Random Word Stories

Winter break was a long 18 days, and I did not think about school one time, as I was in the process of selling one house and buying another. Fortunately, the AVID community on Facebook came to my rescue as I scrambled to figure out what I was going to teach the first day back to school with everyone suffering from back-to-school-itis. 

Another AVID teacher posted that she uses random word generators to spark collaborative writing. Easy enough! I set up the lesson by explaining to my students that I would be providing them with six words from the generator. After discussing word meaning, I would provide them with six minutes to write a VERY short story with their table mates, using all of the provided words. We would then share out to practice listening and speaking skills. 

Apparently, there are a significant number of random word generators online. I clicked on the first one. I generated a different list for each class period. For some of the classes, I had to click through a few times, as there were words that I did not even know popping up. Sure, I could have used those words as an opportunity to model my own learning, but I was tired! 

The lesson went quite well. The time limit helped to keep students engaged. Many of the groups were amused with themselves for what they had created. Some wrote a couple of sentences, working in the words as quickly as possible. Others managed to write short novels in the time provided. If I had not been discussing new procedures for the second semester, I probably could have worked in a second round of this activity. I did have requests from many students to do this again, and I am pondering how to use this to inspire my seventh grade students for their STAAR writing test in a couple of months. 

If you find yourself in need of a fifteen to twenty minute time filler (or you are having an off /I-can-barely-keep-my-eyes-open day and need to improvise), this requires little energy and planning on the part of the teacher. Give it a shot. 

NCTE Reads: Teaching Reading with YA Literature (chapter 1)

It's summer vacation, so I am sitting around doing absolutely nothing - said no teacher ever. I am tired just thinking about everything I am doing this summer - two graduate classes, two technology certifications, and an NCTE book study, to name a few.

For the book study, we are reading Teaching Reading with YA Literature: Complex Texts, Complex Lives by Jennifer Buehler. Now, I just finished up school yesterday (we had Saturday checkout), and our activities for the book study start today. Why no break? Because I am a teacher. And I strive to be the best possible teacher I can be. I don't need no stinkin' break! And of course, I will be sharing on my blog, as well.

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Week 1: MAKE

This week we’re going to create a curated list of YA novels with rationales for why they are complex texts. These lists may prove useful if you choose to use any of these novels in your class and are asked to justify your selection. Please share the title, author, and a few sentences explaining why a YA text of your choosing should be considered complex.

My response: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas - Initially, I was not going to list this book, but I reconsidered. This book addresses topics and themes that are relevant to today’s youth. A young African American male is murdered by a police officer, an event witnessed by the story’s protagonist. The content invites natural discussion and real-world connections.
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Week 1: TALK
 
How do you use YA literature in the classroom, and where does it fit in the larger context of all we’re meant to do in ELA?

My response: 

Due to a change in teaching assignments this past year, my focus on YA lit was put on the backburner. I moved from teaching eighth grade English to seventh and eighth grade AVID. Although AVID still incorporates reading and writing, I spent this year figuring out how to teach the class and bond with students who lost a beloved teacher to another position on another campus, some of whom resented me for coming in and leaving my classes and students behind. 

Personally, I did not discover young adult literature until sometime around 2007 or 2008. I know that most of the Twilight series had been published. I was teaching seventh grade at the time, and my girls were devouring the series. They wanted to talk to me about constantly, so I borrowed the set from a student to be able to reciprocate their discussions. 

I hate Twilight. Despise. Loathe. I found Belle to be a repugnant role model for young girls. To this day, I am quite vocal about my grievances with the series. It did, however, set me on a path of reading young adult literature in search of something worthy to share with my students. 

I abused my library card and read everything I could get my hands on. I recommended reads to my students, many of whom would go to the local library to find a book our school library did not carry. I started building a classroom library, thanks to a state literacy grant. 

I tend to showcase books in a display and talk about what I am reading, encouraging students to use my classroom library. This has been pretty successful, but I have not been able to reach every student in this manner.

During practice state testing situations, I will watch kids and try to determine what they might like to read. When they finish, I will bring them books from my shelves and see if I have hit on anything they might enjoy (I often do, which really surprises me).

Our middle school canon consists of young adult books. I have taught The Outsiders, The Westing Game, The Giver, Homecoming, Redwall, The Watsons Go to Birmingham, and A Wrinkle in Time. In reflection, my book and my mood probably had more to do with my students enjoying any of these books than my lessons did. For example, I dislike A Wrinkle in Time (a little less than I despite Twilight). I openly shared my frustration with my students regarding plot points, which may have been more entertaining for my kids than the story itself. 

For next year, I am considering having my AVID kids participate in independent reading activities with novels. As part of their college-readiness skills, I think they should know how to actively read novels in a particular time frame. I am in the early stages of this thinking and am not quite sure what to have my students do with those readings yet. I am hoping that throughout this book study and its discussions, I can create a meaningful reading environment for my students that carries over into their personal lives.

Tutoring D. - Session 1

As I am working on my reading specialist certification, I have been given the opportunity to tutor a young man this summer. There are extreme circumstances as to how this has come about. In addition, this young man has been homeschooled for many years and is now preparing to enter public high school next year. He has missed most of the fiasco known as STAAR testing, yet he will be entering into its chaos. 

Today we met at the public library. I choose this location because of the availability of resources for all content areas. I know that background knowledge is an issue for kids who have been in public schools since the began their educational careers. How does one help bridge that gap with a student who has been out of that environment for years? My solution - books for kids! 

One of the reasons I participate in the Twitter #bookaday challenge is for the opportunity to learn news things in a simple format. Trade books and children's nonfiction provide lots of information to provide an introduction to events, history, cultures, information, and stories. 

We started our first session with discussing elements of characterization, protagonist, antagonist, and dialogue, using resources from Read Write Think regarding the use of picture books in teaching these elements. To this, I added a Tree Map (Thinking Map) to categorize elements of characterization. 

 

I read Ella Sarah Gets Dressed to D. Initially, he looked at me like I was crazy for pulling out a little kid book to teach to him, but he warmed up to the idea (although I did have to cover up the page where Ella is in her underwear). We went page by page, discussing the pictures in association with the text, the differences in repeated text (capitalization, punctuation), and how Ella was being characterized. D. was able to make inferences without much prompting, and he showed that he possesses a strong vocabulary with the words he used to describe Ella. He also started discussing theme without my even mentioning it, so we added it to the Thinking Map.

 As a follow-up, I had him choose another trade book to read to me, walking me through the same process. He ended up choosing a book written in verse, allowing us to continue our discussion, as well as discuss some elements of poetry (line, stanza).

Although the focus of our session today was reading comprehension with fiction, we also practiced a bit of grammar to feel out what D. does and does not know. [I taught him the importance of the Oxford comma, preaching not to listen to the naysayers who feel it is no longer necessary.] I followed this up by asking him to write a short passage for me to get a feel for his writing skills, and he automatically employed a few of the elements we had discussed. He truly impressed me by adding a nonrestrictive clause to explanation of why anime is more appealing to watch than other types of TV programming. 

I have never tutored anyone before in this capacity, and I have to admit that I am also using him to try out some things to take back to my classroom next year. Ella Sarah Gets Dressed is most definitely coming back to class with me in the fall, and D. is definitely going to be rock star in high school with his knowledge of the Oxford Comma. 

Sentence BINGO

A few nights ago, my ninth grade daughter came downstairs with English homework. Her teacher had given her sample editing and revising passages from previous state exams, along with a BINGO card with words, phrases, and sentence types to find. My daughter needed help understanding some of what she was looking for, so we spent some quality time together discussing grammar. 

Being a connoisseur of interesting lesson ideas, I emailed said teacher and asked if I could steal from her. My students took their state reading exam this week, and we are ready for more formal writing instruction. I looked at the BINGO card as an opportunity to review information my students have been working on since kindergarten. So with the high school teacher's blessing, I revised the BINGO card to fit the needs of my students:

Students were mixed into random partnerships and given two editing and revising passages from a previous English I (ninth grade) state exam. They had to look through the passages to identify sentences that would match the descriptions on the BINGO card. To challenge them even more, not every square on the card had a matching sentence in the readings. They were also not allowed to ask me questions about the information they were looking for; they had to look up everything online to assist them in finding what they needed. 

Once the partners felt that they had a BINGO, they had to come to me and confirm their choices. Every time they had a correct square, I marked it with a dot. If they made a mistake, they were sent back to try again. After my first class, I told all of the others that the high score was four BINGOs on one card, and that made the rest of my classes a bit more competitive. 

Although I was not sure how this was going to work, most of my kids were engaged in the activity, determined to get a BINGO. Many were not able to complete a row today and make BINGO today, so they asked for more time to work on the assignment. I don't think there is a better lesson than the one the kids ask to continue. 

Writing and Researching with Fact Sheets: Part I

Sometimes someone passes along a piece of information that sends my brain into immediate teacher planning mode. With a change in our district professional learning this year, I have not had many of these moments as of late. But then my professor (I am part of master's reading specialist cohort) brought something to our last class that sent my mind a-spinnin'!

From Coaching Writing in Content Areas: Write-for-Insight Strategies (a book I am not familiar with), I was giving a fact sheet about whales. The page includes a list of information about whales, followed by student ability writing levels: 

My first thought: I can totally turn this into a game!

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Writing Challenge Game 1: The Most Superior Writer of the English Class 

• Each student will receive a copy of the fact sheet. 
• Each student will attempt to write the bestest, most wonderfulest, superiorest paragraph about whales. 

I certainly don't expect perfection with their sentences, but I want to get them thinking before we move into more formal writing instruction. My secret superhero plan is to sneak into their documents from my computer while they are working, and tell each student that someone else's paragraph is better. It will drive my Pre-AP students nutty. 

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Writing Challenge Game 2: Create a Stupefying Fact Sheet

• Students will work in partnerships to create a fact sheet about an assigned topic. Look at me sneaking a mini-research assignment into class. 
• I made the topics (but I can also see doing this with student-generated topics). 
• Topics include endangered animals, planets, television shows, countries, authors, foods, universities, and... John Cena. 

• The student-created fact sheets will be used to go through another round of Game 1. 

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After this, I am going to do grammar and sentence structure lessons that we use to revise and edit the writing challenge paragraphs. This is one of those lessons that I feel giddy about, and I am hoping it goes as planned in my head. I may have to get some pom-poms or a coaching whistle. 

Stay tuned for the follow-up. 

Writing - How Data is Changing My Instruction

I have been fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on your viewpoint) to be involved in numerous programs and committees in my district that keep me informed about district and school strengths and weaknesses. I am the lead for my school literacy initiative and our ESL program and also work with these programs at the district level. I am part of my school leadership team, a group that works to set instructional and student goals. This year, I was invited to participate in a district committee that looks at district and school data. The point of this brief resume is to show that I am fully aware of my district and school needs, and within the past few weeks, a great deal has come to light in a new way. I have had to shift gears in regard to how I teach and how I model my instruction. 

Our eighth-grade English curriculum has focused heavily on reading and less on writing for the past few years. As we (the teachers) become more educated in how to understand and use student data, we have started to balance more writing into our instruction. I feel like teaching writing is much more my area of expertise than reading will ever be, but with limited time for writing instruction, I have to admit that I have truly glossed over the writing process for the past few years. 

For the past couple of weeks, my students have been working on an essay about teens cheating on schoolwork (see NY Times writing springboard). I had my kids using a generic expository graphic organizer to create an opening sentence (thesis) with three reasons for their viewpoint and three supporting details per reason. I chose an organizer that I have used in prior ESL training to best meet the needs of my student population. I created my own example and modeled how to create each part. 

While this was occurring in my classroom, I had a meeting with my principal and instructional coaches. We were having a conversation about what is missing in teacher instruction and came to the conclusion that teachers are modeling, but we are not modeling our thinking and metacognitive strategies effectively. Teachers show how to do something, but we are not necessarily conducting a thorough think-aloud to show the students the thinking process and inquiry involved in the work being done. 

Shortly after that meeting, I had an expository writing workshop to attend that provided some new strategies that I immediately brought to class and applied with more thorough instruction and modeling of my thinking. Here is what changed:

• I had my students analyze the reasons and supporting details that they created to determine if they had facts, personal experiences, and/or references (this piece was presented to us for planning, but I was already on the flip side of that). The kids also decided that we needed to identify commonplace assertions. I conducted a think-aloud, deliberately asking questions of myself and expressing the steps I took in sorting through my own ideas. Although it was not a thoroughly planned think-aloud, I do feel like I made progress in making my invisible thinking visible. 
• References were new to my students, and this provided them with an option for making revisions after discovering they had too many facts and personal experiences. Students who lacked personal experiences suddenly had more information to include in their writing. 
• We used a four-question technique to determine what information needed to be included in our paragraphs. Without this, students were simply copying over their reasons and supporting details without any additional thought. I again conducted a think-aloud on how to answer these questions to build a paragraph, rather than just modeling my writing. 
• What point am I trying to make?
• What details support my point?
• How can I show this? or Why is this important?
• How do these ideas connect back to my thesis?
• Another step with the questions was to color code our work to show the thought process. For each question answered within the paragraph, students had to use a different color to ensure that they were actually including all necessary information. 

I still feel like I have a long way to go to provide writing instruction of the quality that I used to when teaching it independently, and working in more focused and specific think-alouds is definitely challenging (and you will hear more about it as I read through Jeffery Wilhelm's Improving Comprehension with Think Aloud Strategies). As adults, it is amazing that we know as much as we know, and it is not very easy to verbalize all of that in order to help students learn how to think on their own. 

Spelling Madness

Yesterday was yearbook picture day for my middle schoolers. Because the length of time needed for each class to be photographed varies based on how many other classes are waiting, I was improvising time fillers upon each return to class - organize binders, work on homework, new seating charts. 

One of my classes is fifteen minutes longer than the rest due to our lunch schedule. We took pictures, then came back to class and created our new seat assignments - and I still had thirty minutes left. On a whim, I issued a spelling challenge that worked far better than I expected. 

I had my students take out an index card, and I gave them five words to spell: Wednesday, February, library, university (student requested word), and pneumonia (just for fun). I then called individual students up to the board who thought they spelled the word correctly. If that student was wrong, she/he called on someone else to come up and correctly spell the word. 

I was not expecting the madness that followed. My kids were raising their hands, pleading to be called upon, and jumping up and down.They were determined to show their classmates that they knew something. We do not conduct formal spelling lessons at this stage so having students get excited about spelling is like encountering the Northern Lights. But now that I know it is a way to sneak in spelling, I am certainly going to have to do it again. 

Community Building Activity: Hands On

Tomorrow is the first day of school with my 2015-2016 students. I will have 118 (at last count) new bodies in my classroom, some of whom I know a bit better than others. Some I do not know at all, as we have had many students transfer in from other junior highs, districts, cities, and states. 

With so much newness, it is important for everyone to get to know one another. It is my responsibility to build a healthy and safe classroom community. Our first assignment is going to be an introductory activity called Hands On, another  steal from the AVID Culturally Relevant Training I attended this summer (see Poker Time seating/grouping strategy). 

We will be hanging the hands in the hallway to show everyone that we are going to work together. When this year's parents come in Thursday night to meet the teachers, I want them to see that we have been building a community from day one. I am a big preacher about my classroom being accepting of all people, regardless of any type of differences, and the Hands On activity is just one way to begin expressing that. 

In addition, my students will be reading, writing, listening, and speaking with this lesson, all of which are essential components of both English language arts and English language learner instruction. 

There is another, more secret reason that I am using this as my first day lesson. How many of you are still preaching procedures, expectations, rules, consequences, and the like on day one? How does your mouth and throat feel by the end of the day? It took me ten years to realize that coming home with a sore throat was not the way to start my school year, so I stopped that a few years ago. The kids will listen to me a little bit, but for the most part, I get to walk around, monitor, listen, and smile (yes, I smile before December). 

How will you build a safe and welcoming classroom environment?

My BEAM Symposium Workshop: Teaching Poetry with the ELPS

Years ago, I was asked to present an in-service workshop for other ELA teachers in my district, and I did it because I do not like (or know how) to say no. Years and years later, this is becoming a thing, and I am really starting to enjoy this thing. I have now presented at my school and in-district for ELA and district-adopted instructional model workshops, as well as at two state ESL/bilingual conferences for English language learner strategies. Last weekend, I presented my first ever, out-of-district, solo workshop presentation at the 31st BEAM Symposium (Bilingual/ESL Education Association of the Metroplex, Texas). 

For my BEAM proposal, I actually reworked that very first workshop. After winning a copy of Kylene Beers' When Kids Can't Read at  a district training, I was asked to present one of her strategies. I conducted a Tea Party experience with the poem "Grandmother Grace" by Ronald Wallace. Because it has been so long, all I remember about this presentation is that it was my birthday, I brought cookies, I made people cry with the poem, and the feedback was good. 

For the English Language Learner presentation, I started with the basic premise - Tea Party with the poem. This is an activity I use frequently in my classroom in various ways, and it is always a success. It gets kids thinking and engaged with poetry (and other genres) before they even see the poem. And getting middle school students to do anything but glaze over at the mention of poetry is success in my book. 

In my revisions of the presentation, I added more activities: Get the Gist from ReadWriteThink, understanding metaphor from Kelly Gallagher's Deeper Reading, and a final word activity, again from Kylene Beers. Although these strategies are not written specifically for English language learners, they work very well for this specific population. 

I did modify the activities to focus specifically on reading, writing, listening, and speaking, the four components of Texas' ELPS (English Language Proficiency Standards). The reading was a given; we had a poem. For writing, I worked with sentence stem responses to the different activities throughout the lesson. Participants shared their sentence stem writing with partners, allowing them to work on both listening and speaking skills. 

Overall, the workshop went very well. I received positive written and verbal feedback. The teachers in attendance were appreciative of the ability to take something directly back to their classrooms. As a teacher, I know that is something that I always want from sessions I attend. 

I have submitted a proposal to present this same workshop at another state organization conference, and it looks like it could be going to a third based on my ESL Teacher of the Year award. My goal is to wear the mess out of it as I practice my presenter skills, and then I will start working on a new one. Because I believe in sharing/stealing in teaching, it is all here for you, as well. 

I considered leaving the classroom last year, but I am glad I did not. I feel like I am in the best possible place. I get to do what I love and work with goofy children every day, plus I get to go outside of the classroom and share what I do with other teachers. Watch out world. I'm comin' to get ya!