Dr. Goodreader

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.
• Writers need to be careful of strings of adjectives and find the perfect adjective to describe something.
• Sometimes writing goes on and on without letting the reader pause and take a breath.  Writers use punctuation to give those breaks to readers.
• 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.

I just decided my old theme was a bit uninteresting.  I was shooting for a clean look when I designed it . . . but I’m afraid it was just blah.  You’re not lost, though.  Stay here and let me know how you like the new theme.

The second phase of a successful conference after RESEARCH is DECIDE.  We must decide what we are going to teach this child.  Think about:

• What do we know about this child and where they are in their development of skills?
• What is the conference history of this child.  Should we keep working on something?
• What is the most important strategy that this child needs to know now?

If you’re not familiar with Pinterest, watch out!  I immediately became addicted and now limit myself to 5 minute Pinterest breaks.  Pinterest is basically a site where you can pin photos and videos from the Internet to bulletin boards.  I have to admit that I didn’t do a great job categorizing my bulletin boards when I started out.  I had no idea what a rich resource Pinterest would be for education!  Here is a picture of part of my education bulletin board.  I highly suggest joining Pinterest and if you do, why don’t you follow me:  Susan Stevens

The most important part of conferring is RESEARCH–we want to learn where our readers are and where they need to go.  Listening is the key.  We did a demo workshop in my classroom the other day for all the teachers in the school who teach language arts.  Yes, we did a short read aloud and a short mini-lesson, but we really wanted to focus on conferring and how flexible and important they are.  We set up three conferring tables, with three teachers, students called up at random during independent reading, and observing teachers.  First, we research:

• How’s it going?
• Show me how you chose this book?  Is it living up to your expectations?
• Are you able to understand the book you’re reading?  (Sometimes this leads to an impromptu running record as I count out 100 words in the book and have the students read to me.)
• How do you get started in a book?  What strategies do you use in the first chapter?
• Last time we talked about (book choice/breaking hard words into syllables/etc.) . . . How’s it going?
• I noticed you were ……Can you talk to me about that?
• When you clunk are you using Dr. Goodreader to help you figure out what to do?  Show me.

Lucy Calkins is my idol; I admit it.  My guru.  I’m a groupie.  How can I ever thank her for everything I’ve learned from her?  Her series on teaching writing workshops have not only helped me, but have helped any teacher who comes to our school not knowing how to teach writing workshop.  Yes, her texts are wordy, but it’s like watching a master teacher teach and hearing a voiceover of why she does everything she does.

And now, she’s come out with a reading workshop series.  We’re using it from 3rd – 7th grade.  Who else would think to teach kids reading research to help them understand how to be good readers??  Each and every lesson is transferable to our reading lives–forever.  We’re using Google Docs to collaborate on units based on her units of study with the adjustments that we make for grade level.

This is a bit that I’ve gleaned from the literature review I recently wrote:

As a result of this study, I will make sure to purchase and publicize a wider variety of “boy books” and “girl books” in my classroom library.  I’m also going to look into the growing genre of narrative non-fiction and more books of the slightly gross humor variety.  Yes, I even found myself purchasing a book about the Jonas Brothers for one of my female readers who needs to be hooked.

From what I’ve read, I need to hook my boys first, and I believe the fantasy genre has a lot to offer both boys and girls. Specifically, I’ll begin the year with a fantasy unit with components designed to hook all students.  I’ll choose something like Harry Potter, with strong male and female characters who fight evil.  Using these books, I can read a chapter and then show a portion of the movie with subtitles to help my ELL students build background knowledge and also help those students who have trouble visualizing.  I’ll do single-gender guided reading groups with “girl fantasy books” that may have a bit more romance and “boy fantasy books” that may have a bit more action.  Discussion will take place on Edmodo and on paper for guided reading groups and be whole group for the group read aloud.

I recently wrote a literature review about helping students enter Book World–a.k.a. the flow of reading.  Here are some interesting points that came up about boys:

• There is negative peer pressure as boys struggle to be viewed as masculine (Merisuo-Storm, 2006; Watson, et.al., 2010).
• Negative attitudes are contagious (Merisuo-Storm, 2006), which makes it important to identify and hook those students with negative attitudes first, before the disease spreads.
• Boys do not have enough male models which is highly important as attitudes about reading develop early (Merisuo-Storm, 2006; Schwartz, 2002; Sullivan, 2004), especially in the area of viewing reading as recreation (Boltz, 2007).
• Boys tend to read brief, informative texts (Boltz, 2007; Schwartz, 2002; Sullivan, 2004), where classroom read-alouds tend to be narrative.
• Boys prefer non-fiction, comics, how-to manuals, graphic novels, sports, adventure, fantasy, humor, horror, and series books (Boltz, 2007; Merisuo-Storm, 2006; Schwartz, 2002; Sullivan, 2004).  Part of the appeal of series books is that boys can guarantee that they don’t accidentally pick out a “girl book” (Merisuo-Storm, 2006).  This is information that we can use.  If we can hook boys on a series they’ve got a reading plan laid out for a while.
• Some studies show that boys are hard-wired to enjoy action books because they have less cross-hemispheric activity, thus needing an extra “jolt” in their reading (Boltz, 2007; Sullivan, 2004).
• Teachers and librarians tend to treat “boy books” as sub-standard literature; we need to promote them in book talks (Sullivan, 2004).

As a result of my study, I changed how I shop for books for my class quite a bit.  I focused on short-chaptered action books for boys such as are now being written by James Patterson and John Grisham.