Literacy Now

The 39 Clues Series (Scholastic, 2008—present)
Grades 3-7

The 39 Clues series appeals to all readers. Fans of adventure, mystery, realistic fiction, and non-fiction will all find their appetite satisfied with the series.

In addition, technology-driven kids will be able to tap into online components and gaming elements of the 39 Clues website and collectible trading cards. This interactive, fast-paced web experience locks readers into an online community where they research and play games in order to find out more information to solve the clues. There they can research more about the various non-fiction connections to the series, as well as broaden their knowledge of historical figures and events.

Middle grade readers of all levels are able to access the books, and reluctant readers will quickly see a familiar story pattern and characters in each novel. Readers with limited background knowledge instantly become “experts” on the series after reading the first novel, and are encouraged to research even more to “one up” their Cahill opponents.

Due to the collaborative nature of the series—which is written by several authors working together—readers no longer have to wait a year or more for the next installment. In fact, new books are released every three to four months!

The 39 Clues provides students with a uniquely multi-dimensional and extremely motivating reading experience unlike any other series out there. Try starting with THE MAZE OF BONES in your classroom, and you’ll instantly see the magic of this high-interest series.

Cross-curricular Connections: history, geography, math, writing, art

Ideas for Classroom Use:

Mirroring Mentor Texts

We all know that kids need to study mentor texts—what better way to teach good writing skills by studying texts connecting to what the kids are actually reading!

You can illustrate the various traits of writing, such as ideas, organization, or voice with the 39 Clues books (Scholastic’s 39 Clues Educator Network has some great resources for this). Ask kids to use colored Post-Its to identify examples of the traits of writing throughout the text. Then, take a closer look at each individual trait.

Divide your class into small groups to research the style of each series author. For instance, how does Margaret Petterson Haddix’s word choice differ from that of Gordon Korman? You could also ask them to look at how diction varies depending on which characters are narrating or speaking.

Finally, have students “mirror” what the series authors do, either by incorporating these traits into their own writing or by imitating the style of a given author.

Fabulous Freewrites

The ideas in the 39 Clues series lend themselves to all different genres of writing—mystery, non-fiction, and historical fiction, to name a few. You can even use the series to work with persuasive writing.

Offer your students the following prompt:

Given the choice, would you take the million dollars Grace Cahill offered in her will, or would you join the hunt for the 39 clues in an attempt to become the most powerful person in the world?

Allow students to write for ten minutes. Then, invite them to share their decisions and reasons why.

Create Your Own Trading Cards

The 39 Clues program includes a series of collectible trading cards that unlock games, puzzles, and additional clues online. My students couldn’t wait to get the “ultra-rare” card in the first series, and were full of predictions about what it might mean to the hunt. They were so fascinated with the cards that I decided to have them make their own!

Kids design their own personal card with an illustration of themselves with their “family” symbols around them, much like the crests that symbolize the branches of the Cahill family in the series.

On the back of the card, students listed traits from Ruth Culham’s 6+1 TRAITS OF WRITING, along with examples from their own writing that showed where they had nailed a specific trait. These “stats” inspired them to pay even more attention to these components of good writing.

Virtual Visits

Your class can travel the world with Dan and Amy, learning geography and strengthening math skills in the process. Related activities include:

• Mapping places the characters visit and learning more about them
• Keeping checking accounts and travel expense reports for the Cahills
• Practice division and multiplication by exchanging money as Dan and Amy would on their travels
• Tackle problem solving skills through tracking the Cahills across the different time zones

My students have been fascinated with learning all about the different settings in hopes that they might be able to “unlock” the secret of the clues.

Develop Digital Literacy Skills with Classroom Wikis and Blogs

Naturally, the 39 Clues unlocked an entire world of extra reading and research to my students. They started a wiki and blog dedicated to the series, where they shared predictions and theories, compiled facts they researched about different related topics, and built an online community of learners centered around researching all different aspects of the books.

This ReadWriteThink lesson plan can be easily adapted for a 39 Clues-themed project.

As moderator, I had to tell my students to stop blogging on numerous occasions—they were researching late into the night during the week, all on their own!

Additional Resources and Activities:

The 39 Clues Teaching Resources (Grades 3-7)
This collection of materials from Scholastic includes curriculum guides, book talks, video interviews, text and audiobook excerpts, activities, and more.

Decoding Writing with the 39 Clues (Grades 3-6)
Teach Ruth Culham’s traits of writing program with the 39 Clues series.

Web 2.0: Beyond Google (Grades 3-8)
Get an overview of new literacies in this article, which includes links to Web 2.0 sites that are perfect for educators.

Teaching with Blogs (Grades 6-12)
This ReadWriteThink Strategy Guide covers all the basics of blogging in the classroom and has many links to related resources.

Mike Bentz has been teaching fourth and fifth grade in Solana Beach, California for fourteen years. He has a Master's Degree in Literacy from the University of San Diego. Mike has collaborated with Scholastic for the 39 Clues series and has offered insight into webcasts, blogs, and teacher guides for the books. He spoke at the International Reading Association conference in 2011 with authors Gordon Korman, Linda Sue Park, Peter Lerangis, and Ruth Culham. Mike's classroom won the 2009 Classrooms of the Future "Inspire Award" for their work with the 39 Clues.



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

Putting Books to Work: George O’Connor’s HADES: LORD OF THE DEAD

The Common Core State Standards are facilitating a lot of conversations about what students should know and be able to do. One of the more interesting aspects of these standards, for me, is the focus on providing evidence from the texts students read.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about how to teach students to justify their responses. As I reflect on this, I have to admit that I have accepted a lot of student responses that do not provide justification and evidence. I know that the student is right, or I know where the student is coming from in terms of the response, so I allow the conversation to continue. I'm not saying that is always bad, but I am thinking about how I might push students thinking deeper and deeper into the text so that they learn to read closely.

Of course, not all texts require a deep reading, but some do. And I wonder if my students have develop the skills necessary to read texts closely that need that type of reading.

This has got me thinking about modeling again. Effective teachers model their comprehension as well as word solving strategies, their use of text structures to follow the author, and analyze the text features provided in the text. These are all well documented approaches for reading, and ones that comprise the modeling behaviors of many teachers.

I am thinking about my own modeling and how I can incorporate greater attention to justification and evidence as I read and think aloud. I know that is part of the category of comprehension, but I'm now thinking that it deserve more attention. I wonder if adding more attention to evidence, through teacher modeling, will help students integrate this habit into their own practices. I know this has worked with word solving, for example, as students learn to look inside words (using morphology and word arts) and outside of words (using context clues and other resources), so it make sense that this would help with justification and evidence.

I've also been thinking about the relative lack of attention to text features in most teacher modeling events. A close read of an informational text would require that teachers notice things like figures, diagrams, charts, illustrations, captions, italicized words, and so on. Attending to those text features may allow students to think more deeply about what they are reading and gain a better understanding of the text and what they can do with the information contained within the text.

I'm not suggesting that teacher modeling is the answer to everything, but I am thinking that we should try to model the things we expect from students. As such, we should probably pay increased attention to justification we use to frame our answers and the evidence we would provide in a discussion about what we were reading. In doing so, we might be able to prepare students for the collaborative work they need to do to move deeply into the text as they discuss their readings with others.


Douglas Fisher, Ph.D., is Professor of Language and Literacy Education in the Department of Teacher Education at San Diego State University and a classroom teacher at Health Sciences High & Middle College. He is a member of the California Reading Hall of Fame and is the recipient of an International Reading Association Celebrate Literacy Award, the Farmer award for excellence in writing from the National Council of Teachers of English, as well as a Christa McAuliffe award for excellence in teacher education. He has published numerous articles on improving student achievement as well as books such as In a Reading State of Mind: Brain Research, Teacher Modeling, and Comprehension Instruction (with Nancy Frey and Diane Lapp).



Members Only: Engaging the Adolescent Reader [member login required]

by Thomas DeVere Wolsey, Ed. D., Walden University 

Finding appropriate books for children aged 3 to 13 that feature high-quality literature, many cultures, and multiple languages is a challenge for schools and libraries with limited budgets. However, the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) Foundation, a unique project begun by the University of Maryland in 2002, seeks to provide digital books that are inclusive of many cultures and in many languages. Most books in this digital collection can be read on standard Web browsers or in Java-enabled devices.  The site is easy to navigate and the text of the books can be enlarged. Young readers can quickly find picture books and chapter books by country of origin, language, genre, or suggested age-range.  The Foundation “…aspires to have every culture and language represented so that every child can know and appreciate the riches of children's literature from the world community (Mission page, ¶3). 

At present, the library has 4469 digital books in 55 different languages. Some books are available in multiple languages providing a great advantage to second language learners. Language maintenance is a critical goal in many school systems, and with ICDL, children (and adults) who have immigrated to another country may still access books in their home language, as well. One example is the digital book, Calling the Doves by Juan Felipe Herrera, a recipient of the Ezra Jack Keats Book Award (1995). In it, the author writes vibrantly of his childhood in a migrant family. With beautiful illustrations by Elly Simmons, readers learn how Herrera chose his road to becoming an author. Click the link to view the book, and as you do, consider how you could share this book, or another in the ICDL, with your students on a laptop, in a computer lab, or with the whole class using a digital projector or interactive whiteboard. 

Reference: 
Herrera, J. P. (1995). Calling the Doves. San Francisco, CA: Children’s Book Press. Retrieved from http://www.childrenslibrary.org/icdl/SaveBook?bookid=hrrclln_00030003&lang=English&ilang=English

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

At the 2011 IRA Annual Convention, literacy leaders from twenty-five states gathered to discuss the Common Core State Standards. We discussed a variety of issues, including:

• how to unpack the Common Core Standards
• what the expectations are for students to read and write across different types of text and media
• how to teaching writing that explains, informs and argues in kindergarten through high school and in history, social studies, science and the technical subjects
• why students will need to learn to read increasingly complex text as they progress through the grade levels.

This exciting discussion revealed that there is a great deal of work to do in order to implement these standards and that states—and state councils—are approaching this work differently.

As a literacy professional working with teachers to understand the Common Core, I have found that unpacking the standards is an essential task. Just as the standards ask us to teach students how to “undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature,” we have to give these standards a close attentive read. And as skilled readers, we will want to discuss our thinking with others.

IRA Engage offers us an opportunity to collaborate with others across the nation that are working to make sense of this complex text, and think about what these standards mean for literacy instruction in our nation’s schools.

It is important to note that these standards were constructed by thinking about what students need at the end of grade twelve to be college and career ready, and then progressing down the grade levels to kindergarten. Although these standards have been adopted by many states, there are still concerns. For more information on some of these concerns, see Freddy Hiebert’s post about complex text in Kindergarten.

Yet, David Coleman, one of the lead writers of the Common Core State Standards, reports that according to ACT data, the single most reliable academic predictor of whether or not a student is going to succeed in college and/or a career is the ability to “read a complex text independently with confidence.” He then goes on to model his view of what a close read of complex text should look like with Dr. Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

A literacy educator watching this video may be taken aback by his dismissal of the many pre-reading activities that are typically part of our practice. So, how do we take this image of the expectation of what students are supposed to be able to do independently, according to the Common Core State Standards, and think about what our teaching should look like in kindergarten, when children are just beginning to learn about text, through 12th grade, when students should be able to read complex text independently?

I think that the key to the conversation lies in understanding that the standards describe what students are supposed to know and be able to do at each grade level, while our teaching reflects how students are going to get there. As teachers, we know that students will arrive in our classrooms differing in their background knowledge, experience with print, language, cultures, and attitudes toward books and writing.

We also know that some students will be curious, passionate about specific topics, eager, able to persevere, confident and ready to explore any text, while others will be hungry, anxious, limited in their world and literacy experiences, and as a result, tentative toward learning. I believe that knowledge about our students and knowledge about multiple approaches to teach students to read, coupled with a passion for literacy is how we will help students read complex text independently and where we need to focus our energy.

We can recognize the differences between these standards and our current practices. These standards call for a greater emphasis in reading and writing informational text. From kindergarten on students are encouraged to engage in reading activities with informational text and draw connections across those texts. They are encouraged to share their opinions in pictures and words. When we look at these standards closely, we can start to think about how our classrooms will look differently with this greater emphasis on informational text and writing.

We can recognize that these new standards place a greater emphasis on disciplinary literacy, the specific ways of reading and writing in the disciplines of history, social studies, science and technical subjects. For teachers in grades six through twelve, this means that they will have literacy objectives in addition to their content objectives.

We can also recognize that these standards call us to integrate new literacies into the work we do with students. A recent YouTube search turned up this video, in which two year olds are playing with iPads, suggesting that some children who come to our classrooms will have multi-media literacy activities at their fingertips, literally.

Fortunately, at IRA there are so many excellent researchers and teachers who have written on these topics. I know that I will be using the knowledge that I have gained from these publications as I look at the Common Core Standards and think about creating classroom practice that will address the diversity of readers we teach. And, of course, we have each other. I hope that you will join this discussion. Talk about the standards that you are thinking about and working with, and share the resources that assist educators in helping students to understand and enjoy complex works of literature.

I do want to point out that the standards include the word “enjoy.” The key to engaging students is to create a joyous literacy environment—one where reading and knowledge gained from reading is celebrated, and sharing the books we read for pleasure becomes a classroom norm. The challenge is to support joyous inquiries for each of our diverse students while integrating opportunities to engage with different texts of varying complexity. And it is a challenge, but I remain optimistic.

After all, we have this IRA community, and all the knowledge that exists within it. Now, with Engage, we also have the ability to communicate with one another 24/7, from anywhere in the world.

Lori DiGisi serves as an educational specialist for the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. Previously, she worked as a literacy specialist at Fuller Middle School, in Framingham, Massachusetts. She's a past president of the Massachusetts Reading Association, the current president of IRA's Secondary Reading SIG, and an active member of the Legislative Action Team.



Teaching Tips: What Should Be Common in the Common Core State Standards?

The Library of Congress launched a new traveling exhibition that will bring facsimiles of many of its top treasures and information about the millions of resources in its unparalleled collections to America. 

Photos: Library of Congress Gateway to Knowledge Exhibition in Washington, Illinois. (Library of Congress Photo/ Abigail Van Gelder). GTK Exhibition in Grinnell, Iowa. (Library of Congress Photo/ Abigail Van Gelder).