Month: March 2012

AASSA Conference

Susan Stevens

I just got back from the Association of American Schools in South America (AASSA) conference in Quito.  It was fantastic, with speakers like Heidi Jacobs who challenged us greatly about preparing our students for the 21st century.  The workshop that was the most practical for me was given by Sergio Martinez, who teaches at an American School in Venezuela.  He taught about various websites for digital storytelling, and I can’t wait to introduce them to my students, as we all know about the reading/writing connection and how important it is.  These sites make writing (and reading) super fun.  They’re all free.

  • Blabberize can make any photograph or drawing into an animated photograph that speaks.  Upload a photo of yourself, use the tools to indicate where the mouth is, and then tape yourself speaking.  Voila!  A talking photo.
  • Google Story Creator tells stories through Google search–in other words you make a story of your searches and what you found.  Simply input the URLs, select music to play while you are showing the search–and you’ve created a story.  Here’s a sample about dogs.
  • Photo Peach is a way to easily create rich slideshows with embedded quizzes.  It has a VERY intuitive interface.  You can have subtitles and music too.
  • Little Bird Tales is a super-secure website where students can build their stories using their own drawings (using an interior program similar to Paint), uploaded drawings and photographs, or using artwork provided on the site.  Teachers may set up an account and give students a key to get in.  This has the most versatility of any site I’ve used, including Story Bird which is a great site where you can create stories using illustrations created by artists.
  • I don’t quite know how to explain ZooBurst.  It’s a site where you can create pop-up books using photographs you upload and/or thematic art on the site.  After you’ve created your book, you can use something called augmentive reality, which is kind of difficult to explain (the book pops out of the computer onto a piece of paper).  Here’s a You Tube video where you can see it in action.
  • Finally, Story Jumper is a site where you can create books from scratch, or using story starters.  The story starters, for example a treasure map along with treasure-hunting pirates, come with artwork that can be used to build a picture and gives less and less support as the story goes on.  This is great for reluctant writers. 
    

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Sentence Stalking Makes Reading Fun!
 

Susan Stevens  






When my sons were very young, I read the book Stalking the Wild Asparagus by Euell Gibbons. We began to stalk not just wild asparagus, but violet blossoms with which to make pancake syrup, nasturtium flowers with which to make salad, and rose hips with which to make tea. As embarrassing as all this may be to admit, I find that I have the same satisfaction when I forage for sentences that I had twenty-some years ago foraging for wild foods with my sons.  Today’s post is directly from my Sentence Stalking Blog.


Why Stalk?


1. Because teachers can use model sentences to teach grammar and punctuation – and more than that, how grammar and punctuation help us write well. For example, when you teach coordinating conjunctions, scan through the stalked sentences to find great examples to teach with. Let students learn from great sentences.


2. Just to appreciate good writing.


3.  Students can learn to appreciate good writing and articulate what makes a good sentence.


This morning, I saw a hawk outside, memorized his features sitting on the telephone wire, and then banged on the window so I could see him in flight. He didn’t move, just kept looking around. When I came out and stomped he flew away, and then I saw fresh blood where he had caught something and then lost it. I went to school, got out a guide book, and was so surprised to find this powerful sentence about the Bicolored Hawk in a bird book:


A sneaky and inconspicuous hawk; rarely seen although it can be very bold, indeed at times almost fearless of humans.


Isn’t that GREAT!  And from a dry book about birds.




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Context Clues
 

Susan Stevens  






Last week I read What Really Matters for Struggling Readers:  Designing Research-Based Programs by Richard L. Allington.  I highly recommend it as an addition to your teacher library.  Here’s what is taught about context clues and focusing attention on words:


“Beers (2003) provides four types of clues that readers might use to figure out the meaning of an unknown word.


    

  1. She begins by looking at the definition clue.  Authors often introduce a new word and then define it.  For example, an author might write, ‘Cowboys often wore chaps, leather trousers without a seat, over their pants to protect their legs from thorns.’
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  2. Authors also provide restatements of information, typically using a more common vocabulary.  For instance, ‘The soldiers looked haggard after the long march from Fredericksburg.  General hooker decided that these soldiers were too tired to begin an assault that day.’
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  3. Another strategy authors use is to provide a contrasting, but more common word to help explain the new word: ‘ General Lee was fastidious about his personal appearance, but General Grant was something of a slob.’  Here students need to notice but, a signal for the contrast.
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  4. Finally authors provide gist clues to help with unknown words.  Readers have to use the sense of the passage and their prior knowledge to figure out new word meanings.  For example, ‘They had marched on dirt roads for three days straight with the sun, the hot July sun, beating down on them.  Each man was carrying not only his weapons but supplies as well.  This 60 pounds of extra weight made the marching even more difficult.  And this arduous journey was not yet over. . . . Here, the reader has to put together a variety of pieces of information–the heat of the summer sun, the dirt roads, the weight of the baggage each carried . . . in order to infer the meaning of arduous” (2012, p. 138-9)
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Visualize
 

Susan Stevens  # 






Jeff Wilhelm tells us in Improving Comprehension with Think-Aloud Strategies that “Students who did not intensely visualize and participate in “story worlds” did not engage with the text in other dimensions.  In other words, if we don’t help kids to visualize settings, characters, and action, then they will not be able to reflect on story action, the ways the story was constructed, what the story means, the author’s purpose and perspective, and a lot of other things that expert readers of narrative do (p. 31).


I think visualizing is just as important in non-fiction reading.  Think about the directions to just about anything–will you have success if you don’t visualize?


We need to model visualizing like we do anything else.  I start by modeling my visualization by sketching on the white board while I read a passage out loud.  I explain that we don’t need to spend a lot of time on our sketches, but we do want the movie in our mind to be as well “drawn” as we can.  I model how I change my movie as I read more and have more details and how sometimes I discover that I’ve made an error in my visualization–like when I’ve drawn a little red wagon instead of the covered wagon the author wrote about.


Model and then give students lots of chances to sketch their visualizations.  Once students can communicate their visualizations using sketches and dialogue balloons, I often use these sketches to assess understanding and correct misunderstandings.




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Conferring: The Heart of Readers’ Workshop
 

Susan Stevens  






Photo credit: stickynotes.ca


After you’ve researched and decided, it’s time to teach.  I generally start with pointing out something that the student is doing well.  “I like the way you _____, because ______.”  Then I choose a concise teaching point that I can write down on a sticky note.  I give the student a copy and have a copy for myself on my clipboard.


I always limit myself to one teaching point.  This could be anything from a grammar point to a point about how writers have to think like readers.  Here’s a sampling of teaching points from last week:


    

  • Writers have to continually ask, “Do my readers have the background knowledge to understand what I’m writing?”  If not writers have to explain more about what they’re writing.
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  • Writers need to be careful of strings of adjectives and find the perfect adjective to describe something.
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  • Sometimes writing goes on and on without letting the reader pause and take a breath.  Writers use punctuation to give those breaks to readers.
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  • Some verbs are irregular in the past tense, like the verb put.  You can use the anchor chart about irregular verbs to find the correct way to write verbs in the past tense.
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