#SOL15: Literacy Superheroes
Halloween Celebrations are over. November, still warm and toasty, is here.
Did you see a few superheroes?
I spent some time this last week with a few of my superheroes.
Real life superheroes. Authors who inspire! Authors who dare to challenge my thinking. Authors who want a better world for our students. And authors who understand that in order for students to really be life-long learners, the teachers have to step back and trust that inquiry is one avenue that unites students and teachers in real-world learning.
Who is one of my super heroes?
Vicki Vinton, co-author of What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Making, is definitely one. Have you read her book? If you haven’t read it,
WHY NOT?
Additional evidence of my esteem would be in these blog posts: here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Those nine posts share thoughts from the last year that include Vicki, other rock star literacy educators and many other bloggers as well. It has been an amazing year of learning and I’ve been blessed to have many opportunities to learn along side students, teachers, literacy rock stars and superheroes!
This book was eagerly awaited as Vicki wrote about it on her blog here and here.
The book is a celebration of the 13 belief statements and the 68 study group members who went to Italy in October of 2012 to study the preschools in the town of Reggio Emilia. And as the authors say, “We hope these essays inspire you to move beyond discussion and into action.”
Essay One is “Centering the Child” by Sir Ken Robinson.
Essay Two is “How Reggio Ruined Me for Anything Less than Inquiry-Driven Learning by Vicki Vinton.
Essay Four is “Engagement: A Hub of Human Development by Peter Hohnston and Gay Ivey.
Essay Five is “With an Air of Expectancy” by Katherine Bomer.
Essay Six is “What Price Beauty? A Call for Aesthetic Education” by co-editor Ellin Oliver Keene.
Essay Eight is “The Journey of a Single Hour: Exploring the Rich Promise of an Immediate Release of Responsibility by Katie Wood Ray.
Essays I have yet to read include those by: Deborah Meier, Matt Glover, Kathy Collins and Thomas Newkirk.
Backstories and Essays you can access:
Sir Ken Robinson – “Centering the Child Part 2“
The Story of the Front Cover and Frontispiece
Jeremy Greensmith – “On Teaching the Scaffold“
Alfie Kohn – “To Change What We Do, Consider What We Believe” [This essay is adapted from the Foreword to The Teacher You Want to Be, edited by Matt Glover and Ellin Oliver Keene (Heinemann, 2015)]
Heidi Mills – “On Beliefs that Matter“
What will my actions be?
I’m still mulling that over. The last few weeks have really caused me to think about my beliefs. How do others know what I value? They can see it here in my blog posts as well as on Twitter. “I loved the alignment of beliefs and practices – as in, ‘If we say we believe this, we must therefore do that . . .'”(Vicki Vinton, p. 20) Crosschecking, constantly! Do my beliefs match my actions?
Which essay is your favorite?
With whom are you sharing the essays?
*I think 2015 is the year of the great books . . . new Mindset, Reading Nonfiction (Notice and Note) . . . my TBR stack is NOT getting any shorter!
Tuesday is the day to share a “Slice of Life” with Two Writing Teachers. Thank you, Anna, Betsy, Beth, Dana, Deb, Kathleen, Stacey, and Tara. Check out the writers, readers and teachers here.
Focus: #TCRWP, Books, and Professional Reading
It’s real!
I’m in NYC!
So excited to be back, with friends, literally from around the country, to learn, live and celebrate writing this week! (Can you guess my favorite punctuation?)
The Saturday before #TCRWP Writing Institute found several “slicers” meeting up at Bank Street Bookstore. Our goal, Julieanne Harmatz (@jarhartz) and I, was to meet Sally Donnelly (@SallyDonnelly1), a fellow slicer up from the Washington, DC area. We had met Sally, oh so briefly at the March Saturday reunion, and were interested in longer conversations. We all found ourselves purchasing Cynthia Lord’s A Handful of Stars that had been highly recommended by fellow traveler Allison Jackson (@azajacks). (sidenote: What’s up with the @? Those are twitter names to follow. If you aren’t following these three, why not? Oh, not on Twitter; well, why not? You should be!)
Amazing book. A dog balancing a blueberry on his nose should “hook” you right into this book! Bank Street Bookstore was also the site of an amazng toddler read aloud with parents, toddlers and accompanying strollers filling the aisles. And that’s all I have to say about that topic because of another book that I purchased that I will be gifting soon. (Hint – book is by Jimmy Fallon; yes topic connected to the new addition to my family.)
We adjourned to the Silver Moon Bakery and cafe for some coffee and much, much, much conversation. Sally is returning to a third grade classroom after years as a reading specialist. We had advice about techonolgy, blogging, professional books (Good to Great: Focusing on the Literacy Work that Matters by Mary Howard) and fellow bloggers for additional advice.
My one little word is “Focus” so I am thinking about my own professional reading for this summer. This book and my all time favorite What Readers Really Do are my re-reads for this summer along with Colleen Cruz’s, The Unstoppable Writing Teacher, and Jennifer Serravello’s, The Reading Strategies Book, as my two new books. Only four – but rich, savory texts that will feed my soul and brain for the year to come.
What professional reading will you FOCUS on this summer?
#SOL14 Friends + Family = Framily
Tuesday is the day to share a “Slice of Life” with Two Writing Teachers. Check out the writers, readers and teachers here. Thanks to Stacey, Anna, Beth, Tara, Dana and Betsy for creating a place for us to work collaboratively.
During a weekend of exhilarating conversations and sessions at #NCTE14, someone mentioned the word “Framily” based on our personal and professional relationships.
So what does this really mean?
So what does this look like?
Friday
On Friday, it looked like this after our presentation . . .
and we also had to capture this sign that was posted saying our session was full!
The conversation continued and our “Framily” grew at Aloft . . .
Saturday
Saturday evening our “Slicer Dinner” also provided more conversation and a larger group of “Framily”.
And the fun continued out on the beach at National Harbor.
Do you know the story of this art work?
How many “Slicers” can you name in these pictures?
How did your “Framily” grow as a result of #NCTE14?
#NCTE14: First-timer Report
What a day!
What a day!
What a day!
I cannot even count the number of times that I heard, “Oh, Fran! I follow you on twitter!” Thanks, all, for helping me out! It’s truly a pleasure to “meet face to face” and sometimes I can manage to locate folks all by myself!
Obviously, I am not matching names and faces very well. Also not very quickly. I already tweeted out that I would be more successful (if you all enabled me) and posted your pictures daily so I could just match the clothes for the day with the pictures. Or a second option would be to have name tags with shorter strings so they would be in closer proximity to the faces of the wearer. Too often the name tags become hidden under layers of clothing.
What a fabulous first full day for the NCTE14 Conference!
The day started early with coffee and a fire alarm in the hotel (and yep, no teachers followed the directions and left the building) but it was ONLY a false alarm.
The sessions ended with our presentation at 4 pm. What a privilege to be on a panel chaired by Vicki Vinton with rock stars: Julieanne Harmatz (CA) and my two new friends Mary Lee Hahn and Steve Peterson (met them both face to face yesterday for the first time). Our session was full with 65 participants who laughed and cheered with us. What a fun time as we shared a variety of “What Ifs?” based on the “Know and Wonder” charts in What Readers Really Do by Vicki Vinton and Dorothy Barnhouse.
So for three of us it was a really big “first day” of many “first times”.
- First time to meet.
- First time to attend #NCTE14.
- First time to present at #NCTE14.
But yet our evening was reminiscent of earlier times. Remember this photo from summer #TCRWP Reading Institute? Six of seven were present again tonight!
Who was missing at this evening’s Loft gathering?
Ryan
Who were some of the new faces?
- Clare and Tammy
- Jan and Kim
- Mary Lee and husband AJ
- Steve
- Melanie
- Mary E
The community of friends continues to grow and our lives are enriched by the stories shared by each new addition. What validation of the need to continue to meet face to face to share our learning and our lives!
Schedule Recap
- 7 – 8 First Timer’s Breakfast
- 8-9:15 General Session Marian Wright Edelman – “OUTSTANDING” Panel: Rudine Sims Bishop, Christopher Myers, Matt de la Pena, Mitali Perkins, Ruchsana Khan
- 9:30 – 10:45 A.06 “Revising the Story: Reluctant Readers Overcoming Shame” with Justin Stygles, Kara DiBartolo, Melissa Guerrette, and Lynda Mullaly Hunt and Lisel Shurtliff who both overcame predicted obstacles on their path as they became published authors. Shaming reluctant readers could result in students being bodily present but mentally absent.
- 11 – 12:15 B.16 “The Nerdy Book Club: Shaping Reading Identity through Community, Story and Choice” Great titles and recognition of authors and teachers!
- 12:30 – 1:45 C.13 “What the Common Core Forgot: Community, Collaboration, and Social Justice” with Harvey Daniels, Sara Ahmed, Nancy Steineke, and Steven Zemelman
- 2:30 – 3:45 D.05 “Developing Strong Literacy Practices in Content-Area Instruction to Support Reading and Writing Development and Deep Content Knowledge” with Amanda Hartman, Celena Larkey, Emily Butler Smith, and Anna Gratz Cockerille
- and of course our session from 4 – 5:15 under #teacherswonder E.09 It’s Not Just for the Kids: Stories of Waht Can Happen When Teachers Embrace Curiosity, Openness, Creativity, and Wonder in the Teaching of Reading.
The equivalence of seven sessions. No wonder I am exhausted!
Did you attend any of these sessions?
Where did you have “new learning”?
#TCRWP: Reading Institute Day 3
Day 3 of the Reading Institute ended appropriately with friends from the What Readers Really Do twitter chat including: one author Vicki Vinton, Ryan Scala, Julieanne Harmatz, Catherine Flynn, Tara Smith, Colette Bennett and myself. Interesting side note that we all Tweet, blog and love to talk literacy and education!!! (Missing friends Allison Jackson and Steve Peterson)
So what did we learn during Day 3?
In Brooke Geller’s session we worked on increasing our knowledge of nonfiction, made tools (pictures tomorrow), and began our study of guided reading and book introductions. The assessment connections have been crucial – if we don’t plan to use the information, what purpose does it serve? One of Brooke’s specialties is asking guiding questions to make us think about our practices. Examples: Which students really need the structure and support of guided reading? Which students need more practice reading? Are your students over taught and under practiced? At what grade do you end guided reading for most students and move on to other structures with more student ownership?
Our Social Studies center work with Kathleen Tolan continued today with a lesson in note-taking (Teach students so this skill transfers across all content areas. Students don’t really want to copy every word, they just lack effective strategies). This also means that you will be teaching nonfiction text structures in order for students to think about the format of notes that will best match the material / information being studied. We played a round of “Guess My Text Structure” which we pretty much all failed in terms of speed of response. The purpose was to provide a bit of “playful practice” with the types of text structures in a given text where students are required to provide evidence of their structure to win. We ended our session with more center time. (Still loving the open-ended nature of these tasks!)
Closing Workshop with Kelly Hohne – Close Reading of Informational Text
So, close reading AGAIN, Fran? Really? Are you kidding me? There was the Close Reading Blog-a-thon. And you have all those blog posts:
- kindergarten here,
- In Love with Close Reading here,
- Falling in Love With Close Reading here,
- Is Conversation a Critical Component of Close Reading?
- #Edcamp DesMoines – Close Reading?
- Close Reading Informational Text? Absolutely!
- Fitting the Puzzle Pieces of Close Reading Together
- Close Reading: The Ultimate Goal
But stick with me and marvel at the sheer brilliance that I saw in Kelly’s work with us during the closing workshop.
The article we used was Gorillas in Danger and if you open it up, you can follow along on a second tab or on a split screen.
(Disclaimer: How I think this went!)
Kelly read the title and the first paragraph. She then asked us to think about that first paragraph. What did it say? What were we thinking? After chatting with a partner, Kelly invited us to study the cover photo. What impact did that image have on us as readers? We then went to the word box and discussed the specific words that had an impact on us from the definition.
Next Kelly reminded us that “beginnings matter” and that we needed to put our ideas from the first paragraph, the cover photo and the definition together as we worked to “see more”. (Wow – close reading from a Read Aloud first paragraph, photo and definition as we BEGAN reading the article.)
Kelly reread the first paragraph and asked us to think about the visual images that were conveyed by the words. We talked about “grooming, sleeping, playing” – human-like characteristics, the lush forest and the deliberate word choices by the author to make us more thoughtful.
Kelly then invited us to reread the first paragraph aloud with her (scaffolded – we had heard it twice so we were all successful) and continued on through the rest of that column. As we were reading we were to also be thinking about word choice. We discussed those words that again seemed important to us and were also deliberate choices made by the author.
Debrief:
Kelly did not read the entire article to us and then ask us to reread it in its entirety a second time for vocabulary, a third time for main idea and sequence of events or a fourth time for point of view/stance.
Instead Kelly carefully chose our entry points: the first paragraph (words), the cover photo, and the definition of “conservation” to begin our “close” reading. We discussed those separately and then collectively. Then we read orally together. Not only did we have a purpose for rereading (fluency) but also for our lens of language and close reading.
Have you seen those moves before?
We had another go at “turn and talk” about the language in the rest of the text on the first page. Then Kelly split the auditorium into three parts. We listened to the second page under our assigned lens which was one of these:
1. language about the gorillas
2. structure
3. language about the conservationists
We ended with even more conversation about the purpose of this article and Natalie Smith’s view of the gorillas.
Kelly pushed us to notice more details in the story with the specific “read aloud” section. We reread with specific lenses. We read together. We used the word choice of the author to help us support the BIG idea of this text. The lens of language paid off and helped us “see more” as well as be something “transferable” so students owned this text and other texts!
What did our language work look like?
What new thinking/learning have you added around the idea of close reading informational text?
Closing Keynote
Jacqueline Woodson (@JackieWoodson)
“Writing about the ordinary can show kids how extraordinary they are.” She knew that she was going to be a writer by the age of 7. It took her 20 years to be a writer and “get those stickers”. Absolutely. Hysterically. Funny! Inspiring! and oh, so great to hear her both recite and read her work!
It’s a new day! What will you be learning today?