Sophie and Sadie's Scholarly Site

 

My friend Meredith Landis posted this on her Facebook page:

Question of the Week: Picture books to teach characterization protagonists, antagonists, and changing characters.... Who has ideas?

My vote: An author study of one of my favorites: Eve Bunting!

I chose three of her many, many books with characters that change in some way with themes that older elementary students can dig deeper into.

 

Which picture books would you suggest?

I love reading, and of course, I love my dogs. I have known some kind, patient old souls who are of the four-legged variety, but the first and best example would be  our  beloved old Max,  my Daddy’s German Shorthaired Pointer, who let so many little children ride him, rough-house, and play with him. When Max was being “loved on,” his  big brown eyes would shine so brightly and that little nub of a tail would wag like it was on by a motor.  He was the most patient, sweet-natured, and kind dog  I’ve ever seen -hands down.

I thought of our old Max when I saw that  therapy dogs were being used to help kids read. I can see Max doing something like this. Max would have been a natural!

Here are several ways that dogs are being used in libraries across the country to help children in learning to read beginning with a story from ABC News.

Therapy dogs are used in the READ program in Salt Lake City.

And in New York, both the dogs and the kids in this library share something in common: They both live in shelters.

You can read more about a similar program using dogs to promote literacy at TALES FOR PAWS.

And here are some great books to read aloud to your own dog. I am sure our old Max would approve.

Get a tissue for this one by one of my favorite authors, Cynthia Rylant.

I told myself that I needed to take it easy on the professional books this summer ( after all I  still have to buy groceries, pet food and keep that AC hummin’ hear in good ole SC) so I’ve indulged my thirst for professional knowledge by mostly following several blogs.

HOWEVER, because I do feel like I need to feed my mind in many different ways,  I decided I would allow myself one or two professional books during my summer vacation, and with only a few days left of June, I made one  of  my first choices:

"I believe that classroom environments are most effective when they are literate and purposeful, organized and accessible, and most of all, authentic."

Debbie Miller,
Teaching With Intention

from http://www.literacy-builders.com/free-resources/quotes-we-love

If you are not familiar with Debbie Miller and her work with reading comprehension, you may want to view these videos to get a better idea of the authentic, literate, and purposeful classroom environments that she is speaking of.
These were a few videos of her teaching style in action on You Tube which were posted by Stenhouse Publishers:







As you think about what you want  to go on inside your classroom, you may want to check  out Reading With Meaning which is definitely one of my  teaching “anchor texts” for teaching reading comprehension. My  hard copy is now about ten years old, and I have a backup copy on my Kindle.



TEACHING INTENTIONALLY: Why Do We Do What We Do?

If  your interest is piqued, you may preview several chapters of Teaching With Intention at the Stenhouse site like I did:

http://www.stenhouse.com/html/millerpreview.htm?r=n144


In reading reviews of this book on Amazon, one or two reviewers said the book was “ a good summer read.” That  kinda sounds like “fluff”  to me, but after reading the first few pages, I understood what the reviewers intended: Summer is a good time to reflect on our classrooms not just the decorations and furniture arrangements, but our reflections should focus on what goes on inside those classroom walls. Everything we do, think, say, and believe as teachers should be reflected in our classroom: the  arrangement, the overall environment, our lessons, our words- all create an atmosphere of who were are as teachers and what we believe in.

This idea spoke to me so strongly because it reminded me of the words that were spoken about what was important  to my family as evidenced in my home.

Gary Smallen , an assistant football coach at Coastal University in Conway, SC, has for all intents and purposes been a big brother to me. He was a player for my father Don at  Dentsville High School in the 1960’s. The two remained lifelong  friends, mentor and student, player and coach, father and son until my Daddy passed away in 2005.I asked Gary to speak about my mother Iris when she passed away in March 2010.

Gary began his eulogy speaking about how you can tell a lot about people just by going into their homes. He said he had spoken with his son ( and my father’s god-son Jason,  and the two men came to the conclusion that  when a visitor  comes into your home, it is almost like a profiler gathering evidence and information. And so a speech was born! 
Gary said that anyone could tell a lot about my mother and me by the home I created that we shared for the past several years. ( I moved three years ago to  the small town where I have now taught for almost 20 years, and bought my dream house- a nearly 100 year old farm house). Gary spoke of the  old family photographs, the old sports memorabilia, the Biblical quotes, the  old handmade   objects like quilts and churns, the many books in almost every room, and how each object included and displayed in this home was something precious that held a story and was of some importance. But these objects in my home also reflected what my family held dear: our love of family and our past, our love of sports, our strong faith, and our love of knowledge. I cherished the words he spoke that day because now as I look around my home, I remember that each and every place I look- I see and feel LOVE.

When I read Debbie Miller’s first chapters, I felt like her words were speaking to in the same way that Gqry’s words did that day. They were powerful, strong, and thought-provoking. That’s what I want my kids to feel when they look around my room this year. My plans for this year must be done intentionally.

Some of the challenges and questions I had  on my mind were:

• What do people see when  they come into my room?
• Is what I value about learning evident?
• Does what I have displayed reflect my own beliefs about learning?

Thinking about the answers to these questions is empowering and  can also somewhat sobering.

So as I am preparing for my new school year, I need to be careful, selective, and thoughtful  not only in how the room looks ( and Lord knows, we teachers LOVE to plan  and decorate our rooms) but what goes on when my class arrives MUST BE DONE WITH INTENTION.

As I am picturing my room filled with children, I have to think “How am I going to get them to that place that is my ideal, my dream classroom?”

These questions have given me what I need to start.

An overview for students of the strategies needed to form Super Six teams. This will be how I introduce reciprocal teaching this year to my students.

In later posts, I will include some of the handouts and mini-lessons and procedures needed to begin using this powerful teaching strategy.

NOTE: There are a few "techno" problems that I need to iron out. My original seems to be without all these obvious flaws. I'll try to get those straightened out.:)

Today I am going to focus on something that inspired me  last year and  gave me an “A-ha!” moment: the teaching strategy of reciprocal teaching. I am a fan of this strategy because of this woman:
Lori Ozckus!



http://lorioczkus.com/index.php


Thanks to her work in reading comprehension,  I changed how I approached  my small-groups and guided reading in my fourth grade  social studies classroom.I had been searching for  years for new ways to make reading a more interactive, hands-on experience-one that involves  movement and manipulatives and yet “kept it real” for fourth graders.  Hers was the first book I encountered that  does just that!

First,  an example of Lori Oczkus’  in action teaching a reading lesson from You Tube:





Lori Ozckus takes  reading comprehension and makes it interactive with the use of  both hand signals and puppetry in her book Interactive Think-Aloud Lessons. One of my fellow teachers who is a kindergarten teacher also had  interest in the use of hand signals and movement with her kindergarten students to enhance learning. When we talked about this book, she grew excited and confirmed to me that she had seen firsthand in her own classroom how this strategy could work. I was ready to try these strategies of adding a movement and interaction to  help readers in my  fourth grade classroom.




http://lorioczkus.com/books-fabulous-four.php



http://www.primaryconcepts.com/rdgcomp/Comprehension-Puppets.asp



While I really loved the idea of the hand signals for read-alouds, in the intermediate grades, our focus in reading  shifts from “learning to read” to “reading to learn”  because more reading is done in content-areas. While I still do read-alouds,  I teach social studies so the reading strategies I address need to scaffold readers who are beginning to delve into the complexities of informational texts and nonfiction content-area reading. When we read in my class whether it is a shared reading, guided reading, or a read-aloud, I also have to address content, and my time is limited so I need lessons that can pull double-duty.







I went on a search again for interactive strategies and found that lo and behold: Lori Ozckus  also has a book on this as well- reciprocal teaching!



But I have to admit that at that time, I REALLY wasn’t sure if I knew what reciprocal teaching even meant.

Another Google search took me to seeing how this strategy could  be used in the content-areas and in any upper grade classroom where reading takes place in some form nearly every day.


Here is reciprocal teaching in action in an intermediate classroom:










I was convinced just by what I  saw that this strategy could work for me. Lucky for me, I found a chapter sample from her book online here:

http://www.reading.org/Libraries/Inspire/03-507_Chapter02.pdf




Please visit  Lori Oczkus’ website, you can see more of her work in using reciprocal teaching in action along with some additional handouts such as a viewing guide.

http://lorioczkus.com/index.php


http://www.reading.org/downloads/publications/videos/500-VideoGuide.pdf



In my next several blogs, I am going to show how I took some ideas from the work of  Lori Ockzus along with several other online resources to adapt and create my own reciprocal teaching style along with some lessons and resources to help in your classroom.

I’ve spent the past few mornings working on some things in preparation for the upcoming school year, and these past few days I’ve just been overwhelmed at the amount of great websites and blogs and classrooms that I’ve visited all while sitting here on my comfy little couch. In case, you didn’t already know it:There are some amazing teachers out there in the world who are just a click away!
Despite all the negative news that teachers seem to attract these days, the majority of us go to work each day and close the doors to our classrooms and teach! It’s sad then that most of us will never make the six o’clock news unless we retire at age 100 having taught five generations in the same school. Teaching can sometimes be thankless but also very isolated.
That is all the more reason that we as teachers need to come together collaborate and support each other even across long distances, and visiting and sharing and ENCOURAGING via classroom websites and blogs is a great way to do just that.

I feel enthusiastic,renewed, and encouraged in my beliefs about both education and what I do as a teacher, but I’ve also discovered better ways of doing some things that I already believe work well in my classroom.

For several years, I’ve been a fan of Ms. Powell ( Angela Watson) of mspowell.com. As someone who is organizationally-challenged, I admire her skill in lesson planning and storing her materials, but she also has some instructional practices that are worth checking out. I believe that her book The Cornerstone should be a gift for all first year teachers in the primary and elementary grades. It’s THAT good in helping to set up a classroom, set procedures, communicate with parents- everything.
Her website is the first place where I saw the idea of a content-based bulletin board that would serve as a visual review for students.
http://thecornerstoneforteachers.com/


My district supports a literacy-based model of reading that encourages the use of anchor charts. Having used Strategies That Work for a decade, I am familiar with that idea. I found many good examples at readinglady.com.:


The Reading Lady
http://www.readinglady.com/mosaic/tools/AnchorChartPhotographsfromKellyandGinger/

The Mosaic Listserv
http://www.readinglady.com/mosaic/tools/tools.htm
Another teacher that I am a HUGE fan of is Angela Bunyi who blogs for Scholastic. Her use of anchor charts and bulletin board incorporate several great ideas from the  Daily 5  and CAFÉ books and Tanny MacGregor’s book on comprehension.


http://blogs.scholastic.com/3_5/2008/08/combining-readi.html
Last year before my job description was  social studies teacher, I hung up a “chart wall” as described in Denise Leograndis’ book, Launching The Writing Workshop which I LOVE because there are plenty of colorful pictures of the classroom and examples of the charts. However, once I became a social studies teacher, it was difficult to adapt that idea to a content-area. I was really bummed!





So now I have found something that seems to take the best of all of these ideas: FOCUS WALLS!

Take a look at the Power Points by a third grade teacher in California

http://schools.cajonvalley.net/webpages/tlee/hm_reading.cfm?subpage=262015
My imagination is just running wild for FOCUS WALLS!





I imagine my focus wall as a content-area chart wall that is very LITERACY-BASED.   I imagine my wall being a place that includes something along the lines of Michael Gravois (who has so many wonderful hands-on ways for children to create study tools and manipulatives in  his many books such as the one below about publishing research). The class mural or quilt would be ideal in my social studies classroom.




Using my imagination and some online examples, I’ve come up with my own focus wall based on what’s expected with my district’s literacy model and also what I believe is best for my own classroom such as reciprocal teaching during my  small group/ guided reading block. Here are my headings for my  new focus wall.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yLgXZ05cnBsXipFd1E-oMWvppmc9IvqsuKSqWYC8-Qk/edit?hl=en_US


I am looking forward  to later   posting some pictures of my very own content-area, literacy-based focus wall.



I hope you’re WOW’ed by focus walls, too!:)

As I’m ending my day, I’m thinking about some potential themes for this blog. I noticed as I thought about change that I was humming an Eric Clapton song,CHANGE THE WORLD. I also happen to find a great YouTube Video with really COOL graphics to share.



The  chorus of this song reminded me of  the book, MISS RUMPHIUS by Barbara Cooney. The character Miss Rumphius sets several goals for herself as a child, but her grandfather reminds her that she needs to do something to improve the world. This book is a great  read at the beginning of any school year or any new venture  as a way to encourage students to set similar goals.

We as teachers need to encourage our students to look ahead, set goals,  and plan their futures because the outcome of our lives begin with a single thought whether they are positive or negative.

As the saying goes,

“Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.”

( from http://thinkexist.com)

And like Miss Rumphius, we need to help students see their lives as a  whole- a destiny, a legacy that can be planned with set goals that go behind ourselves.

Why  should parents teachers, and children think of leaving a legacy? According to the Legacy Project website,
“Leaving a legacy is a human need. It is in part selfish -- we want to feel immortal. The idea of leaving something behind that will "live forever" is appealing. We also want to feel like we matter in the vast sea of humanity. By connecting with those at the beginning of their lives, we do complete a full circle in life's journey and leave some of our "selves" -- our experiences, ideas, values, and personal example -- in the minds and hearts of others. But leaving a legacy also has an altruistic component. If we don't leave a positive legacy, what kind of society are we building? What kind of world are we leaving behind? What are we passing on to our children and grandchildren?”

The Legacy Project has a huge list of  many wonderful ideas, lessons, and books to help parents and teachers teach the idea of leaving a legacy in children and in families.
http://www.legacyproject.org/teachers.html


Here’s a new charmer: A wonderful story that reminded me of my Grandmama who left behind a legacy of love and living  a life for something more than  ourselves.



We can really change the world and leave a little something good of ourselves behind just like Miss Rumphius.
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