Schema: Text Set

As strategy presentations begin, here are my expectations for the text sets. Text sets will be posted here on the blog - you will be responsible for posting them. Elements of a text set:

* 3 books per person in the group.
* Graphic of the book cover. You can upload pictures you take yourself of the book covers. There is a button on the blog posting page that will walk you through uploading photos from your computer:

* You must link to a webpage where we could purchase the book. You can use Amazon, Powells, etc. to create this link. The link button is five buttons from the left, next to the text color button.
* There must be a synopsis of the book.
* You must connect the book with the strategy you presented on.

I've put together a text set for schema that shows you how I would like the set laid out:

Fox, M. Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Patridge.

Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Patridge, a boy who isn't very old, lives next door to an old people's home. His favorite old person is Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper, who he tells all his secrets to and how has, according to his parents, lost her memory. Wilfrid begins to ask various people at the old people's home what a memory is and collects objects that spark his own memories to share with Miss Cooper. He shares his box with her, his shells, puppet, grandfather's medal, football, and an egg, and she begins to rememeber her own memories.

Strategy Connection: As children begin to think about schema and strategy instruction, memories and the objects, visuals, and experiences that trigger them, become very important. This book provides a jumping off point to begin talking about experience and how our experiences shape how we interpret texts, objects, and experiences. It calls to attention that our schemas are different and may lead to different interpretations. This would be an excellent book to utilize before a strategy unit on activating and connecting previous knowledge.


Lionni, L. Swimmy

Swimmy lives in a corner of the sea with a school of little red fish. Swimmy, however, is "black as a mussel shell," which allows him to escape when a hungry tuna gulps up the school of little red fish. Swimmy is left alone and wanders the sea, finding a jelly fish, a lobster, strange fish, seaweed, an eel, and sea anemones, until he finds another school of little red fish hiding in a cluster of rocks and weeds. They hide because the big fish will see them, which Swimmy finds sad and declares they must think of something so they may play in the sea. Swimmy begins to arrange the small red fish into the shape of a large fish and they learned to swim together like a big fish, chasing other big fish away.

Strategy Connection: This book highlights how we use experiences to shape our thinking. Swimmy is the lone survivor of the Tuna fish attack on his school of friends and uses that experience to help his new friends think of a way to avoid becoming lunch for another tuna. This book is a great conversation about how do we figure out how to do things? How much do our previous experiences shape how we solve problems? Excellent questions as we begin to be more conscious of our own reading and book choices.

Yolen, J & Teague, M. How Do Dinosaurs Say Good Night?

This story follows a group of dinosaurs as they prepare for bed. The book starts out with the dinos doing all of the things that could be considered unpleasant: pouting, shouting for another book, and even roaring. The book concludes with the dinosaurs going to bed quietly, with just one more kiss and a hug.

Strategy Connection: The power of this book is in how children know when the dinosaurs are not going to bed in the "correct" way versus when the dinosaurs are. They are using their schema about how to go to bed to make a value judgement about the dinosaur's behavior. How have they learned these concepts of right and wrong? Probably through experience, which has influenced their schema.

As always, comment with questions.

Strategy Instruction Presentations & Text Sets

Below, you will find the schedule and groups for strategy instruction presentations. It is unfair to expect the same products from all groups given the unequal distribution of people within groups, so I'm going to amend the text set requirement. Rather than having a flat number of ten books you must have in your text set, you will need to have three books for every member of your presentation group. For example, if you are presenting alone, you will have to create a text set of three books that go with that strategy. If there are five people in your group, your group's text set will need to contain fifteen books to go with that strategy. Book sets are not due to be posted to the web until two weeks after your strategy presentation.

Activating and Connecting
Jenna
Lauren
Megan
Amber

Questioning
Jessica
Chloe
Leslie
Melanie

Visualizing and Inferring
Ashley
Danielle
Amanda
Margot
Kelly

Determining Importance
Jenny
Courtney
Kourtnee
Pauline

Summarizing and Synthesizing
Katy
MaryKate
Abbey
Shaun
Julia

Martha Blogs, Interesting Visuals, and Other Web Stuff

A quick break from our normal programming to look at some interesting stuff going on in cyberspace.

Martha Stewart, the purveyor of all "good things," recently had a show featuring bloggers and how they engage in their writing process. On her own blog, Martha posted a how-to about starting your own blog, which I found really interesting both as a researcher and teacher. With mainstream celebrities like Martha Stewart now endorsing and even encouraging the creation of blogs, do you think they will be looked at as a legitimate and meaningful print source? As you engage in this blog, do you think you would ever create posts of your own or even create your own personal blog space? What blogs, aside from this one, do you read if you read any at all?

Ray Rohmer is the chair of Strong American Schools as well as the director for ED in 08. He keeps a blog and recently posted a YouTube video from a roundtable in Colorado, asking where the national will is in terms of education. He takes the position that, without focus in this area, we are at risk of becoming a second-class nation. Take a look at the video - warning: it's decently shaky, but definitely not Cloverfield shaky - and express your thoughts. Do you feel as though candidates have made their education agendas clear or have they been glossed over in favor of other platforms, such as the "polar bear syndrome?"

Indiana University is sponsoring a video contest through the Celebrate IU Website. Use your creativity to create a 60-second or less video and upload it to the YouTube Celebrate IU group. There are cash prizes and cash is always good.

Last, but definitely not least, I noticed this piece of clip art on the Indiana Department of Education's website:

Such an interesting image. Thinking about our visual literacy conversations, what are the implicit meanings this image evokes about the ISTEP?

As always, comment with questions.

Reading Workshop

Reading Workshop is a powerful way for teachers to introduce new reading skills to children in a comfortable, social environment. As discussed in class, there are three major parts to the Workshop:

* The Minilesson (10 - 15 minutes)
The minilesson is meant to be a concentrated lesson focusing on one element of reading. These minilessons tend to fall into one of three categories: management, strategy, and what Joanna Hindley calls "literary gossip." Management are those lessons you will begin with at the very beginning of the year, establishing what your workshop will look like so you can engage in strategy and literacy gossip lessons without having to worry about structure. A look at the first six weeks of a first grade reading workshop can be found here (the link will download as a .doc file). Additional sources for minilesson ideas can be found at the Learning Pad.

* Independent Reading (students) & Conferencing (teacher) (30 - 40 minutes)
After the minilesson, the students are released to practice their skills. This looks differently in different rooms. In my own classroom, students spread throughout the room, sitting in chairs and on the carpets; the only rule was no sitting under the tables because I'm old and don't want to be crawling after anyone. Other teachers have their students reading at their tables, some have their students only reading in a particular area of the room. Depending on your own comfort level and your classroom setup, this portion of the workshop could look many different ways.

While children are reading, you are conferencing with students to gauge how well they are using their strategies, what books they are currently reading and which directions they need to move in to become even better readers. This is the most important element of the Reading Workshop - where the teaching happens. Conferencing can get sticky, but that time you spend with individual children and groups of children who have similar skill levels is invaluable. For another, more detailed view of conferencing, look at Bayview Education. They also have several forms available for download for record keeping.

* Sharing (10 - 15 minutes)
Sharing is an opportunity for students to collaboratively talk about their progress as readers, sharing their use of strategies and celebrating their successes. You can work this section several ways - sign up for kid's share, have a daily schedule, or choose students based on what you saw in conferences that day. It's very flexible. Sharing is also so important - it allows kiddos to hear about what works from other children, who may explain it in ways you didn't. Reteaching is always a beautiful thing.

Additional Internet resources for the Reading Workshop:

Karen McDavid's Reading Workshop Page: An excellent page with a lot of great information, including minilesson ideas, professional books suggestions and forms for record keeping. Contains a list of additional links that are worth checking out.

Jennifer Myers' Reading and Writing Workshop Page: Another excellent page containing video of minilessons, children's work, and background in establishing the Workshop structure.

Differentiation in a Reader's Workshop: This Scholastic article addresses the many ways that a teacher reaches the variety of different learners in their classroom. There are several downloads here that are worth space on your hard drive.

Hopefully, this entry on Reading Workshop is helpful, even though I realize it barely touches the surface. I will post the major links in this entry to the main blog page to ease navigation. If you come across additional links that are useful, please comment.

A post about classroom library organization is in the works - so much to write, so little time!

As always, comment with questions.

Kidwatching, Day One

In class today, we began our work with Kidwatching, beginning with Concepts of Print and Book Handling. Working in small groups, you established the following "big ideas" that merged from the text:
I know how rudimentary these skills seem, but we need to remember the varying levels of ability and knowledge that will be in our classrooms. It's also important to remember these skills may need to be retaught, adapted as new texts / media are introduced, and rethought as students and their literacy needs change.

An example of change would be technology, which the group did an excellent job of thinking about:

It's interesting how well these ideas, normally attached to traditional texts, give themselves over to technology. Just as with traditional texts, you begin at the start: how to turn the computer on, how to turn the monitor on, what the keyboard is for, what the various symbols on the desktop mean. This group also had some really fascinating conversation about technology and the implications it has for the classroom: how much is too much, what is the role of the teacher, and does it do anything more than make things more complicated? Questions we will wrestle with this semester.

I had an instructor in undergrad whose favorite saying was, "Every good teacher is a good thief." She wasn't referencing actual theft, but the synergy of ideas of adapting, morphing and applying those ideas in a variety of contexts. A group worked on thinking about how they would adapt the concepts in this chapter to grades 3 - 6:


Interesting points that were made in this group: as students mature and move into new forms of text, there are new skills that must by learned. How to use a bookmark, mark a page with a sticky note, work in literacy circles / book clubs are all skills that need to be introduced and modeled for students. There was also a lot of discussion about efficiency and how we make the most of the time we are given with students, i.e. how do we keep them reading for the majority of the time we have them throughout the day?

I'm working on a post about reading workshop; that should be up before class on Thursday.

As always, comment with questions.

Class Norms

I didn't really understand what you meant by "thoughtfully reflected upon classrooms readings, personal experiences and belief structures." Other than that, I think the norms look good!
-Leslie

Literacy Assessment Profile

Assessment is best used to guide student learning and classroom instruction. For the Literacy Assessment Profile, you will focus on one student in your placement classroom and assess their literacy learning in the areas of reading and writing. During the first week of your placement, please take time to talk with your supervising teacher to ensure s/he is aware of your obligations for this course. (I will send supervising teachers a letter outlining my expectations for you in this experience.) Ask the teacher to identify a student who is a developing reader or writer. Work with the teacher to block periods of time to work with your student one on one during your placement to administer your assessments; assessments should not occupy more time than thirty minutes per individual assessment.

The Literacy Assessment Profile will consist of six pieces: 3 running records and MSV analysis of one of the running records, a retelling, a reading interview, a collection of anecdotal records, a collection of artifacts from the classroom, and the development of two lesson plans that grow out of the assessments you have given, addressing directions the student needs to move toward in terms of their literacy learning.

A little detail about the components of the Literacy Assessment Profile:

Running Records (3) & MSV Analysis :: Running records, in a nutshell, are student readings using leveled texts to ascertain their reading ability. Students read orally while the teacher follows long, making notes of miscues for later MSV analysis. It may sound Greek now, but we will begin unpacking what running records are on October 21.

Retelling :: Following the guidelines we will read about in Wilde (chapter 7, September 30), would will engage the student you are working with in a retelling of a story, using the guidelines to draw conclusion about that student's ability to comprehend text.

Reading Interview :: There are many ways to engage children in interviews about their reading practices. We will read about several in the Kidwatching text and I will have several other "canned" (pre-made) interview structures so you may understand more about your student as a reader through deliberate and thoughtful questioning.

Anecdotal Records :: Kidwatching in the purest sense. Several times throughout your placement, you will need to observe and take notes as your student engages in literacy activities. Kidwatching has many effective strategies for collecting anecdotal records, as well as ways to interpret them to more fully understand what a child and their knowledge.

Artifacts :: During your time in the classroom, you will need to collect artifacts of your student's learning. Much like archeologists collect artifacts to piece together the everyday lives of ancient peoples (and sometimes not-so-ancient peoples), you will collect artifacts that allow you to piece together your student's literacy understandings. These artifacts can include written assignments, photos of the literacy space, trascripts of conversations, and artwork.

Lesson Plans (2) :: Instruction should lead to assessment and naturally flow back into more instruction. Given all the information you have gathered about your student, you will need to identify two areas in which your student either needs additional support or needs to go in order to become a more sophisticated reader. You must reference your assessment findings as you identify these areas, explaining your choice of lesson plan topic. A lesson plan format will available shortly.

Parent Letter :: Parents and educators need to work together for the sake of children's learning. Establishing communication is an important aspect of the parent-educator relationship. Keeping this in mind, you are to construct a letter of introduction to your potential student's parents, outlining your background as well as your intentions with their child (for example: "I hope to work with your child to learn more about the effective teaching and assessment of reading. In order to read this goal, your child and I will read several texts together, engage in a retelling of a story, as well as an interview about their reading habits"). Ensure them the identity of their child will remain anonymous. Your letter needs to be emailed to me by the beginning of class Thursday, September 18. Please use the subject line E341 Parent Letter when you send your email. It helps me keep everything organized.

As always, comment with questions.

Visual Literacy

Hopefully, the idea of visual literacy is a little more clear to you after today's discussion. I think that everyone did a really good idea of incorporating a nontraditional idea of literacy into their current conceptions of literacy. If it still doesn't make sense (and I will get around to the "what is going on" poster in a separate blog post later this week), that's okay. We're working on developing as language arts educators and there's always tension and anxiety involved in anything really worth knowing.

As a group, we decided the definition of visual literacy was the interpreting and making meaning of something you see by using your imagination and creativity as well as your schema to develop your own narrative. We will come back to this definition every so often, refining it as we go along.

The visuals we used to analyze in class today:

The Wedding Dance, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish, 1525/30 - 1569

The Window, Henry Matisse, French, 1869 - 1954

Lance Armstrong, Annie Liebovitz, American, 1949 -

Sarah Palin on the cover of the current Newsweek. Dated September 15, 2008.

We will be coming back to visual literacy throughout the semester so continue thinking about how you interpret visuals, whether symbolic or in form (such as text). I hope today was helpful in thinking about how you would enact this kind of literacy in the classroom.

As always, comment with questions!

Our Class Norms, Sloppy Copy

(click picture to enlarge)

I've wrestled a bit with putting everything we spoke about in class on Thursday into a paragraph - in some aspects, I'm very comfortable with it, but others are lacking. Please take time to review the paragraph and comment on what parts you perceive as being accurate and spot-on as well as those phrases and ideas that need further refinement. Suggestions are most appreciated.

As the instructor and students of E341, we recognize several norms that will help our class time be more productive and meaningful in our quests to become superior educators. We assume equal and appropriate responsibility for our engagement and success in our class. We will enter into our class space prepared to engage with one another, having thoughtfully reflected upon classrooms readings, personal experiences and belief structures. Class time will be purposeful and flexible to the needs of the class as a whole. Communication is integral to our success as a collective; we will be honest about our misunderstandings and celebrate our successes. We will engage in constructive criticism, helping one another gain new insights and understandings. We will be conscious of our conditions as humans, aware of the feelings and emotions of those with whom we engage as we attempt to construct our identities as educators. As a class, we will care for each other’s development as we care for our own and be aware of our use of materials and space. We are all responsible for the success of this class and will hold each other accountable throughout the course of our time together.

Greetings and Salutations!

Welcome to the E341 Fall 2008 blog. This space is meant to extend, reinforce, and supplement the readings, activities and discussions we will have in the classroom. We will all be responsible for creating content for the blog; once a week you will be either posting an entry or responding to someone else's entry on this blog. Entries can be responses to readings, discussions, or something that was not explored in class that you are curious about. Replies need to be thoughtful and respectful. There isn't a length that I have in mind but please make sure that your postings are of appropriate length to share your ideas thoroughly.

I did hoof it over to the IU Bookstore this afternoon and, alas, our class books were not there yet. I was reassured by the staff that they were on their way. I also have not been given access to OnCourse yet and will email out the readings for next week on Thursday if the situation continues.

I look forward to our semester together~