Here you'll find the readings and reflections of an 8th grade reading teacher. I agree with Taylor Mali - If I'm going to change the world, it'll be one eighth grader at a time.
I got this one from my Twitter feed last week and thought it was intriguing. Using this website, http://www.fakeiphonetext.com, people can create, well, fake iPhone texts.
What I learned from trying this a few times is that you have to put the name and a colon before the actual text, otherwise it won't work. I'm currently reading Going Bovine by Libba Bray (@libbabray), so I borrowed a conversation from Chapter Fifteen (p. 120) to try it out.
Rather realistic. Each fake iPhone text is given its own URL, so it can be accessed again later. The link above is the the webpage that holds the image.
Imagine creating a conversation between a stomach and the intestinal tract, or between two of the conspirators of the Boston Tea Party (before or after), or even between two characters of a novel, one of whom didn't appear in the scene in question.
All of our 8th graders read The Pearl by John Steinbeck. I could see creating a text message conversation between the head pearl buyer and one of his subordinates, giving instructions about how to proceed with Kino. Or a conversation between Cameron and Janna (now we're back to Going Bovine) after their incident in the hallway at the beginning of the book.
I could see having individual students posting their text conversations on Edmodo, which would hopefully start a conversation about their books.
Bray, Libba. Going Bovine. New York: Delacorte Press, 2009. Steinbeck, John. The Pearl. New York: Penguin, 1973.
This morning we talked about how to help our students write good theme statements. Our presenter called her process 2Q2T or Two Questions to Theme.
First question:
What is this (story, poem, letter, speech, play, piece, etc.) about?
Here students generate a list of topics for whatever it was they read. We read the poem "Dandelions" by Deborah Austin. Some of the topics we generated for this poem were
war
flowers
weeds
gardening
warfare
The answer to the first question is plugged into the second question where it says topic.
Second Question
What is AUTHOR trying to say about TOPIC?
If I choose to talk about war then my question looks like this:
What is Austin trying to say about war?
In "Dandelions," Austin is trying to say that in war situations, soldiers never give up.
From here, students answer their questions, which becomes the claim sentence for their claim-evidence-commentary paragraphs.
Below, my notes. Glean from them whatever you can.
The student who answers questions is passive. The student who writes/asks questions is active. That being said, how do we get students to ask questions that are meaningful and thought-provoking?
Teach them how to write leveled questions. What are leveled questions, you ask? They're questions that are on the line, between the lines and above the lines. That is...
Level One: (on the line): Questions answered with facts from the text. You can put your finger directly on the answer. ex. In Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which bowl of porridge did Goldilocks eat?
Level Two (between the lines): Questions that require an inference to answer. You can put your finger on the evidence that supports the answer. ex. What kind of person is Goldilocks?
Level Three (above the lines): Questions that are open-ended and draw in our own schema as well as evidence from the text. ex. What different kinds of reactions can people have if someone breaks into their house?
Some uses for the questions students generate:
Socratic seminar
Fishbowl discussion
Games
We've talked in workshop about student involvement. If we want students to engage with the texts we're asking them to read, they have to take some ownership of the material and the learning process. I'm willing to bet that they'll care more about the answer to a question they've written than an answer to a question I've written.
It's not enough to want kids to question everything. We have to show them how.
In our district, we use the RACE rubric for writing:
R: Restate the question
A: Answer the question
C: Cite evidence
E: Explain how evidence answers the question
It's not a bad format for struggling writers, just to give them a starting place and formula to plug their information into. I don't think it's a terrible scaffolding tool, however it's so formulaic that writers that aren't struggling can't grow or develop voice. The presenter for the workshop I'm attending this week, the Advanced Placement Summer Institute offered different words for the same type of writing formula:
Intro - which includes context, an interesting statement, or foreshadowing what's to come.
Claim - the statement that the writer is trying to prove
Evidence - a pithy statement one that contains the most meaning
Commentary - from your own head -- explain how your pithy statement proves claim
We started yesterday's session with interviews. Participants then took comments from those interviews, then built a claim-evidence-commentary paragraph around whatever comment participants saw as pithy. (I didn't get to participate because I came in late.) I was listening to people read their paragraphs, and I heard the thing that was lacking from RACE paragraphs. Voice.
I write RACE paragraphs and often feel like they're lacking that tongue-in-cheek type tone that my mother hates.
We brainstormed purpose/use of claim-evidence-commentary way of responding and here's what we came up with:
helps pinpoint ideas
for literary analysis - focus on one piece of evidence
helps express voice
use for rhetorical analysis
if every response is framed as an argument, the idea of "claim" works
helps refine thinking
format not limited to questions
The AP teacher in the midst of participants likes this format. She says that it gets them ready to do the kind of literary analysis students will have to do when they get to the 11th and 12th grade.
I did a dry run of the facebook project that I've talked about here and here and that David talks about here, on Monday in my college class. What I learned from the dry run is that editing templates in Google Docs isn't super user-friendly. Needless to say, I was disappointed and needed to go back to the drawing board. So I thought to myself, "Okay. I can post a PowerPoint version of the template, and groups and download/upload their files to Google Docs and we still don't have the 'X has the USB and she's not here today,' problem."
Tried that today and come to find out that files cannot be uploaded to Google Docs through the laptop computers we were using, and they'll only send through Gmail if we're using the older version. So what I've resigned myself to doing is creating a conversation between the class email I set up and myself. They'll download their most recent file from the conversation and email it to me when they're done at the end of the class period.
In the end, teachable moment was about problem solving. An added bonus: most of my students don't have email addresses, so they'll learn how to attach a file before the get to the high school.
Back in January, David (@techforschools) over at Tomorrow's tech in today's schools posted about creating Facebook profiles as a way to show understanding of concepts across the curriculum. In his post, he included a PowerPoint template to be used as a starting point for this project. As soon as I saw this, I knew it had to be my final exam for this semester. So my students will be creating two Facebook profiles, one for their novel, and one for their novel's protagonist.
In order to help my students prepare for their final, I created planning handouts that they'll fill out as they go. I've included them here.
I hate to run away from Wordle because I love Wordle, but Tagxedo offers better options for individualizing a word cloud. Then, when using as a project to discuss character, setting, or any of the other literary elements we're asked to discuss, students can also justify why they chose a specific shape for their word. Tagxedo also offers the ability to customize the shape of the cloud.
In playing with the app I took a paper from my RDG 617: Media Literacy class on how the show Boondocks examines stereotypes within the African-American community, uploaded it and a outlined picture of the main character, Huey Freeman. This is what was created, which I think is pretty neat.
Another nice aspect of Tagxedo is that on my slow computer at home, the app runs quickly. I don't have to spend as much time waiting for a render as I do with Wordle. Tagxedo is also set up so word clouds can be saved. If I wanted to save a Wordle, I saved it to the public gallery to come back to later, or I opened it on my Mac, selected "Print" and then clicked the PDF button.
The kicker will be this: will Tagxedo work at school when Wordle doesn't? (It was unblocked but the computers in my classroom are a little out of date.
Gone, by Michael Grant (2008), is Lord of the Flies *(Golding, 1999) for the current generation. In Perdido Beach, California, everyone over the age of fifteen disappears in an instant. Everyone else is left to fend for themselves without adult supervision. But there’s a barrier between Perdido Beach, rechristened The FAYZ (Fallout Alley Youth Zone) and the outside world. No one can get out and no one can get in. No one knows what caused the disappearances. And everyone looks to Sam Temple to lead them, to figure out what happened and keep them safe. But the kids from Coates Academy, the private school on top of the hill, have other ideas and their own agenda. It doesn’t help that some kids are developing strange powers and are using them to control those without. Take Golding’s story, mix in some of NBC’s hit show Heroes and add a force field and you’ve got Gone by Michael Grant.
Why read Gone, especially since it’s a longer read than most students are willing to sit through? Gone can be a vehicle for discussion of who has power in society, why those people are in power and how they remain in power. In the novel, the kids begin to divide themselves into factions—those who have powers against those who don’t, those who rally behind Sam Temple, who has a power, because he has saved them before, and those who rally behind Caine from Coates Academy. Caine also has a power, but his motives are self-serving. We could discuss how Sam’s leadership differs from Caine’s leadership, and how different students in school are leaders and how they became to be viewed in that role. We can also make a connection to current politics and how the political system works.
If read in conjunction with Lord of the Flies, students could draw parallels between the two texts, comparing the characters of Sam and Ralph, and Caine and Jack in terms of personality, situation, willingness to lead. One discussion topic often linked with Lord of the Flies is the nature of man, or the idea that man is inherently evil. This argument could be discussed in the context of Gone as well. The two leaders of the FAYZ, Sam and Caine both carry secrets that they do not want exposed. How these secrets play into their leadership roles and the choices they make would make an interesting addition to the Lord of the Flies discussion of man’s true nature.
In his profile on Goodreads, Michael Grant said that his goal in writing Gone was to “creep [people] out. To make [them] stay up all night reading, then roll into school tired the next day so that you totally blow the big test and end up dropping out of school” (n.d.). I want students to have the satisfaction of completing something bigger than they thought they could. I want them to be able to say, “Yes, Michael Grant was right, I didn’t want to stop reading,” or “No, Michael Grant was wrong, and this book didn’t remotely interest me,” and be able to use the text to support their reasoning on either side.
A teaching activity with Gone would be to write a scene from the next novel. Gone 2 is subtitled Hunger. In an interview with Static Multimedia (Johnson, 2008), Grant said that the residents of the FAYZ would be dealing with many forms of hunger, some obvious, and some not so obvious. Students could brainstorm types of hunger, then choose one type as a starting point for their own scene.
*For my own amusement, each Lord of the Flies link goes to a different place.
Biard, J.H. (n.d.). “Editorial Review.” In School Library Journal. Retrieved from
In the laundry list of things I had to have done by Tuesday, one of the most interesting was my proposal for the French Award. The French Award gives $5000 to a teacher to fund a project they're interested in incorporating into their class.
My project involves using video as a synthesis of student learning. The items I'd purchase to create my project are a Flip Video Camera, an Elmo Document Camera, 6 iPod Touches, a 1 TB external hard drive and somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 FollettBound novels (they're a little more expensive, but Follett will replace any damaged book for free, and kids can be pretty hard on books).
Here's a basic outline of the project--know that I'm pretty excited about this, and will probably try to do it even if I don't get it funded.
1.Students will vote for one of six thematic: Natural Disasters, Self-Identity, Truth, Acceptance, Survival, and “Big” Issues. Based on their responses, a thematic unit and other related texts (readings, videos, music and art) will be chosen.
2.Through mini-lesson, teacher created podcasts to be viewed in small groups on iPods, teacher guided practice, small group practice, reciprocal teaching and independent practice, students will learn about varied sentence structure, vocabulary, reading strategies and other elements of language arts as they are presented in their language arts classes. All of this knowledge will be incorporated into the script for the film they will produce at the end of the six weeks.
3.Each week, students will compose a blog post (web host to be determined), reflecting on their learning, reflecting on their thoughts about the theme in terms of their personal experiences and their reading, and suggesting ways that their learning and connections can be incorporated into one of the six film categories (these categories will be used as tags for easy reference later, other categories will be added based on the theme selected):
a.Anticipation—what we thought before we started reading
b.What we read—short summaries of the novel text and other texts read, viewed or heard during the unit, what was learned from them, how they connect together and to the theme
c.Visual Art—representation of the theme in an artistic way, either researched or student created
d.Music—type, style, genre, specific examples that might fit the theme
e.Film—People who think this theme is interesting might also want to see what movies? (Find trailers on YouTube)
f.Where we ended up—our final thoughts and how our initial thoughts changed or stayed the same
4.In the fourth week of the unit, students will be divided into specific production teams of no more than three students based on the categories listed above. Students will begin using their weekly blog reflections and the blog reflections of their peers to create a script for a 2-4 minute presentation on their category. During this time we will still continue to have reading and writing strategy, and vocabulary lessons.
5.Each day in the fifth week of the unit, a group will present their script to the class using the document camera. They will solicit feedback from their peers on revision making notes on their copy as they go about what they should include that hasn’t been included, what can be removed, how to incorporate their vocabulary and writing/grammar into their script. The group will then take those suggestions and revise their script accordingly. They will spend time practicing their script, reading with fluency and expression.
6.In the first three days of the last week in the six weeks, groups will record/create their portion of the presentation. Students can use video cameras, PowerPoint presentations saved as movies, Windows Movie Maker, scanners or any other necessary technology to create. All video or files will be saved on the external hard drive. Students who have had the technology class as an elective or who are interested in learning how to put together a film will come to my class during lunch to put together the pieces of the film.
7.The second to last day of the unit will be a viewing of the films from each class. Students will be able to see how their peers in different classes synthesized their learning.
8.The final day of the unit, students will write a blog post reflecting on what they learned about their theme, their thoughts on the film aspect of the project, what worked well for them and what didn’t, what else they’d like to learn and how we could work better as a community of readers and learners. We will use our blog posts as a springboard into class discussion and debriefing.
9.At the end of the semester, all parents will be invited in for a Literacy Night were we will show the films students created to their parents and discuss student accomplishments fort he semester.
I'm always looking for new ways to assess my students' reading without making them do a book report. I honestly have never assigned a book report and I don't think I ever will. But there still has to be some accountability for their reading. How else would I know whether or not they do what I ask?
In thinking about this last week, I stumbled across the memory of attending the New Mexico AP Summer Institute in Albuquerque in June 2006. The presenter for the workshop I attended included a "Creative Thinking Test" for a specific novel in with our materials. My favorite question was #4, the Creative Thinking Questions. These questions asked readers to think figuratively about their novel, comparing a character or an event to an object, color, or personal characteristic. I have taken this idea and expanded it to a longer (and not finished) list of comparisons.
My students have answered some of these questions before, but many of them didn't come up with the result I was looking for. So I'm going to take a more structured approach.
Concepts Addressed
Test prep - how to respond to short answer questions.
Marzano: Similarities and Differences (and SIOP: use of graphic organizer)
Figurative language
Reading Comprehension
Revision
The plan is to model the activity step-by-step. So I'll model, they'll do. I'll model, they'll do. The goal is that they'll come to understand that some questions have more than one part that needs to be answered. I reformatted this list so each question will fit on an index card. The beauty of doing that is I can do this activity more than once, and students are not likely to draw the same question twice.
In looking at steps 1 and 2, I did organize it this way on purpose. Often, students will do a cold answer of a question without really thinking about it. I want them to be able to compare that type of answer to an answer that is well thought out, and the only way to do this is by not having them plan their answers first.
The Activity
Step 1: Each student draws a card, reads it, writes it down on his/her paper, then answers it.
Step 2: Using a T-Chart, write down the characteristics of the character or event chosen, and the figurative term (underlined) on the card.
Step 3: Look at how the question is broken down. Using colored highlighters or 3 different colored pencils, mark the three parts to the question.
Step 4: Review answer written. Mark answer with corresponding colors.
Step 5: One color at a time, expand the answer so that it completely answers each part of the question. Check those sentences for grammar and spelling mistakes.
Step 6: Rewrite paragraph in a cohesive way, remembering to indent, etc.
G is for the gate that Margo and Q had to scale on their adventure when they broke into Sea World, the last amusement park in Orlando that Margo had to break into.
H is for the high that Q feels when he figured out that paper towns were not abandoned housing developments, but instead a mapmaker’s way of catching copyright infringement. Then he finds out that Margo was in Algoe, a paper town with one building.
I is for the intensity with which Q loves Margo, even though they hadn’t been friends since they found Robert Joyner dead in Jefferson Park.
J is for Jefferson Park, the location where Margo and Q found Robert Joyner when they were nine.
K is for the killing of the Joyner, a detail that Margo changed for the story she wrote about her and Q when she was 10.
L is for leaving, which is what Margo did. She told Q that leaving was something she had to do for her. She couldn’t live near her parents or the city of Orlando anymore.
M is for Margo Roth Spiegelman, the girl that everyone thought they knew, who sees herself as a paper girl, in two dimensions.
Sometimes, when I get bored (or when my students need examples), I do reader response projects. I like this one. It made me think a little differently about my novel. For this example, I used John Green's Paper Towns (Speak, 2008), which my students saw me reading and heard me talk about for a few days.
So here's my A-F
A is for the anxiety that the protagonist Quentin feels when Margo Roth Speigelman convinces him to go on a quest for revenge with her that includes breaking and entering.
B is for Blackberry, the way Q’s friend Radar (probably) updates his Wikipedia-like website called Omnictionary.
C is for catfish. Margo had Q go to the grocery store, buy three whole catfish wrapped separately and hid them in various places, saying that her relationships with people “sleeps with the fishes.”
D is for darkness. When Margo’s clues lead Q to an abandoned mini-mall, he finds the dark to be rather frightening initially. The more time he spent there the more he became accustomed to the darkness.
E is for the effort that Q spent for a month trying to track down the clues that Margo left for him.
F is for failure. Q would have felt like a failure if he found Margo and she was dead.
Now, I haven't read this novel yet. It's on my list. I have a student, let's call him WarGuy, that I had to take a minute and talk about.
This week is Red Ribbon Week. In honor, and to reinforce awareness in our students, we had a school-wide assembly during 4th period on Monday. I mention this to my students once they get in the door and get settled, and WarGuy, who's reading Private Peaceful says, "We're not reading today?!?"
From many of my students I'd expect that statement to take a "Hooray! We don't have to read." or "Yes, no Super Sucky Reading today" (and yes, I have one that actually says that for SSR on a regular basis. Of course, she won't tell anyone that she secretly reads at home). WarGuy was genuinely upset that he didn't get to read.
To give you an idea about how fast he's devouring this novel--most of my students will take six weeks to read a 200 page novel. That's about six pages every school day. WarGuy, who said when he was transferred into my class that he really doesn't like reading, is over 3/4 of the way done, and I gave him the novel last Wednesday. He comes in every day and offers his commentary on what he read outside of school, then does the same after our daily SSR.
Other members of the class find WarGuy annoying, but I hope they're picking up on how I react to him, pointing out the things he does that good readers do, and offering suggestions.
It's a reader response to a story from Moccasin Thunder, a collection of American Indian stories. One of the more challenging novels I taught during my student teaching was William Faulkner's A Light in August. I'm actually rather sad that I've managed to lose my annotated copy of this novel. Anyway, one of Faulkner's ways of getting into characters' heads was particularly intriguing to me. That is, he would state what the character was thinking, "and place those thoughts in quotation marks," then tell what the character was thinking ...with subconscious thought in italics. I can't remember whether or not I've employed this particular method in my blog here. If I haven't, it's about time, and if I have, then I'm probably due. My goal was to show the progression of subconscious thought, similar to anyone's the angrier they get.
The actual assignment asked us to rewrite the story in a different point of view, either shifting narrators, type of narrator (e.g. omniscient, limited omniscient, etc.), shifting person (e.g. 1st or 3rd). I chose this character because it's interesting to me to explore one's hatred for another group of people, mainly because it's not something that I comprehend. SO without further ado...
"Summer Wind"
This is totally not where the girl wants to be right now, when all her friends are out cruising and hanging. She's stuck behind that stupid register all day with all those idiot customers who have no idea or respect for how hard it is to work on the front end.
She couldn't believe this one woman the other day. Old lady. Indian. God knows she must be slow. The girl sighs heavily and starts ringing the old woman out. She's there with some boy who the girl thought might be cute if he wasn't so damn dark.
"Twelve dollars and twenty-seven cents." She wonders if her disdain for those natives came out in her voice. When she's tired, things like that are harder to hide.
The girl couldn't believe the audacity of that woman. The girl gave her the total and the woman smiles this saccharine nasty-ass-sweet smile. Damn woman spent five minutes rooting around in her purse trying to find her wallet and the girl's thinking "You best stop grinning at me," …thinking god damn injuns holding up my line, why don't you go back to the reservation we stuck you on…
Then, and then she started counting out all this change. Slowly. Like the molasses the girl's mother talked about when she was late getting out of the bed in the morning. She wanted to say, "Damnit old lady, I know you have some paper in that billfold," thinking "Why couldn't she pay in bills"…thinking the genocide of the Holocaust was wasted on the Jews… But she didn't say any of these things. And then the old woman dropped all the quarters on the floor and had to start over again.
"Could you repeat the total, dear?" Her voice was still sticky.
"Twelve twenty-seven," the girl spat. Literally, though less intentionally than one might believe. She sent a mock-apologetic glance at the people in line behind the old woman who were snickering to themselves at this point. Probably at the retardedness of the lady.
The girl was so angry by the time the old woman got through counting and recounting that when she gave the girl the coins, the girl was so flustered with rage that she dropped them all over everywhere thinking, "Shit,"…thinking I can't believe these goddamn fucking injuns wasted all this fucking time…
"I could count it again." The soft voice penetrated the girl's inner monologue. "Just to make sure it's all there."
The girl shook her head. "That won't be necessary."
"Okay, then dear. You have a nice day." The girl turned shades of red as she watched them walk away.
When they're out of earshot, she said, "Damn, injuns" under her breath thinking "Thank god they're gone," …thinking why didn't the white man wipe them all out when they got here? Would have done the entire world a whole lot of good…
on a quest for revenge with her that includes breaking and entering.