Literacy Now

Spring is just around the corner, and not a minute too soon for those of you still wearing your snow boots. But that doesn’t mean your classroom needs to stay buried in a snowdrift of doldrums.

Creating a classroom township—complete with neighborhoods, businesses, and budgets—will help you welcome springtime with renewed energy. Your students will come away with a true sense of what is required of them to cohabitate and function emotionally, financially, and socially in the real world. Along the way your students will use everyday skills in reading, writing, math, art, and social studies, which for you, the teacher, makes meeting academic needs across the curriculum almost—dare I say—easy?

The snow is melting, so without further a-dew, let’s get started!

FOUNDERS DAY

After introducing the concept of a classroom township to your students, the first item of business is to name your new municipality. My class made many suggestions, and after a vote Hunterville was the winning name.

p: Images_of_Money via photopin cc

The next order of business is to have a form of currency. My classroom was organized in groups which were identified as neighborhoods. I then gave each neighborhood a template of blank currency (rectangles drawn on white paper). The neighborhoods each designed ones, fives, tens, and twenties. Once again, we took a vote for the most popular of each and then I made photocopies.

To get Hunterville up and running, I provided each student with $200. With that money they were required to pay taxes, rent, and any fines they might incur. Anything left over was theirs to do with as they pleased. I explained that the only way to acquire more money was to earn it by either starting a business or working for someone else.

WAYS TO EARN A LIVING

The highly motivated students were the entrepreneurs. They were required to write a business proposal and submit to me for approval. Once approved, they applied for a business license, for which there was a fee. Each day they were open for business, they were required to have their license properly on display.

There were a variety of new businesses in Hunterville. One in particular was a bookmark making business where the girls designed bookmarks and then sold them to their classmates. The owner of the business had such a high demand that she hired two employees. Of course, she then needed to pay their wages, too.

Business owners who hired employees quickly learned about the relationship of general contractor/subcontractor and the can of worms that opens up. For example, if a job was not done correctly—or not at all, which did happen—the consequences first fell on the general contractor who then needed to take care of the subcontractors. Often that meant they fired their employees and needed to hire new ones in order to maintain a product for sale. Others decided it was not worth the headache and closed up shop and went to work for someone else.

Some students worked independently, such as the artists who sold their pictures to classmates. They learned their profession had an unsteady income, but ultimately decided they could live on less. Others liked the idea of a steady income and chose to work for the township cleaning the classroom, being the classroom librarian, collecting garbage/recycling, or enforcing classroom law. I provided the Tickets for Behavior to the officers who were on duty in the classroom, watching for negative behavior.

And then, as in the real world, others chose to not work at all. Consequences for this choice were dire. They learned that asking for money from their friends was short-lived at best, and they could not participate in any of the perks that required money (more on this below).

BASIC EXPENDITURES

Students were required to pay rent for their “home,” or in our case, their desk and surrounding space. Rent was based on the number of members living in the community and the location of the community within the classroom. For example, three students living together near the window paid a higher rent than five students living near the locked supply cupboard.

Those who did not pay rent received notices to pay or vacate, and if they continued to not pay rent they received an eviction notice. Those students lived on their own with their desk set apart from the rest of the community.

p: 401(K) 2013 via photopin cc

One last requirement was that everyone needed to pay monthly taxes. Once again if they did not pay taxes there were consequences. Taxes were paid to the township’s treasurer (the teacher). That money was then used to pay salaries for those working for the township. It was also used to pay interest to those who had a savings account with the township’s bank. (I was the banker for Hunterville but I did have employees to help collect on debts.)

After about two months of Hunterville in full operation, one student decided to open his own bank, creating a healthy competition. The door was then wide open to discuss business monopolies and why they are not necessarily a good thing for the greater good.

INDIVIDUAL BENEFITS AND CONSEQUENCES

Students who were able to pay their debts and still have some money left over were allowed to make purchases such as Friday Free time, extra recess, and homework passes (certain restrictions applied!), or earn interest on money held in a savings account at the bank. The fact that their money could make money was very interesting and exciting for the students.

Once a month we had a Hunterville Marketplace. The students were allowed to bring items from home to sell to their classmates using Hunterville currency. I sent a letter home with each student that they needed to return granting permission to bring their selected items to school to sell. The students who did not have money could not purchase any of the perks and during Marketplace they were allowed to only window shop.

Of course friends would sometimes loan money to friends but that never lasted for very long. Ultimately, students who were without an income realized the benefit of having a job.

MEETING CURRICULUM REQUIREMENTS

Literacy: During your introduction of the classroom township, model how to write a basic business proposal and have an example posted for the students to refer to at anytime. Then, let your students work independently to write their own plan. They will certainly have a sense of accomplishment and ownership of their new business and will work harder to make sure it is a success. Be sure to check for content as well as correct grammar and punctuation before giving them final approval!

For those not wanting to start their own business, they are required to complete a job application with the same writing requirements. Students will also need to read the various notices that are posted by the township’s Mayor (also the teacher), and fellow citizens and comprehend what they mean. If they don’t, they will be surprised by the consequences that will certainly follow.

Math: Students quickly learn the value of money—how to earn money, how to save and earn interest. They also learn how to budget their money earned so they can pay their debts and still take advantage of the perks. The entrepreneurs especially learn about the concept of cost benefit analysis for services provided and money earned.

Art: With budget cuts and expectations for high-stakes testing, art in the classroom is a subject of the past. But in your classroom township there are many opportunities and teachable moments to take advantage of for you to teach art and for students to experiment with different media.

For example, your township will need a sign. I used butcher paper and paints and let the students use their creative skills to make a sign they would all be proud to display. Signs for the individual businesses are another simple way for students to express their creativity. Designing the currency is another wonderful opportunity for students to collaborate on art designs. All you need to do is provide a few materials—construction paper, crayons, paints, pastels, markers, or whatever else you find in the dusty art cupboard. Art does not need to be fancy but it does need opportunity to explore and then see what happens!

Social Studies: Creating a township is the perfect way to touch on so many aspects of living socially, government, laws, rules, and regulations. Your students will understand what it means to actually commune with one another. And they will see firsthand how everyone has a very important role to play in their community’s success.

It will not take long for the township to operate fully by the students, reducing your role to that of a moderator, more or less. If there are glitches along the way, and there are certainly bound to be some, your students will be more inclined to solve the problems themselves and carry on business as usual.

As you witness their transformation from student to active community leaders and participants in their township, you will cherish everyday even more that you go to work in your new town!

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



Putting Books to Work: Rick Walton's I NEED MY OWN COUNTRY!

Oh, the Places They Can Go: Sharing the Journey to Destinations Unknown

by Judith Hayn

Vaught, S. (2012). Freaks like us. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

Jason Milwaukee is 17 and like his best friends Derrick and Summer, he shares a self-contained classroom with other “alphabets,” so labeled because of their acronymic disorders. Jason is called "Freak" because the voices in his head perpetually echo that name accompanied by other epithets and visions because he has GAD (General Anxiety Disorder) and is SCZI (Schizophrenic). Derrick or "Drip" is ADHD while Summer is SM (Selective Mute), and it is her sudden disappearance after school one afternoon that triggers this compelling mystery. Freak’s feelings for Summer have apparently morphed into romance, but will the friendship the three friends share be mistaken for his and Drip’s guilt in her disappearance? Freak cannot verbalize his racing unsynchronized thoughts to uncover what he does know about Summer’s despair and hopelessness.

Susan Vaught delineates Freak’s character through first person narrative by using his rational observations accompanied by his troubled thoughts which only he can discern. This makes for challenging reading that is well worth the effort. Freak is much more than mentally unstable as Vaught meshes his illness into action, and the reader enters his chaotic mind. The fear and panic that engulf Freak are almost visceral as he tries to prove his innocence and find his friend.Freaks Like Us is a powerful reminder that there is something freakish in all of us—indeed, a novel to arouse empathy and awareness.

Dr. Judith A. Hayn is an associate professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

This article is part of a series from the Network on Adolescent Literature Special Interest Group (SIGNAL).

 

 

by Alexandra Panos

In this blog post, I hope to add to the growing number of voices advocating the importance of multimodal, digital poetry in the ELA classroom. As a middle school teacher in Chicago, a pulsing center of competitive high school choice, I have had to advocate strongly for an immersive poetry experience in my classroom. My school first transitioned to standards based reporting two years ago, and is now in the midst of a transition to the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). But, because of the ongoing scholarly arguments for poetry instruction and the quality work students produce, my administration has joined me in my endeavor to fully embrace poetry in my classroom. 

Ryan’s Poetic Glogster

Students and teachers who engage in poetic exploration often immerse themselves in the reading and writing of poetry and poetic language. In a time of standards-based grading practices and curriculum design, the need for this exploration has grown, rather than diminished. Other scholars have made this argument better than I could, and I encourage classroom teachers to read, read, read the academic and classroom-tested literature available.

In Mark Dressman’s recent book, Let’s Poem, he directly addresses the world of multimodal poetic response and creation.  Any teacher tackling poetry as either a new area or making the case for its inclusion in their CCSS classroom would benefit from his detailed, classroom tested, and exciting approaches to poetry, some of which I describe below.

Bridget Dalton’s recent piece, “Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards” in The Reading Teacher lays out a framework for the integration of technology into the writing classroom. She argues that the open-endedness of the CCSS gives educators space to promote thoughtful multimodal, composition in the ELA classroom.

Most recently, Julie B. Wise wrote an encouraging piece on this blog directly aligned to the grade 5 CCSS classroom. Her plan for intertwining reading and writing digital poetry is accessible and adaptable for any classroom. The use of PowerPoint as a publication strategy emphasizes student language choices.

Ultimately, the argument comes down to the inherent importance of careful language study in the standards-based or CCSS classroom. Any way you teach it, poetry instruction should reflect the complexity of choices available to poet and reader, from which students have the right, and need, to make meaning in ever expanding and increasingly digital modes.

Audrey’s Poetic Glogster

Why Multimodal, Digital Poetry?

An added benefit of the shifting nature of literacy education is the emphasis on digital and multimodal literacies in the ELA classroom. Poetry reading and writing often require complex literacy events to unfold for students to make meaning. Luckily, with the expanding nature of the digital world, we are now better able to give our students quality methods with which to respond and create.

As with all multimodal responses and compositions, they have clear ties to pedagogical principles most ELA teachers already employ in their classrooms. Ties to the dramatic and fine arts have always been multimodal ways to engage with poetry, but we also can weave into our classroom practice new digital methods that support and extend our facilitation of student learning. I hope this brief list of more “traditional” multimodal ideas can further encourage teachers to either take up multimodal poetry as an integral component of their classroom culture or extend to digital modes as well.

Lilly’s Poetic Glogster

Choral Poetry

Reading poetry aloud is one of the original multimodal methods of approaching poetry in the ELA classroom according to Mark Dressman. In my classroom we do choral readings of The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe, blues poems by Langston Hughes, and, if requested, my students’ writing. The shared nature of the readings help students learn from and with one another. Let’s Poem has a wonderful breakdown of how to engage in choral reading. 

To extend to digital work, try using Garage Band to create poetry podcasts!

Spoken Word Poetry

Folding spoken word poetry into the classroom can mean a greater awareness of both the aural and figurative natures of language. In my 8th grade classroom, we watch portions of the fantastic documentary Louder than a Bomb which follows students as they compete in the largest spoken word poetry slam in the country of the same name. It is inspiring and motivating for student writers. As we workshop our own poems, we also make time for daily mini-slams. Sharing poetry orally inspires critique of language as well as reaches out to other modes of art, such as rap and music. Let’s Poem also has great resources for application in your own classroom.

To extend to digital work, have students create “music videos” to accompany their own spoken word poems!

Artistic Interpretations

Students have visceral responses to many of the images they find in poems we read and write in my classroom. I’ve found that artistic response is often a powerful way for them to demonstrate their emotions as well as create meaning. They do this for a range of poems, from Hurt Hawks by Robinson Jeffers to Naomi Shihab Nye’s Sifter to the lyrics of their favorite songs. In particular, their own writing lends itself well to artistic interpretation as it provides them a means of broadening the figurative language found in their poems.

To extend to digital work, have students create Glogsters of images, sounds, and video!

Franny’s Poetic Glogster

Publishing Multimodal, Digital Poetry in my Classroom

My students and I enjoy reading and writing poetry throughout the school year, but place special emphasis on it in the cold Chicago winters, when we dive into the depths of poetic language. This brief month of intense focus has led to carefully crafted poems which we publish digitally using Glogster.com. 

While I am not writing here to share a unit plan, I hope solid examples of some student work and my grading tool might benefit others who hope to facilitate the publication of multimodal, digital poetry. To create these detailed poetic Glogsters, students must meet several criteria, and make careful choices about their work. The most important of these criteria include:

• Purposeful edits through independent work as well as peer and teacher conferences
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.5 With some guidance and support from peers and adults, develop and strengthen writing as needed by planning, revising, editing, rewriting, or trying a new approach, focusing on how well purpose and audience have been addressed
• Intentional use of figurative and aural language, poetic form or line break, and sensory devices and images
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.3d Use precise words and phrases, relevant descriptive details, and sensory language to capture the action and convey experiences and events
• Appropriate synthesis of information through writing, images, video, sound, and use of space
• CCSS.ELA-Literacy.W.8.6 Use technology, including the Internet, to produce and publish writing and present the relationships between information and ideas efficiently as well as to interact and collaborate with others.

Seventh and eighth graders wrote, designed and published the pieces shared here. I have my students for three years, as such this is either the second or third year these students have had an immersive month of multimodal and digital poetry. Some students, such as Lilly, add music, video and moving images, fully embracing the digital nature of Glogster as a medium. Others, such as Audrey, look at their Glogster as a still canvas. Rather than force students to use specific media, I ask that they write a reflective paragraph which explains the choices they made. This provides more formal writing practice as well as cements the meanings they are making.

My immersive month of poetry with my students is my favorite time of the year. Our final step is to embed our Glogsters into Edmodo.com, an education social networking site. Here students comment on one another’s work, discuss the language chosen, and feel the real sense of accomplishment which comes with publication.  Students learn, standards are assessed, and we grow as a community of readers and writers because of the intricacy of choices we make in our study and creation of poetry.   

Josie’s Poetic Glogster

Resources

Common Core State Standards Initiative. (2010). Common Core State Standards forEnglish Language Arts & Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and TechnicalSubjects. Washington, DC: National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and the Council of Chief State School Officers. Accessed from:http://www.corestandards.org/the-standards

Dalton, Bridget. "Multimodal Composition and the Common Core State Standards." The Reading Teacher 66.4 (2012): 333-39. Print.

Dressman, Mark. Let's Poem: The Essential Guide to Teaching Poetry in a High-stakes, Multimodal World. New York, NY: Teachers College/Teachers College, Columbia University, 2010. Print.

"Edmodo | Where Learning Happens | Sign Up, Sign In." Edmodo | Where Learning Happens | Sign Up, Sign In. Web. 25 Feb. 2013. 

"We Are Celebrating!" Glogster. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

Wise, Julie B. "TILE-SIG Feature: Digital Poetry Bridging Common Core Standards with Multimodal Instruction." TILE-SIG Feature: Digital Poetry Bridging Common Core Standards with Multimodal Instruction. International Reading Association, n.d. Web. 25 Feb. 2013.

 

Alexandra Panos is a middle grades Language Arts teacher in Chicago. Her future posts will focus on multimodal approaches which support digital literacy.

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

THE WATER CASTLE is a novel about an overly-ambitious young man on a road trip, trying to escape a bad breakup, who stumbles upon a quirky small town—and a quirky girl—and figures out what really matters to him in life.

THE WATER CASTLE is a novel about three teenaged siblings who return to their ancestral home and discover that two of them have secret, magical powers. The middle child remains unchanged—or does he?

THE WATER CASTLE is a novel about three siblings who return to their ancestral home and meet a strange man who seems to know everything about them, and hints at a secret legacy in the home: the Fountain of Youth.

THE WATER CASTLE is none of these. In fact, it is a novel about a boy, Ephraim, whose father has a stroke. The family, including his two siblings, moves to the ancestral home in the small town of Crystal Springs, Maine, so their father can recuperate. Strange sounds, flashing lights, and a legend about the old water bottling business lead Ephraim to the story that the Fountain of Youth is located in his town. He enlists the help of Mallory Green and Will Wylie—descendants of families who have been tied up with his own for generations—to try to find it and save his father.

But, at one point in time, the novel was each of these.

The problem—or maybe the gift, depending on how you look at it—was that I had a setting, but no story. In my head I could perfectly picture Mallory Green’s house: chock-full of books, a garage and old gas station outside, tiny animal figurines dotting the lawn. I could place that house in the town that would become Crystal Springs: pretty as a postcard, but something not quite right. A boy arrives—self-involved, grieving a bad relationship, trying to find an experience to round out his college application and then…nothing. The tale would not come. I started and stopped, started and stopped.

With the next draft, I unearthed another setting: the Water Castle itself. An old house, but not a museum, not one restored to its glory days, but one that was still in use. The idea of layers and layers of time, one on top of another, appealed to me. This draft, too, is where I got my characters: Ephraim, fearful of not measuring up, his more talented siblings, Price and Brynn. Mallory, too, the inhabitant of that house from the first draft, morphed from being an object of teenage boy’s desire, to a more prickly, independent girl.

I guess I got caught up in the paranormal wave because “strange things afoot” turned into these children having their natural gifts heightened. Price, an athlete, becomes stronger, faster: superhumanly so. Intelligent Brynn becomes gifted to the point of telepathy. Yet perhaps I am not cut out for this kind of writing because no matter what dire situation I put these characters into, they could get out of them—they were superheroes after all.

So my characters languished in their lovely setting, waiting for a plot.

I took a step back. What interested me about this place? These characters? I realized that I was not interested in magic, per se, but the possibility of magic. I wanted to explore the line where magic and science crossed. Another setting began to influence my writing: a real one. At the time I was living in Poland, Maine, home of Poland Springs water. I had visited the campus, which includes a museum and perfectly maintained old bottling plant and the “original source.” Here, again, was this line between magic and science: in the early days of marketing, the purveyors used both to claim that the water could cure a wide array of ailments. This is how the Fountain of Youth entered my story.

After a bit of a false start in which a quirky caretaker offers to lead the children through their own family history I realized, of course, that the children should be leading themselves. I had a question for my characters: is the Fountain of Youth really here? Can we find it? It was a mystery, an adventure, and—finally, finally—my plot.

All of this makes it sound like one draft flowed nicely to the next. This was not the case. There were tears, self-doubt, self-flagellation, and occasionally the strong desire to not only give up this story, but also the whole writing endeavor. It was work. Hard work.

The whole process—from those first scribblings to the story of three friends on a quest to discover the Fountain of Youth and save a father—took five years. On school visits I have asked kids how old they were five years ago and to think of the amount of time that has passed since then. This is a bit unfair since for them five years is nearly half of their lives while for me, it is a significantly smaller proportion.

I also show them a screenshot of my files. The “Castle” folder on my computer has 177 items. These are different drafts, pulled out chapters, revision notes, editorial letters, research files, and more: all the pieces that go together to create a novel.

I tell the students this not to scare them away from the world of writing, but rather in the hopes of inspiring some self-reflection. What, I ask them, would you be willing to dedicate five years of your life to—or even one year? Because for me, even with all the tears and the days I felt that this book—this reflection of me—would never amount to anything, it was worth it. Every day, every file, every tear built this book that I am immensely proud of. These pages and drafts were not wasted: they were the process that led me to the final product. Indeed it is this process that keeps me going as a writer. Not every book I write brings me to tears, and that is a good thing, but if writing were not work, it would quickly lose its appeal.

Megan Frazer Blakemore is the author of SECRETS OF TRUTH & BEAUTY, a novel for young adults, which received a starred review in PUBLISHERS WEEKLY and was on the ALA Rainbow list. She works as a middle-school librarian in Maine, where she lives with her family. Visit her online at www.meganfrazerblakemore.com.

Looking for more resources? Click here for a teacher's guide to Megan Frazer Blakemore's WATER CASTLE.

It Was Written by Somebody

In Writing, Nothing is Wasted

Being a teacher means embracing constant change. Yet all too often, teachers are told when, how and why to change. In this monthly column, Mrs. Mimi takes on creating change for herself by rethinking old practices and redefining teaching on her own terms.

Happy World Read Aloud Day! If you are celebrating, I hope your day is fabulous and you revel in the joy that is reading. (Nerd alert, right?) And if you are not celebrating today, I hope your day is fabulous and you revel in the joy that is reading.

If you’re not picking up what I’m putting down, what I am saying is that whether it is World Read Aloud Day, a Monday, the third Tuesday of the month or the day back after a long vacation, reveling in the love of reading should be something that is considered and practiced each and every day.

Don’t get me wrong—days such as World Read Aloud Day are extremely important and make for wonderful celebrations. They help us to remember how lucky we are to share our stories, our opinions, and our knowledge with one another through the written word. However, I would say that celebrating the joy of reading, books, blogs, and all the other texts that deserve to be enjoyed just one or two days out of the year is not enough.

Think about your own reading instruction, and think about it honestly. Is it fun? Is there a sense of excitement about what you are reading and learning to do as readers? Is there an air of celebration for the accomplishments of students? Or is it task-oriented, test-driven and all about getting to the next level?

If you are a joy-filled wonderland of reading excitement and growth, go get yourself a cocktail and celebrate you. If not, I’ve been there too and I know how you (most likely) got there.

We are teachers, we are list-makers, we are afraid of dropping a ball, we are diligent, and we are just trying to navigate our way through an ever changing landscape of standards, mandates and programs. Am I right or am I left? The business of teaching small friends how to read is serious and should be taken seriously, but not so seriously that we beat every ounce of fun out of it, leaving it in a sad pile with nothing but a rubric and Scantron sheet to keep it warm at night.

So, how do you get your groove back? I would suggest reflecting on your own reading life. What and how do you read for pleasure? If you’re like me, it’s a reward at the end of a long day or a treat in the midst of a busy week. Why can’t this sort of reading for pleasure be reflected in our classrooms? Extra reading time in the midst of a busy week viewed as a way to treat ourselves and celebrate our hard work. Or extra reading time at the end of the day as a way to unwind and enjoy some time to get lost in a book. Reading is a pleasure (when your students are given choices) and should be viewed and practiced as such within the classroom.

p: ms. tea via photopin cc

Now think about your next unit of study or the next few weeks of instruction. What are your overarching goals for your students as readers? Do you have specific goals for each student that you can track and celebrate once they are accomplished? Keep your eye on the prize by holding two or three goals for your students in your mind as a way to avoid getting mired down in the day by day tasks of completing graphic organizers, logging titles and making it to all of your conferences on time.

Finally, think about the ways in which you celebrate the written word and your students’ accomplishments as readers. Do you celebrate at all? Do you celebrate with cupcakes and cheesy poofs? While I can certainly see the joy in a good crunchy cheesy poof and know that the rush of sugar that comes from cupcakes can make your little friends appear joyful (prior to the crash that is inevitable), is their joy related to their reading successes or is it related to the novelty of gloriously salty or sugary midday snacks? Consider moving away from the cupcakes (I know, they are fabulous) and toward more authentic celebrations in which children name their successes, compliment one another, become famous for their achievements and share their learning in more authentic ways.

The bottom line is if we get stressed and over burdened by day-to-day teaching points, we can easily lose what should be the common thread of our reading instruction – joy. If we are pumped up, they are pumped up. And if we can model our classroom practices after the real-life authentic joy that can come from reading, we are golden.

Happy World Read Aloud Day and happy celebrating…everyday.

Mrs. Mimi is a pseudonymous teacher who taught both first and second grades at a public elementary school in New York City. She's the author of IT'S NOT ALL FLOWERS AND SAUSAGES: MY ADVENTURES IN SECOND GRADE, which sprung from her popular blog of the same name. Mimi also has her doctorate in education from Teachers College, Columbia University.