Raising Readers and Writers

We’ve just finished our second day of school.  I love beginning first graders.  They are so eager and ready to learn.  They say whatever is on their minds and they go with gusto until they drop (which is around 12:30).  I know that within a month, they will quit asking to go home after lunch and they will be able to get through the afternoon without their eyes drooping shut. 

Today was an amazing day with my young learners.  They are already showing me their thinking  as we read several books aloud.  We started the day with First Grade Here I Come by Nancy Carlson.  Henry isn’t sure he really likes first grade.  It’s just not kindergarten.  However, as he tells his mother about his day, he realizes that he really does like first grade and there are many positive things happening in his classroom.  This book gave us the opportunity to talk about how first grade is different from kindergarten and how much more we can do now that we are older.  Later in the morning, we read I’m the Biggest Thing in the Ocean by Kevin Sherry.  In this story, Squid brags about how much bigger he is than all the other animals in the ocean, until he comes across a whale.  The kids loved this book and their conversations told me that they were thinking about the author’s words.    What was most exciting to me was the way they talked back and forth about their thinking.  They’ve only been in first grade for 2 days and they already are learning that talking about books deepens their understanding.  (I’m thankful to the kindergarten teachers who set the foundation for these conversations).

As all teachers know, the first few days in the lunch room can be daunting.  Today, we ran into a snag as the older kids were coming in to eat and some of the little ones from next door were just getting through the lunch line.  I offered to take the kids who were done eating back with my class.  I walked into my room and pulled I Know An Old Teacher  by Anne Bowen, illustrated by Stephen Gammell.  In this hilarious story which mimics the I Know An Old Lady stories, the teacher offers to take the class pets home for the long weekend.  Much to their dismay, her students discover that she is eating each of the class pets.     I looked up and saw kids who didn’t know each other hugging and laughing as they shared their disgust over the teacher’s antics.  The end was especially enjoyable exciting!  I sent the book with our after lunch guests so their teacher could read it to the rest of their class.  They were so excited to share it with their classmates and their teacher.  I knew we had taken the first steps in learning that books give us the opportunity to connect with others.

Our final read aloud was The Recess Queen by Alexis O’Neill.  In this story, Mean Jean is the queen of recess.   The other kids don’t swing until Jean swings; they don’t bounce until Jean bounces, and they don’t jump until Jean jumps.  That is until Katie Sue comes to school.  Not knowing Jean’s reputation, Katie Sue runs outside and plays without a worry in the world.  The other students watch to see what happens.  Jean tries to no avail to boss Katie Sue around, and in the end, Katie Sue invites Jean to play with her (which no one else had ever thought to do).   This book gave us the opportunity to talk about how we want to be treated in our classroom and how we should treat others.  It was the beginning of our class promise.  Again, we had a lively conversation.  I was able to show the kids how books can be used to learn life lessons.

As I reflected at the end of the day, I thought about all the different ways we connected with books.  I know that this is the time to fosterbuild an environment that honors conversations as we read, write, and learn together.  It is the glue that will bind us into a strong first grade learning community.

I’m sure you can guess why I haven’t posted in a week.  The new year is upon us and my classroom has become my second home.  I was talking to a colleague from the Columbus Area Writing Project last night about the grant I’m writing and was lamenting about the fact that I had been at school for 8 hours on a Saturday (and many hours before that) because I can never just do the same thing I’ve done in the past.  I am always rethinking, changing, revising, and adding to my teaching repertoire.  He had just the words I needed at that point.  He read a quote to me that he put in his dissertation.  Sonia Nieto said, “Excellent teachers don’t develop full-blown at graduation; nor are they just “born teachers” Instead, teachers are always in the process of “becoming.” They continually discover who they are and what they stand for, through their dialogue with peers, through ongoing and consistent study, and through deep reflection about their craft.”

As I listened to him read these words, I took a deep breath, and realized that all the reflecting I do and the changes I make are worth all the extra time.  Not only do my students benefit, but so do I.  I am always learning something new from my students and my colleagues.  These experiences have helped me grow into the teacher I am today.  I am  fortunate to work with excellent,  dedicated teachers on my team.  We are able to have conversations about what is working and what needs tweaked in our classrooms, and we learn together.  I don’t know what I’d do without them.

One of our team members is starting her first year of teaching.  I have another good friend who is also beginning her journey in the classroom.  Both of them are enthusiastic and full of wonderful ideas.  They will bring so much to their young learners.  As I reflect on the quote, I hope that both of them will realize that outstanding teachers are always evolving.  It is also my hope that they encounter many teachers who are “in the process of becoming.” 

So, thanks to my friend, Kevin, for his words of wisdom.  I think I’ll hang them near my desk where I can be reminded of them daily.  Good luck to everyone going back to school.  I hope your year is filled with discovery, reflection, and wonderment!

All of us who are teachers know what it’s like right before school starts. We have these crazy dreams where we’ve lost complete control of our classrooms.  I’ve had dreams where I’m standing on the table trying to get everyone to pay attention and chaos is reigning in the room.  Well, last night’s dream was a new one.  I dreamed that my first graders were huge, like high school kids.  One of them had a beard and mustache.  Another one was smoking a cigarette and wouldn’t put it out when I told him to.  None of them fit into the tiny first grade chairs, and of course none of them would listen to directions!! 

I thought it would be fun to share our anxiety filled school dreams.  Share them in the comments section and it will give everyone something to smile about as we get ready to start a new year.  The reality is never as bad as our dreams!

My son and daughter will be attending a brand new high school in the next couple of weeks.  They are both in the band and up until this year, both played mallet instruments (mainly the marimba).  Because the band is so small in the new school, there will be no mallet instruments in the marching band.  To say the least, they were both very disappointed.  To their credit, they’ve stepped up to the plate and have done a great job with their new instruments (bass drum and cymbals).

Tonight, they were able to bring home a marimba, which is now set up in my living room.  I am sitting here watching my son play his heart out.  This is his passion and he is willing to give it his all to be the best he can be.  He is so intent on his playing and it makes me so happy to see him be so immersed in his work.

As I get ready to start a new year, I can’t help but think about the importance of building this passion for reading and writing in my young students.  I am always excited at this time of year as I anticipate my new class.  I can’t wait to share with them my own passion for reading and writing.  I love the challenge of a student telling me, “I don’t like to read.”  I always promise that child that after a year in my classroom, he will change his mind.  I don’t think I’ve fallen short in that promise yet. 

My husband and I are lucky.  All 3 of our children are avid readers and each is a good writer.  Their tastes differ, but they have that love of holding a book in their hands and disappearing into a book.  Yes, they had good role models here at home.  Stacks of books and magazines are everywhere in our house.  The bookshelves are overflowing (one of the summer projects that didn’t get done).  But they were also blessed to have teachers who gave them time to read and choices in reading books that grabbed their interest.  For that I am eternally grateful.  Because in my mind, that is one of the most important gifts a teacher can give.

http://bubble-cast.com

I have been intrigued with voice threads since I first saw them on Katie’s blog.  I think what I liked the most was  the variety of ways your audience can comment.  I did some searching and saw some other projects that looked interesting, like a poetry unit and one from a kindergarten teacher beginning a conversation with her students about reading.

In the past, I’ve been pretty hesitant about using technology myself.  I’ve always relied on the technology teachers (who are wonderful in our district) or my husband and children to hold my hand and guide me.  This past spring, I decided that I was just going to jump in and try to learn some new things that I could use in my classroom.  Blogging was the first step.  I have loved being able to connect with so many people from so many different places.  I took the podcasting class (again) during summer academy to help me gain some confidence.  I’d like to be a bit more independent during the school year when I use podcasts with my students.  My colleague and I already have our first podcast planned.  We are going to let our students introduce themselves using Pixie and podcasting to begin building a strong classroom community.

Now, I’m adding voice threads to my repertoire.  After seeing Katie’s latest post, I decided that I needed to stop procrastinating and just try it.  My 10 year-old nephew is visiting us this week.  He and my 14 year old were bored and wanted to make something tonight, so  I decided to let them document the process using the camera from my new iPhone (another piece of technology I’ve been investigating) and creating a voice thread of the process.  I was determined that I could do it!

The whole process was very interesting.  At first, my nephew wanted me to take the pictures.  But after I showed him how easy it was, he took over.  As we recorded their voices, there was a lot of giggling.  What really struck me was the different strategies each of them used to record their voices.  Annie was very purposeful, rehearsing her part and trying to use a variety of beginnings.  Caleb, on the other hand, just made it up as he went.  (He had the most giggles, of course!)  I think we see that in our classrooms all the time.  Different children take on tasks in their own way and it usually works out just fine. I’m already thinking of ways to use voice threads in my classroom.  I think it might be fun to share writing with another class or even start a discussion about a book with my own students.   I’d also like them to publish some writing with illustrations later in the year.  There are even more possibilities with my 4th and 5th grade writing club. My wheels are turning!

Directions for creating the voice thread were pretty easy to follow .  I found this site which I turned to a couple of times.  I still need to tweak a few things, but that will be for next time.  The only difficulty I had was adding a Voice Thread plugin to my Wordpress account.  I did have to call on my computer techie husband for his help.

So here it is…something that we love to do at my house – bake.  The kids had a blast in the kitchen and at the computer.  Feel free to leave a comment on the voice thread.  I’d like to see how that works too.

Christian the Lion by Anthony (Ace) Bourke and John Rendall is another book that Sara and I chose for our nonfiction unit.  The illustrations and text intrigued us.  Each page reminds me of a mixture of a modern scrapbook and old fashioned photo album.  The bright, textured pages are very colorful with smatterings of paw prints crossing the page.  On each page are several photographs, both in color and black and white, tucked into those old fashioned photo corners like my mother used in my baby book.  As we skimmed through the book, we knew our young writers would enjoy the book and it would give us another type of mentor text.

The story is based on a true story.  Rendell and Bourke were living in a trendy part of London in 1969 when they discovered a lion cub in Herrods, an upscale department store.  They bought the cub and brought him home to live in their basement flat under the furniture store where they worked.  Christian played soccer with the young men, rode in the car with them, went to restaurants, and was even on the radio.  Unfortunately, within a year, he was too big to live in the apartment.  Right about that time, Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna, married actors who had just finished filming Born Free came into the furniture store.  They helped Bourke and Rendell connect with George Adamson and his wife, the real life naturalists on which the movie was based.   Rourke and Rendell  flew with Christian to Africa where they met Adamson and they slowly acclimated Christian to his natural habitat.  An end note from the authors tells what happened when they went back to Africa to visit a year later.  I don’t want to spoil it for you. 

The story is written from Christian’s point of view with an introduction by Rendell and Bourke “clipped” to the first scrapbook page.  Christian tells about where he was born (there are several maps throughout the book), his life at Harrods, moving in with the 2 young men, and eventually traveling to Africa where he was introduced to his own pride.  The use of real photographs support the story very well and my emerging readers will be able to read the pictures and get a strong sense of the story.  Overall, I liked the book.  I can see using it to help students imagine another way to share information with their audience.  Students could use digital cameras or disposable cameras to take still pictures of a subject  and create a scrapbook from their subject’s point of view. 

However, because the story has been simplified for a young audience, it left me with several questions.  I didn’t understand why the men would bring a lion cub home to live in a basement flat under a furniture store if they wanted a better home for the lion.  Why would a lion even be allowed to be sold at a department store?  I know it was the 60s, but really, it just didn’t make sense to me.  I did some research on the Internet and found this site which answered all of my questions. 

The fact that I had questions is a good teaching point for my young readers.  It will give me an authentic way to show my students that readers have questions and that we can use different resources to answer our questions.  We could actually google “Christian the Lion’ and look at all the information that is out there.  My search also brought up several videos on YouTube that the kids will enjoy. 

I think this book will be a great addition to our nonfiction library.  It’ll be interesting to see if the kids make connections to other books in our nonfiction library that are written from the point of view of the subject.

I was drawn to The Book Whisperer by the title.  Here was someone who shared my passion for students doing real reading instead of reading whole class novels, completing comprehension worksheets and doing word searches to build vocabulary.  I read Donalyn’s bio and saw that she was a fellow teacher consultant from the National Writing Project (North Star of Texas Writing Project).  I knew this was a book that I wanted to read.  I checked it out of the library (one click shopping from Amazon was taking its toll on my budget), settled down to read and was hooked!  I read the first 4 pages and decided that I had to own this book.  I needed to be able to mark pages, write in the margins, and add my own questions on the back cover.  So I literally stopped at Barnes and Noble on my way home to buy the book.  I am so glad that I did.

Last weekend, I was in one of my favorite places to read…the beach on Lake Erie (really any beach will do) when I was able to  really delve into this book.  I loved her introduction, “I AM NOT A READING RESEARCHER.  I am  not a reading policy expert.  I do not have a Ph.D.  What I am is a reading teacher, just like many of you.”    Wow!  Here was someone I could relate to.  The more I read, the more I felt like I had found a new friend, even though I’ve never met Donalyn.

Donalyn believes without a doubt that if we want our kids to be better readers we need to give them time to read.  Everything she asks her students to do is an authentic reading task.  Her kids are given choice in their reading selections, they are encouraged to read in a variety of genres, they write letters to her in their reader’s notebooks, and they share recommendations as they find new great reads.  Her classroom is a place where readers thrive, even those who have previously struggled.  Her classroom is a place of give and take.  She also shares that even experienced readers like her sometimes have difficulty getting through a book.  I appreciated her honesty about her struggles with working with others who don’t share her beliefs as they focus on using worksheets to help students “get ready for the test” and the difficulty in saying good-bye to her 6th grade students knowing that they won’t be given the reading freedoms they had in her room as they move on through school. 

Even though Donalyn teaches 6th grade, her ideas hold true for all grade levels.  She has helpful websites and books to guide teachers as they look for books for their students.  One of them is Jen Robinson’s Book Page, which I read regularly.  She also has some good ideas for those adults who are not passionate readers themselves.  She had her students help her design the “Ultimate Library List” which is in the appendix as well as student forms she uses in her classroom. 

I can’t say enough about this book.  It validates everything I believe about the teaching of reading and writing.  You can follow Donalyn’s blog to get more inspiration.

Sara, the ELL K-1 teacher, and I were at Cover to Cover last week searching for new nonfiction titles for our classroom libraries.  Both of our classrooms will be the focus of a research study on nonfiction writing in the primary grades during the upcoming school year.  Apparently, there’s limited research out there on young writers doing research and writing nonfiction.

I met Melissa (our researcher friend and doctoral student at OSU) when I was a fellow at the Columbus Area Writing Project.  She spent quite a bit of time in my room last year doing informal observations and getting to know the kids as readers and writers.  They always looked forward to her visits.  The more we talked, the more we knew we wanted to delve into learning more about the kind of thinking and talking kids do when they are reading and writing nonfiction. Melissa wrote and received a grant to buy nonfiction books for our classroom libraries.  The three of us are going to create a study group to analyze the work being done in Sara’s room as well as mine.

On Thursday, we met for lunch to talk about the kinds of books we wanted to buy.  Barb Kiefer from OSU, also came to lunch  to talk about nonfiction books.  Boy, do we have a lot to learn!  She explained that what I had been calling literary nonfiction is actually called “hybrid” nonfiction in the book world.  Hybrid nonfiction is a type of writing that uses literary techniques usually found in poetry or fiction.  We had a lot of conversations about each of the books we chose and what type of nonfiction each book was.

One of the books we chose is a brand new one by Molly Bang, Living Sunlight:  How Plants Bring the Earth to Life. This poetic book, beautifully illustrated by Penny Chisholm, is written from the point of view of the sun.  It explains the process of photosynthesis and how important the sun is in sustaining life in our world.  She takes a very complicated idea and makes it understandable for the young reader.  The vibrant illustrations pop out on each page.  For the more sophisticated reader, there are end notes with more scientific details about photosynthesis and other organisms that are the foundations of life on earth (i.e. phytoplankton).  I can’t wait to share this book with the kids.

Sara and I left with a bag of expository nonfiction and hybrid nonfiction books that we can use at the beginning of the year as mentor texts.  As the year goes on and we get to know our classes, we’ll go back to purchase more books.  We want  to find a variety of books about a variety of topics.  We want our students to understand that nonfiction is about more than animals.    I’ll be talking about some of the books we choose in this blog as well as the different things we learn in the research project.  I am looking forward to working side by side with these 2 wonderful teachers and making new discoveries about our young readers and writers.