Raising Readers and Writers

As I began our unit on informational texts, I wanted to make sure the kids had a solid understanding of the difference between fiction and informational texts.  After looking at several examples of non-fiction books and creating a Venn diagram comparing fiction and non-fiction, I gave the students piles of books that included both kids of texts.  I wanted to listen to their thinking and see if they could sort them accordingly.  They did a great job.  They were able to articulate their reasoning for sorting books.  They looked at non-fiction conventions (table of contents, photographs of real things as opposed to illustrations of things that could never happen), the topic of the book, whether or not the book told a story, etc.  I was feeling pretty smug, thinking I had done such a good job of teaching this concept.  (A little like the smugness I felt with my oldest daughter who was really very well behaved.  Then my son came along and reality hit!).

Then…I noticed S. had Me and My Place in Space in the fiction pile.  I had this book in our nonfiction section of the classroom library.  I began to wonder about this misconception.  I decided to bite the bullet and ask him and his partner why they had put this book in the fiction pile.  (Remember, too, that Melissa is in my room video taping the whole conversation for her research…Yikes!  I was hoping that I could carry this off!)  We started to look through the book with the whole class.  As we paged through the text and looked at the pictures, we could see without a doubt that the illustrations lent themselves to “fake fiction.”  A girl wearing a homemade box space suit floats through the solar system.  The drawings looked like those we saw in many fiction stories.  The class was sure that this book was indeed fiction.  But then, I started to read the text.  There were facts about space interspersed among the pages.  We could learn from this book!

We knew we had a dilemma.  What to call it?  I was sitting in my chair with 23 six year-olds watching me as I grappled for the correct term.  I couldn’t for the life of me remember, so I called it a “combination text.”  That term was fine for the time being.  (Melissa later reminded me that the correct name was “hybrid informational text.” )

The next day when we sat down, I told them the correct term.  We talked about how hybrid cars use a combination of gasoline and electricity  and hybrid texts were a  combination of fiction and nonfiction.  My kids now think they are the smartest first graders in the whole world because they know this very important term.  Every time a new adult comes into the room, we have to give them a little quiz.

Hybrid texts was a new term for me as I began this research journey this summer.  I had been calling this type of book literary nonfiction (Katie Wood Ray’s term), until I had a conversation with Barb Kiefer from OSU.  Hybrid texts are those like Steven Jenkins’ books whose main purpose is to convey information, but also contain other features of fiction whose purpose is to entertain.  You can read more about hybrid texts here.

So now, if you’d walk into my room, and picked up a book from the classroom library, you could expect my students to tell you more than you’d ever want to know about the text features and what kind of book it is.  This knowledge has empowered them and given them more confidence in themselves as learners.  They love to share their thinking and are always excited to bring me a new book that they’ve deemed a hybrid text.

Alas, I have turned into my mother.

We are studying past and present in first grade and the pilgrim lady came to visit last Friday to talk about life in colonial days.  I had the GREAT idea to make applebutter and johnny cakes with my class on Monday and Tuesday before we left for Thanksgiving.  I love to cook with my kids and I have a great room mother who loves to cook too!  So between the two of us, we are having a ball creating memories for my kiddos.

Flashback to Monday…the applebutter making went along without a hitch.  We used the super duper apple peeler/corer that makes spirals out of apples and produces a long string of apple peel.  Lots of oohhs and aahhs filled the room.  We observed what the apples, sugar, and spices looked like brimming to the top of the slow cooker.  I hinted that it might look different on Tuesday, so we needed to make careful observations.  (See, I even wove science into this project!).  I went home thinking about the next day…Johnny Cakes were going to be a bit more challenging.  I was looking forward to meeting friends for breakfast at 7:30 the next day… and then my mind started going!

Tuesday morning at 6:30…I began to think that maybe the kids might not like the Johnny Cakes which are basically corn meal pancakes.  I decided to stop at the store to get bread for the apple butter before I met my friends.  I left the house around 7:05…plenty of time to pick up some bread from Kroger’s bakery and make it to breakfast.

7:36…I rush out of the grocery store and call my friend to tell her I’m going to be late and here is our conversation:

Me:  Hi Kathy, I’m late.  I had to stop at the grocery store before I met you for breakfast.

Kathy:  Let me guess, you stopped to get bread for the apple butter.

Me:  How did you know?

Kathy:  I’ve known you for a long time!

Me:  Well, let me tell you about my grocery store trip…it’s a little like If You Give A Mouse a Muffin. I decided to go the grocery to get bread, just in case the kids didn’t like the Johnny Cakes.  I got to the store, picked up the bread and thought, “That’s a lot of bready things.  Maybe I should get some fruit.”  So I picked up grapes, bananas, apples, and watermelon.  Then I thought, “Hmmm…the fruit might turn brown, I had better get some orange juice to pour over the fruit”  So, off I went to the juice aisle and got a small container of juice.  Then I thought, “The kids might not like apple butter.  I should get some butter for them.”  Turn the cart around and go back to the dairy.  Oh yeah, I think they might like apple cider.  Turn the cart around again to get cider and paper cups.

And that was my trip.  I made it to breakfast late.  My friends and I had a good laugh and I realized that I really had turned into my mother!  I remember trudging alongside her and rolling my eyes many times as I went along to help with grocery shopping.

Cooking Johnny Cakes and making fruit salad ended up being a huge success.  Imagine the kids’ surprise when they realized that apple butter doesn’t really have butter in it.  AND it looked really different on Tuesday morning after it had cooked all night in the slow cooker.   The principal stopped in to have a taste and told the kids that she had never had apple butter before.  She liked it too!  Thank heavens for Mrs. Hughes who was manning the griddle while I was supervising chopping up of fruit.  Most of the kids liked both the apple butter and Johnny Cakes (and the bread was a hit too).  It was a great day.

The added bonus…it was S’s birthday, so we got to have cupcakes on top of everything else we ate that afternoon.  (Yes, another detail I forgot).  There were a few tummy aches by 3:00. 

Now I’m off to do the cooking for our own Thanksgiving.  It’s one of my favorite days because I get to spend the day doing something I love to do!  Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Well, I’m hooked!  I went to my first NCTE convention this year in Philadelphia and I know that it won’t be my last.  It was such a great experience being with thousands of like-minded people.  I started Friday with Billy Collins at the NWP opening session.  I had never heard him speak before and what a treat he was.

Another highlight was seeing Franki Sibberson, Debbie Miller, Ann Marie Corgill, and Karen Szymuziak talk about helping students find their identities as readers.  Listening to these women validated everything I believe in.  I loved Debbie’s comment that teachers should “flood the room with books.”  They gave me many things to think about and helped me refocus on the joys of teaching my young learners.  Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the the “nay-sayers” and I really needed their words of wisdom that day.

I was also fortunate to hear Sonia Nieto and Mary Cowhey in the opening session of Early Childhood Day on Saturday.  Again, their words were empowering.  I have been very intentional this year to ask my students to do work that is purposeful and authentic.  I want my students to do work that requires them to solve problems, make connections, and think critically.   I very much appreciated Mary’s statement, “Students and teachers are producers and learners of knowledge.”  She reiterated that students should be involved in “real world” learning.  She reminded us that, “We are teaching people who come with all sorts of backgrounds.  It’s our job to create an atomosphere to allow critical thinking.”  How true that is!  I go to work every day with 24 very diverse learners who are depending on me to help them learn to do the kind of work that will help them be successful in life.  Pretty lofty goals for six year-olds!  I begin to worry sometimes that this type of teaching is losing its power as we are buried in data teams and standards based teaching.  That’s another post.

I also attended a couple of sessions focusing on technology.  I am determined to become more independent when it comes to using technology with my kids.  I also want to expand my knowledge of ways to use technology with my 4th and 5th grade writing club.  This week my first graders and I created a podcast about our mealworm study which I’ll post later this week.  In the past, I have relied on the technology teacher to create the podcast for me, so we were feeling pretty good that we figured it out!  I learned more about Twitter from Bud Hunt and Kevin Hodgson had a great session on using technology to create  digital picture books.

This only touches on the great thinking from last weekend.  Being surrounded by so many smart people rejuvinated me and gave me the incentive to go back and work on an article that I’ve been putting off.  I’ve got to get back to focusing on what brings me joy as a teacher and what moves my thinking forward.

Squeals of delight could be heard as my kids discovered Here comes  the big mean dust bunny! sitting on the chalkboard tray yesterday morning.  Cruz begged me to read it just as it was time for him to leave for the ELL teacher.  He only relented when I promised we would read it as soon as he came back.  As we sat down to do our minilesson on nonfiction conventions an hour later, Cruz reminded me of my promise to read the new book.  The table of contents lesson was going to have to wait.  We had to read this book!

The rhyming dust bunnies are back!  Ed,Ted, Ned, and Bob are joined by the Big Mean Dust Bunny this time.  Just as in Rhyming Dust Bunnies, Ed, Ted, and Ned are rhyming away, this time to maybe cheer up the grumpy dust bunny.  He wants to smash them.  Again, as the three of them rhyme, Bob, comes up with words that don’t rhyme.  Right away, my kids wondered if he was warning the others about an upcoming danger…namely the cat.  Well, don’t you know, they were right on.  And the cat?  It’s Big Fat Cat, another familiar Thomas character.

The kids LOVED this book.  Laughter filled the room and their questions, predictions and inferences were bouncing all over!  These 6 year-olds never cease to amaze me.  We added this book to our Jan Thomas basket.  I know it will be well-loved just like the others.

The teacher writing group met last week with the task of finalizing the revisions of our vision statement (first posted here).  I asked Dr. Bloome to please lead us in this endeavor.  He has the gift of leading us down the path of change in  a very positive, engaging way, which helps us think outside the box.   By the time we finished, we had a lot of feedback and everyone there had a part in making the changes.  Isn’t that integral to making a vision statement, or any kind of document for that matter,  successful?  Everyone needs to own it.  I’d like to explain the steps we went through.

Dave gave everyone a copy of the vision statement, which he had reformatted, so that people would have room to write on the document.  Then he told us, “Imagine that you were going to take this document seriously. (Insert chuckles here). How would it change you?” How many times do we scan through documents in front of courses of study, or other statements sent from “higher ups” that we don’t have any stake in?  It’s very easy to put these aside and never pay attention to them.  We do not want the vision statement to fall in this pile.  After we had time to write our responses to Dave’s prompt, we shared at our tables and then shared out what someone at our table had said.  Here are some of the responses (from the sketchy notes I took):

Use mentor texts and take them into own writing;  read a lot more books meant for people over the age of 12;  importance of communication between grade levels; collaboration between a community of writers in our classrooms; try to bring technology into own writing; take more risks with students as writers; and persue reading and writing as if they were brothers and sisters as opposed to cousins.

Next, Dave asked us what we wanted our vision statement to do for us, our classrooms, our school, and our school community.

For ourselves we said we wanted to:  raise the comfort level in sharing writing ideas among colleagues; have more open communication with colleagues about writing, hold ourselves accountable for writing in a variety of genres; focus on the value of writing; balance the components of writing; and writing more ourselves.

For our classrooms we said we wanted to:  have our students view themselves as writers; have focused talk like writers among our students; have our students’ self confidence grow in sharing their writing; model ourselves as writers.

For our school we wanted to:  bring teachers together so that we share a common language and are on the same page; collaborate and share more; have more authentic writing experiences; focus on where students are and where they are headed.

Finally, for our school community we wanted to:  see our students have a respect and joy for writing; create newsletters about writing; have a common language going back and forth between home and school; create a desire among our parents for more information; and bring families in more often to share writing experiences.

Our next task was to go through the vision statement and highlight words, phrases, and ideas that stand out as being very important. These phrases were deemed as having a strong impact:  our school fosters and environment where writing is encouraged and honored; use of technology; variety of genres; writing is meaningful; immersed in quality literature; read like writers and have conversations like writers; and students enjoy writing.

Then Dave asked us what we thought we might need to add to the vision statement. We thought it was most important to include bringing families in; having a common language, and knowing where students are and where they are going as writers.

Our last task was to go through the vision statement one more time to note any parts that made us uncomfortable.   One teacher was concerned about the statement of the teachers being a community of writers when not every staff member is involved in the after school writing group.  What do we do here?  Dave suggested that we change it to:  Our staff works hard to be a community of writers.

So where do we go from here?  Our principal, a few other teachers, and I will meet to go through and word smith the document.  Our principal, who has an artistic eye, has some great ideas to weave the information together into a document that will appeal to everyone.

I learned a lot from this experience.  Even though I gave the original vision statement to several people for revisions, I only got positive reviews.  The document was still essentially mine (and I held on tight to that…it was my baby).  After going through this process with Dave and the rest of the group, it now feels like it’s ours. I like that feeling a lot better!  I feel very lucky to work with such dedicated teachers who share a common vision!

My first graders are so excited about our new genre study.  We’ve been reading lots of nonfiction and they have so many questions.  After reading Flip the Flaps:  Animal Homes on Tuesday, I gave the kids time to ask their own questions.  Each child was given several index cards to write their wonderings.  Their questions covered so many topics like:  How high can a dragonfly fly?  How did God make people?  Why does a rainbow come out when it rains?  How does electricity work?  One of my emerging writers drew a picture  of a dragonfly to help him remember his question.  A is just beginning to string letters together that represent the sounds in words.  He copied 2 wonder words from the chart (how and why) and the word dragonfly (another student had asked for that word to be put on the chart) and then turned the card over and drew a rudimentary bug to represent a dragonfly.  When he shared, I told the class how smart he was to draw a picture to help him remember what he was wondering.  As soon as I said that, several others started to draw pictures to support their questions.  It is very important to me that each student in my room feels his work is honored, from the very beginning writers to those whose work is more conventially written.  Each student made an “I Wonder” envelope in which to keep his or her questions.  I got this idea from Debbie Miller’s Reading with Meaning (she used Wonder Boxes).  The students will continue to add to their envelopes and we will use these questions to guide their research.

Our next step was to begin to organize the wide variety of informational books we have in our room.  Early the next day before the students came in, I strategically grouped informational books together for students to categorize.  Each pile had a few books in several categories.  My mini-lesson focused on looking through a pile of books and deciding what the book was mainly about.  The students are familiar with the labeled book baskets in our classroom library, so it was easy to make the connection by thinking about what kind of label we might put on different piles.  The students worked in small groups of 2 or 3 to sort their pile of books.  The conversations were amazing.  C looked at the book The  Wild Side of Pet Cats.  First he thought it would be about pet cats, but as he looked through the photographs, he decided that it wasn’t really about pets.  It was more about cats that live in the wild.  Conversations like this were happening all around the room!  After the kids had time to sort their books, we gathered again in the meeting area to create our baskets.  Again, there was a lot of thoughful conversation in the group.  I am always amazed at what six year olds can do when you give them the opportunity!

Our final step was to make labels for each of the baskets.  We decided that our labels should have the words as well as a pictures for each category.  I am going in early tomorrow morning to attach the labels so that we can put the baskets in our classroom library. 

What a week it’s been.  My kids have loved exploring all of the new books.  I always begin a new genre study by just reading lots of books.  One of the first books I read was Flip the Flaps:  Animal Homes by Judy Allen and  Simon Mendez.  I chose this book for several reasons.  First, the detailed illustrations draw the reader right into the book and the text is engaging for young learners.  My emerging readers are sure to find information in the pictures if they read the book independently.  Secondly, each habitat (pond, stone, tree, etc.) is a short chapter that includes a flap to be lifted.  Don’t all kids like “lift the flap” books?  The authors list 3 questions on each flap, which can be lifted to reveal the answers.  This book led to more questions from my students.  It was the perfect segue into the students writing their own “I wonder…” questions (an idea I got from Debbie Miller’s Reading with Meaning).  More about that later.  I know that I will go back to this book again and again.  Not only is there is a lot of information to be learned,  it is also a great model for writing informational books.

I am a huge fan of Steve Jenkins’ books.  I have quite a few in my classroom and was happy to add some more and other books that reminded me of his style.  He always takes an interesting look at his subject that keeps kids captivated, instead of the traditional take on animals (habitat, appearance, diet, etc.).  I love that my students can look at his books and envision a wide variety of possibilities for their own writing.

Living Color tells the reader how animals use color to protect themselves, call to other animals, attract mates, or warn predators.  The vibrant illustrations are textured cut paper collage.  The animals virtually pop out of the page.  Each double page spread focuses on one color and what it means for different animals.  Text also flows around the illustrations, another technique that students can do in their own writing.  For instance, “Red says…This is my space. The male hooded seal marks its territory – and tries to impress female seals – by inflating a sac of loose skin that hangs from its left nostril, blowing it up like a big red balloon.”  Who knew that could be attractive?  The book is filled with interesting facts about some very uncommon animals and insects.  The end of the book tells more about the role of color in an animal’s life and as is typical in Steve Jenkins’ books, the last pages give a bit more information about each of the featured animals (size, habitat, diet).  I know the kids will love this book as much as the other Steve Jenkins’ books.  I have enough now that I’ll be making a Steve Jenkins basket.  I will use this book as a mentor text to discuss all the possibilities for presenting information in an interesting way.

This next book, Hello, Hello by Miriam Schlein, looks at the different ways animals greet eachother.  Eight of her books have been honored as Outstanding Science Trade Books for Children.  Again, I chose this book because it gives lots of information about animals in an unusal way.  We learn that “Elephants are very, very, very, very, friendly.  They touch trunk tips or they put the tips of their trunks in one another mouths.”  Zebras take a different approach as they stretch out their necks and sniff eath other’s noses.  Then they make little chewing noises.  The books ends with the ways humans say hello.    I can see kids using this book as a jumping off point to research other ways animals greet each other.  The illustrations, oils on textured paper, are bright and give the reader a glimpse into each animal’s habitat.  Students will learn that much information can be gleaned from illustrations and that they will need to think about what kind of information they want to portray in their own final illustrations.

I have the books packed up ready to take into school tomorrow.  I’ll be sure to post about how the kids react to all of the new books.  I’m sure to hook everyone with something!