward to hearing the story, as well as how it would lend to our writing.  They could see the connection.

            We had a lot of great dialogue at the Literacy Workshops in Staten Island on March 20, but what stuck in my mind was the topic of middle school students and their generally negative attitudes towards reading and writing in particular. 

What happens to that enthusiasm that oozes during elementary school? 

The love of books, authors, drawing, creating, sharing? 

What happens to our students as they cross through the doors of  middle school, that they dread when they are asked to read or write?

A few things I am sure of;

“activities” (as they are referred to in elementary school) become “assignments”,

“reading” becomes “homework” and

“discovery” becomes “research”.                                                                

And I suggest that us teachers have the power to change that mentality.

        How?

We can show our students how we engage ourselves in the reading and writing process and how we are passionate about our own reading and writing by:

·        sharing good literature and reading aloud to our students on a regular basis

·        humanizing authors by reading about them and their passions for writing

·        writing in our writer’s notebooks, as our students write

·        sharing our notebooks with our students

·        encourage risk taking by reducing the assessment of every written word

 

What other ways can we show our students our passions and that we are lifelong readers and writers? How can we revise the ideas in our middle school classrooms that reading and writing are nothing but classroom tasks?

 

We want all of our middle school students asking, “When are you going to read to us again?”