Free Text for Summary and Analysis: Flood Warning

 The nonfiction reading standards for sixth and seventh grade are tough for kids, especially those who don't have much experience with academic reading and writing. At the same time, however, kids report that they really like reading nonfiction! 

In my classroom, I always like to start the year with some informational texts. Not only do these texts help me to see where my students are (and what challenges I have ahead of me!), but they also capture students' interests!

One of my favorite texts sets is the Summary and Analysis set that I started around 2015. I wrote the texts to go along with our earth science standards, and formatted them to be weekly homework assignments. I can get so much mileage out of these texts! With one reading packet we could do repeated readings, write summaries, and talk about analysis responses.

A key piece of this Summary and Analysis: Flood Warning is the scaffolded summary. This writing frame shows students exactly what is needed in a successful summary. I have found it a vital resource for helping students to get a feel for the academic style writing that is needed in a summary. It's a great way to start the year!

Classroom Organization Tips for the Start of the School Year

 

     Right now my classroom sits hooded in a mishmash of sheets and tablecloths covering boxes of books and other supplies. It is probably as organized as it will be all year! As I pull items out of the boxes and bring the room back to life, this is the time to think about my processes and try to streamline organization systems. 

      Recently a teacher on a Facebook group asked about the barest of essentials for classroom organization.  I don't like organization systems that take lots of money to buy and many hours to create. All too often I find that I don't end up sticking with them! Instead, I use a few easy to find items and customize them to my needs. Here are the three things that I find right away in the boxes to set my room up for success.

File crate with most needed files

     I have trouble with large paper sorters because papers go in and they don't come out. Instead, I like file folders in a paper crate. I use broad categories for the kinds of papers that I use again and again--for example, vocabulary progress pages. When I need specific packets or worksheets, I can rotate those folders out from my filing cabinet. (For example, I have folders made for each of my Summary and Analysis packets--I end up using them every year!)

Labeled drawers

    I love this little drawer unit! It helps me to put things back where they belong. The labels are just laminated Astro-Bright paper trimmed to fit, and written on with a wet erase marker. I change my mind about where to put things a lot! You will see the other classroom essentials on top: a Zenergy chime, perfect for getting students' attention, my red Swingline stapler, and two kinds of tape.

Beautiful succulents

Ok, while these are not strictly necessary, I do like having them in the classroom! They add to the general ambiance. Every year I find at least one student who really likes taking care of them. And sometimes students just like to go and stand by them! 

Just published: Bump Out puzzles for enrichment students in grades 1-2! These puzzles challenge students to find the item that doesn't belong. Kids love them and they lead to such great discussions.

Beyond Basic Facts: Math Fluency for Advanced Students

 

As an enrichment teacher, I work in two different schools. Both of these schools have school-wide fact fluency initiatives in which students in every classroom work toward fluency in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division facts.

While basic facts are important, there are other aspects of mathematical fluency that I want to address as well. When students have some values committed to memory, higher level problems become faster and more efficient. Understanding number relationships helps students to move quickly between fractions, decimals, and percents. As problems get harder, they can quickly decide when to keep numbers as fractions or when to change them to percents.

I have realized that working toward mathematical fluency has a place in the enrichment classroom. We can go beyond the basic facts to work on topics that have some mathematical richness and room for discussion.

For fourth graders, these topics include:

• addition and subtraction within 100
• extended multiplication and division facts
• simplifying fractions

Fifth graders benefit from fluency practice with:

• multiplication and division by powers of 10
• comparing decimal and fraction values
• fractions to decimals

For sixth graders, fluency practice can explore:

• percents
• exponents and square roots
• integer operations
• using area and perimeter formulas

 Creating fluency practice for students isn't difficult! Choose a topic, then create sets of problems within that topic. Students enjoy competing against themselves week after week, aiming for improvement. With my enrichment students, I made improvement the goal instead of a set number of problems. This makes success within everyone's grasp.

If you would like the sets that I created, they are available below.

Beyond Basic Facts: Fourth Grade

Beyond Basic Facts: Fifth Grade

Beyond Basic Facts: Sixth Grade

Language Comprehension Skills: Bump Out Puzzles for Vocabulary Enrichment

All students need experiences with categorizing. In the classroom, this can look like sorting spelling words, organizing class materials, and grouping like things together. 

As an enrichment teacher, I love categorizing activities as ways to help students think more deeply about how different objects, words, and concepts relate. One of my favorite activities for this is a tried and true technique called "bump out".

The concept is easy. Present students with a list of four words, three of which go together. Students have to figure out which word doesn't belong and then "bump" it to the next box, making a new set of four words.

For example, in the set

chair

pencil

marker

eraser

the word "chair" is bumped out, because it is not a school supply like the others. 

While the concept is simple, putting together the activities can be tricky. I used to try to make one for each science unit, struggling to make the word boxes behave in Microsoft Word until I gave up and started hand drawing my sets. I still have some (bad) scans of these early bump out activities that I made!

This year, I started making new sets of bump out puzzles for my first and second grade enrichment students. Instead of hand drawing, though, I used Google Slides to get the text boxes right! Students enjoyed the challenge, and I enjoyed the rich discussions that followed as we talked about why some words didn't belong. On each puzzle, I include some that are very easy and others that require a little bit more background knowledge.  

If you'd like to pick up a set for your classroom, you can find the finished set here: Vocabulary Enrichment Bump Out Puzzles.

Main Ideas for Middle School Readers

 Helping readers to find main ideas is important work. It's also complicated, messy, and challenging enough to make me want to tear out my hair! Those of us who remember working through the colors of the SRA reading kits as students were never really taught how to find a main idea. (Here's an interesting blog post about the history of the color-coded kits!)  Instead, we just read the paragraphs and guessed until we figured out the pattern on our own! As a teacher I wanted to do a little bit more than just have a set of materials in the corner.

What is a main idea?

Too many students and teachers confuse topic and main idea. As I wrote in my book Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling, a topic is the superordinate word or phrase to which all of the ideas in a passage refer (Aulls 1975). On the other hand, a main idea is best expressed in a complete sentence. Sometimes an author states the main idea; sometimes an author leaves the main idea implicit. The old Write Source 2000 books called this "a topic + an attitude or statement about the topic" which is a good definition to use with students.

Why is this so hard?

Skilled readers create mental models of a text as they read, building a hierarchy of ideas. You may be doing this right now with this text! However, less skilled readers often connect one sentence only to the one before or after. They are reading at a very local level, and rarely see the big picture (Kintsch 1990). To teach main idea, then, is to help students see nested hierarchy of ideas in a text--paragraphs have main ideas, but so do sections, and so does the text as a whole.

It sounds so simple to talk about it, but if you've ever looked at a roomful of sixth graders you know that saying, "Let's look for a nested hierarchy of ideas in the text!" is not likely to bring you much success as a teacher. Part of the difficulty is rooted in the fact that authors express main ideas in a variety of ways. Sometimes they are at the beginning of the text, sometimes they are at the. end, and sometimes they are not stated at all. Distressingly, some texts written for students seem not to have a main idea at all!

Working with middle school readers

My favorite order for teaching main idea is to follow these steps:

• Single paragraphs with explicit main idea at the beginning
• Single paragraphs with explicit main idea in another location
• Multi-paragraph pieces with an explicit main idea
• Poorly written pieces

With sixth and seventh grade readers, I am often tempted to go directly to the third step and jump right into multi-paragraph pieces. Year after year, though, I have learned that skipping main ideas at the paragraph level can lead to big problems later on! I generally like to start with one of the single paragraph activities from my text set Main Ideas and Details in Expository Text or my old standby Finding Topics and Main Ideas (free PowerPoint). Depending on how these go, I can move directly on to multi-paragraph pieces or stick around in single paragraph land for awhile.

New Resource

When I can't find a text, I write my own! This resource was written to accompany the Wonders Unit 1, Week 3, but it can be used for most sixth and seventh grade readers. It includes a single text about extremophiles, along with a tree map graphic organizer that shows the hierarchy of ideas in the text. In addition, comprehension questions refer to the individual paragraphs and sections as well as to the article as a whole, leading students to consider how the ideas fit together. You can find it here: Middle School Main Ideas: Article and Activities for Grades 6-7.

References

Aulls, M.W. 1975. "Expository Paragraph Properties that Influence Literal Recall." Journal of Reading Behavior 7: 391-400.

Kintsch, E. 1990. "Macroprocesses and Microprocesses in the Development of Summarization Skill." Cognition and Instruction 7: 161-95.

Kissner, E. 2006. Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling: Skills for Better Reading, Writing, and Test-Taking. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Sixth Grade Wonders: Secret Life of Caves, Unit 1 Week 3

 This is my favorite week of the first unit of Wonders in sixth grade! Of course, if you know me and my interests, you will understand why. Caves, animal adaptations, deep sea exploration--this week has it all.

Which is why, in my classroom, it was never a single week of instruction. I think that the pacing of Wonders is far too fast, especially for complex texts and complex ideas. "Okay, kids, we're going to introduce the idea of chemosynthesis in a single day of reading. Don't understand the ideas in this text? No worries, we're already done and on to the next thing!" This doesn't really lead to the kind of thoughtful, reflective reading I hope to develop. So, for Unit 1 Week 3, I usually took 2-3 weeks.

Additions to the Wonders resources

In addition to the texts and activities provided in the weekly instruction, I supplemented with these resources.

Caverns Informational Text: This text, written by me for Reading Intervention, became a homework text to go along with the unit. I added a comprehension quiz and a note-taking sheet to reinforce the concepts of main idea.

Speed Drill and Questions for "The Secret Life of Caves"

Speed drills are a great way to increase fluency and help students to notice semantic elements. When I noticed that many of my students were skipping over the tougher words instead of breaking them apart, I added syllable practice to the page. This set also has some practice multiple choice questions and an open-ended response that mirrors the question for the Weekly Assessment.

Yeti Crab Subject and Predicate

My students loved reading about the yeti crab in "Journey Into the Deep," so I made them an additional grammar practice page starring this creature.

Troglobites Clip from BBC Earth

My students loved this clip and begged to watch it again during dismissal time!

I hope that you enjoy teaching this week of instruction as much as I did!

Sixth Grade Wonders: Drumbeat of Freedom, Unit 1 Week 2

 This Reading-Writing Workshop selection in Unit 1, Week 2 is a strong story. When I used it in a co-taught setting, though, I needed to add some more activities to allow for differentiation and some small group meetings. Over several years I added and refined these activities. Here they are, ready for you to use in your own classroom this year!

Speed Drill, Multiple Choice Questions, and Story Map

I still like using speed drills to increase student automaticity and fluency. Not only do speed drills help students to recognize words, but they also give us a chance to talk about word meanings that might be new for them.

I also wrote some multiple choice questions in the style of the questions used on the Weekly Assessments. These questions proved useful for small group work, as we could talk together about the questions and possible answers. Students are much more willing to share their thinking when talking to five others as opposed to talking with the entire class! For the Part A and Part B questions, I learned that some of my students really didn't know what to look for, and this allowed me to target instruction to help them with this.

Finally, I added a story map and list of events for students to work on. I really like giving students lists of events from a story to read and sequence. No matter what the age, this activity helps students to think about how a story unfolds. Students can also use the given events to help them write a short summary of the story, or create an illustrated plot diagram.

If you try these out, be sure to write a note and let me know!

Comparing Poems: A Look Back

 Time Warp: I originally wrote this blog post more than 10 years ago! As I was looking over past posts, I realized that I worked with the ideas in this post over this past year.

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As the last part of our quick unit on figurative language and poetry, the students and I spent the last week looking at how to compare poems and write paragraphs to share our comparisons.

Whew. It's a difficult process for students. On the one hand, students often spontaneous make comparisons as we move through poems--"That one reminds of me of..." or "This is just like..." However, to write successful comparison paragraphs, students need to learn how to do more thoughtful, thorough comparisons.

Using a chart
A chart is essential for helping students to compare poems. Sometimes people try to use Venn diagrams for this purpose. Venn diagrams are great for set theory and fun visual gags...but terrible for planning writing! A chart sets up the important criteria for what is to be compared. Because testing season is coming up, I told students that they won't be able to use a prepared chart for our state tests, but that they can make their own comparison charts.

It's interesting to watch students use the chart. When I model this for struggling readers, I work with one poem at a time. This kind of careful reading and analysis takes a lot of concentration, and struggling readers often have trouble with the attentional shifts needed to go back and forth between texts. On the other hand, strong readers often prefer to work in the opposite way. They thrive on the extra challenge of going back and forth between texts and often create strong insights, seeing differences in the ways that the author developed the topics. (2024 update: As I work with gifted and enrichment students, I now see how much our strong readers love to work on topics like this! It's an easy way to add differentiation.)

Do we have to fill out the whole thing? That's the beauty of it--I tell students that we only need to fill in 4 or 5 blocks. We look for the criteria that are the most interesting for the poems that we have. Interestingly, kids always like to fill in the block for figurative language and sound devices!

Scaffolded response frame
A scaffolded response frame is useful for students who are still learning compare and contrast structure. Let's face it--this describes just about every elementary school writer! A nice middle level of scaffolding is to project the scaffolded response, but have students write their own responses.

Is it formulaic? Yup. Does it lead to scripted, formulaic writing? Some of the responses on the last assessment were the best that I've seen. Helping students with the topic sentence and the transitions freed up some processing space for them to do some deeper thinking about the texts. Kids used quotation marks to show where they were quoting from poems, using specific details, coming up with similarities that I hadn't considered. These are good things! (2024 update: When I did a similar activity with a group of gifted students, I expected that they would chafe against the formula of the frame. Nope! They wanted the frame even more than other students.)

Choosing Poems
This is the hardest part. It's tempting to stick with poems that have the same topic. But even poems with the same topic don't always make the best comparisons. Last week I chose two hawk poems. The whole lesson fell kind of flat--besides the same topic, the poems didn't really have anything interesting or compelling enough about them to spend a great deal of time talking about.

Two poems that worked very well were "Hello, Moon!" by Patricia Hubbell (found in Hey, You!: Poems to Skyscrapers, Mosquitoes, and Other Fun Things) and "The Moon's the North Wind's Cooky" by Vachel Lindsay. These poems both explored the changes in the moon in an interesting way, with lots of differences in the use of figurative language and structure to talk about.

(2024 note: To differentiate this for my enrichment students, I gave them poetry books and let them choose the poems to compare. This gave them a purpose to strategically read many poems and talk about them together.)

Comparing poems was an interesting and rigorous way to end our study of poetry...but I do think that we are all ready to go on to text structure next week!

Math Jigsaw Problems

 This year, I've been working with math enrichment groups in addition to my regular gifted classes. In math enrichment groups, I pull 10-20 students from a grade level to work on math problems together. It's a lot of fun, but not without some challenges.

One challenge is that the students are often very quiet! I know that some classroom teachers with chatty classes would see this as a very privileged kind of problem. However, when my goals for the enrichment session include getting students to construct and share viable arguments, this silence can be deafening. The students would be quiet for several reasons. Taken from different classes, they often didn't know each other very well. Some of the students would want to work quickly on their own, while others were more tentative. 

A colleague gave me a copy of the book Get it Together: Math Problems for Groups, Grades 4-12. This book has some great problems and worked well for my older students. However, cutting out the problems is a chore! I decided to create some of my own jigsaw problems.

Here's the idea:

• Problems are basic logic matrix problems, with coin amounts and change to add a math component
• Each student only gets one clue, requiring the students to talk together to solve
• A final problem challenges students to create their own clues
  
  
  

You can find a single problem here: Single Problem Jigsaw Problem Solving.

For all four problems and an answer key, click here: Jigsaw Problem Solving for Math Enrichment.

Teaching Tools and Texts

 I'm publishing text-only versions of some of my favorite texts that I've authored over at my new blog! Stop by to read some texts and see where to get the formatted and student-ready versions...or just print them and use them as they are. 

Hope to see you there!

https://teachingtoolsandtexts.blogspot.com/

Figurative Language in Expository Text

 Do your students struggle to analyze figurative language in expository text? Mine certainly do! For intermediate readers who are already having trouble with content-specific vocabulary and new concepts in expository text, analyzing figurative language is yet another big challenge. 

But being able to understand how and why authors are using this figurative language is vital for deeper comprehension. Often, a single simile is used to convey a big idea about a new topic. Examples of personification are used to show nuances. A pithy metaphor in the introduction pops up again in the conclusion. In all of these instances, being able to identify and understand the figurative language adds to the deeper meaning.

Sometimes, well-meaning teachers spend too much time in the identification phase and not enough time in the analysis phase. It's easy to see why! Struggling students can pick out the words "like" or "as" and say with confidence, "That's a simile." It feels like you are being successful. However, when asked to analyze similes, these same students might fall back on using the exact same words from the text instead of elaborating on the simile and putting it in the context of the key concepts from the text.

Here are some things to keep in mind as you plan to analyze figurative language in expository text.

And, if you'd like a ready-made resource perfect for sixth graders, try this: Figurative Language in Expository Text. Available as a printable and digital resource, this text includes practice with analysis, a fluency activity, and more. It is the perfect supplement to Wonders Sixth Grade Unit 1, Week 4.

Quick Reading Assessments

 

The start of the new school year is almost upon us! My classroom exists in a perpetual state of chaos and disorder!

While it's hard to leave those lazy mornings and sunny afternoons behind, it is exciting to think about preparing for my new group of students. Once I clear a space in my new (smallish) room and figure out my schedule, these are the go-to assessments that I will pull.

Summarizing Narratives

   Learning about how our students process and summarize narratives is a good first step. A student's summary yields a wealth of knowledge about how they approach reading stories, how they understand story structure, and whether they are reading at the local level (looking at individual sentences) or at a global level (thinking of the text as a whole). 

    The problem with student summaries is that they take a long time for students to write, and they take a long time for teachers to read! I've streamlined the process by creating a checklist with key events and ideas from the text. This checklist makes assessing summaries much easier...and makes it possible to share the task with a co-teacher or an instructional assistant. This year, I'm planning to use these tasks for progress monitoring with my enrichment students.

QRI

    I love using the QRI as a quick assessment! The flexibility of using narrative or expository text really adds to the picture of what a reader can do. If you're not familiar with the Qualitative Reading Inventory, the book is a series of short texts and questions for readers of different levels. First, use the word list to get an idea of how students read words out of context. Then, select a text for the student to read, doing a running record as you go, and then ask the student 6-8 questions about what they read. The questions are split into inferential and explicit questions, which adds another layer of nuance into the interpretation of results.

    Now...the manual has lots of directions for getting even more specific with your scoring, but I can do a quick version of the assessment in about 15 minutes. My trick is to split up the word reading and passage reading over multiple days. I have students read aloud from the word list on one day, then score and pull passages for the next day. This helps me to keep my file crate of materials in order! For many students, I skip the retelling portion (after all, I'm scoring summaries!) and set them up for look-backs from the start. Looking back to the text is a skill that I want to encourage, after all!

    The best part of the QRI is how knowledgeable you can sound when talking with other teachers and parents. "This student reads really well with words out of context, and shows a wide range of word-solving skills. When they're reading the text, however, they have trouble with word-solving," or "Wow! This reader does wonderfully with narrative passages that have familiar content. When faced with an unfamiliar topic, though, they have great difficulty, even when new concepts are explained in the text." This is actionable information obtained in a quick, positive session.

Reading Intervention for Fluency, Academic Vocabulary, and Nonfiction Text Structure

      This product has been a labor of love. Back in 2010, I wanted to put together a research-based set of activities for classroom teachers working with intermediate level readers. I wanted materials that would focus on academic vocabulary and nonfiction text structure, with lessons that were easy enough to add to an already full schedule and materials that were ready to be copied. Most importantly, I wanted to create something that would be inexpensive for classroom teachers. After months of work, I created this:

Reading Intervention for Fluency, Academic Vocabulary, and Nonfiction Text Structure.

     I worked this summer to freshen up the materials to make them even easier for classroom teachers, adding answer keys, PDFs, and better formatting. More than ten years after I wrote it, I'm still proud of the features!

The texts

    In this set, the texts are science-based, with topics ranging from poison ivy to bluebirds to caverns. I worked with topics that are adjacent to key science topics, often inspired by my visits to area museums, science centers, and parks. 

Academic Vocabulary

     Academic vocabulary is essential for unlocking the meanings and nuances of nonfiction texts. In certain reading series, I've noticed that the vocabulary words are jammed into texts, resulting in some odd usages and questionable sentences. Instead of doing this, I wrote the texts, and then searched them for academic words from Averil Coxhead's Academic Word List and other academic word list sources. 

     Engaging students in learning academic vocabulary is important. In my experience, building playful experiences in which students use the words to answer questions works well! I created a PowerPoint presentation for each text in which the words are introduced. These presentations include photos and questions to help students interact with the words, see them repeatedly in print, and use them in sentences. 

Fluency

     Is fluency broken? I kind of think so. I'm not sure that it has the prediction power that it once held. (Read more here.) Nevertheless, I still value time spent in helping students to read aloud with accuracy and expression. Each text in this intervention set includes a phrase-cued text for students to read and a fluency progress monitoring page.

     I love phrase-cued texts because they help students to see how sentences can be chunked for easier reading. Phrase-cued texts also support students in understanding sentence chunks for my favorite grammar activity, sentence unscrambling! 

     Fluency readings are a great way to talk one-on-one with a student and get a better idea of how they are word-solving. When I do fluency readings with students, I emphasize that the timing is just one part of the reading, and that I also want to hear what they can do with expression and word-solving. At the end of the reading, I give the student a compliment ("I notice that you took the time to figure out the word vanished.") and choose a quick teaching point to discuss with the student. Sometimes we look at the pronunciation of a word, and sometimes we focus on expression within a sentence. The next time that I work with the student, we review what we talked about previously.

    I created fluency passages for each of the texts in this intervention. Fluency passages are also a great way to involve parent volunteers or instructional assistants in your reading intervention. Most adults enjoy the opportunity to work individually with students.

Nonfiction text structure

     Many readers in grades 4-6 are still reading at the "local level"--that is, they're focusing on individual words and sentences within a passage without building a model of the passage as a whole. Understanding text structure and using graphic organizers to represent details can help students to move beyond the local level and develop a global model of the text.

     Each text in this series includes a graphic organizer to represent the big ideas and important details in the text. Students can then use these graphic organizers to help them write a summary of the passage as a whole.

Multiple choice questions

      While these were not part of the original program, I decided to add them as I was using the program with my own students. Each passage has 4-5 questions, along with an open-ended response prompt. 

Working on this intervention has been a bit of a passion project for me, and it's been gratifying to see so many positive reviews. Here's to another 10 years of academic vocabulary, fluency, and text structure!

Learning with Macroinvertebrates: Activities, Resources, and Lessons

 

This spring I had the wonderful opportunity to take sixth grade classes out for field trips with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. They brought the canoes and took one class, while I took the other class to do a macroinvertebrate survey.

Which meant that I had to really brush up on my macros! Luckily, I've worked with these kinds of lessons in the past, and I've found and made plenty of resources to help me along.

Marvelous Macroinvertebrates

Because I'm teaching ELA and not science, I needed to make a strong connection to the ELA concepts and standards. Luckily, I was headed into argumentative text! Exploring an author's claims and how they support main ideas works wonderfully with a study of macroinvertebrates and their importance to streams. Several years ago, I wrote the resource "Marvelous Macroinvertebrates" as part of my Summary and Analysis series. This resource was just what I needed to start the course of study.

When I pulled it out of my filing cabinet I was happy to learn that I had been very smart once upon a time, and the vocabulary part of the article happened to match the vocabulary goals for the Wonders lessons I was replacing. Thank heavens for small mercies! We could look at the roots macro- and micro-, which was a nice vocabulary connection.

The lesson I wrote for the Summary and Analysis activity included taking notes from the text, which worked well for my students. Then, we examined the author's claim that macroinvertebrates "are a big deal for streams." How well is this supported in the text? What evidence is present? (These kinds of things are always a little tricky when I'm the author. Sometimes I tell students that I wrote the text, and sometimes I don't. In this case, I let the author remain anonymous!)

At this point, the concept of "macroinvertebrates" was still pretty fuzzy for my students. They knew about crayfish, but they couldn't really picture anything else. This video about stream surveys helped to make macroinvertebrates a bit more engaging for them...and it enabled us to hit my favorite standard, in which we compare a written text to a video text. 

Of course, I had to balance my desire to teach teach teach about macroinvertebrates with the needs of the ELA lessons that I was working on. We played some ID games on Quizlet to help students know the difference between a crayfish and a mayfly nymph, but we didn't get into many of the technical details of  the insect life cycles.

The Field Trip

My hope was that by the time we actually went on our field trip, students would know enough about macroinvertebrates to engage with the survey and get some good data.

It worked!

Even though two of our days were cold and rainy, the students were wonderful and spent time finding creatures, exploring the stream, and completing the biotic index. We found more mayfly nymphs than I have ever seen before!

The Follow Up

I collected the data from all of our trips, and we put it together into one huge list. Then, students had to make a claim about whether the creek we studied has good water quality, or not. It seems like a really easy question, right? But making a claim and using real facts from your own data to support it is the heart of science. Just getting students to write a paragraph based on this was a challenge!

Next Steps

On future trips, I want to make at least one student group in charge of photography, so that we can document what we find. I was too busy managing students and keeping an eye on the time and making sure that no one fell in (alas, they did!) to do many high quality photographs.

I've experimented with writing a formal field report based on this trip, and I'd like to consider this for next year as well. 

Sentence Unscrambling: A Tool for Differentiated Grammar Instruction

 

     It's always tough to know how to start the year with a new group of writers...and this year brings more challenges than most. I'm planning to dust off a tried-and-true instructional technique that yields big benefits to both reading and writing: sentence unscrambling.

     Sentence unscrambling is just one of the four basic sentence composing techniques suggested by Don and Jenny Killgallon, authors of multiple texts and exercise books for teachers. When I use the technique in my classroom, I go a step further and use sentence composition activities to build reading comprehension skills as well as handwriting fluency.

    The great part about sentence unscrambling is that it can be tucked into small bits of the day, and it reinforces everything you want students to be noticing and thinking about as they write. Here's how I built an activity for my students as part of our first unit, in which we explore texts related to oceans.

Find or write a suitable sentence

     When selecting a sentence, think about constructs that students may find intriguing, but challenging. Sentences with capitalized words, interesting word choice, and multiple clauses make for good sentences at the sixth grade level. 

Break up the sentence into meaningful chunks

     These chunks will be what students unscramble. Keeping some words together helps students to see how sentences fit together and will help them in their next sentence composing activity, sentence imitating. 

    So how does this sentence split apart? Deep stays on its own, as an adverb showing location. Under the Pacific Ocean stays together, as a prepositional phrase. The main verb, lives, will be all on its own. Finally, the mysterious giant squid is a group of words that should remain together, as mysterious, giant, and the all modify the noun squid.

Scramble the sentence for students to analyze

     I always keep the first letter of the sentence capitalized, because this is a great clue for students to use as they analyze what could be going on. Otherwise, I try to just do a random scramble.

Analyzing the sentence

    When I introduce the sentence to students, I model how to read the different chunks and think about how the sentence could fit together. My sentence uses some inverted word order, so it adds a bit of a challenge. I encourage students to use a numbering scheme to keep track of their thinking instead of rushing to recopy the sentence. "Hm, which sentence chunk could be first? Ah, here is the one with the capital letter. Which could be next?"

Recopying the sentence

     This becomes a handwriting activity when students have to recopy the sentence correctly. Believe me, there will be some big surprises as you see how kids struggle with this! I always use lines that have a midline so that students can space uppercase and lowercase letters appropriately, and so that I can see who has a good handle on capitalization and who does not.

Differentiating

     Sentence unscrambling has so many differentiation possibilities! Of course you can have variations in the kinds of sentences that you offer. For example, in the above sentence, you could have some with the inverted subject-verb and some without, just to prompt a discussion about what's going on and why. You could also have some students create the sentences and do the chunking. 

     For students with OT concerns, I provide them with larger lines for recopying the sentences. Some students may also need to have the sentences cut up for them so that they can put them together.

Daily Sentence Writing

     If you would like a set of created activities, try Daily Sentence Writing!

Returning to In-Person Instruction: Creating a positive environment

     Planning for this year is turning out to be especially challenging! Teachers will have students who haven't been in a classroom for over a year, students who have been in socially distant classrooms, and students new to the district....it's quite a range of situations.

     I've been thinking about the new challenges that we'll face and what kinds of resources will be best. From the first hour of the first day, my priority is creating a classroom where kids feel safe and valued. But this is easier said than done, and the work that gets us to that dream classroom is difficult and tedious in the first days.  

Low-risk activities

    An important way to frame these first days of school is to focus on activities that have a low social risk. None of us like sharing deep information about ourselves with an unfamiliar group of people! For many students, sharing their innermost hopes and dreams is a risky social move. It's much more approachable to talk about their favorite breakfast foods or what they like to do at recess. When I plan ice-breakers for the first week, I consider the social risks that students are taking, and make sure that I offer lots of low-stress, surface level activities. If you've ever asked students to share about their hopes and dreams and been met with absolute silence, you know what I'm talking about!

     As students walk into the classroom on that first day, I like to have a quiet, desk-based activity for them to do. Some years I make individualized name tags for students to color; in other years I have puzzle pieces that build to a group puzzle. Students can sit down and immediately do something while also checking out the room, their classmates, and the view to the window. 

     But I don't ask them to engage in academic work or anything that might make them feel anxious. I always have an inclusion classroom with students who have a wide range of abilities. I want to get past that first day with good feelings all around, and I don't want anyone to feel badly or worried about the upcoming year. 

Getting everyone talking

     The routine of "Greeting" from Responsive Classroom has become one of my go-to first day activities. Greeting everyone means that each child hears their name spoken, and everyone experiences a norm-building activity of greeting and acknowledging one another. (You can read more about this in the Morning Meeting Book.)  On the first day, we stand in a circle. Each person says their name, and then the whole class says, "Good morning, ____!" We talk about the power of making eye contact and how important it is. 

     On subsequent mornings, students greet each other in 3 minutes of smiling, laughing, and sharing. Each time, I begin by emphasizing the importance of taking time for each other, looking each other in the eyes, and letting our classmates know that we care for each other. By sixth grade, students can understand the distinction between being friends and being friendly. We don't expect our students to all be friends with one another, but our class functions much more smoothly when students are friendly with one another.

Books in hands

     My other big task for the first day is to get books in students' hands. I put together tubs of student-friendly, welcoming books, and set up a short period of time for silent reading. For more on this process, check out my resource "Start the Reading Year".

     The first reading session is short, breezy, and fun. It's meant to be exciting for students! I use sticky notes to put names on books, because I'm not yet ready for students to take books home. Some students want to read on, but others set their first choices aside for new ones on the second day. After we read, I have students share their recommendations and what they look for in books. I enjoy getting to hear from students!

    

     

         

     

Reading Survey for Students

This year will pose so many challenges for classroom teachers! Whether we are teaching remotely or (gulp) face to face, one of the more pleasant challenges will be how to get books in the hands of readers.

One of my favorite methods is to talk briefly with a student and then offer three books: one that is very similar to their previously read books; one that is similar, but in a different genre; and one that is a stretch book for the student.

Sadly, I can't use this method in the upcoming school year. So I decided to create a Google Form to help me learn about my students! 

This form includes three sections. Because it is a Google Form, you can always feel free to add your own questions! In a future post, I'll add some details about how to interpret results and how to match books to responses.

Genre Questions

I've noticed that the shift in state standards means that students aren't as familiar with the names of reading genres anymore. The questions in this section ask about the characteristics of genres instead of using the genre names themselves. Students may not say that they like reading biographies--but if they say that they enjoy books about real people and places, a biography might be a good choice for them!

Format Questions

Some students have very pronounced opinions about the style and format of the books they read. I included questions about graphic novels, picture books, and point of view in this section. 

Reading Attitude Questions

How do kids feel about reading? These questions help me to gain some insight into which kids are going to need some more helpful nudges...and which kids just need me to get out of their way!

Setting up a classroom for collaboration

    It's that time of year again...when pictures of perfect classrooms start to show up on Pinterest and Instagram! It's also the time when anxious and perfectionist teachers start to feel very, very badly about themselves.

    But setting up collaborative classroom actually means learning to let go. It means that as teachers, we can let go of key routines and processes that should be in the hands of students. It means that we can let go of perfectly pretty bulletin boards and having every square inch of the room filled with themed posters. It's actually quite freeing!

    As we prepare to welcome students back to our classrooms, it's important to consider how we can create a classroom that fosters collaboration and community. 

Materials stored and labeled for student use

    I am so lucky to have a classroom with lots of drawer space. I make this usable for students by labeling the drawers and providing students with free access to them. It always takes some time in the first weeks of school for students to become used to this!
    Of course there are some materials that I don't like to leave out, tragedy of the commons and all, and these I simply store in a higher cupboard.
    Do the drawers ever get cluttered and messy? Of course! Around December, a few enterprising students always undertake the task of organizing the marker drawer or fixing up the colored pencil drawer. It's just one more way to put tasks in the hands of students.

Browsable book bins

    These are so helpful for students to be able to find and return books on their own. In the first days of school, I put the bins around the room to facilitate browsing. I love how flexible this system can be!

Student-led routines

    Instead of a moon phase bulletin board, I have a place on my board for "Today's Phase" and "Next Phase". The student astronomer will be in charge of checking out the phases and placing the posters accordingly.
   In addition to the moon phases, I also have a dry-erase board set up for the meteorologist to fill in each day. Planning for these routines before the start of school helps them to have a place in the physical arrangement of the classroom.

Leave some things un-done

    My recess games cabinet is a bit messy right now, but that's okay with me! On one of the first three days of school I like to spend an hour getting everything out so that kids can see what the options are. Then, students decide how to organize the cabinet so that the games and materials they like the best are the most accessible. Students are much more likely to keep up with an organizational scheme that they have created.

 

 

 

Looking Back: Classroom Libraries and COVID

 

This year has been tough! My school was face-to-face with the entire class for almost the entire year. Last year, I wrote about plans for a classroom library in the face of a pandemic. Now, I'm at the happy point of looking back on the year and thinking about lessons learned.

Taking Books from Room to Room

   Because I moved about this year, I couldn't have a typical classroom library. Instead, I had to take a bin of books with me from room to room. (By the end of the year, I was carting a tall table and an overhead cart with handouts and books!) 

    I expected this to be harder than it was. My start of year book survey helped me to do first day book assignments. Then, I could pick out follow-up books to put into my book bin to cart from place to place. I did make many trips back and forth to my classroom to get books that I'd forgotten; luckily I had a co-teacher for two classes and a lunch break in the middle of the other.

   I had some tried and true books that went with me and were in almost constant circulation! Because of this year's overall atmosphere, I found that kids gravitated toward quick and fun graphic novels. These were the all-time favorites from the year.

Teacher Sign-Out Book

    In the past, students have been responsible for signing out books. This year, I needed to keep the sign-out book myself. Returned books went into a quarantine bin, while I checked books in and out with a sign in book.

   And this worked out wonderfully! In fact, I think that I will clear the first 10 minutes of every class this year to do this again. I kept better track of books than ever before. Previously I had thought that I absolutely could not handle writing down student book checkouts, but I learned otherwise. It worked out well and helped me to have short conversations with readers every day. 

No Browsing

   At the start of the year, I worried about the lack of browsing in my classroom library. However, this turned out to be less of an issue than I thought. Between the book survey and my traveling book bin, I managed to get kids set up with the next book they'd like pretty easily. Each morning, I would sort the quarantined books that were ready to be returned, check my notes for what to take the next day, and get my book bin set up.

   In fact, I noticed that no browsing meant that more time was spent reading. Students became more skilled at asking me for the kinds of books they'd like ("Mrs. Kissner, I want something that's sad and long") and I got better at making recommendations. I did sometimes give students three books that I'd selected for them to look through. They could choose one and return the rest to the quarantine bin.

   I don't think that I will disallow browsing for the future, but I think that I will limit it. I always have a core group of students who like to avoid reading, and too much freedom to browse gives them time to do this. Finding a balance between browsing and teacher recommendation is my task for next year!

Outdoor Reading Time

   This isn't something new for the pandemic...but wow, does some outdoor reading time brighten everyone's mood! In the first few weeks of school, I had students bring along a beach towel to sit on outdoors. Our bright and sunny courtyard was the perfect place for fresh air, reading time, and much-needed social distancing.

   In my end-of-year survey for students, independent reading time rated highly as one of the favorite activities for students. In fact, several students suggested that I give more time next year! This just goes to show that independent reading is important no matter what. 

Lessons for Next Year

   What will next year bring? I can't even begin to guess. But I have learned some new tricks for my classroom library and figured out how to make daily reading time work in a wide range of situations.

Why You Should Teach Emily Dickinson's Poems in Sixth Grade

 In looking for poems to share with students, I love to go with the work of Emily Dickinson. Here's why!

Her life story is intriguing to students

Today's students find Emily Dickinson's life fascinating. Her reclusive nature and quiet life are mysterious, and counter to what many students experience. Teaching about Emily Dickinson helps students to consider how an author's life experiences impact their work.

Emily Dickinson's poems are great for teaching theme

Helping students to identify themes in poems and to write to explain those themes is a big task in sixth grade! Luckily, Emily Dickinson's more popular poems have fairly transparent themes. "If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking" and "I'm Nobody! Who Are You?" are two that work especially well.

Emily Dickinson's poems appear on standardized tests

I know that this isn't a reason to teach a particular author's work, but the fact that Emily Dickinson's poems frequently appear on tests is important to me. I always emphasize to students that they should try to enjoy what they read on tests...and if they can recognize an author's name and meet the text as if they are greeting a friend, then that makes the testing experience much more pleasant for them. 

You can sing them!

I frequently torment my students by singing to them, and the poems of Emily Dickinson work really well for this. In "Crash Course," (which is a great resource for teacher background!) John Green sings Dickinson's poems to "I'd like to teach the world to sing," but I prefer to sing the poems to "The Addams Family." It works because of the meter of Emily's poems...and is also a great way to show students what meter is.

Ready to use resource

This spring, I made a hybrid resource for my students to showcase the life of Emily Dickinson. I like to have a weekly assignment for students to work on, and this resource includes activities for vocabulary, informational text comprehension, and poetry.