Creating Lifelong Learners

Using literature circles is another way to increase student comprehension.  Even teachers of prescribed reading series should incorporate additional authentic literature in their teaching.  This literature may be related to curricular units and must be high interest and at an appropriate reading level of students.

I adapted my reading comprehension posters into Literature Circle Table Tents (print and fold each in half after laminating) which I use to assign each student a job.

The jobs are:  The Predictor, Maker of Connections, Great Summarizer, Curious Clarifier, Word Wizard, and the Very Good Visualizer.  Of course, when reading in the real world each person must do each of the jobs.  However, in literature circles each person specializes on a particular job each day (we switch jobs daily).  This gives students additional practice using the strategies and ensures that they know what each of the strategies is.  Each card includes a definition.

For additional information on literature circles, I recommend the following:

In the Middle by Nancy Atwell
This is more about Reader’s Workshop than about literature circles but it does give you fantastic ideas about how to develop reading comprehension and interest in literature.  I highly recommend it.

Litcircles.org gives some additional information about how to set up literature circles.

Somehow the Literature Circle name intimidates some teachers.  I like to think of them as Oprah’s Book Club for kids.  It’s really just about enjoying literature with peers while the teacher helps facilitate some discussion surrounding the book.

Have any literature circle tips to share?

Update:  Adding Edutopia Article on Literature Circle Discussions

Here are a few tools to use when assessing students at the beginning of the year:

The Basic Phonics Skills Test (BPST)
This is helpful in identifying specific areas of phonics need (short vowels, long vowels, digraphs, etc.)

San Diego Quick Assessment
It’s also important to know students’ knowledge of sight words which is an almost completely separate skill from decoding and an almost equal predictor of reading success.

Yopp-Singer
Test of phoneme segmentation

DIBELS
provides several free fluency passages as well as comprehension assessments

What pre-assessments do you use?

Here are some resources I’ve compiled to assist you in planning for your return to school:

Need something to do?  Want to get to know your students?
Activities for the First Day of School

Want to beef up on classroom management?  Here’s everything you need from job charts to management systems:
Classroom Management for Teachers

For Open Court Reading teachers, I’d start with
Unit Openers
then Concept Question Boards
and finally have a plan for more explicitly teaching reading comprehension this year

I am suspending e-mail delivery of the blog for the summer.  As always, you can visit the blog directly by going to:

http://www.creatinglifelonglearners.com

E-mail delivery will resume in the fall.

Here are some terrific finds for the end of the school year.

1. A fabulous listing of fake web sites, hoax photos, etc. The best being a site warning of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide (also known as water).

2. Snag Films
Can’t remember where I found this but you can watch documentaries on this site for free. I particularly recommend Run Granny Run which was a really touching film about an 80+ year old woman who runs for senate. Very inspiring.

3. Alec Couros’s list of 80 great Youtube movies for teaching media literacy just got a little longer.

4. And create your own video sharing site for free using Fliggo which I’ve posted about before.

Kevin Hodgson lays out what he considers to be an ideal language arts curriculum.  Please read the entire post.  However, the tenets he puts forth are:

Writing to Learn

Including listening and speaking (as well as reading and writing)

A “Stakes Approach” (Moving from low-stakes like journal writing to high stakes like publishing and performance)

Writing Across the Curriculum

And including technology and multi-media

Scott McLeod suggests that we might be the problem with education.  Blaming the problem of low-level “kill and drill” education on the test is no excuse:

Our prevalent instructional model that emphasizes low-level, decontextualized, factual recall was dominant long before ‘the tests.’ Our challenges of providing higher-order thinking experiences, opportunities for authentic collaboration, and real-world connectedness existed long before the No Child Left Behind Act.

I don’t think Scott means to suggest that there aren’t problems with The Test.  However, he does ask us to take a look at ourselves and not use the test as an excuse to absolve us of a responsiblility to provide high quality education to our students.

I experience the same kind of excuses in regards to the Open Court Reading Program.  Whether or not we like the reading program, having it in our classes does not allow us to turn off that part of our responsiblity that requires an engaging curriculum and provides opportunity for higher level thinking and twenty-first century skills.

How do you decide who to befriend on a social network?  I was planning on writing this even before my mother befriended me on Facebook.

This is not a how-to guide for students using social networks.  This is about how I use them as a teacher.  I preface this by saying that there are no rules.  And if there were rules then those rules are changing as we go.  My idea of how to use the different networks has certainly changed from a year ago.  A year from now I might say something completely different.

Facebook

This is the one network where my personal business is all hanging out.  There’s nothing inappropriate on there but because I share pictures of my new kitchen and my Hawaiian vacation, I only befriend people I know…usually these are people I’ve met in person but occasionally they are people with whom I’ve developed an online blogging relationship or correspondence.  Sometimes web site visitors who I’ve never talked to before try to befriend me and I don’t accept.  Sorry, pick another network and we can be colleagues.

Anyone who joins should read this article on setting up the privacy settings on Facebook. I block my page from Google and I don’t allow all my friends to see tagged photos of me so that I have control over what photos of me people see.  Invariably you will only be tagged when you’re having a bad hair day or a big zit.

But because it is possible to block as much as you want to about yourself from people you don’t want to see it, I don’t think you have to be afraid of joining.  I do draw the line when it comes to befriending students.  My first year’s class is not quite starting high school yet so the issue has never come up for me.  However, I always wonder if a student posted something about contemplating suicide or experiencing child abuse on their Facebook account if you would be mandated to report it or liable if you didn’t report even if you might have missed it in the first place.  I just think it’s inappropriate to befriend students.  Feel free to disagree.

Twitter

Thanks Oprah and CNN for bringing this to the masses.  Twitter is like the status function of Facebook and just that.  What’s cool about is that you can have conversations with people you’d never talk to in real life and you can get up to date news.

Anyone can follow me on Twitter.  At first I would follow back anyone who was also a teacher but it got so cumbersome to follow everyone that I started missing tweets from the people I really don’t want to not miss.  I use Tweetdeck on the Mac now and that helps to separate the people I follow into groups and it has a super great desktop interface.

Here are 7 Ways to Be Worth Following on Twitter and How to Make Any Tweet Worth Following
both of which I found via @angelamaiers who I want to be when I grow up.

LinkedIn

I’ll add anyone to my network on there if know them even just a little bit.  Tell me you use my web site and we’re colleagues.  That’s all it takes.  This is a business oriented Facebook minus the pictures.  You basically post your resume and recommend other people.  The day that a Fortune 500 company comes looking for a second grade teacher and UCLA graduate to be CEO I know I’ll be snatched up.

Ning

Ning is like a Facebook for teachers.  I used to add anyone to my colleagues list by lately Ning is subject to random spam attacks by nefarious and less than nefarious types.  I don’t like being spammed by friends or porn stars so I’ve become more selective about adding people as colleagues.  I add people I meet at conferences so that I remember them and can find them later.  It’s not supposed to be a mailing list manager but some people use it that way.

If you only join one Ning then join Classroom 2.0.  The whole idea is that you join Nings based on your interests but what happens is you end up a member of 20 nings and it makes you wish you only had joined one in the first place.  Stick with Classroom 2.0.  I haven’t stopped by there in ages but it helped me immensely in setting up technology projects and finding like minded individuals.

These are my thoughts about who to befriend.  Agree?  Disagree?  Have different ways of using the networks?  I did befriend my mom.  I think

When teaching writing it’s important to show students how to do it and show them good examples of that genre of writing.

Our fifth graders recently had to write a multi-paragraph essay on whether or not to support the Revolutionary War from the point of view of the colonists.

To write this prompt well one needs:

• content knowlege of the American Revolution
• knowledge of the genre of persuasion
• writing vocabulary (e.g. drafting, revising, and conventions)

As this writing comes at the culmination of a unit on the revolution, the content knowledge can be built through the story selections.  However, even if students learn everything you want them to about the War and its causes, they will not learn how to write persuasively by osmosis.

Rather than focus on everything at once, we chose to focus on teaching students to write persuasively.

Here’s a list of examples of persuasive writing to examine with students (found via Twitter):

• Ahlberg, Janet, and Allan Ahlberg. 1999. The Jolly Pocket Postman
• Caseley, Judith. Dear Annie
• Cronin, Doreen. Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type
• James, Simon. Dear Mr. Blueberry
• Orloff, Karen Kaufman. I Wanna Iguana
• Pak, Soyung. Dear Juno
• Rylant, Cynthia. Gooseberry Park
• Stewart, Sarah. The Gardener

Update:  Here are a few others…I Wanna Iguana, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, The Great Kapok Tree, My Brother Dave Is Delicious.

Every year or so I run a post about what this blog is about. Here’s one from around this time in 2008.

This is as much for me to clarify and rethink my purpose for writing here as well as for readers.

Who Am I?

My name is Mathew Needleman and I’m the author of this blog.  Sometimes I’m referred to as “the folks at Creating Lifelong Learners” but really it’s just me.  I write this with occasional contributions from others which are credited when appropriate.  I am a elementary teacher and a literacy coach working in LAUSD.  The views presented here are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.  I do not work for Open Cout Reading, I have a web site dedicated to supporting teachers who are teaching the program but I created that site on my own without the endorsement of the publisher.

This cost of hosting and running this blog is partially offset by generic advertisements that I run.  If you don’t like the advertisements, the easiest way to get rid of them is to subscribe to the blog.  The RSS feed runs ad-free.

What Is This Blog About?

If you arrived here from Open Court Resources, you may be expecting me to write exclusively about language arts.  If you arrived here from Video in the Classroom, then you may be expecting me to write exclusively about video production.

I don’t teach either language arts or video production in isolation and so this blog reflects that.  I try to balance my writing between the two but really I try to be more spontaneous than that.  If something particularly is on my mind then there might be more posts about one than the other.

I also have more than a passing interest in classroom management, educational policy, and educational technology.  These subjects appear in posts regularly.

Are there subjects that you’d like to hear more about?

I thank you for reading.