Classroom Book Awards 2013

Last year, I read a post by Colby Sharp about Classroom Book Awards on his blog and I loved the idea! It is a perfect way to reflect on all the great books we read and enjoyed during the school year.  Before reading about this idea, I always had students reflect on our class read alouds by choosing which read alouds were their favorite, sparked the best conversations, had the strongest characters, and taught them important life lessons.  However, I never thought about opening the reflection up to include more categories and to give out book awards, which seems more official and exciting for the kids.  

So last year, I began this tradition of hosting Classroom Book Awards and students loved it! Click here to read my post about the process from last year.  Since the end of the school year is approaching, we started the process of nominating and voting on books this week and we now have our winners! To begin the process, we decided on our award categories as a class and I created a nomination form with categories on Google Drive.  Then students nominated one book per category on their form independently.  I collected the nominations and tallied the books that had the most nominations.  Those books then went to the next round.  I repeated this process of tallying up the most votes for three rounds and then the 4th time was the final round where students were voting between two books for each category.  Below are the winners for our awards: 

Classroom Book Award Winners  2013

Book of the Year - One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt

Best Social Issues Book - Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper

Favorite Chapter Book Series - The False Prince Trilogy by Jennifer Nielsen

Best Middle Grade Novel - The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate

Favorite Graphic Novel Series  - Lunch Lady Series by Jarrett Krosoczka

Read Aloud of the Year - One for the Murphys by Lynda Mullaly Hunt

Most Inspiring Read Aloud - The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen

Best Picture Book - It’s a Book! by Lane Smith

Best Historical Fiction Book - The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne

Best Nonfiction Book - Winter’s Tail by Juliana Hatkoff and Isabella Hatkoff

     

 

Enjoy Reading! :)

It's Monday! What are You Reading?

Thank you Jen and Kellee for hosting this weekly!  To see what others are reading and recommending each Monday, or to participate, be sure to check out their blog Teach Mentor Texts :)

About a week ago, I was in my glory at BEA (Book Expo of America) in NYC surrounded by new and upcoming books!  This was my third time going to BEA and I will continue to go each year.  The Javitts Center is filled with high levels of energy and excitement for books!  It is a great opportunity to meet authors, learn about new books being released, get ARCs signed by authors, and be around thousands of people that share a passion for books and reading.  One of the best parts of the day is coming home from the conference to look at all the new ARCs and make my new TBR piles, as well as think about which books I will recommend to different kids in my class.

Some of the books I have read this past week are: 

Wake Up Missing by Kate Messner comes out on September 10th.  My students were very excited when I showed them we had an ARC of this book! This year was the first year I had a student with a concussion...not just one student, but three! So they were the first ones who wanted to read this book since the main characters suffered from a concussion and are attending a facility to try to get rid of their ongoing symptoms.  This is a suspenseful book that is filled with mystery and adventure!  My 5th graders who have read it so far, loved it. :)

 The Show Must Go On! (Three-Ring Rascals) by Kate Klise and Sarah Klise also comes out on September 10th.  This is Book 1 in their new series and I was excited to read it since I love the 43 Old Cemetery Road series! This book/series is written in a similar style to the 43 Old Cemetery Road series and has some letters, illustrations/graphics, and speech bubbles.  Readers love their writing style and find it very engaging. This series will also hook reluctant readers too and is perfect for grades 3-5.  I look forward to continuing to read the next books in this series too.

Home Sweet Horror: Scary Tales Book 1 by James Preller will be released on July 8th.  I am not the scary story type of reader, but I always have students each year who enjoy reading scary stories.  However, sometimes the scary stories are not always appropriate or sometimes even too scary for middle grade readers.  I enjoy James Preller's books so when I saw him signing ARC's for his new Scary Tales series at BEA, I knew I wanted a copy.  At first, I thought it was going to be a book of scary short stories since the title was Scary Tales, but it is actually one continuous scary story with short chapters.  It is a short chapter 
book with illustrations and an appropriate amount of "scary" for middle grade readers.  


Last year, at BEA, I received an ARC of Book 1 in this series so I was very excited to get my hands on Templeton Twins Make a Scene: Book 2 by Ellis Weiner (thank you to the generous person who gave me their copy when I asked where they got it from...thank you, thank you!) This book will be released on October 8th in bookstores.  If you haven't read The Templeton Twins Have an Idea: Book One yet, then definitely add it to your TBR list! 

In addition to the ARCs I received at BEA, I also have been reading books that will support our American Revolution unit that we are currently in.  

One book that we have been reading is The Split History of the American Revolution: A Perspectives Flip Book by Michael Burgan.  This book is part of a series, including one on World War II, the Civil War, and Westward Expansion.  I love this series because it tells both perspectives for the historical event. For example, in the American Revolution book, if you hold the book one way, you read about the Patriot perspective. However, if you flip the book around, you read about the British Loyalist perspective.  It is a great tool to teach point of view and perspective! I highly recommend this series for social studies units and/or nonfiction reading.  

Enjoy reading this week! :)

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

One of my favorite Monday morning routines has become checking out the links at teachmentortexts.com to find out what other bloggers are recommending to read. I have many saved pages that I return to whenever I am at the library or bookstore. Feel free to join with your book recommendations.

Two weeks ago, I wrote about some of the how-to books I have been reading to use as mentor texts during our writing academy this summer. I found another one! How to Negotiate Everything by Lisa Lutz is a hilarious mentor text that could be used at many levels. I shared it with our kindergarten teachers who loved it because the pictures offer so many opportunities for inference and it is packed full of persuasive language. Since they are teaching an opinion unit, these teachers were going to use it as a read-aloud to develop a chart for how to convince people of your opinion. I hadn't thought about it as a mentor for opinion writing, but it works for that as well. This book has many teaching opportunities and laugh out loud moments and I can't wait to see how the children respond to it this summer from second right up to sixth grade.

One of our teachers who attended the Book Expo lent me Patricia Polacco's new book, The Blessing Cup, which is available for pre-order on Amazon. I love how Patricia celebrates special objects that
 have rich histories and stories; The Blessing Cup is another beautiful celebration of family history told by way of the importance of the cup that is passed down from generation to generation. I have read many of Patricia's books several times and there are certain pages that always reduce me to tears. Without being a plot-spoiler, there is a page that got blurry for me and I suspect that I will continue to well up whenever I read this particular page. Once again, Patricia has created a story full of memorable characters and moments. Enjoy!

Finally, I can't say enough about the new Units of Study that have finally come out from Teachers College. This week, I have read Writing Reviews by Lucy Calkins, Elizabeth Dunford, and Celena Dangler Larkey, which is the first-grade opinion writing resource. I also read Changing the World by Lucy Calkins and Kelly Boland Hohne which is the third-grade opinion writing resource. If you are not familiar with the set-up of these new books, they outline about 20 sessions of writing workshop per unit, with explicit ideas for mini-lessons, conferences, small groups, mid-workshop interruptions, and shares. Veteran writing teachers, as well as new teachers will find an incredible amount to learn, as all of the books are not only aligned to the Common Core, but also committed to the philosophy that young writers need audience and purpose, as well as tools for independence and repertoire. The comments throughout all of the books are so passionately full of respect for the struggles that all writers face and authentic practices for encouragement. Each grade level has its own set of books, worth every penny!

Enjoy the week,

How Writing Impacts Instruction

Last week, Stacey Schubitz of twowritingteachers.wordpress.com posed the question to her blogging community:

HOW HAS YOUR INSTRUCTION BEEN IMPACTED BY BEING A WRITER?

 I did not respond that day, as I have been swamped and exhausted. (What a cliche at this time of year!) Also, when I started to respond, I realized that this was a much bigger question for me than I could write in one sitting without mulling and thinking a lot! Since Tuesday, I have been thinking about this question almost whenever I have had a chance to think random thoughts. I will start by agreeing wholeheartedly with Elle, who wrote:

Katie Wood Ray is the person who helped me to understand just how important it was for teachers of writing to be writers. She said that you wouldn’t take your child to a dance teacher who couldn’t dance or to a piano teacher who couldn’t play the piano. She said that teachers have a job that is doubly hard. They need to know how to do the thing – whatever it is (in this case, writing) – and then they need to break it down and talk about the doing of it so that others can understand. She called to us to hop onto the smart train to learn to write or read or dance or play better so that we could be better teachers.
I find myself urging teachers to write alongside of kids. My own writing alongside of teachers gives me the understanding of the process, the failings, the triumphs of doing it. The power of the community, the need for feedback. The lifeblood of feedback. It makes me know that teachers can’t wait days to give back assessments. That students must feel the touch of their hand on their work each day in the feedback we give.

I was lucky enough to have a week with Katie Wood Ray many years ago as my first experience with workshop instruction--she gave a week-long workshop at Amherst College in the mid-nineties that still impacts my teaching life-- so I especially loved Elle's reference to her. I also couldn't agree more that teachers have to be writers with their students, just as athletic coaches have to be knowledgeable about their sport. My tennis coach would not have been able to teach me a serve if he was not able to break it down into small parts.

But there's more about being a writer that helps me teach when I am in classrooms.

• I know that sometimes writing does not go the way that you plan or expect. Sometimes a piece takes a turn away from the preconceived path and a map or an  outline loses its effectiveness. While this is a problem for a prompt-oriented piece, some of my favorite work that I have done took me on an unexpected path. While I love to teach children about planning their writing, I also think that, especially for students who are more advanced writers, there will be times when discoveries about how stories should go will be made along the writing path. If, in my coaching life that doesn't give me my own set of daily students, I am lucky enough to meet with a student who discovers something about a character along the story's way or thinks of another reason to support a claim from writing about others, I would celebrate, and teach into how writers adjust and modify plans, sometimes.

• Sometimes, it really is hard to think of what to write or how to start. Sometimes, ideas tangle and dance just out of reach and no matter how many starts and re-starts you take, those ideas just don't make sense out of your fingertips or off of your pencil. I am more empathetic to students when this happens to them, and I am a great believer in having sections of notebooks that are dedicated to potential ideas. (I've been needing this for blog posts, recently!)

• Responding to the mechanics of my writing is much less important to me than responding to my writing as a reader. I want to know if what I write has an impact. Yes, of course I want readers to understand my work, but I want them to relate to my work and have a reaction that is not about grammar, spelling and punctuation. Do you like what I've written??? Have I convinced you or entertained you or informed you??? Those are the questions that I really matter to me. One time, I read a piece in my writing group that was full of emotion to me and at the end, one of the members told me that she wanted a little more description in the opening setting. This happened a while ago and I still remember the sadness I felt that the first response to an emotional piece was about the setting, even though I really do know that settings are important. As a teacher of writing, I try to always react to the content and the emotion in students' work before anything else, especially when a student has taken any sort of emotional risk.

• Charts and checklists really do work for me when I am going back over a draft of writing. Just recently, I have used charts to remind me of transitional language when I was writing a mentor essay. I also appreciate the reminders that charts provide for story components and craft moves. I write a lot, but even still, I don't remember to include all that I should and these tools of the trade are really helpful. As a teacher, modeling how I use them and authentically using them really supports our students' paths toward agency and independence.

• Having a writing life makes me a better participant in life. I pay attention more, ask more questions, wonder out loud, linger over interactions, make decisions to remember, appreciate the everyday humor, emotion and beauty that exist in my daily world. This is where I think that story-telling and morning meeting times when teachers and students really, really listen to each other talk about what has happened to them is so, so important. 

• Having a writing life can also be distracting to my daily life. I find myself thinking about my writing when I wake up, when I'm walking, when I'm driving, when I'm cooking dinner--you get the idea... And when I am really involved in developing a piece, it's harder for me to generate energy for another. I have a lot of respect for my high school daughters who have to balance writing assignments across subjects, but I wonder about the passion and commitment that they have for any of their pieces.

• When I am really involved in creating a story, I need to talk about it and create those characters, scenes and events so that they are almost as real in my physical life as they are in my mental life. When I am developing a claim, I make it much stronger when I can get people to debate with me and be on the hunt for clues that support or detract from my opinion. It amazes me how much is out there when you are looking for it!

Stacey's question distracted me this week and I am grateful for that. I also loved reading what others wrote! You can read more by following the link to the comments.

Enjoy the week,

It's Monday! What are You Reading?

Thank you Jen and Kellee for hosting this weekly!  To see what others are reading and recommending each Monday, or to participate, be sure to check out their blog Teach Mentor Texts :)

                                             

We are huge fans of the Theodore Boone series by John Grisham in my classroom and have been counting down to the day the fourth book, The Activist, was available in stores last week! This series is perfect for reluctant readers and/or readers who love mystery, suspense, and a page-turner! I have read and loved all of the books in this series and now can not wait for the fifth book to come out...hopefully there will be a fifth!! If you haven't tried this series, I encourage you to pick up the first book, Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, and give it a try - you won't be disappointed. :)                                                                                 

We are currently in our historical fiction book club unit and have been reading various historical fiction picture books and chapter books during read aloud - click here to read my posts on our historical fiction unit.    One of the books we read aloud and loved was Freedom on the Menu: The Greensboro Sit-Ins by Carole Boston Weatherford so I was excited to find a companion text to read aloud titled Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood up by Sitting down by Andrea Davis Pinkney and Brian Pinkney.   This is a great book to read aloud and compare to Freedom on the Menu to discuss similarities and differences on how the two books shared the story of the same situation.  One of my favorite parts of the books is the detailed Author's Notes and the large timeline of important events in the back of the book.      

 In my classroom, we are also fans of the My Life as a... series by Janet Tashjian and were so excited to buy and read My Life as a Cartoonist when it came out this month! This series is perfect for reluctant readers and readers who enjoy and benefit from illustrations to help them understand vocabulary too.  The idea of having sketches in the margins throughout this series, to help define vocabulary used in the story, is brilliant! It not only helps readers navigate through some vocabulary, but also makes it fun to read too!    Thank you Janet Tashjian for continuing to add books to this series!                                                                                                                                                                                                          

Enjoy Reading! :)

                                                                                                                         

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? How-To Books!

One of my favorite Monday morning routines has become checking out the links at teachmentortexts.com to find out what other bloggers are recommending to read. I have many saved pages that I return to whenever I am at the library or bookstore. Feel free to join with your book recommendations.

During the summer, our district offers a week long Writing Academy with a theme or a specific genre for children entering second through sixth grades. This year, we will be studying and creating how-to books. To prepare for, I have been looking for and reading how-to potential mentors. I'd welcome recommendations, but so far some of my nominations are:


How To Babysit a Grandpa by Jean Reagan

 I read this one over the winter and at first, I wondered if it would be too abstract, since it is not clearly procedural as cookbooks and science experiments are. However, I keep coming back to it and I think that it would be a useful mentor text to show children how they can write about a person within a how-to construct.





How To by Julie Morstad
Thank you to Carrie Gelson for bringing this one to my attention. The publishing date is May 30 and I have been exploring all of the previews that I can find on line with five copies in my shopping cart. How to wonder, be brave, and see the breeze are topics that are described. I can't wait to see how it inspires children.



How To Make Bubbles by Erika Shores is one of the Puffin Plus series of procedural writing and it is perfect for teaching younger students how to be explicit in their how-to writing. Great pictures and clear, simple language should work really well to inspire our younger students, especially.


Because I am envisioning some video making during the summer, I searched youtube for videos that might go along with some of the book activities. I can't wait to try showing them:
http://www.quietyoutube.com/watch?v=WlqkwcDneLM : a video about making bubbles

Another video I watched to go with this unit is about blowing a bubble with gum and the format is exactly what I hope that some of the students create since the narrator goes through clear steps and descriptions, including some warnings!
http://www.quietyoutube.com/watch?v=u9SzUDm14ss: a video about how to blow bubbles

TIP: If you insert the word quiet before a youtube link, the ads disappear!

I have a few cookbooks and craft books that we will use as well. If there are particular favorites anyone has out there, please share!

Over the weekend, I have been working my way through the first of the new Units of Study from Teachers College that arrived this week. Talk about amazing how-to books. Each grade has its own set of spiral bound books that accompany writing units. From Scenes to Series by Mary Ehrenworth and Christine Holley is in the first grade collection and it contains nineteen sessions that describe workshop instruction. I am loving the language, work samples, teaching tips and resources that are included. As I've been reading this book, I have been keeping track of some of my favorite lines and descriptions and I will share them in a post that I am planning for later this week.

Happy reading, everyone!

Initial Reflections on Performance-Based Assessments

Since we are trying to prepare students for Smarter Balanced Assessment that will begin in 2014-2015, fourth-graders across our district completed performance assessments over the last week. We used an assessment that Teachers College Reading and Writing Project designed. If you are looking for examples of assessments, their website contains several at various grade levels.

We used one of the fourth-grade performance assessments that challenged students to think about school lunches. The materials include two articles and a video that students watch twice, according to the directions. Students then decided whether they were in favor of being allowed to bring lunches from home or having programs where all students buy lunch. I watched some of our classes take the assessment, I have looked at student work, at I have talked to students and teachers about this assessment and some of the feedback and implications for instruction are:

• Taking notes from and gaining information from a video is difficult. Even though most of our students have had their fair share of screen time, they watch as passive participants without much debate, conversation or learning going on after sessions of screent time. Several students talked about the video going too fast for them to take notes. Some implications for instruction?
• We had at least one class watch the video once on the big screen and then individually on computers with the option of pausing. I'll be interested in talking to these students about their experience with the task.
• Students have to learn how to take notes without feeling the need to write full, perfect sentences. They have to develop an understanding of why we take notes, but for many students who are just mastering the skill of writing in sentences, this is really, really hard.

• The video is designed as the first task of the assessment and is contains a clear bias toward purchasing/providing school lunches. We have teaching points that address the point of view and bias of the author and we will need to develop some points around the point of view and bias of the video-maker, as well. That being said, some questions around the concept of video as a part of assessment:
• Should there be a balance of biased clips? At least one of our students got stuck because she was in favor of bringing school lunches but that side of the argument did not exist in the video clip. If that's the case, a long assessment becomes longer...
• Should the point of view of the makers be highlighted?
• Should video clips be neutral? Those would be hard to find for many of the topics that lend themselves to making claims.
• Should students be allowed as much time as they choose to stop and start the clip? With the pressures of on-line testing, districts should be acquiring the resources for this to happen...but are they?

• Let's keep going with the concept of bias. Students had been working on research-based essays leading up to the performance assessment so we have been developing text sets around specific topics. When the topics are controversial, it is challenging to find level-appropriate collections that support both sides. The TC assessment definitely leaned toward providing school lunches through not only the video, but also the reading selections. Because we want students to use evidence from texts and not just their own thinking and experiences, there are implications for instruction. I'm wondering if we need to:
• teach students that they should choose the side that has more evidence, regardless of their opinion. My teenage daughter is taught this strategy to prepare for AP exams but at what age are students really developmentally able to argue a stance that they don't support? And what about those of us who are so committed to teaching about purpose in writing workshop? For the assessment, you might need to assume a position with which you don't agree?
• teach students to be adept at addressing the opposing beliefs. (Some people think... but I think becomes an even more important thinking prompt to teach students).

I'm sure that there will be much more to come as I reflect with the teachers about the unit and the assessment--we will be meeting in June to share struggles, strategies and celebrations. I'd really be interested to hear about other districts' experiences as I'm sure that we are not the only ones trying out these new assessments.

Enjoy the weekend!

Thinking about Purpose for Students

As the district's new Writing and Social Studies Coordinator, I am leading the development of a whole new curriculum for the sixth grade social studies. To further complicate this challenge, we decided that we would integrate and embed writing instruction into content areas and reading. Throughout the year, I have met with teachers to develop essential questions, learning outcomes, and enduring understandings that mesh with not only the Common Core State Standards, but also with our state frameworks and the rest of the units in our district in different grades. At this point, we have chosen resources and set up the units and yesterday, we met and began structuring a learning plan.

At the recommendation of a colleague, I began the day by showing the teachers the Alan November TedTalk where he emphasizes the importance of purpose for students. He told story after story about the quality of work students of all ages created when they felt that their work had purpose. Because one of the end-of-unit assessments will be creating a travel brochure of one of the places we will study, some of us wondered out loud about linking up with a local travel agency to see if they would consider being on the receiving end of a multi-media presentation about Brazil, Tanzania, or Australia, the three places where we will focus our studies.

Today, I called a travel agency to see if they might be interested in using student work. As she understood what I was suggesting, she realized the potential win-win scenario this could offer, since students could research and present parts of these countries that she doesn't have materials about. She was not only interested in receiving and using well-done presentations to show clients, she also is collecting resources and is willing to offer guidance and feedback to students about what sort of products would be useful for her business and how they could tweak their projects so that she might be able to use them. I am so excited about this concept and hope that we really do get to implement it in the fall, as what an amazing purpose for students! If anyone has seen this work or has other ideas for setting up authentic opportunities for students as they study geography, culture and interactions, I would love to hear about them.
Take care,

Historical Fiction Book Club Unit: Part 3

Click here to read Historical Fiction Book Club Unit: Part 1 (Launching the unit)

Click here to read Historical Fiction Book Club Unit: Part 2  (Read aloud and writing about reading)

This month, students have been working hard in their historical fiction book clubs to read, think, write, and talk deeply about their historical fiction books.  They have been creating charts and using a variety of note-taking strategies to help them prepare for their book club conversations that they have on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Students choose whether to write their thinking on post-its, in their reader's notebook or book club notebook, or use Google Drive to help them deepen their thinking and prepare for their conversations.  

Below are some examples of the work students have been doing in their notebooks and on Google Drive to prepare for their conversations:

Bulletin Board where students post examples from their notebook 

Example of how one student used Google Drive to create a chart 

Another example of how one student used Google Drive to create a chart

Example of a chart created on Google Drive 

Example of a chart created on Google Drive

                 

Example of a plan one student created in preparation for conversation

   

Have a great week! :)

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

On Mondays, Jen Vincent and Kellee Moye host What Are You Reading? on their blog, teachmentortext.com. If you are ever in need of a book recommendation, this is a guaranteed place to find some!

Over the week, I read a few great books. One of my favorites was Hey Little Ant by Philip Hoose and Hannah Hoose. This book was published in 1998 and was a Reading Rainbow selection that I had never heard of until it was mentioned by a favorite website of mine, learningtogive.org. I bought it for our kindergarten teachers and then read about it again in Non-Fiction Mentor Texts by Lynne Dorfman and Rose Capelli (another book I read over the last two weeks). If you haven't read Hey Little Ant, I highly recommend it for young children, as well as older students. Perspective and empathy are important themes in this book and it could serve as a launchpad to much more serious conversations about other people's lives-- I can envision Hey Little Ant inspiring conversations about not only animal rights, but also decision-making, peer pressure, human rights and social awareness.

I also read Hold Fast by Blue Baillet which would actually work well with Hey Little Ant, since it is another book with strong messages about empathy, perspective, and social awareness. While I did not find Hold Fast to be as compelling as some other books I have read, I am glad that I read it and I think that it's important for educators and students alike to read about and learn about life in homeless shelters.

Non-Fiction Mentor Texts by Lynne Dorfman and Rose Capelli is now extremely tagged and noted. We have launched opinion writing units in several grades this year. Since these are new units, we do not have extensive lists of mentor texts or samples of student writing and this book provides both. It also provides great teaching tips and lesson formats for other types of informational writing. I have already read a few chapters multiple times and I am not returning this book to my shelf any time soon.

Also, I have to add that we are re-writing our sixth grade social studies curriculum and I have been reading every exemplar that I can find. The resources and the generosity of districts are overwhelming as every time I search, I find new materials to read and digest that have helped me plan and prepare for upcoming meetings where we will develop our units. Some of my favorites have been from the Greece Central School District, learningtogive.org, Discovery Education, Choices.edu and National Geographic, but really, these resources represent just the tip of the iceberg.

Happy reading,