Back to Books, Local PD

I just got in from a busy day ending on an enjoyable note.  I am fortunate to belong to The Literacy Connection, a hometown grass roots effort for growing professionally.  This group started with five teachers in 1982 and continues providing a supportive learning environment for local educators.   This year our work, conversations and guest speaker are centered around the theme, Back to Books!  Keeping Children's Literature at the Heart of the Curriculum.  With the shift in curriculum, I find this title enjoyable and much needed.  A breath of fresh air as people become reactive creating, publishing, and purchasing new teaching resources.  I think this will help us slow down, look at what we already have to use and not lose sight of using children's literature.  

Tonight we were fortunate to spend a couple of hours at Cover to Cover an independent local bookstore with the brilliant book owner, Sally Oddi.  Sally knows books.  Sally knows readers.  Sally knows how to talk about books, leaving you with the feeling you need each one.  Even if they aren't just right for your grade level or students you can find someone who needs that book she just talked about.

Tonight Sally had some wise nuggets of information for us all.

-quoting Donalyn Miller, "Get your kids reading real books."

-"Nonfiction is getting its time."

-"Questioning exercises should take them back to the book.  Use the book."

-"Our constant goal is to stretch the ability to read with information."

Notice the key word with information not for information.  I think the word with indicates the process of reading and not just reading for answers.  Thank you Sally for always welcoming and sharing new books with us.

I look forward to sharing more of this journey with you this year.  We will be thinking about ELL students in the reading workshop, documenting children's work, choosing books for minilessons, poetry, children's literature and the Common Core, and then we end our workshop series by spending a day with Donalyn Miller learning and reflecting after reading her text, The Book Whisperer.

Poetry for Kindergarten!

Happy Song for the First day of School

by Patricia Hubbell

It's my 

Happy 

Snappy

Tip-top

Day

Tootle

Oodle

Hip

Hooray!

I wish

This day

Would never

End - 

I've just

Made a

Brand-new

Friend!

Love, love, love this poem!  What a bouncy collection of words for emergent readers to hear and read.  This poem can be found in The Poetry Friday Anthology -Poems for the School Year with Connections to the Common Core compiled by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong.  You can purchase a K-5 edition or a grade level edition as an e-book.  My grade level edition was just $3.99.  I just had to skip a visit to any of our local ice cream stores and believe me it's worth so much more than that.  

The book came to be from the momentum for Poetry Friday here in the blogging world.  The introduction in my K book addresses literacy needs for K students.  It feels like the authors are speaking right to me as they discuss focusing on enjoying and understanding poetry as a goal.  Kindergarten students need to focus on figuring out how words and language interact in their literate minds.  The authors also provide tips for reading poetry aloud.  I found this to be a helpful refresher and I think essential for a new teacher.  You will also find 10 reasons to use poetry.  Easily a great resource to help parents understand.  After each poem there are 5 suggestions for using this poem in your classroom.  

It's sometimes difficult to find a great resource specific to kindergarten and kindergarten alone.  This collection is perfect for kindergarten.  Poems carefully crafted for emerging readers and learners.  I can't wait to share a poem a week with my students.  I hope you can skip that special treat during your week and pick up this must have text.

Poetry Friday is hosted by Renee at No Water River, Thanks Renee.

Cybils and Nonfiction Picture Books

I am honored and thrilled to have been selected to join the Cybils Awards process this year, actually a little bubbly!  The Cybils Awards are chosen and given by bloggers for children's and young adult text.  I've read and followed some of the Cybils buzz in the past on and off however, I just learned a lot about the whole process from the Cybils FAQ page.  I am excited to be thinking about and discussing Nonfiction Picture Books.  Nonfiction is a genre for everyone to reckon with if you are carefully reading the Common Core.  I'm also interested in what new authors are doing to make nonfiction accessible to emergent readers.  I feel very lucky to have a reason to discuss books with new friends on the Cybils Award process.  I also feel very lucky to have Round 1 judges looking for the best to pass along to the Round 2 judges.  You can find the complete list of judges at the Children's and Young Adult Bloggers' Literary Awards.

Reading Like a Writer

There has been a lot of conversations this summer about The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate.  At our first staff meeting our librarian and another fourth grade teacher were just gushing about this new book also.  Then Mr. Schu posted Ivan had passed and I thought I need to read this book.  I was also hoping to spark an interest in my fourth grader too.  What I discovered as I was reading, I was reading like a writer.  Lines of this text just made me stop and think about the language choice.  It made me realize the careful craft of choosing words to create images, emotions, and thinking.  Since there has been so much buzz about this heartfelt story I thought I would share the lines that struck me most written by Katherine Applegate.

-"Humans waste words.  The toss them like banana peels and leave them to rot."

-"Humans are clever indeed.  They spin pink clouds you can eat.  They build domains with flat waterfalls."

-"But even though I draw the same things over and over again, I never get bored with my art."

-""Memories are precious," Stella adds.  "They help tell us who we are.""

-"Because she remembers everything, Stella knows many stories.  I like colorful tales with black beginnings and stormy middles and cloudless blue-sky endings.  But any story will do."

August 10 for 10: Picture Book Event is Here 2012

Good Morning Everyone, it's going to be a great day!  It's August 10th, 2012 and that means Cathy at Reflect and Refine Learning Building a Learning Community and I are here to host our third annual 10 for 10 Picture Books blog sharing event.  If you could see my laptop right now, I have three screens opened for my blog.  One tab has my list from the inaugural August 10 for 10.  The second tab has the second collection of picture books I put together in 2011.  The third tab is this edition.  I really thought I would put a new spin on my list - maybe a focus or a theme or a common thread.  Nothing came to me until I was doing dishes today and thought maybe I could share my list of new books I want to add to my room this year.  However, I don't have them yet so I would be relying on thinking from others and the whole purpose of this event is have a need to go book shopping.  I've decided to look at both previous list and think critically to see what I must keep, what might I let slide off the list because something new has just touched my heart.

My list is not in a ranking order, I've just numbered them to make sure I stop at 10!

1.  Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do you see? by Eric Carle changed my life in college and has to STAY for a third year!  I was sitting in my reading methods course at SUNY College at Buffalo when Dr. Phelps read this book in class.  I was introduced to a predictable pattern, shared reading, Eric Carle, collage hand made papers, turning the page slightly ahead of the text to encourage student participation and I'm sure much more.  I remember thinking this was much more fun and engaging than the basal readers and reading groups I grew up with.  I've never had a group of students who didn't fall in love with this book.  It has to stay because reading this book is one of my fondest memories to each of my three daughters who are now bigger and I'm sure took turns reading it to each other at some point in our journey together.

2.  Suddenly, is a book I found a year ago and think it needs to stay on my list for another year.  Suddenly! by Colin McNaughton is perfect for helping kindergarten students think about predicting.  The text is larger in size.  The illustrations are very supportive to the text and using our picture clues to understand the story is essential.  The text also has a pattern and would allow us as writers to think about the word suddenly and what happens following that word each time.  The rest of this post was written November 10, 2011.

3.  The Three Bears by Byron Barton has to STAY for a third year!  I just enjoy reading this book to students.  The text is simple and repetitive and for whatever reason my inflection is at it's best reading this book. I think the simple collage technique is an easy one for students to see and replicate.  I love to help children figure out there's one color for each character that gets repeated in clothing and objects.  My two classes shared creating retelling murals this year using Byron Barton has a mentor and then we interactively wrote our text.   These were beautiful pieces of collaboration and fostered so much literacy learning.  I also think this will be a great book with other 3 Bear versions to help my young readers compare literature, part of the Common Core.

4.  A must have NEW selection, Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons.  You  can my initial thinking and reactions the day it was released this year.  My list needed a book to talk about math ideas and this is perfect for so many concepts mathematically.

5.  I can't believe I removed this book from the list last year.  Gosh, 10 is so hard to do!  I have to be quite honest here, I think limiting this to ten books was Cathy's idea.    Ish by Peter Reynolds is a must have for any classroom to embrace the arts and the differences between artist capabilities.  It encourages the reader to look at things in a different way, with a different lens.  Looking at things with a different lens is essential for 21st century learning.  Welcome back, Ish!

6.  Since we are talking about the arts, I leaked out on twitter earlier this week I Am an Artist might make my top 10 and it is.  I recently got back from spending a lot of time outside and in nature.  It's amazing what you can see if you take the time to look.  Another book encouraging readers to look at things differently, maybe that is a future list of some sort for this event or something else, maybe that's an article or a blogpost.   I predicted I Am An Artist would join my list.

7.  Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox is about older people, it's about spending time with them, it's about memories.  I want it to STAY for year three!  Memories give us ideas for writing.  As in this story, memories help us remember.   I think we need to work harder and bridge the gap between our young and old.   I think we need to work harder as a profession to help students make writing easier by writing about memories and what is known to them.

8.  Super Sam! is a new addition this year.  I think as I looked for a few new titles this one jumped out as one that fostered students to think deeply about the text and notice more through the illustrations that aided in comprehending the words.  My students also understood the play on words using the illustrations.  K students can think deeply, my initial thinking was posted February 21, 2012.

9.  Rosie's Walk by Pat Hutchins is a book from my first list and needed to return. In the past I've used it for mathematics, when we were working on directional words.   The students enjoyed it so much we retold it through painting the different places Rosie goes.  We were building a map and created labels through interactive writing.  When we mounted our mural for a retelling, we used Velcro for Rosie and she could move along the mural as she does in the story.  In reading the Common Core our emerging readers and writers need to be doing this work for literacy, I think I will be using this within the first quarter of the year.

10.  Pete the Cat by Eric Litwin was on my first list and has been slightly moved over by this NEW Pete the Cat Rocking in My School Shoes!   for two years in a row (Both titles link you to my original posts for these books.)   I honestly had a dream last year where I went to school and the room was filled with parents and students.  The room was set up but I had no handouts, no sign up sheets and really no introduction to kindergarten speech planned.  It bordered a nightmare and as I conclude this list I know just like Pete the Cat says, "because it's all good." the next couple of weeks will all work out, it always does.


I'm so glad you stopped by.  If you are joining us this year please let us know.  You can let us know by leaving a comment on our blogs.  You can let us know via twitter @cathymere or @mandyrobek.  We will then connect all of our list via a Jog.  Make sure you settle in with a large class of water to stay dehydrated, I think the Jog will be a long one with lots of interesting things to view.

The Ohio Visible Learning Project

The Ohio Visible Learning Project is a collection of Stories from Wickliffe Progressive Community School in Upper Arlington, Ohio.  This collection was edited by Fred Burton, Mara Krechevsky, and Melissa Rivard. The stories reflect learning taken from Reggio Emelia Preschools in Italy and the partnership this building had with the Making Learning Visible Project to form the Ohio Visible Learning Project.  

"documentation requires learning (children, teachers, parents) to slow down and both individually and collectively reflect on the content and processes of learning."  Several times throughout this text the reader is guided to the relationship between documentation and assessment.  Documentation is a form of formative assessment.  Conversations inform and provide insight for further learning and planning.  Another definition I read in this text worth pondering, "...documentation as the practice of observing, recording, interpreting, and sharing through a variety of media the processes and products of learning in order to deepen and extend learning."

I was intrigued by the process and journey this building took to grow as a group.  It began with a group of teachers who were interested and formed an inquiry group.  For the next four years the entire building became involved and worked in interest groups to grow together as the reflected on work they were trying in their classrooms to make learning more visible.  

There are some tools we could all use found in this book.  One is the "See/Think/Wonder" Thinking Routine which helps structure conversations in hopes of deeper thinking and reflection.  More Thinking Routines are available at the Project Zero website.  Another helpful tool to read about is the use of protocol questions to help guide observational discussions after viewing student work, p.102.  

There are stories from various grade levels.  There are stories discussing ways to use technology to help capture student voices.  There are examples of process boards, a way in which the process of learning is documented and shared with others.

I was given this book and accompanying DVD at NCTE this past fall free from a session I attended.  I'm in the process of finding out how you too can receive this resource for making student learning more visible.  Stay tuned.

Join Us Friday! August 10 for 10 Picture Book Event

I just got back yesterday from a writing retreat for three days and then I came home to pack us up for a week on Keuka Lake in New York.  My hometown, Penn Yan, is at one end of this beautiful little piece of heaven in the Finger Lakes Region of Upstate NY.  

I knew it was August and when I was mapping out my week I realized it is going to end with a blog event no one should miss, if I say so myself.  Cathy and I would love to have you join us for August 10 for 10 Picture Book event where we all share our top ten favorite picture books.  These might be all time favorites you can't live without.  It might be ten new favorites that are a must have for the new school year.   I haven't gone to my room to set it up yet.  I haven't looked at my list from last year.  I my haven't thought much about top 10 but I know there's a book I mentioned earlier this year that could make my list.  I better do some blog rereading.  I share with you I haven't done much work on my list for this Friday to show you it's still possible to join us.  This doesn't have to be really complicated.  We'd love to know the book title, author and why is always the most interesting part to read and helpful.  If you just have time for a book title and author that's great.  Book covers for a visual are also very helpful.  We appreciate learning and the support we provide each other as we start the school year.  We hope you can join us how you feel comfortable.

On Friday, please leave a comment on either of our blogs Enjoy and Embrace Learning or Reflect and Refine:  Building a Learning Community and we will put together a blog jog to help everyone's list come together in one special place.