Reflection-- Anne Frank Research

One of my favorite things about teaching is the ability to reflect on my lessons.  Figuring out what went wrong and implementing changes to enhance lessons brings such satisfaction.  Sometimes, those changes aren't going to be used until the following year, but still, there is growth in the process.  I also think that blogging is a fantastic way to reflect.  It gives you the opportunity to get comments from others who may have struggled with the same things.  Plus, there's the organizational factor.  I often refer back to posts I have written in the past to help me remember successful lessons.

So with all that being said, today's post is another one of reflection.  I recently did a pre-reading assignment with my eighth graders (read more about it in this previous post).  Last year, the students wrote and delivered speeches.  This year, I switched it up slightly and had the students write and present a newspaper article.  Each student researched a topic and wrote their paper, but we didn't have a lot of time.  Don't you hate the time factor?!  This is where I ran into trouble.  I really should have had each student do a visual to go along with their article.  Instead, I had the students present their article by reading it--with NO visual.  My ultimate goal was for students to learn from their peers' presentations.  I had the audience taking notes, but since there was no visual, it was very difficult for them to follow along with the presentation.  Students kept interrupting the presenter asking them to repeat things, "What was that date?  How do you spell that name?  What year again?"  By the end of two days of presentations, I wasn't sure the students in the audience got anything out of it.  Next year if I do this assignment, I will definitely require a visual that contains both pictures (to bring life to the topic) and bullet points (to help the audience follow along).  That way, the audience can focus on listening, but still learn from the research their peers did!   Lesson learned- sometimes forgoing parts of assignments "for the sake of time" actually ends up being more costly in the end.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

It is important that we share with our young people the reason for three day weekends.  So often, we get swept up in the enjoyment of having a day off, that we fail to recognize the reason for the holiday.  This blog post is primarily to share an infographic that was shared with me by Waldorf Honda.  This succinct poster helps us all remember what a special man Martin Luther King, Jr. was.  I hope that you enjoy the infographic and share it with your kiddos.  Help them learn from this great man and appreciate the real reason for this holiday!

Thank you for sharing this with us, Waldorf Honda!  

Maternity Leave Coming to an End

Hi Everyone!

It has been about 10 months since my last blog post.  In September I had a baby and now my maternity leave is coming to an end.  Here is my sweet boy--

Sorry that it has been so long.  I have had a wonderful time at home with my munchkin, and now it is time to get back to the work I love.  I'll have a busy first week back, as it is also going to be the week before Christmas break.  If you're looking for engaging lessons for that week, I have some good ideas on last year's Christmas blog post. 

Happy Holidays! 

Annotating Text in Middle School English

In the past two weeks, annotating texts has come up a couple of times.  It all started when I got an email from one of my past students.  This particular student has been very thoughtful, as he not only visits his old stomping grounds, but he actually tries to improve what's going on here.  I find it refreshing that as he is sitting in his high school English class, he is thinking, "Wow, Mrs. Smith could give the kids a jump on this concept."  In a nutshell, the email said they were doing a lot of annotating, and maybe I should introduce it to the seventh and eighth graders.  This got my wheels turning.  Of course, "close reading" and "annotation" are words that are thrown around, but was I doing anything specific to prepare my students in these areas?

Then today, it came up again in a very real way.  My seventh graders are reading A Single Shard by Linda Sue Park.  They are around chapter 8, and they have gotten a lot of information about how Tree-ear and Crane-man live their lives.  After reading the first two chapters of the book, I prepped the students for a paragraph which was "coming down the line."  Today, I revisited that initial discussion and expected the kids to write the paragraph.  For you to really get a picture, here is a little bit more information.

The paragraph was to be a response to the following question: Explain what the quote means and how it relates to the situation of Tree-ear and Crane-man.  Use numerous text details to support your answer.  Pgs 44-45 might be a good reference.  

“Scholars read the great words of the world. But you and I must learn to read the world itself.”  Pg 7

And our initial discussion after chapters 1-2 contained this note: Scholars study books and learn from what they read.  Tree-ear and Crane-man must learn to read the world- meaning cultures.  They learn things by reading behaviors.  Not book smart, but smart with experiences.  

With a little help, the kids came up with those notes, so I was feeling very confident that they would have no problem writing this paragraph, even if it was coming two weeks later.  To my surprise, I heard, "I don't get it," and I saw confusion on faces all across the room.  It was one of those teacher moments when you think...what?  How do they not understand this.  What I realized (with a little self-reflection) is that the students were not making a connection between everything they had read in chapters 1-8 and this paragraph prompt.  It took them a long time to realize that Tree-ear "reads the world" in almost everything that he does (scavenging for food and getting a job being just two examples).  What would have made my students' lives much easier is if they were annotating the text.  If, after introducing the quote, I had said, "as you read, purposefully annotate the text with this prompt in mind," I would have gotten much better results.  

So, it is with great excitement that I embark on the annotation journey with my middle school students.  I read a very helpful blog post by Dave at Teaching the Core.  He both makes a distinction between annotation and the buzz word "close reading" and give step-by-step tips on introducing it in your classroom.  Here is his post (read it...you will not be sorry).  With Dave's assistance, I am going to introduce purposeful annotation with a folktale about foxes.    I have determined that the purpose in reading this article is to get a visual of a "clever fox" to connect to A Single Shard (so reading for understanding) and our end result will be a class discussion about the ways the author uses "cleverness" to make the story interesting.  In the story,"The Too-Clever Fox" by Leigh Bardugo, there are numerous examples of the fox being sly, but it becomes really interesting when there is a twist at the end which causes the fox to almost lose his life.  Hopefully this will also lead to a discussion about the fox being cocky.  Ultimately we will connect this back to Crane-man's experience with the fox.  I want the students to see the flaw in the idea that foxes are clever and magical.  In A Single Shard it says, "Foxes were dreaded animals.  They were not large or fierce, like the bears and tigers that roamed the mountains, but they were known to be fiendishly clever.  Some people even believed that foxes possessed evil magic" (Park 82).  I think this activity allows the students to see the fox in a different light and then they will be able to imagine what would have happened if Crane-man had continued on his journey instead of turning back when he saw the dreaded fox.  

Annotation is not really different from engaging with the text through, say, a dialectical journal, which is something I do with my 8th graders quite often, but there is something about having the writing directly on the text that is really appealing to me.  As students enter higher level English classes, it may be the case that they own their books and can write in them freely.  However, for middle school English, this is one area that will be a struggle.  The 8th graders are about to start To Kill a Mockingbird, which for some students is a difficult book.  I am going to need to think of a way to have them meaningfully annotate their borrowed books.  Perhaps it will be with sticky notes, although I personally feel that is just not the same.  

If you have any ways you use annotation, especially with books that the students cannot write in, let me know.  I am all ears!

As always, thanks for sticking with me in this journey. 

It's Christmas Time

I have been thinking a lot about my lesson plans for this week...the week before Christmas.  We have wonderful holiday traditions at St. John's which include the Christmas Concert on Thursday and a caroling assembly and faculty/8th grade luncheon on Friday.  Lots of fun to be had by all for sure, but how can I keep my lessons engaging up until that last day?  Here are some of my thoughts.

Today, I did a lesson on allusion in The Giver.  I realized that teaching allusion with pop music might be just the thing to spruce up the lesson.  I hopped onto YouTube and showed about the first minute of the following two videos:

Allusion to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet

Allusion to Kryptonite (Superman)

This was the hook for the lesson.  I didn't tell them what we were doing just yet.  I had them watch the first video and try and find some connection to a literary device.  They had no idea, at first.  We watched the first minute again, and with a little prodding, they got it.  They didn't know the name of the literary device, but they knew what I wanted them to "get."  Taylor Swift was referencing Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  In the second video, Kryptonite comes and goes very quickly, so they needed to actually see the lyric to "get it."  This is the video I used for the lyrics:

At least with that class and that concept, I started the week off strong.  One day down, four more to go.

Here are some things I am planning for the rest of my week--
Comma Jeopardy- because who wouldn't want to review commas (and take a quiz) the week before Christmas.

Writing about gratitude-- This will actually be in connection to the literature that we are reading.  The students will write about something that they are grateful for, and then they will think about the main character (or person) in the book(s) they are reading.  The 8th graders are reading Anne Frank's Diary and the 7th graders are reading The Giver.  So, is Jonas showing gratitude and in what way?  Is Anne showing gratitude and in what way?  For the part where the students write about their own gratitude, I was inspired by a post on Two Writing Teachers.   I am going to make it into a worksheet for the students with one side being to write about themselves and one side for them to write/reflect upon the character/person in the book they are reading.

One other possibility for this week came from a post on I'm Lovin' Lit from 2013.  She shows a Christmas movie, but not just for entertainment.  She shows it to teach/emphasize literary concepts for the students.  Things like theme, characterization, conflict!  I love this idea.  I haven't yet decided in what way I am going to use it because I think I will only need it for one class period on Friday.   I will probably modify it a bit to fit my needs, but it is totally worth getting the freebie and checking out her post here.  Thanks, Erin!


And with that, I hope it will be a Merry Christmas to all as we enjoy this final week before Christmas.

Symbaloo

After having my students bookmark another page for English last week, and hearing, "but I already have so many bookmarks," I decided to start a Symbaloo page for my classes.  Have you heard of Symbaloo?

I am still a Symbaloo newbie, but here's my take--

Symbaloo allows you to have a webpage that organizes all of your bookmarks.  You can share your page with others and they will be able to see all of your bookmarks, but they can't add to your bookmarks.

Here is what my Symbaloo currently looks like:
http://edu.symbaloo.com/mix/smithstjes




While it is true that my Symbaloo does look a little bare right now, it actually took me a bit of time because I was customizing it.  I added pictures to some of my links to make them more interesting.  Some of the links already came with their own icons that I liked (Actively Learn and ExitTix above), but others weren't great.  You have two options for adding pictures.  One is to upload your own image which I did for the St. John's link, the third link from the left on the top row.   Or you can use one of the Symbaloo icons, such as the first two icons on the top left.

Here are some of the top reasons I like it--

1. I can post both links that I want the kids to have long term access to and daily lesson plan links that I will remove more quickly.

2. It is easily organizable and visually appealing.

3. I can embed it on to my class website (as I did above).

4. It is a great way to find something (especially things you use often) without adding tons of things to your bookmark bar.

It reminds me a little bit of how I have started to use Pintrest.  The main difference for me is that I like to "pin" things that I am not ready to use yet.  It is nice to keep those resources in one place.   Then if I am looking for something to jazz up a lesson, I can check Pintrest for some inspiration.  Once I have found a link that I want to use over and over, then I will add it to Symbaloo.

Just a quick note about embedding.  I initially had some difficulty embedding my Symbaloo page above.  Here is the tip that eventually got it to work--switch to "HTML" at the top of the screen on blogger.  That way when you embed the HTML code, the website can read it.  So thankful to have figured this out to use it on other sites as well.

Have you used Symbaloo?  How do you like it? 

Google Apps for Education (GAFE) Reading Apps

I learned about various apps/extensions during the Google Apps for Education (GAFE) session at Ed Camp Baltimore on September 27, 2014.  Today's post will be about two of the reading apps that I learned about.  These are for the Chrome web browser.  If you don't use Chrome yet, I would suggest a switch in your default Internet browser...because it is amazing!

 Readability 

This is an extension that you can find by going to the Google Chrome Web Store.  The icon is a red arm chair.  

This extension is very useful if you have your students reading articles from websites.  The purpose of the extension is to clean up the appearance of the website.  Often times, news sites have excessive links all around the article.  The look is very busy and it can be difficult to focus on the text you actually want to read.  Once you have found the article you want to read, you just click the readability button and it gets cleaned up for you. 

Let me show you an example.  Here is the original article that I wanted to read from BBC News.  

 I clicked the Readability icon at the top of my web browser.






And in seconds my article looked like this:

Your article will still have the pictures that are specific to it, just not all the extra stuff from the website.  It is much easier to read, but there are other features too.

Once your article is cleaned up, (I selected "read now"), you should have a row of buttons on the left hand side of the page.
The first button is the Readability logo.  This is for logging in to the Readability site, which doesn't seem necessary to me.
The second button looks like this- Aa - and it gives you access to some features that will personalize your reading experience.  You an change the color, font, size of text, and size of margins.
The third button (a megaphone) also asks you to log in to the app.
The fourth button is a little arrow and it allows you to send this text to your kindle, email, Twitter, or Facebook or you can print it from here.

While I have not yet used this link with the students, I think it will be very useful.  

TLDR

TLDR stands for Too Long Didn't Read and it is another Chrome extension.  This one does not seem to work with an article that has already gone through Readability, so it will have to be done on the original website.  The purpose is to create simplified texts for English Language Learners or other students who could benefit from a summary or a shortened version.  I think it would be especially helpful when trying to do research for a project.  By reading a summary, you can decide if that article will fit your needs.  If you determine that it might be a good one, then you can go on to read the original text.  I can't speak to how well it shortens the text, but it does provide a short, medium, and long version of the article.  

The icon for TLDR is those four letters in blue and green lowercase letters.  Once you are on the article that you want to use it with, click the button and a dialogue box comes up in the middle of your screen.  It then lets you click what you want to read- summary, short, medium, long, or original.  At the bottom, there is a "find more like this" button, but it seems to me that that button is referring to more apps/extensions, not more articles.  My primary purpose would be to use the summary feature to get an idea of the article, and then to read the original to see if you can use it.  I do not believe it works on PDFs, just on websites.

The question will be, can students handle the power of an extension like this?  Perhaps you want your students to read an entire article, but they have been armed with this extension.  They might be able to "get away with" only reading some of the text.  For now, I am not going to introduce this extension, but rather, I will use it myself to provide summaries.  One example is for a mini-research project where I will be providing the links.  I can now include a short summary with each corresponding link, so the students can pick the best articles to fit their needs.

I am excited for what Google Apps and Extensions can do in our classrooms.  These are just two examples of many useful resources.  This is just scratching the surface. 

What are your favorite GAFE that are related to reading?