Literacy Now

It’s that time of year again! The air is turning ever so slightly crisp in the morning, leaves are slowly drifting off their perches in the trees, and little ones are anticipating their first day of school, some for the very first time and others for yet another year. With all the changes September brings, there is one that is always filled with anticipation—meeting your classroom teacher. Or, if you’re the teacher, meeting your students for the first time.

p: Sylvain Masson via photopin cc

Years ago when I was a student teacher and welcoming my first classroom of fifth graders, I lost sleep wondering how I would get to know all 29 of my students (and quickly). And how would they get to know me, their fearless leader for the forthcoming 180 days?

On one of those sleepless nights I came up with a quick and easy ice-breaker and multi-faceted lesson simply called, “Ask Mrs. Hunter a Question.” With this lesson I was able to assess my students’ writing skills for sentence structure, punctuation, grammar, penmanship, and creativity. They in turn learned a snippet of information about me.

As I lead my students into their classroom on that first day one of the first things they noticed was the poster outside our door that said, “Ask Mrs. Hunter a Question.” As soon as we settled into our morning routine I explained the poster. The guidelines were straightforward:

1. Write your question in a complete sentence.
2. Use correct punctuation and grammar.
3. Check your spelling.
4. Write your name in the top right corner.

The poster included a pocket with half sheets of paper for students to use. There was also a very large envelope for them to put their completed questions inside.

Each day for the first week of school I would take time to read and answer their questions out loud. This was a great transition activity after coming in from lunch recess or if we had a few minutes between classroom cleanup and the last bell of the day. The students loved learning the fun facts about their teacher—my favorite color, how many pets I have, my husband’s name, my birthdate (I was always 80 years old!). I in turn also got to know my students—the depth of their questioning skills, their writing skills, and how well they followed directions. It is interesting to see how many versions of “upper right corner” there are! This lesson also allowed us to start our community of learning with each other in a fun and engaging way that set the tone for the rest of the year.

To make your own poster, the supply list is short. You most likely will have the items in your classroom.

Supplies:

1. A large piece of construction paper or other colorful paper the size of a poster—approximately 24” x 36”.
2. 3–6 pieces of 8” x 11” colored paper.
3. 1 manila envelope (optional)
4. Scissors
5. Markers or crayons
6. Notebook paper cut in half

Take three of the colored pieces of paper and cut the edges to give them a more exciting or unique shape. Next arrange the shapes on the large poster-sized paper. Using colorful markers or crayons write these words on the shapes, separated as noted: “Ask/Mrs. Hunter/A Question.” (Of course, substitute your name for mine.)

Next, take the manila envelope and label it “Questions.” If you want, you can use two pieces of paper to make an “envelope” by using one as the base and then folding another sheet diagonally to make the envelope’s flap.

With one last piece of paper, make a pocket to hold half sheets of notebook paper. I suggest using a few different colors on the poster as a whole to make it stand out and look inviting.

Students will be excited to write their questions because they really do want to know all about their teacher. Each day we looked forward to learning something new together. I saved their questions in their portfolios as an initial assessment piece. Weeks later I could see the progress each student had made. And each week throughout the school year we continued to grow as a community of learners because the seed had been planted with this initial lesson.

Happy Writing!

Kathleen A. Hunter, MS is a literacy tutor and aspiring children's book author. You can visit her online at www.KathleenHunterWrites.com.

Writers love the sounds of language. Poets in particular pay attention to the basic sounds (phonemes) and how they can be manipulated into musical arrangements (poetic lines). Phonemic awareness, which is a vital stepping stone to the development of reading skills, is therefore important to both the emerging reader and the poet.

p: stefernie via photopin cc

Poetry makes a natural teaching tool for phonemic awareness, and even better yet, most kids love to be read to and poems, funny ones in particular, are high on their list of favorites. Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky, and a number of other children’s poets have shown that children love to laugh and giggle at silly antics and sillier characters. If a child can laugh and love it while learning to read, it’s a winning combination.

Let me show you a way to play with phonemes with your students. The first exercise involves making up a list poem made of short, declarative sentences of only a noun and a verb. This will set up a pattern that’s easy to follow. For example, look around the room and start a list on the board of what you observe. With help from your students, the list will grow quickly. Here’s an example of what you might see:

Johnson sneezes.
Robert coughs.
Jennifer fidgets.
Miss Jackson writes.
Donny reads.
Maggie sniffs.
Clock ticks.
Paper rattles.
Pencils sharpen.
Bell rings.
Miss Jackson waves.

You’re not worrying here about phonemes. This is just a quick exercise to create a simple list poem. What it does do is set the stage for a phoneme-driven list poem to follow.

The pattern is set: noun-verb. If you need to reread the first poem to reset the formula, read it with gusto and let the kids add their own sound effects. After all, we’re talking about hearing sounds.

This time, instead of looking around the room for inspiration, choose one of the sounds you are teaching. It could be a long vowel, short vowel, consonant, blend, digraph, or rime. For this example, I’ll choose one of the 37 rimes identified by Wylie and Durrell in their 1970 study. Here’s the full list.

-ack, -ail, -ain, -ake, -ale, -ame, -an, -ank, -ap, -ash, -at, -ate, -aw, -ay
-eat, -ell, -est
-ice, -ick, -ide, -ight, -ill, -in, -ine, -ing, -ink, -ip, -it
-ock, -oke, -op, -ore, -ot
-uck, -ug, -ump, -unk

Picking one at random, I’ll go with ick. Here’s a list of words that contain the phoneme ick.

brick	ick	nitpick	stick
carsick	kick	pick	thick
chick	lick	quick	tick
click	lipstick	Rick	trick
drumstick	lovesick	seasick	wick
flick	Mick	sick	yardstick
homesick	Nick	slick

Next, make a list of nouns and verbs from this list. There are many other words. I just want to walk you through this.

Nouns	Verbs
brick	kick
chick	lick
drumstick	pick
Mick	trick
Nick	flick
Rick
tick

Read the first noun aloud and then the list of verbs, one at a time. Does a brick kick? Does it lick? Does it pick? Does it trick? Does it flick? Too bad for brick. It doesn’t fit in our poem! How about chick? Does a chick kick? (Yes.). Does a chick lick? (Not so much.). Does a chick pick? (Sure.). Does a chick trick? (Why not?). Does a chick flick? (Hmm.).

You’ll wind up with something like:

Chick kicks
Mick tricks
Nick picks
Rick licks

Then maybe throw in something funny such as, Ticks love drumsticks. That should get a giggle.

Now your class has created its masterpiece and read it aloud, with a little help from you. What I like about this exercise is that every time you’ve asked your students a question you’ve reinforced the sound you’re teaching. The kids have heard it, they’ve pronounced it, they’ve manipulated it, and they’ve repeated it.

Not a bad day’s work. Don’t forget to keep a record of all the class poems your brilliant young poets create. That’s assembly stuff!

Learn more about why phonemic awareness is crucial to literacy development and discover ways you can help preschool children connect sounds with print using fun, engaging classroom poetry with David L. Harrison and Mary Jo Fresch’s new IRA E-ssentials piece, “Playing with Poetry to Develop Phonemic Awareness.”

David L. Harrison is the poet laureate of Drury University. He has published more than 75 books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction for young readers and has been anthologized in more than a hundred others. His work has been translated into 12 languages and presented on television and radio and via podcasts and video streams. You can read his blog here.

by Thomas DeVere Wolsey & Elfrieda H. Hiebert

One of the great strengths of the Internet is its ability to bridge distances, and to close the geographic limitations of being in one place while something worthwhile occurs in a far distant location. TextProject is helping to bring thought leaders right to the screens of teachers and teacher candidates as they explore the Common Core State Standards (CCSS, 2010) and those standards mean for them and their teaching practices.

Not only are a series of six webinars recorded and available on the TextProject YouTube channel, but we have created webinar guides to help focus discussions teachers might have in professional learning communities, on their social media pages, and in the faculty lounge. Teacher educators may find these guides useful as an activity as they work with students preparing to become teachers. Three guides are currently available, and more will be in the coming weeks as the webinar series on the CCSS continues.

Each guide offers overview and background sections including definitions of important key terms, such as “close reading,” “technology-enhanced constructed response,” and so on. Listen and Learn activities include links to key portions of the webinars with purpose-setting questions. Reflect and Respond engages webinar viewers with key points in the broadcast that are relevant to teachers, and Extend and Apply asks teachers and teacher candidates to look at their own practices more closely in light of the webinar content or to continue the discussion through exploration of additional sources.Webinars in the CCSS series and Guides are listed here:

• January 25, 2013
  Research and the Common Core: Can the Romance Survive?
  Dr. P. David Pearson, University of California, Berkeley
  This presentation considers the research foundations of the Common Core State Standards, especially as it pertains to comprehension.
  Guide available
• February 27, 2013
  Common Core State Standards and Education Policy
  Timothy Shanahan, University of Illinois at Chicago
  Dr. Shanahan identifies tasks which states and districts must undertake to successfully implement the English/Language Arts Common Core standards.
  Guide available
• April 24, 2013
  Key Shifts in Assessment and Instruction Related to CCSS-ELA
  Dr. Karen K. Wixson, University of North Carolina at Greensboro
  Dr. Wixson presents on the upcoming assessments. She takes a close look at the sample questions and discusses the different question formats.
  Guide available
• May 30, 2013
  Informational Text and the CCSS: Pitfalls and Potential
  Dr. Nell K. Duke, University of Michigan
  Dr. Duke presents the pitfalls and potentials of the CCSS as it relates to informational texts. She explains the differences between previous and current definitions for key words used in the CCSS.
  Guide coming soon
• June 20, 2013
  Using Quantitative Measures of Text Complexity in Classroom Instruction: What’s Appropriate? What’s Not?
  Elfrieda H. Hiebert, TextProject & the University of California, Santa Cruz
  Dr. Hiebert presents information on using quantitative measures in the new Common Core Assessments.
  Guide coming soon
• August 28, 2013
  Stretching Elementary Students in Complex Texts: Why? How? When?
  Dr. Heidi Anne Mesmer, Virginia Tech University
  Dr. Mesmer presents information on stretching students to read complex texts.
  Guide coming soon
• September 26, 2013
  Going Beyond Text Complexity: Considering Text-Task Scenarios in Understanding Comprehension
  Dr. Sheila Valencia, University of Washington
  Dr. Valencia presents an expanded way of considering the relationship between comprehension and text complexity by examining text-task scenarios.
  Webinar and guide coming soon

Also, be sure to check out the TextProject’s 77 Seconds series in which Dr. Hiebert provides concise information on issues and approaches in literacy education.

Useful Links:

CCSS Webinars on TextProject YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0F32BE29849E98E1
CCSS Webinar Series information  page on TextProject: http://www.textproject.org/events/common-core-state-standards-webinar-series/
CCSS Webinar Guide on TextProject: http://www.textproject.org/professional-development/webinar-guide-series/
77 Seconds on Literacy Topics on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwIychIT3ICgmw59Hc-JaBdY5dpYMHIIs

Reference:

Common Core State Standards Initiative [CCSS]. (2010). Common Core State Standards for English language arts & Literacy in history/social studies, science, and technical subjects. Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association. Retrieved from http://www.corestandards.org/assets/CCSSI_ELA%20Standards.pdf

Dr. Thomas DeVere Wolsey is a literacy specialization coordinator in the Richard W. Riley College of Education and Leadership at Walden University.

Dr. Elfrieda (Freddy) H. Hiebert is president and CEO of TextProject, Inc. and a research associate at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

This article is part of a series from the International Reading Association Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

 

by Kristine Pytash

The PEW Internet & American Life Project recently produced the report, The Impact of Digital Tools on Student Writing and How Writing is Taught in Schools (2013). In this report, 2,462 Advanced Placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers from middle and high school classrooms were surveyed about the role of technology in the teaching of writing.

While the report provides a range of information, this blog will examine two significant points. First, with advances in digital media and technology comes a very important question: how are teachers defining writing? Second, when teachers do use technology during writing instruction, what do they think are the benefits for students learning?

Technology can be used to facilitate writing instruction. For example, platforms such as Eli Review allow students to upload papers for peer review and feedback. But technology has also redefined writing. Composing with audio, video, games, and images allows students to create multimodal writings. One of the interesting aspects of this report was that for the teachers a “conceptual divide” still exists between what teachers consider “formal” writing and “informal” writing (p. 17). Formal writing was confined to typical school writing assignments, such as journal entries and research reports while texting, blogs, and tweets were considered informal writings. Teachers did note that these types of informal writings are important and can even spur longer, more formal pieces. It seems that for some teachers, a divide still exists between the writing students do in their daily lives versus what will be valued in colleges and workplace settings.

Despite the debate between what constitutes formal and informal writing, teachers acknowledged that digital tools provide important affordances. According to teachers, technology and digital tools are making it easier for students to engage a wide range of readers allowing them to learn more about how purpose and audience drive writing.  Teachers also noted that technology provided more opportunities for students to collaborate on writing assignments. Finally, teachers reported that technology provides students with opportunities to be creative as compositions that include audio, visuals, including remixes, provide students with a variety of mediums for self-expression. These are typically areas of writing instruction that can be challenging to teach.

While the report surveyed a variety of teachers from a variety of states, all the teachers who participated in the survey were either AP teachers or participated in NWP. The report acknowledges this limitation. In addition, while survey results indicated these teachers seemed enthusiastic about using technology for writing instruction, readers must take into account that these particular teachers might receive additional professional development or may have access to digital tools that other teachers do not have access to. The students in their classrooms might also have more opportunities and experience with how to use technological tools. It will be critical for future reports to examine the types of technologies accessible to teachers in a range of school and classroom settings. Educators must be vigilant about the need for all students to have opportunities to compose with digital tools.

Dr. Kristine E. Pytash is an assistant professor of adolescent literacy education at Kent State University, kpytash@kent.edu.

This article is part of a series from the International Reading Association Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).

When I was in junior high, I thought my life was boring.

I had my reasons. I wasn’t pubescent enough to be cool, I wasn’t cool enough to have a girlfriend, and I wasn’t even uncool enough to have some weird badge of shame like headgear or a rolling backpack. I just felt boring. And although I harbored secret ambitions of one day becoming a writer, I had no idea what interesting things I could possibly ever write about.

p: tantek via photopin cc

Flash forward a few years to my sophomore year of college, when, in a fit of craziness—and, yes, boredom—I decided to write a novel. But what should my novel be about?

My first impulse was, of course, “Don’t write about your life—your life is yawn-inducing!” After some reflection, though, that thought lost out to another truism: “Write what you know.” And yet I figured that, being only 19 years old, I didn’t know a whole lot about anything, so I decided to try and write about the only thing I really had much perspective on: junior high.

And boy, was it not boring.

My middle school memories came exploding out of my brain like they were Athena leaping out of Zeus’. There was the social environment of my school in Santa Barbara, CA, which mixed together Hollywood-royalty children who lived two minutes from Oprah’s house along with the kids from the Eastside of town, some of whom had parents who worked at Oprah’s house. There were the impossibly lavish Bar Mitzvahs and the unfathomably frightening gang altercations. And there was even the typical junior high stuff, which all of a sudden seemed strangely fascinating to college-aged me: the two-week relationships, the bathroom wall rumors, and the medieval forms of bullying (like the time I got dumped in a trash can, which I’d been trying for the better part of a decade to block out of my mind).

I realized that my twelve year-old life wasn’t boring at all. Sure, it seemed that way to me at the time—everybody’s story seems boring to him or herself, especially while it’s happening. But in truth, everybody’s story is worth telling. Nobody’s story is boring.

And once I realized that, I really got cooking. In writing my book, I began to consider junior high not just from my perspective—that of the awkward Bar Mitzvah boy whose parents work in show business—but from the perspectives of the other kids who I grew up near and around. The budding cool kid and almost-rebel who’s torn between his privileged upbringing and the gang life. The queen bee who destroys the reputations of those around her until her victims begin to destroy her back. The kooky outsider who has only a loose grip on reality, going so far as to develop crushes on anime heroes and video game characters.

I went to school with versions of all of these characters. Thus, these characters became the major players in my book about middle school.

I think that, for many kids who want to write stories, the most difficult barrier to entry can be lack of imagination. It’s not that kids don’t have big imaginations—that’s obviously not the case—but many of the best and most popular books for kids already feature such gloriously different and fleshed-out worlds: a school for witches and wizards, a battle arena for bloodthirsty tweens, a city that needs to be protected by a loony principal clad only in his underwear. I think that kids must read these stories and feel the need to try and create equally fantastical scenarios in their writing, when, to be honest, all they need to do is look to their own everyday lives.

Kids should feel that their lives are filled with engaging, gripping, un-put-down-able stories, because, honestly, they are. What’s more, once kids start to write about the world around you, they begin to further consider the characters around them. When you write from the point of view of a dork, or a popular girl, or even a bully, you come to think about what things make those people the way they are, and after a while, you might even begin to understand those seemingly-different types a little bit more. In my opinion, that’s not such a bad thing.

Unremarkable lives really are pretty remarkable. That’s something I hope a young reader will get from reading my book.

That said, you don’t even need to read something I wrote to realize that—you’ve just got to write something yourself.

Teddy Steinkellner graduated from Stanford University in 2011, where he won a creative arts grant. TRASH CAN DAYS: A MIDDLE SCHOOL SAGA is his first novel. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Follow him on Twitter at @teddysteinkelln, or visit him online at www.teddysteinkellner.com.



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