For anyone just tuning in now, this is the fifth week of my chronicle as I get my metacognition-focused classroom up and running. I'm taking the activities Michelle Kelley and I suggested in our book, Comprehension Shouldn't Be Silent (IRA, 2007) and sharing how the first six weeks look in my classroom circa 2012. If you are on the same journey or a parallel one, pipe up and let us know how it's going in your classroom!

Week 5

This week I focused on coaching students as they used the literacy structures put in place so far such as writer’s workshop, read-aloud and R⁵: Read, Relax, Reflect, Respond and Rap. During R⁵ as I took the status of the class, I noticed several students who were reading different chapter books each day. One of them said he finished the book he was reading the day before. He reads nonstop in class and I think he probably did finish his book.  One of the other students said she left her other book at home so she got a new one. I asked about the book she was reading the day before that and she said it was boring. I’m going to monitor her during status for a couple of weeks and step in if the pattern continues. I do have a lot of readers this year though (yeah!)

The other activities listed for this week include:

Activity:  Introduce the text feature walk structure

I did a heavily scaffolded teacher-led text feature walk through the cover story on a Scholastic News. This went alright but the students didn’t jump in and take the reins from me like I wanted them to. I wanted to show a video of former students doing a text feature walk but the DVD player on my computer is broken and I couldn’t get the sound to work in the computer lab so I may have to white-knuckle this one and just let the students try it themselves.

Activity: Begin literature circles training

I haven’t started literature circles in the first six weeks of school for a number of years. We are still perfecting all the other structures and it is a little much to add at this point. When we do start, I’m going to offer a variety of books on writing for kids like the Writer’s Notebook and How to Write Your Life Story (both by Ralph Fletcher. I might throw some author biographies in there as well. I’ll wait another month before adding this.

Activity: Continue to add to the text feature wall

We are!

This year has been a little different than others because I have all my new text feature resources from Reading the Whole Page, like real examples to show on the whiteboard and lots of interactive PDFs. Also, because all my students were proficient at predicting based on their DRA results (shout out to their former teachers!), for the first time ever I’m not starting with the unit on prediction. I’m weighing my options of what will give them the most bang for their buck. My students are already so inquisitive that I am scared to teach them questioning (only joking a little here – with this group I will have to find a bunch of new ways to say, “That’s a good question, let’s look it up!”). I am leaning towards the unit on summarizing because almost all of my students struggled with it on their DRAs. I’ll probably mull this over for a week or two!

Week 4

I am happy to announce that all my DRAs are scored, my class profile created. This week I made good on my leftover goals from last week:

Activity: Establish literacy centers and expectations for all during small group work.

I overheard a few my kids talking during snack time about whether certain snacks were healthy. Since our rule is that they can eat a healthy snack, it was open to some interpretation. Inspired by a center I read about in Intermediate Literacy Stations (Maupin House, 2009) I created three literacy centers that gave my students time to read kid-friendly articles about nutrition and  they learned from reading to the articles to read food labels. Here are some pictures to show what we did:

Reading and Evaluating Food Labels

Directions

Laminated Food Labels

What students learned about proteins, carbohydrates and fats

 

 

 

 

 

 

Activity: Review the differences between narrative and expository genres

This was a quickie! I defined narrative as a story, true or untrue with a beginning, middle and end. We discussed other narrative elements such as characters, setting, problem and resolution. I defined expository as a text, true or untrue, that explains, describes or explains something. After I defined each one, I showed some examples on the doc cam and had kids cooperatively sort piles of books into narrative  and expository.

The other new activities for this week include:

Activity: Create an interactive text feature wall.

Done!

Activity: Broaden text feature lessons to include using them to aid comprehension.

Last week I promised to elaborate on some of the cool new materials we created and I used for our new book, Reading the Whole Page. This week I was still focusing on identification and the kids responded well to the lessons. One of my kids blurted out, “Text features rock!” Don’t you love fourth-graders? Anyway, I showed full-color examples of each feature on the interactive whiteboard then had kids write the name of each feature on their little dry erase boards. Ironically, this process reminded a lot of students responding on the old-fashioned slates at the Student History Museum in Sanford where we recently went on a field trip.

Activity: Begin small group work (teacher led)

I used the text feature sorting cards in small group so I could monitor and clarify as students matched examples of the features to their names. There were 21 text features and every single one of my kids was able to accurately match them with just a few tweaks. For those that had confusion, this light scaffolding was all that was necessary.  

Week 3

This week I was playing catch-up a little because I didn’t do such a great job of introducing the strategies last week.  I created two sorts to help my students understand (at least at an entry level) the concepts of predicting, questioning, visualizing, making connections, summarizing, metacognition and clarifying. One sort had terms to match with definitions and the other had descriptions of strategies in use to match with the terms. The sorts really helped students understand what these terms mean and what the strategies look like in action.  Michelle and I are working on the second edition of Comprehension Shouldn’t Be Silent, and both sorts will be in the new book.

This is the point in the school year where we’ve been teaching and giving beginning-of-the-year assessments nonstop and suddenly remember we are expected to give grades. Since it’s important to assess what we are actually teaching, I decided to create an assessment to go along with the metacognitive strategies and stems from R⁵. It looks a little like the genre quizzes from our R⁵ book in that each question requires a word or short answer and students have to both define and use the strategies.  My husband and I both administered it to our classes (he teaches fifth-grade at another school) and some of the answers students gave really blew us away. We invited students to draw a labeled diagram on the back and just had to share this example from his class.  

Because I paused to drive home the metacognitive strategies (and am so glad I did), I didn’t get to all the activities listed for this week.

Activity: Continue writer’s workshop, read-aloud, and R⁵.

Check, check and check. Tuesday night I had students generate a list of words that mean the same thing as sweet. In class on Wednesday we shared our words, talked about them, and put them on a continuum from sweetest to least sweet.

This was in preparation for writing on Friday. To help get them all engaged in writer’s workshop, I shared an “I See” poem. (I am not sure whom to credit with this idea – it wasn’t mine.) I displayed a graphic organizer that looked like this:
 

I see..
I feel…
I smell…
I taste…
I hear…

The final products

I gave each of them some Pop Rocks candies. They observed the candies using all of their senses, then wrote free verse poems. How did my disengaged writers do, you ask? Everyone engaged for the entire time. Some finished before others but all were successful (and a little sticky, I suspect.)

Activity: Have students notice and share when they clarify.

We didn’t limit the sharing to clarifying – during R⁵ kids shared a variety of strategies they used.

Activity: Establish literacy centers and expectations for all during small group work.

I didn’t get to this activity this week. I’ll do it next week for sure.

Activity: Review the differences between narrative and expository genres.

Next week for this as well. Did I mention all the mandatory test we had to do???

Activity: Begin noticing and identifying nonfiction text features.

You may know that our new book on teaching text features, Reading the Whole Page, just came out in August. I am able to do a much better job teaching text features now that Maupin House was kind enough to translate my sticky notes into a professionally designed teaching resource! I’ll spend some time telling how I use these resources a little later. My good friend and awesome first grade teacher, Kim Wilson, will be a guest blogger telling how she used the materials with her little guys as well. Look for that next week.

Speaking of next week, I have some catching up to do…

Week 2

First off I need to confess, I did not score all my DRA’s this weekend.  Instead I took a long bike ride, enjoyed my family, and took care of a few chores that have been neglected (like grocery shopping and throwing away the food in my fridge I failed to cook last week.) It’s okay though – I’m not starting reading groups until next week.  In Comprehension Shouldn’t Be Silent, we list the following activities for week 2:

Activity: Set up writer’s workshop or the writing program you use.

We continued reading Ralph Fletcher’s, “The Writer’s Notebook.”  The students each wrote an ‘unforgettable story’ from their lives. It was amazing to hear them automatically pick up on Ralph Fletcher’s voice and that of students highlighted in his book. A couple of kids are having trouble sustaining their interest for more than about five minutes of writing so I’ll have to put a little effort into engaging them.

Activity: Teach the structure and set expectations for our structured independent reading block, R⁵: Read, Relax, Reflect, Respond and Rap .

Well, we had our class meeting where I asked students if they noticed what I was doing while they read. Just as in past years, the least engaged knew exactly what I was doing – taking notes on what they were doing. Mind you, it didn’t alter their behavior, they still didn’t read. I taught the class the rules for R⁵, showed a video of former students doing R⁵, then gave it a run-through. The kids did a pretty good job with reading and relaxing. As we got to the reflect and respond part, where students think about then record a description of a strategy they used, one of them asked the million dollar question. She pointed to the list of strategies and said, “What do these mean?” Apparently, I had forgotten to do any meaningful instruction in the strategies! Perhaps the years are beginning to blend together…

Activity: Define metacognition and introduce predicting, questioning, making connections, visualizing and summarizing.

Um… see above.

Activity: Introduce think-aloud structure and use think-aloud to introduce clarifying.

I love to use a big book called, “Wild Weather” when I do this first think-aloud. It just so happened that the day I chose for this lesson was also the day we spent 45 minutes ducking and covering in the closet due to tornado warnings. Let’s just say we were all really engaged in the text as we read about hurricanes and tornadoes. Rain whipped against our windows driving the point home that weather can indeed be wild in the sunshine state! Despite the distractions, my kids were able to notice when I clarified and explain what I clarified each time.

Activity: Have students notice and share when they clarified.

Okapi has some great ebooks with lots of nonfiction text features. I threw one of these up on the projector and instructed students to read and notice when they needed to clarify. A handful had genuine examples of something they didn’t understand, a few said (probably legitimately) that they didn’t need to clarify because they understood it. A few others just made up something they clarified to demonstrate the skill. That is the problem with trying to use one text for all kids in a class I guess. This is a work in progress.

Reflecting on this week, it is obvious I need to do a better job of teaching the metacognitive strategies. I’ll create some new materials this weekend and see how it goes next week.

Launching the First Six Weeks of School

In our book, Comprehension Shouldn't be Silent (International Reading Association, 2007), Michelle and I talk about all the structures and mindsets we establish with students during the first six weeks of school. We included this section because I like to have something to refer to each year and thought perhaps others would too.  Since I started a blog, I thought it might be interesting for people who've read our book to see how this process works in real time with real students and fire alarms and broken air-conditioners and mandated testing and all the other things that punctuate the start of school.

When I read books written by other teachers, I tend to picture the person who wrote it teaching perfect kids, in a perfectly clean and organized classroom, in a perfect school, with perfectly supportive teammates and administrators. Of course, that isn’t always my reality (especially the part about the perfectly organized classroom.) I'll admit I teach in a really great place. It's half a mile from my house so I can walk or bike if I want to and I always get a great group of kids (how can kids be anything but perfect?) But just like most other teachers, I face a daunting list of standards, students with an incredibly wide range of intellectual and social needs, and the whole host of other things that interrupt or change our perfectly laid out plans. I mean, what is the statistical chance that during the first week of school, all 23 of the years I have taught, the air-conditioner would malfunction and we would have at least one ark-inspiring deluge during dismissal?

Week 1

In Comprehension Shouldn’t be Silent, we list the following activities for week 1. Under each bullet are notes on whether or not I was able to do the activity, what I did and what I learned.

Activities: Establish an emotionally safe, discussion rich environment and assess students’ interests and reading preferences

This will be easy this year – kids are nice to each other, well-mannered and verbal. I had students do an in-class interview of each other, the Gesture-Name Game from Kagan, and our interest inventory at home, which was brought back and used to find commonalities in various cooperative learning structures.  The Gesture-Name Game is one in which students stand in a circle and say their names with a gesture, which the others copy. It serves as a litmus test of the kids’ ability to follow directions, have fun but hold it together, and pay attention. It looks like this will be a good year!

I also shared my Math About Me book. This is a simple pattern book where students write about one thing on the first page, such as, “I have 1 dog,” and build up until they have ten things on the last page. Usually, after I share my model, I have students draft and publish their own on an index card book which is shared with the class. I like to do this the first week because it gives everyone a chance to share some things about themselves and it gives me a chance to pull everyone to complete their DRAs (Developmental Reading Assessment). I realized this class is going to keep me on my toes when a little girl asked if they could publish at home on PowerPoint like I did and the next day, another student brought in her completed book on a pen drive. Um… extensions anyone?

Activity: Work in cooperative groups to establish rules.

We didn’t do this. We have our class norms and it seems to be enough. If the need arises, we will revisit this.

Activity: Set aside time for unstructured reading to observe off-task behaviors.

It never ceases to amaze me that some children, when given time to read, never actually do. They get up, go to the bathroom, change books, roll on the floor, pick their noses (okay, it was only one but I felt the need to share my pain here), and stare into space. I used our disengaged reader checklist from the R5 book (International Reading Association, 2008) and observed for 3 days. By the end I had a good picture of who was truly disengaged and who had an off day. Now I need to begin helping them find a good book.

Activity: Assess metacognition, reading comprehension, and students’ ability to self-assess and goal-set.

Got all my DRAs done. Now I just have to score them. Plans for the weekend?

Activity: Begin Read Aloud

I started reading Ralph Fletcher’s, “The Writer’s Notebook.” If you haven’t read it, it is a book that teaches children how to think and live like a writer – noticing things and writing them down in a notebook. I have always loved sharing this with children because I use books about writing to help me get better and I think they should too. Also, I am a Ralph Fletcher fan. It was especially significant this year because Michelle and I are working on a book about meaningful at-home literacy and we’ve been guided to one of Ralph Fletcher’s books as a mentor text. As I was reading his take on living a writer’s life to students, it was like he was speaking directly to me! When my writing and teaching worlds fold together like this it makes me feel like I am on the right path. My students were inspired as well and many of them brought in their own notebooks the next day. I even saw one get up to write something down during the unstructured reading time.

Activity: Brainstorm what it means to have a discussion, discuss a topic of interest

Did I mention these kids are verbal? They had no problem coming up with what a real discussion looks like and doesn’t look like. And they talked with one another. The only problem was that even though we decided just going around a circle and taking turns wasn’t really a discussion, they defaulted to this at first. I think maybe they have some preconceived notions about what teachers want, regardless of what I tell them. With a little redirection and gentle prodding, they discussions became a little more organic. I think this will take some further coaching to solidify.

I looked over the list of week 1 activities in the book on Friday and felt pretty good about where we were. Oh, and in case you pictured me in a crisp polo shirt with perfect hair in a cool, comfortable room while I was doing all these things, you would be WRONG! It didn’t get below 85 in my room the entire first week. The humidity was ridiculous so I was sporting a lopsided blonde semi-fro and I gave up and wore some of my dressier tank tops by mid-week just to stay cool. My room does still look organized though.

Celebrating our new book

The book is here, the book is here! I finally got my hands on a hard copy of our new book, Reading the Whole Page: Teaching and Assessing Text Features to Meet K-5 Common Core Standards, (Maupin House, 2012). Of course, nothing compares to the feeling of holding your child for the first time, but thumbing through a finished copy of something you worked so hard on is one of life’s great joys. The best part is that all those lessons and thinksheets I have used to teach text features are now in one place, professionally designed, and ready to be used. I can’t wait to pop the CD in and begin using it with this year’s group of kids! My husband Jeff, a fifth-grade teacher, is trying to negotiate shared custody of the book so he can take it to his school on Monday. I’ll have to get him his own copy.

Open a new box of chocolates (both literally and figuratively)

I met my new students at open house today. It always gives me that Christmas feeling – you know, nerves, warm feelings, enthusiasm for what is yet to come. Seeing all those sweet, excited faces in their carefully chosen outfits is heartwarming. I can already tell that there will be lots of parent support. I can’t wait to get started on our family literacy nights

Everyone has gone and the room is full of dropped-off supplies and anticipation. The sharpened pencil bin is overflowing, all the nametags are pristine, and the whiteboard is completely white. The room won’t stay this way long, but it will be filled with the sounds of great conversations, pencils scratching paper, giggles, dice rolling, pages turning, and people working together to learn. I can’t wait for Monday!