Today.

Today is the first day of the new trimester.  This means two things:

1. I get to teach my own class starting today — English 9A with 26 students.
2. I barely slept last night and woke up early today.  This is typical behavior prior to the “first day of school.”  Starting a new trimester is like the first day of school in November for me.

I’m going to treasure every minute because I won’t be given this opportunity next year.  It’s like savoring every bite of a beignet in New Orleans or each bite of my favorite chocolate bar.  I’m anxious to meet the class and get to know the people who will be my primary community of readers and writers for the next three months.

I can’t help but think back to my first year of teaching.  Some things are still the same.  I don’t sleep the night before the first day of class because I’m so excited.  I’m like a little kid on Christmas eve.  I can’t wait to meet my students.  I’m also still wearing my rose-colored-glasses and saying to myself, You can make the world better, Pollyanna. 

Some things are different.  My skin is thicker.  I worry less about what other people think.  I’m not as concerned about being judged.  I understand the way some people respond to me has less to do with who I am and more to do with what has happened prior to walking through my classroom door.

Of course, my heart breaks easier today than it did before.  It aches when I hear the stories of neglect or angst or loneliness the students in our classrooms face day in and day out.  It seems each year there are more students who have been hurt by life than who those have seen the joy it can bring.

I’m anxious to use everything I know about adolescents and teaching and literacy and technology and weave it all together to create a trimester focused on lifting the level of the 26 teenagers in my classroom.   And I’m nervous that I won’t be good enough.  I’m racking my brain trying to figure out how I can catch them all.  Hoping against odds that I will always know the right way to respond so all 26 succeed. 

Today I begin a new adventure.  I will do my best to teach well not only today, but everyday.

Writing About Thanks

 

Today's reading spot, which I'm thankful for, was on our sectional.

 

There’s just a little over a week to go before Thanksgiving. Do you know what you’re most thankful for? Want to ruminate about the things you’re most thankful for through writing? If so, take a cue from Molly Irwin’s Blog, where she writes about the idea of recording the things for which you’re most thankful.

I started doing this in the form of Facebook Status Updates for the past few days. Here’s what I’ve recorded thus-far.

Thursday, 11/12: “…thankful for the man who stopped traffic so I could turn out of my street this morning. He caused me to make every green light on my way to minyan.”

Friday, 11/13: “…thankful to have gotten eight hours of sleep last night.”

Saturday, 11/14: “…thankful to be finished with the PRAXIS Exam!”

Today: “…thankful for NY Times Home Delivery and an afternoon to read the paper.”

I’m planning to come back to each of these thankful updates, once the holiday (and all of the cooking I’m eagerly planning to do) is complete, so I can write about each of them in more depth. For example, take the Praxis Test. Even though I’m consulting now, I decided to take it so that I can get certified to teach in Pennsylvania, which doesn’t accept my teaching licenses from New York and Rhode Island. There’s a big story in that. Additionally, today’s thankful post about the Sunday Times reflects a weekly Sunday ritual I have. While this snippet doesn’t reflect much about how I attack the paper once I bring it into the house, the writing I plan to do later will. Each of these blips about thankfulness captures something special about each day I’m living right now.

I hope you’ll take on the thankfulness challenge suggested on Irwin’s Blog. If you do, I’m sure you’ll find it rewarding.

Integrating Blogs, Podcasting, and Digital Videos

NCTE’s Annual Convention in Philadelphia in next week.  I’m delighted to be chairing a session for some educators from California entitled “Integrating Blogs, Podcasting, and Digital Videos into 4th and 5th Grade Language Arts Classes.” Here’s the description of the session from the Convention Program:

The presenters will discuss (1) how blogs were integrated into the language arts curricula, (2) how podcasting and digital videos were used to increase students’ fluency with elements of narrative writing, and (3) the first-year results of the project in terms of the CST scores and an outside project evaluation.

The session is scheduled for Friday the 20th at 11:00 a.m.  If this sounds interesting to you, then I hope you’ll add this session to your Convention Program.

Ah, to be 13 again. Well, not really.

I’ve had 13, a collection of short stories edited by James Howe, sitting in my bookshelf for the past few years.  I bought it based on the recommendation of a staff developer at the TCRWP who shared Rachel Vail’s “Thirteen and a Half” at a Calendar Day I attended.  Since the book is geared towards a middle school audience, I put it on my home bookshelf and didn’t pull it out with my fourth or fifth graders.

Curiosity got the best of me yesterday and I finally retrieved the book, which contains “thirteen stories that capture the agony and ecstasy of being thirteen” from my bookshelf.  I went to the T.o.C. in search of a story title that piqued my interest.  I settled on one written by James Howe entitled “Jeremy Goldblatt Is SO Not Moses.”  Thanks to Howe’s ability to capture the voices of the characters in the story (Note: It’s a story told from many different perspectives.), I was instantly transported back to that time in my life, which partially made me smile and partially made me cringe.

Once your students have a command over Standard English, you can teach them how to “break the rules” of writing.  While “Jeremy Goldblatt Is SO Not Moses” is loaded with insertion commas and commas that are correctly placed before conjunctions, it rarely uses commas in lists.  In fact, it uses the words or & and to create lists within the writing.  This technique is quite useful since it makes the writing it sound like a teenager’s voice.  There are several examples of this throughout the text, so it will be easy to show students several examples of this technique.

Another thing you can teach students to do with this text, which Ruth was just discussing with me yesterday, is how to whisper-in to the reader.  Chelsea, one of the characters in the story, is a very self-conscious girl who doesn’t understand some changes of heart she’s having throughout the story.  She whispers-in to the reader, reminding the reader not to rat her true intentions out, at a few points in the text.  Each time she whispers-in, she puts her warning in parentheses.  Each parenthetical reference made me feel as though she was saying something under her breath.  We can teach students how to say something under their breath, only the reader can hear, by whispering-in to the reader inside of parentheses.

When students write narratives, it’s often hard to discern the difference between the adults and children when they’re speaking in the story unless there are strong setting details and plot structure in place.  Since “Jeremy Goldblatt Is SO Not Moses” is artfully written from a variety of perspectives (e.g., Jeremy Goldblatt, his friends, his Rabbi, his mother, and his mother’s friend), we can use this text with students who are having trouble assigning words to make their characters seem believable.

If you teach middle school, consider getting 13.  While you may only use a few of the stories inside, I’m certain this book is one to which your students will relate.

November 11th

Formal and Informal Writing with Conventions

I use conventions in my writer’s notebook and in e-mails. I tend to write with proper conventions when I’m IM-ing since I know it makes my message easier for my reader to decode when we’re writing back and forth rapidly. I write with conventions when I jot notes to my husband. I consistently write with conventions since proper grammar, usage, mechanics, and spelling allows other people to easily understand the idea I’m trying to convey.

I’ve noticed that children, and many adults, do not use conventions consistently when they write. Many people pick and choose when they’ll write with conventions since it requires less thinking to abandon them. However, I think it is incumbent upon us to get our students to write with conventions consistently so they will be heard accurately every time they put their writing out into the world.

If you notice some of your students’ writing is lacking conventions, for example, they’re not writing with conventions in their notebooks, take the time to explicitly teach them how you do that same kind of writing with conventions. Think-aloud as you demonstrate doing notebook writing where you’re being intentional about your use of conventions. Talk through your decisions to insert different kinds of punctuation. Talk through difficult words as you attempt to spell them. Talk through the placement of words as you structure your sentences so they convey meaning and will make sense to someone else who is reading your writing. This kind of explicit instruction, when repeated, will encourage your students to use conventions with greater consistency in their own writing. It might not happen immediately, but if they see you being thoughtful and consistent about the way you communicate with your words, they will begin to emulate what you do.

So a little challenge:  Identify places where your students are writing without conventions. Do some that writing on your own with intentionality about the way you’re using conventions. Then, plan a minilesson that will convey the need for consistently using conventions when you write like that.

SOLSC

Pleaes link your Slice of Life Story to this post by leaving a comment.

Peer Conferring: Questions

I’m intrigued by peer conferring.  There’s just something about two writers coming together to talk about their work that’s interesting to me.  I love the nuances of peer conferring — learning what works well and what doesn’t.  I like to study really strong collaborations to find the little-known-secrets to a specific grade level of writers.  And I like to offer advice to young writers on ways to truly help one another.

One successful peer conference is a QUESTION CONFERENCE.  In this conference, the responder simply asks the writer questions.  In order to teach this technique, I model it in a minilesson.  I’ve found it works best if the responder first reads through the draft.  This way he has a sense of the whole.  So I begin my minilesson with a draft students are familiar with from previous lessons or I give them a minute to read my draft for the first time.

Then I teach the process of a Question Conference.  I read the draft to my students stopping throughout to gather questions.  I ask them to share any question they have as I read.  Then I write the questions all over the margins of my draft.  I then share with students how I use the questions to guide my revision.  I mark specific questions which make me think or the questions I think are most important.  Then I determine how I will use them to revise.  Sometimes I change my ending, other times I add in an entire part, and yet sometimes I sprinkle new information throughout my draft.

A few years ago I read about Question Grids in Nancy Steineke’s Reading and Writing Together:  Collaborative Literacy in Action (Heinemann, 2002).  So I took the idea of a Question Conference and made a Peer Conference Record to help scaffold the discussion of middle school writers.   Below is a copy of it.

View this document on Scribd

If you give Question Conferences a whirl (or have in the past), I’d love to hear some of your thoughts.

Owning Your Story.

I was talking with a friend and colleague of mine, Deb Gaby.  She was commenting about how often in life when we begin to think differently, this new awareness crops up in many different aspects of our life.  Interestingly enough, Deb and I are both thinking deeply about  collecting the stories which define our lives.

She was sharing with me the way books help her find the important stories from her life.  When she connects to a book there is often a personal reason for this connection.  She is using these connections to help her collect important life stories.  I think this is a teaching point we could use in our Writing Workshops as well.

I’m taking a class at Big Picture Scrapbooking from Ali Edwards.  The class is titled Yesterday and Today and is all about collecting stories from our lives both yesterday and today.  For me it translates to making sense of today with stories from yesterday.  Here is the scrapbook page I created on the first day of class:

Living fully today from documenting yesterday.

Credits: Yesterday and Today Week 2 Template; 12×12 LIFE Text Frames byAli Edwards; Clock Parts No. 2 by K. Pertiet; Golden Bay Paper Pack by L. Grieveson (all downloaded from Designer Digitals); font: Mom’s Typewriter (downloaded from DaFonts) & CK Ali (downloaded from Creating Keepsakes)

A few weeks ago Ali shared this quote:

Credits: Ali Edwards Yesterday and Today Class Materials

I’m also reading Bird by Bird:  Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott given to me by one of my best friends.  Lamott writes:

Remember that you own what happened to you (6).

She also writes:

I tell them [her writing students] they’ll want to be really good right off, and they may not be, but they might be good someday if they just keep the faith and keep practicing.  And they may even go from wanting to have written something to just wanting to be writing, wanting to be working on something, like they’d want to be playing the piano or tennis, because writing  brings with it so much joy, so much challenge.  It is work and play together (xxix).

And . . .

Sometimes when my writer friends are working, they feel better and more alive than they do at any other time.  And sometimes when they are writing well, they feel that they are living up to something.  It is as if the right words the true words, are already inside them, and they just want to help them get out.  Writing this way is a little like milking a cow:  the mild is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it. I want the people who come into my class to have this feeling too (xxxvi).

All of this affirms within me the importance of students collecting bits of their lives.  It reminds me of the importance of writing to make sense of life.  A few weeks ago I blogged about tapping into the class as an authentic audience.  I think more importantly is to develop response groups with in a class so students can get to know one another on a personal level and allow themselves the freedom to write the meaningful stories, the tough stories, the important stories of their lives.

In one week I’ll begin teaching a ninth grade English class.  I’ve decided we will support one another in telling the stories of our lives via response groups.  I’m also dedicating myself to creating a safe place where students are willing to tell the defining stories of their lives.

Making Characters Talk

Dialogue. It’s something we wish students would use purposefully inside of a piece of writing. Too often, when our students do write with dialogue, it sounds like this:

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” my sister said.

“What do you want to do today?” I said.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Let’s go to the park,” I said.

“Okay,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

Rather than crafting dialogue that moves the plot forward, kids often write the words that got them to the place they were going to, rather than writing the dialogue that gives their story momentum. Why? It’s hard. It’s challenging to remember the real words people said when there were lots of words flowing. (That’s why we sometimes have to nudge students into recalling the gist of what happened and then implore them to create the dialogue that most likely got exchanged.)

I recently received a review copy of Michael Rosen’s new picture book, Red Ted and the Lost Things, which is available in stores this-coming Tuesday.This text contains a universal theme: losing something. Red Ted is a bear whose owner leaves him on a train. He is scooped up and placed in a room where there are other lost things. He meets Crocodile, also lost, who hops down off of the shelf in the room of lost things and plans an escape from the train station in order to look for Red Ted’s owner. (NOTE: There is a happy ending in this text, which includes adorable illustrations by Joel Stewart.)

This graphic storybook does something very special: it tells the story of Red Ted’s adventure, from start to finish, almost exclusively inside of dialogue bubbles. The conversation between Red Ted and everyone he encounters is moved forward through the use of well-written and meaningful speech. Hence, this book can be an excellent teaching tool for students who struggle to write dialogue that moves their stories forward.

It’s important to note that there aren’t any dialogue tags in this book since it’s a graphic storybook. You might want to use the “Call Out Bubbles” Ruth shared last month to get this started. Once students have created meaningful conversations between their characters, in the style of Red Ted and the Lost Things, you can teach them how to punctuate their dialogue correctly using dialogue tags.

Speaking to Me.

These words are speaking to my soul tonight.  I’m planning to use them in a workshop I’m leading tomorrow.

Students such as these walk into your classrooms in every size, shape, and color.  You can’t know their histories because their only control is control of their secrets.  You are asked to create a safe enough place for them to learn, and for you to teach, and then are provided with ill-thought-out standards, drawn up by men and women so distant from your theatre of engagement as to be functionally illiterate in its regard.  These people demand that you test memory-level learning and abandon the staples of real education — response, expression, relationship — to chance.

But many of you will refuse to do that, because you didn’t invest years of your life getting an education and gathering the tools to follow your passion . . . to be disallowed the right to make the connection with your students that could change their lives.  No child left behind?  Only policy makers and politicians need a bill named that to remind them that leaving kids behind isn’t a good idea.

There simply is no tougher job than that of Teacher . . .

From Adolescent Literacy edited by Kylene Beers, Robert Probst, and Linda Rief; “Flying Blind” by Chris Crutcher

Share Your Slices

Happy Election Day!  Whether you’re teaching today, attending professional development (I’m personally leading a session on conferring, so I’ll be posting my Slice later today.), or have the day off, please remember to get out and vote!

Link your Slice of Life Story to this post by leaving a comment.

Allowing Words to Hang in the Air

At the Basic Workshop Training there is always time for Adult Writing.  Yesterday, I shared one way to help get students writing is to read aloud a well-written text (a poem, picture book, or novel excerpt) and then allow the words “to hang in the air” while everyone silently picks up their pens and begins to write. 

I used Jacqueline Woodson’s Sweet Sweet Memory for this experience.  (If you’re not familiar with this text you should get your hands on a copy ASAP.  Like all of Woodson’s work it is exquisite, but this may be my favorite — if I could choose a favorite!)

Here is what came out in my notebook after writing for ten minutes with Jacqueline’s words floating in the air around me.

The world is swirling round and round
I’m trying to stand still in the midst of change
Anchoring my feet so I’m not engulfed by life.

I want to stand still, to catch my breath
But it’s impossible

The world is swirling round and round
I don’t want it to sweep me away
But it’s impossible not to change
To simply stay still.

Breathing in
Breathing out
Changing.

I’m swirled around by life
Reminding myself to live in the moment
Saying over and over to not make things more complicated than they need to be
To accept good enough
To go with the flow
To know it’s going to be okay

The world is swirling round and round
When all is stripped away
I wonder what matters most.

Clearly this is first draft writing . . . but at least it’s a start to putting words on the page in response to how I’m feeling right now.  As a writer I plan: 

1. To write an ending
2. To study Woodson’s work
3. To revise (and revise and revise and revise . . . )
4. To publish (This may be a blog post, a classroom writing celebration, or a scrapbook page)

By reading well-written text and then picking up my pen I almost always get words on the page I can come back to and craft into something I’m pleased to have written.

Publishing Books with Students

This past Monday I heard Kwame Alexander, who is a poet (He trained with Nikki Giovanni at Virgina Tech!), author, and founder of Book-in-a-Day, speak at the KSRA Conference in Hershey, PA.  My handwritten notes from his talk about engaging students with poetry are at the bottom of this post.

Alexander founded Book-in-a-Day, Inc., or BID,  an organization that works with middle and high school students, a few years ago.  BID’s purpose, as per the organization’s website, is:

Book-in-a-Day (BID) is a non-profit, educational services company that fosters literacy skills through a groundbreaking writing and publishing workshop, which focuses on student-run publication—in one day. Educators spend hours looking for exciting ways to bring literature to life. The solution is Book-in-a-Day, a new fun-filled, hands-on literacy project that teaches students the fundamentals of creative writing, through poetry and book publication.

As many of you know, I worked with my students to get their writing published in 2007.  It was a lot of work, but was worth all of the long nights and weekends that were put into the project.  If you’re interested in doing something similar, then consider BID, which brings people with expertise in publishing students’ work quickly, to your school.

View this document on Scribd

Writing About Historic Events, People, or Places

Pennsylvania-based author Linda Oatman High led a session entitled “Writing to the Beat of a Different Drummer” at the KSRA Conference I attended this week.  (My handwritten notes from her session, which provided an array of ideas for getting students to write, are located at the bottom of this post in a Scribd Document.)

Oatman High writes books for children and adults.  Quite a few of her children’s books are about historical events. I was captivated by one of her books, which I purchased later in the day and had her sign at the Author Tea I attended, since it was about my hometown of Manhattan.  The book, Tenth Avenue Cowboy, is a work of historical fiction that was published last year.  It’s the story of a shy boy named Ben who relocates to the Hell’s Kitchen Section of Manhattan in 1910.  Ben misses his life out West and is enthralled when he learns of the Tenth Avenue Cowboys who ride on the tracks warning residents of Hell’s Kitchen of on-coming trains.  Thanks to the kindness of Johnny, one of the Tenth Avenue Cowboys, Ben is virtually transported back to the West when he gets the opportunity to ride with him warning his neighbors of an oncoming train.

If you are planning to do some content area writing this year, but don’t want to have your students do a traditional report or a how-to book, consider having them research an historic event, person, or place and write about it as if they are an historical fiction writer.  Tenth Avenue Cowboy is one of many books you could use as a mentor text to teach your students how to write about an historical event in the third person.  The story contains vivid setting details, dialogue, and varied sentence lengths.  There are also several exquisite similes in the text, which you can show your students if you want to have them try out figurative language.

View this document on Scribd

I {Heart} Comments

From time to time, I use this blog to sort out ideas I’m wrestling with.  I must admit this puts me in a vulnerable place.  Such was the case with Monday’s posts.  Audience — authentic audience — has been on my mind a lot lately.

Sometimes I think we make things more complicated than they need to be.  Often when  I  begin thinking this, the topic almost gets more muddy before it sorts itself out and a simplified version emerges.  I blog as a catalyst to this process.

When people leave comments to this kind of post it helps my thinking evolve.  Thank you to those who commented on Monday; you helped me think through what it means to have an authentic audience.  Deb Lund’s comment gave me the concise words I needed to help me make sense of the role peers can play as an authentic audience.  She wrote:

If they’ve already had the experience of having their own voices and choices honored, then an audience can enrich that experience. If a teacher has been the students’ only audience up to this point, they’ll just feel more pressure to make it “right” for the intended audience, and they’ll place limits on themselves that will make their writing more sterile.

If using the peers for an audience is treated like a critique group, as in the art teacher example (especially with his question “What do you think?”), students are honored. They’re sharing together in a friendly and safe format. The teacher isn’t judging as he stands with them. He’s an observer, a coach, a facilitator.

You may want to read her entire comment here.

It’s not just the posts when I’m vulnerable that I value comments . . . I always value comments.  They help me understand teaching writers at a deeper level and they make me realize there is an audience out there to my writing.  I write better when I know my peers are reading.  I hope my students are able to have this same experience in their writing lives as well.

SOLSC Meets Picture Book Illustrators

KSRA Authors Tea Mug & Chocolate (er, what’s left of the chocolate)

Originally uploaded by teachergal

When I received the registration form for the KSRA Conference, I did something I don’t usually do. I signed up for the Author Tea. I figured I might meet some interesting people and have a nice afternoon snack. (After all, there’d probably be chocolate there since the KSRA Conference is held in Hershey, PA.)
The authors present at the Author Tea came from all parts of Pennsylvania, and from points beyond, such as Massachusetts and even Alaska! As always, learning about the work children’s book authors do was interesting to learn about.

In addition to meeting eating a lot of chocolate and chatting with a bunch of authors, I had a rare opportunity to chat with two illustrators. Lisa Papp and Robert Papp, a husband and wife who are illustrators, were great fun to talk to. While I’ve met a bunch of authors in the past few years, I haven’t met a single illustrator, so I started asking them all of the questions I’ve had on my mind about illustrating for picture books, an art I truly admire. Lisa and Robert work in different medium, watercolor and oil paint, respectively. While they each have unique styles, they both answered a bunch of questions I had about illustration.

Here are just a few of their answers to some of the questions I posed:

Q. How long does it take for you to illustrate a book?
A. About a year. First, sketches have to be submitted to the art department of a publishing house. That’s often the smallest amount of time within that year. Then, once the sketches are approved, the painting work begins.

Q. Do the authors you work with have any of the design aspects of the book?
A. No. Most publishing houses keep authors and illustrators separate.

Q. Who decides where on the page the text goes?
A. Mostly it’s the illustrator’s decision. Usually the text gets laid over a plain part of the illustration. However, the art director might go back and forth with an illustrator about the placement of the text on a page.

Q.  How large are your paintings?

A. They’re often double the size of the illustration that’s on the page.  (To that end, both Lisa and Robert often take photos of people, dressed up in the “costumes” they want the characters in the book to wear, and then paint off of the pictures.)

 

NOTE: I usually post my Slice of Life Stories on my other blog, but since this was related to a conference I’m attending, and plan to blog about more in the days to come, I figured I’d post it here on TWT.

Join Us for Today’s Slice of Life Challenge!

Please link your Slice of Life Story to this post by leaving a comment.

Motivation (Part II).

This finally led me to thinking about my high school art classes.  I was in the Honors Art Course and for me it was tough to get into.  I worked even harder to stay in it.  I didn’t have the talent that everyone else had and I lived with the pressure that someone else could slide into my spot at any time.  It made me work harder.  In reality, Honors Art is the course that prepared me to study in college (and so much more).

Every Friday we would have to put our sketchbooks out on the back table then stand, circled around the table looking at the art before us.  Mr. Malicki allowed the silence to linger around us as we absorbed the work on the table.  Still today I remember the pressure.  He would finally ask, “So, what do you think?” then allow the silence to fill the room once again, until someone would say something.

We would talk about the art on the table.  If someone didn’t put forth their best effort, it would be removed.  Mr. Malicki didn’t accept second-best.  I watched as remarkable drawings were removed from the table because the artist didn’t do their best.  He pushed us to do our best work — and then some.  He pushed us to take risks.  He pushed us to talk to each other, asking questions, giving compliments.

Some Fridays we would stand around the table for a few minutes then head off to work, while other weeks we would spend the entire class period huddled around the back table.  I learned a lot during those share sessions — not just about art, but about myself and my classmates and, most importantly, about life.

The audience of my class was enough for me to put forth my best effort (and then some).  Mr. Malicki was a part of that audience, an important part.  He knew about art and I wanted to learn how to become a stronger artist.  Those share sessions were crucial to my learning.

The girl in the history class reminded me of myself.  Her work was strong, but she wanted it better.  She wanted this because the audience mattered — both the students and the teacher were a worthy audience.

I’m planning to tap into this power of a classroom audience next trimester.  I think it begins with building a solid classroom community and depends upon everyone wanting to do their best work.  These are not easy tasks . . . especially when given the parameters of a high school teacher:  70 minutes every day for twelve weeks.

It can happen.  It does happen — it happened in this history class, it happens in English classes, art classes — any class where the teacher pays more attention to teaching students instead of content.  As I set my eyes on teaching readers and writers, a solid community will form which will become an authentic audience for my students.

Motivation (Part I)

Last week I was in a history class.  It was the teacher’s prep, but there were students working to put final touches on their presentations which were due later in the day.  Out of the blue, this conversation ensued:

“I’ve got to start all over!” a student shouted.

The teacher smiled and said, “What do you mean?”

“Look at theirs!  It’s so much better than ours! That’s it, I’m going to start over.”

“It’s due later today, it’s fine.  You did a good job too.”

The student rolled her eyes.  “I can make it better.”

The teacher smiled again and said, ”You don’t have time.”

And here’s the kicker . . . the student said:

Sure I do.  I’ll work on this during English instead of my rough draft.  I’ll lose the hundred points since my rough draft won’t be in on time, but that doesn’t matter.  At least this will be good, though.

The teacher shook his head again and said, “Don’t do that.  You’ll be fine.”  Although I didn’t look at their writing projects (each group wrote a newspaper to share information with the rest of the class), I’m sure the teacher was right.  Their work looked solid. 

That’s when this question began haunting me:

What makes the writing project in U.S. History so much more important to this student than the writing project in English?

Here are some of the thoughts that have been bouncing around my brain about this:

• The audience played a crucial role.  In history, the audience was the entire class; in English the audience was the teacher.  I think this made a difference.
• Attaching a large number of points to a writing project is not enough to motivate a student to get it done . . . especially when there is another project with a more pressing audience.
• I’ve not valued a classroom of peers as an authentic audience like I should.
• I’m sure this student is a “good student.”  At first, I used this to brush off her statement about losing the points in English. I figured she was simply overzealous.  However, this didn’t give me solace.  If the “good students” are willing to brush off an English writing project, what about everyone else? 
• I wonder how the teacher placed so much value on an audience of a classroom full of peers.  I’m curious about the kind of teaching that led up to the final projects.  I’ll need to ask him.

What are your thoughts about this?  Leave a comment and let me know.  I’ll be back tonight (probably late) for Part II of this post.  Until then, happy teaching.

Encouraging Revision

Revision is one of my favorite parts of the writing process to teach.  I enjoy figuring out ways to encourage writers to make significant revisions.  It seems so often our students revise just to appease the teacher and the revisions don’t really matter to the writer and don’t really matter to the meaning of the piece.

To make this transition to significant revision, I revert back to my own revision process.  When writing narrative one of the things I do to write it well is to include character details (dialogue, action, emotions/thoughts, and description).  While working in a primary classroom, we noticed students weren’t using any dialogue in their stories. 

To encourage this craft move, I created a sheet of Call Out Bubbles.  Then I chopped them apart and put them in a basket in the Writing Center.  The minilesson for the day was about how writers often use dialogue in their stories to make their characters come alive.  (There are many ways to teach this — published text; your own writing; students’ writing.) 

I used my own draft.  I placed a transparency of a page from my story.  It simply told the story:  My marshmallow caught on fire.  Then I modeled how I could revise using the call out bubbles.  I wrote in the bubble:  “OH NOOOOOO!!!!” Then taped the bubble to my picture.  When I did this, one young writer said, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” I smiled at him, “I hate burnt marshmallows!  I was really upset when it caught on fire.”

“I love them,” he said, “I didn’t know you would be upset at that part of the story.”

This led nicely into the teaching point of the conference — when we  add significant details to our writing, the reader has a clearer understanding of our story.  The call out bubbles are a concrete means to the abstract process of revision.  

A follow-up lesson would include looking at the picture (which now has the call out bubble) and then adding to the words of the story. 

As I type this post, I’m thinking about how this could be used with older writers who are not dependent on their pictures to write the story.  Here are a couple of ideas I’m thinking about (but haven’t ever tried in the classroom –  consider yourself warned!):

1. When envisioning their narrative, have them write some dialogue they may include in their story on a handful of call out bubbles, then paste into their writer’s notebooks.
2. When revising, write the dialogue on the call out bubble, then tape the bubble onto the draft where the dialogue should be added.  (There would have to be some teaching about quotation marks and speaker tags . . . I’m not sure if the call out bubbles would help or hinder this.  It may make it easier to understand that quotation marks go around the words spoken if the spoken words are in the speech bubble.  At the same time, it may make it more complicated than it needs to be.  I’ll have to make a plan to try it out . . . )

Now here’s the disclaimer:  If you use these in your classroom, be ready for call out bubbles to be everywhere!  There will be some significant dialogue added . . . but there will be much more that is simply added because just like everything else, when we learn a new way to lift the level of our writing, we want to use it all the time.  Plan to revisit this idea of significant revision with your young writers as you nudge them to control their revision.    Not to mention there will be a need to stick the bubbles to their pictures — they will need access to something sticky.  Plan on including this in your Writing Center if your students do not have access to glue or tape currently.

View this document on Scribd

As always, if you try this or have another version of this idea, I would love to hear from  you in the comments.

Making Students Feel Valued.

This morning as I was listening to the radio on my way to school, they were asking little kids to respond to the question:  How do you know someone loves you?  This response stuck with me:

You know someone loves you by the way they say your name.  Your name just sounds safe in their mouth.

It’s true, you know.  We do know someone loves us by the way they say our name.  I can often tell if a teacher loves a student by the way he says the name.  Just as I know a student is not loved by the way the teacher says the name. 

A few years ago, my friend Barb Bean began taking attendance in her fourth grade classroom by saying “Good Morning” to each of her students and adding their name to the end phrase.  They would respond to her with “Good Morning Mrs. Bean.”  Then she would go to the next student.  At first this seemed scripted and contrite to me.  So I asked her about it.

She shared with me about how she wants each of her students to feel they are a special part of her classroom community, so she greets them each by name.  What better way to feel important than by being welcomed by name and given eye contact every morning.

The little boy on the radio this morning reminded me of Barb’s morning procedure and the gift she gave her students by extending an individualized greeting each day.  It took only minutes out of her classroom day and each student felt important.

I don’t think we ever outgrow the need to feel special and part of a community.  I’m considering using Barb’s procedure to collect daily reading progress with my ninth graders next trimester.  I think at first it may feel a little awkward or, dare I say it, old-fashioned .  However, after a handful of days, I believe it will become a comfortable procedure and students will know they are valued since I took the time to offer an individualized greeting at the beginning of the block.

How do you ensure students’ names “feel safe in your mouth?”

WordFest 2009

I presented at the Capital Area Writing Project’s WordFest tonight.  Just thought I’d share my presentation in this forum as well.

View this document on Scribd

SESSION NAME: Well-Chosen Words About Slices of Real Life

BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Help your students find the beauty in their everyday lives by opening up your notebook and sharing your own writing with them. In this section, we’ll write anecdotes, or short, well-written stories about our own lives. We’ll take time to confer with each other about our writing and will discuss ways to infuse this type of writing into the classroom or the writer’s notebook on a daily basis. Finally, participants will have an opportunity to share their work with their colleagues.

GRADE LEVEL(S): Elementary

Personification, An Effective Ending, & More

A copy of Laurie Halse Anderon’s The Hair of Zoe Fleefenbacher Goes to School arrived at my home last week. I read it once and put it aside since I was unsure of what this book would be most suitable for teaching (i.e., there’s so much it can be used for!). I took a week away from Fleefenbacher and turned back to Susan Ehmann and Kellyann Gayer’s I can write like that! A Guide to Mentor Texts and Craft Studies for Writings’ Workshop, K – 6 before cracking it the picture book open again. I reviewed all of the craft elements Ehmann and Gayer define in their book (pgs. 9 – 25) and made a list of the ones I thought I remembered being present in the text.

My highlights represent changes I made once I reread the text.

When I reread the text, which is about a first grader named Zoe who has WILD hair. Her hair was admired and appreciated by her family, friends, and even her Kindergarten teacher. By the time she arrives in first grade, her new teacher, Ms. Trisk, feels that her hair is out of control and needs to be tamed. Zoe’s parents are called in and efforts are made to tame the girl’s hair, but eventually her teacher grows to accept and appreciate what Zoe’s hair can ‘do.’

That being said, personification is a biggie in this text since Zoe’s hair can do things that ordinary people’s hair cannot do (e.g., open cookie jars, pick up the trash, and tickle people). In order to make Zoe’s hair come alive, Halse Anderson uses descriptive language, which enhances the illustrations depicted by Ard Hoyt, throughout the book. Thanks to strong verbs and specific nouns, it’s clear what Zoe’s hair is capable of doing and how hard it is to be tamed.

The ending of this story is not only satisfying to the reader because justice is served and Ms. Trisk becomes more tolerant and understanding, but it’s also a circular ending. The final sentence of the book contains the main character’s name, which is also contained in the book title, as well as the fact that she has one blue eye and one green eye (which the lead did). While a circular ending might be hard for some young writers to achieve, you can certainly teach the ending as an “effective” one, rather than a “circular” one.

Additionally, there are several places in the text where there are lists, sound words, and a variety of interesting print features and layouts. Therefore, carrying this text alongside you in a conference will allow you to teach up to ten craft elements to your students.

Write What Matters Most.

It’s getting late.  I’m tired.  A blog post is required before I go to bed.  Although I have a list of possibilities, I don’t have the energy for them.  Not tonight.  Tonight I simply want to take Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith’s advice: 

“There’s nothing to writing.  All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

One of my favorite kinds of entries, the kind that often gets at the heart of things, is a list with the repeating line: Today I . . .

• Today I spent most of my day with teams of teachers, my state standards book, and engaging conversations.
• Today I spent time swinging . . . not just pushing others on a swing, but actually swinging myself.  High and fast.  I soon remembered how I don’t like swinging high and fast.  By contrast, one of my current favorites is pushing a three, five, and eight year old high and fast on a swing.
• Today I rushed dinner.  We shoveled broccoli and pizza down our throats and took bananas to-go.
• Today I was on the opposite side of the table for parent-teacher conferences.
• Today I fell in love all over again with my husband when he responded to an explanation about the importance of students’ experiencing questions that are similar to those on the state test with: ”More important than preparing her for standardized tests, is this is the type of problem she will face in the real-world.”
• Today I listened and listened more.  I was blessed by the stories I heard.
• Today I ate a Honeycrisp Apple.  It was delightful.
• Today I treasured the warm air, crisp blue sky, and smell of October.
• Today I dedicate myself to remembering the small details of the day which are the most important.