Understanding Narratives: Story Events

    Supporting all learners in a mixed ability classroom can be a daunting challenge. Over the years,
I've found that having the right materials makes a huge difference! When I'm teaching narratives, my go-to tool is a simple set of events from the story.
    These event cards are so useful! Differentiation is quick, easy, and meaningful, as event cards have so much potential for helping students to zoom in on a story and read closely.

Preparing Event Cards

    Event cards are simple to prepare. Just make a single-column table in Word and type the events from the story in order. Use the same number of lines for each cell to keep your final cards the same size. (I find that a 16-point Georgia with three lines per cell work well.) Remember that it's almost impossible to cut a single line cell!
    Depending on your students, you may want to make your events simple, or more detailed. Be sure to include a sentence to establish the setting and the characters.
    When I'm ready to use my cards, I photocopy them on some cardstock and trim the edges at the paper cutter. The kids can do the rest of the cutting! I store cards in envelopes or clear plastic bags in the hopes that I will find them again the next year. (Narrator's voice: She won't.) I never make enough for everyone in the class, because I want students to have to share! Groups of 2-3 are best to make sure that everyone gets to handle the events.

Sequencing

    At the most basic level, the event cards are great for helping students to sequence the events in a story. This week, students read a drama from our literature anthology. Putting events from the drama in order helped students to piece together the action.
    Here's where these cards are great for differentiation! It's fascinating to listen in on the conversations that students have. As they argue about which event comes before that one, they often can't resist going back to the text to prove their points.
    Groups finish this task at different times, of course, and so I always put an extension question on the board. In this case, it was: "Read through the event cards with your partner. How is this reading experience different from reading the story in the drama format?"
   

Understanding Parts of a Plot

     Event cards are also perfect for talking about how a plot unfolds. This is an important standard for sixth grade, and one that requires lots of productive conversation.
     Using event cards is so much friendlier for students than filling out a plot diagram! A mistake in ordering doesn't mean tedious erasing and rewriting--instead, it's just a simple swap of the cards. Watching my students piece together the events of a story helped me to see how their understanding of plot is developing and how they see the different pieces come together.

Character Changes

     If students are having trouble talking about how characters change over the course of a plot, event cards can be helpful tools! Events provide anchors to help students recall the sequence and understand what happens when. Sometimes students who struggle to respond verbally can hold onto an event card and explain how the character changed in response to what occurs. For students with retrieval and executive functioning issues, having manipulatives for reading can be just the scaffold they need for higher order thinking.

Have you tried story event cards? What have you noticed with your learners?
   

Close Reading Tip: Connect Images to Text Evidence

    I just love this quick routine for building student skill with finding text evidence. Yesterday, as we were reading the classic "The Land of Counterpane" by Robert Louis Stevenson, I showed students classic illustrations of the poem. Here is one of my favorites, a 1907 illustration by Jessie Wilcox Smith.

   Not only does the illustration help to give students crucial context for the poem, but it gives us a quick, engaging task for finding text evidence. "Can anyone find a line in the poem that connects to this image?"

   Suddenly students had a real reason to go back into the text, and they loved scanning the illustration for tiny details. They eagerly plunged back into the text to find the lines that connect directly to the image.

    A quick image search yielded other illustrations, as this poem has been heavily anthologized. We looked at the similarities and differences, always going back to the text--how does this connect to specific lines in the poem? Because we were also working with a companion expository text (found in my Comparing Texts 2 bundle), our next step was to broaden our comparison to see if sentences from the expository text could be connected to the poem. And they could!

   Matching images to texts is highly motivating for readers, and it's fun to do. Even better, though, it builds connections for learners. What are your favorites for this kind of activity?

Summarizing Nonfiction...Again and Again and Again

It's been nine years since I wrote a book about summarizing, and I keep feeling like I learn more and more. This year, as I've moved back into sixth grade, I decided to start the year with frequent summarizing tasks. I'm teaching summarizing, but I feel like I'm the one who is learning lessons!

This year's summaries are based on a set of four expository texts about water. Each text has a similar structure and text features. My goal was to build on repeated experiences and frequent feedback to level up my students' summarizing skills.

Here are some of the things that I have learned (and re-learned!) so far this year.

Provide limited space for the summary

    Conscientious sixth graders want to do well! In many cases, this means that they write summaries that are almost as long as the original text. There are two different profiles for the writer of the long-winded summary. On the one hand, you'll see kids who are proficient readers and have a large working memory produce these summaries. They just have a big capacity for details, and they understand everything in the text. On the other hand, some kids who are struggling but conscientious will create these summaries. They're not sure of which details are most important, but they want to please the teacher and so they put them all in.
    My problem when I get these summaries? I'm too soft-hearted! These kids have obviously worked hard, and at the start of the year it's tough for me to hand them back for the kids to redo.
    When I provide limited space for the summary, though, I let the lines do the heavy lifting. "Make sure your summary fits in the space," I say, and when kids ask for extra paper, I give them a small sticky note.
    How much space should you provide? A good rule of thumb is to think about how much room it would take to write a sentence for each paragraph, and then add 3 or 4 more. This gives kids with big handwriting enough room to write a good summary without going overboard.

Teach students to chunk the summary process
    Some students look at the article and think, "I can never summarize that!" In many texts, though, kids can use the headings to guide them through. This is especially helpful for chunking a summarizing assignment for students with learning disabilities. "Don't worry about the whole thing today," I tell students. "Let's just do this first chunk."
    This also helps students who tend to summarize in a knowledge-telling fashion. These students write everything they remember about the text, in the order in which they remember it. A summary written like this tends to sound like a list of random facts instead of an organized summary. By reminding students to go back to the text, you can give them an anchor for their thoughts.

Beware the "about" summary

    Around about the third summary I start to see the topic-based summaries creeping in. Students are becoming more efficient with their summarizing and decide to take a shortcut.
    These are actually signs of good progress. Usually, I end up writing about twenty times: "Don't say what the article was about--actually include the information!" Once kids see the difference, they realize that the 'about' summary is quite empty of actual facts.

Look for growth over the long haul
    The development of summarizing skill is a long process. As readers grapple with more and more complex texts, they need to see how they can wrestle ideas to the page to write a summary. Students won't necessarily become strong summarizers after one lesson, or two, or even three. However, the good news is that repeated summarizing can build comprehension as well. I like to think of teaching summarizing as test-prep I can live with!

Close Reading and Textual Analysis

    This week I had the pleasure of talking about close reading and textual analysis with some of my colleagues. It's been a topic that I've been working with all year, as I have helped my fourth graders to analyze texts and create passage-based essays. Here is the presentation if you would like to check it out. 

Close Reading and Textual Analysis

 I've also been working with using short videos in class. I love short videos because they are so engaging for students, and they really help students to sharpen their analysis skills. For this workshop, I created a playlist of some videos that are short, yet offer a great deal of depth and complexity.



Creating the playlist took some time. My family is used to me spending hours watching the best and worst of YouTube's educational offerings as I work on Frolyc activities...and I often call them over to see my favorites! Many of these come from Ads Worth Spreading. It's interesting that these advertisements operate on multiple levels--they are ads, so they are selling something, but they are also well-produced and thoughtful.

Close Watching of a Video

Because I'm moving to sixth grade next year, I decided to take the time to create a start of year activity. I made this textual analysis activity to go along with the video Saroo Brierley: Homeward Bound ad.

Textual analysis gives us so much to talk about! 

Making Inferences in Nonfiction

It sure has felt like Antarctica at school this week!

    As intermediate readers move into more complex, dense informational texts, they need to make more and more inferences. Talking about these inferences and the thinking behind them is essential.

    I created a new text with embedded questions to help readers get to this level of inferencing. Embedded questions are great for helping readers to notice key details in texts. The text is chunked so that it looks less intimidating, and readers know where they will find the clues they need to devise answers.

Visualizing
    Visualizing is a kind of inference! After all, authors never explain all of their details in a description. Authors depend on readers to fill in critical details from their own prior knowledge. In turn, those details help readers to fill in other gaps in a text.
    Consider the text at the right. How did people try to find a southern land mass? The word "sailors" is a key here. 

1. Read the text aloud with students.
2. Ask students, "Can you find the sentence that helps you to visualize how people tried to find a southern land mass?" Some will be able to; others may be confused by the mention of Greeks at the beginning of the passage.
3. Demonstrate underlining the sentence. 
4. Think aloud: If sailors tried to find Antarctica, what would they be using? Ships! Would they have modern ships? Why or why not? Students may recognize The Age of Exploration as a clue to the time period, or they may not. 
5. What other details from the text could we add to our visualizations? Icebergs, sea ice

    This led to such interesting questions and comments from students. Some students didn't recognize that "southern land mass" refers to Antarctica. Others started wondering--why didn't the sailors steer around the icebergs? Why was the sea ice such a problem? I followed up with a video from my Antarctica playlist to answer their questions at the end of class.


Pronoun/Antecedent Inferences
    Pronoun/antecedent inferences are essential to understanding expository text. Often, students have trouble tracking these, especially when the pronoun is in a different sentence from the antecedent.
    In this example, we marked the text with arrows to show the relationship between the pronoun and the antecedent. This helped to prepare students for the inference question: What is the name of one of the three research stations? 
    If this seems remarkably easy, I assure you that it is not simple for many struggling readers, especially ELLs. We had to discuss whether the station would be "Nathaniel Station" or "Palmer Station", and why! 
 

    Making inferences helps readers to put the pieces of a text together. These kinds of inferences need to be explicitly taught and discussed. 
    To make your own embedded questions, take a look at some informational text that you are sharing with students. Cut it apart and add inference questions--visualizing, pronoun/antecedent, text-based inferences, and reader-based inferences. How do your readers respond? 


For more on kinds of inferences, you can see Chapter 4-7 of my book, The Forest AND the Trees: Helping Readers to Use Details in Texts and Tests.

Here is the Antarctica text that I used in my lesson:

Making inferences from Emily Kissner

Notes
Looking for more texts to compare? I just finished Spring Paired Passages, which includes texts about weather sayings and tulips. Great for test prep, but with interesting enrichment and extension possibilities as well!

Questions Lead to Inferences

  Helping readers to make inferences in nonfiction can be tough. For narrative texts, inferences about character emotions and traits are easy to see. In expository texts, however, the inferences often operate under the surface. Skilled readers may not realize they are making inferences, while less skilled readers may not even realize that an inference is called for.
   To help readers make inferences, I have found that questions are essential. Helping readers to ask questions of a text "wakes up" the inferring process. 
    No questions = no inferences. 

Facts-Question-Response Chart

   I love to use the Facts-Questions-Response chart from the Comprehension Toolkit. This chart has it all! Readers have to:

-Find and paraphrase details for the Facts column
-Ask questions of the text for the Questions column
-Note their own thinking for the Response column
-Best of all, slow down as they read!

    For me, teaching the FQR chart really helps me to see what readers are thinking. I have adapted this chart a bit in recent years. Numbering paragraphs helps us to navigate through the text and share our thinking easily. I also encourage students to put lines under their responses to keep thoughts from each paragraph organized.
    The FQR chart is especially beneficial if you have a large class. Teaching 30 readers at once is challenging. When we work on the FQR chart, I can quickly "clipboard cruise" to note who is doing well and who needs some more support. For example, the student who has filled up the entire "Facts" column but has no questions or responses will need some coaching, as will the student who falls back on a question formula.

From Questions to Inferences

    How does this lead to inferring? After reading a paragraph, we talk about the students' questions and how they can be answered with an inference. In the "Welcome to Antarctica" text, students read that the airport in Antarctica is only open from October to May. This made them wonder--why? Using background information from the "Happy Australia Day" article that they read, students inferred that Antarctica's seasons must follow the same pattern as Australia's--and that the months from October to May are the warmer months. 
    Not all inferences are as ambitious as this. One student read the sentence, "The Southern Ocean is rough and choppy, and many people get seasick." This student asked the question Why do people get seasick?
    I could tell that this reader hadn't connected information from the first part of the sentence with information from the second part. With some coaching, he was able to make this inference and write it in the Response column.

The Text

    I like to use texts that present new information to students for this activity. Last week, I used "Welcome to Antarctica", which is a text that I wrote as part of our Antarctica unit. You can find the text below.
    Helping readers to make inferences in nonfiction can be a challenge. Starting out with questions makes the challenge easier!

Welcome to Antarctica: Informational Text from Emily Kissner

Main Ideas, Topics, and...Photographs?

    This week, I found that I could build visual skills, questioning, and inferring even with a very traditional topic/main idea activity.

    As you can see from these paragraphs, right now we are looking at topics and main ideas. These are not the same at the all. Topics are best expressed in just a few words. Main ideas express a main point about a topic, and are always in complete sentences.

    Readers need to see lots of different paragraph examples, with main ideas in different places. Looking at multiple paragraphs with related topics helps students to see how topics and main ideas can be expressed in different ways. In these paragraphs, students also saw how paragraphs can have a sentence that doesn't belong.

Photos, Close Reading, and Details

  Okay, this is all the basic stuff. Kids really do need to have these experiences with paragraphs, and they are meaningful. But the lesson didn't really get exciting until I started showing some skink photos from my personal archive.

   "Look carefully at this photograph. Based on evidence from the text, what inference can you make about this skink?" I asked students.

    I didn't have to beg or cajole them to look back--they were flipping through their pages, scanning the sentences, eagerly searching for the detail that they remembered. "It must be a young skink!" one student said. "Look, it says here in the text..."
    
    Oh, the explicit text reference--that's totally what I want to see and hear! In the next picture, students first had to use some clues to figure out if the skink was on a wall or on the ground. "As you can clearly see, this is a floor mat," one student said--he definitely has a future as a prosecutor! 

   We went on to look at more pictures of skinks, talking about how sentences from the text can explain or describe them. In this conversation, students were:

-Using close reading to find details
-Making inferences as they matched text details to visual details
-Asking questions

   It all shows how a simple lesson about main ideas and topics can become so much more! 

   You can easily do this with your own paragraphs and photos. Why not try some paragraphs about your school? Consider the animals that are popular in your classroom right now--or a question that came up in science class. 


The skink texts are available as part of this product.

Close Reading for Understanding Dialogue

    Young readers have a great deal of trouble with dialogue. It seems as if the task of every autumn for me is to help readers learn how to recognize dialogue, figure out who is speaking in dialogue, and visualize conversations as they read.  And what an important task this is! Dialogue carries plot details and characterization. When students don't know who is speaking, or don't realize the importance of dialogue, they miss essential details of a story.
    For fourth graders, tracking a conversation in text without pictures requires careful attention to detail. After some initial instruction, I was curious to see what my students could do. I designed this assessment to peek in at their processes:

Dialogue Assessment from Emily Kissner

   As I looked at student responses, I noticed several patterns.

1. Every question correct. About a quarter of my students answered every question correctly. This doesn't mean that their instruction is done--in fact, it means that students are ready to really explore dialogue and learn how to wring more meaning from it.
2. Trouble with Line 4. Notice how the dialogue in Line 4 does not have a speaker tag. Readers have two ways to identify the speaker. They could look at the textual conventions of quotation marks and a new paragraph to know that someone new is talking. Alternatively, they could look at the context of the conversation to know that the miller wouldn't thank himself. Students who did not answer this question correctly often said "the miller" or even "sir".
3. Trouble with "You look tired". Teachers who know kids--really know kids--will not be surprised to hear that a decent number of students said "the miller" in response to this question. Skilled adult readers are shocked by this, as they clearly see that the miller has dropped out of the story by this point. However, readers who are having trouble managing characters in their heads will assign dialogue to anyone that seems convenient!

Next Steps
   I hate "going over" tests. This is probably a major character flaw. Instead of "going over" the answers, I made clean copies for all students who scored less than 4/5. Then I gathered the students in small groups to reteach. Together, we read the text and aloud and answered the questions again.
    I used sticky notes to symbolize each character, so that we could talk about who was in the story when. This helped students to see that Hans leaves the mill on Line 10, which makes the miller drop out of the story.
    The small group setting helped students to talk out their issues and their misconceptions. "Well, of course the miller wouldn't say thank you," one student said. "It would be kind of silly for him to thank himself for gold."
   "Oh, the rider is a different person!" another student exclaimed. "Well, that makes a lot more sense."
   I waited until after we had discussed the passage to hand out the scored assessments that students had already taken. Then we were able to talk about new understandings. What did students know now that they didn't know then? How were they thinking through the story events differently? How might this help them with their independent reading books?

Resources
    I eventually wrote three dialogue assessments, which I have added to Analyzing Story Elements. It took us a few tries to get it right! Even now there are still some students that are working on identifying narrators in first person stories. More lessons on identifying speaker in dialogue can be found in my book, The Forest AND the Trees.

New Texts

    Last year I wanted to combine social studies and fluency. I realized that my struggling readers needed much, much more exposure to the names of states! I wrote sets of leveled geography texts about different regions of the United States. I think that I can safely say it is one of the more difficult writing tasks that I have undertaken. You can find them here:
-US Geography Leveled Readings Northeast
-US Geography Leveled Reading South
-US Geography Leveled Readings Midwest
-US Geography Leveled Readings West
    Hawai'i and Alaska are both so big and interesting that they deserve their own texts, which aren't quite finished yet.

What's New on Frolyc
    I have lots of texts and activities for student iPads over at Frolyc. If you want to see new activities, subscribe to the What's New on Activity Spot Pinterest board. This month I have worked on Genres: Science Fiction and Fantasy, Autumn Poem, Anthony Wayne (a chronological order text) and more.

Supporting character traits

If it's September, I must be teaching about story elements. This week, we have been taking a careful look at character traits. I had to do some quick edits to the classroom version of my Character Traits Powerpoint to delete the pictures of my son--after all, I can't embarrass him by having him on the screen during a lesson!

Traits vs. Emotions
One of the big lessons of fourth grade is getting students to see the differences between traits and emotions. As I was planning for the week of teaching, I was disheartened to see how much misinformation is floating around regarding character traits. A YouTube video started with the example of happy as a character trait. A case could be made that a character who is always cheerful is happy. However, most students apply this word as a fleeting emotion. It muddies the waters to start with such an example! As I teach traits, I try to make sure that students see that character traits are generally stable and unchanging. While emotions come and go, traits usually stay the same. (In stories for children, exceptions to this are highly explicit in how the character's traits change, and make the change in trait a huge factor in the story.)

Finding Traits
I started talking about traits about a week before we really worked with them in details. During our read-aloud, we talked about the character traits that we could apply to the main characters in the books. (With one class, I'm reading Tollins: Explosive Tales for Children; with the other, I'm reading The Talented Clementine.)

During each reading session, a student sits in the "place of honor" beside the large picture of the character and records the character traits that we develop during the reading. As you can see, Sparkler is clever, brave, curious, and protective. These were traits that students already knew and suggested on their own.

Collecting Textual Evidence to Support Traits
After our preliminary readings to test the waters, I was ready to introduce character traits more formally. I used my (edited) version of the PowerPoint to introduce traits and supporting traits with examples. I gave students a list of character traits. Then, we read more about Sparkler in the Tollins book. I modeled how to use this simple chart to record examples of traits and actions.

Writing Justification
Notice how this has the start of textual support, but is missing a key element: the rule, or the justification. The rule goes beyond the textual support to show how the text detail supports the inference. In the case of Sparkler, we had this information:

-Sparkler copied down every word and picture from the human medical books
-This shows that he is persistent

In our justification, we have to show how the two pieces of information go together.
Rule or justification: Someone who is persistent works hard and doesn't give up. Copying the books was hard work for Sparkler, but he didn't give up.

I showed students the response frame that includes a place for the character trait, character actions or word, and justification. After I introduced the task, I differentiated by student choice. Students who were ready to work on their own could go work quietly wherever they wanted in the room, while students who still needed some help could stay at the front with me. This was a very productive time for students.

Looking Back, Looking Ahead
This process requires a level of thinking that is tough for fourth graders! However, breaking the process down into the three different tasks was very helpful. It was also helpful to begin this tough level of thinking with shared, engaging text. Students could move through working with evidence, trait, and justification. While I would love to say that everyone got it perfectly after just one attempt, anyone who has actually been in a classroom knows that it is a long process. But it is a fruitful one--teaching students how to justify their text evidence in this particular case is easily transferable to other situations.

Engaging Students in Complex Poetry

Last week I stumbled upon a way to engage students in reading complex poetry. It was a wonderful, magical moment--made even more enchanting by the fact that students were completely immersed in a poem twenty minutes before dismissal a week before the holiday break!

Behind the Scenes
    I love to start our study of poetry with accessible, easy poems that students can read and decode without much effort. After some success with these poems, students are much more willing to read more complex poems that require more thought.
    I have loved John Masefield's "Sea Fever" ever since I first read it in my seventh grade literature anthology. (Oh, I adored that book--a huge volume of different stories and poems!)  It is a perfect poem to read and revisit during a poetry unit, as it can be discussed in many different ways, looking at speaker, speaker's attitude, figurative language, and more.
    But how could I introduce it in a way that would engage students? I decided to try out Keynote for this. I quickly put the poem into Keynote, using a different slide for each line and a different background for each stanza. On a snow day, I recorded myself reading the poem in Keynote, and then took it over to iMovie, where I added some ocean sound effects. The entire process took about an hour.


During Class
   I wanted students to have experience with this poem over multiple readings. For our first reading, I had pretty low expectations--I just wanted to see if students could connect their printed version with the video version. Could they find the way that I had marked the different stanzas?
   It turned out somewhat differently. Students noticed the marking of the different stanzas on our second viewing, with lots of comments along the way. ("Is that you?" "Wow!" "Why don't you talk like that during class?") With ten minutes left in class, I decided to show it one more time as a choral reading, inviting students to read along.
   But students had different ideas. They couldn't help but call out their questions. I paused on the line with a star to steer her by when one student asked, "Why would you steer with a star?" Another answered, "Oh! They must have looked at the constellations!" We hadn't progressed much more when we got to the wheel's kick and the question, "How can a boat have wheels?" This didn't need much discussion--I just pantomimed steering a boat with the wheel and said, "You know, the big wheel they use to steer with."
   By this point I realized that the choral reading wasn't happening. In fact, it had evolved into more of a close reading--students were really focusing on each line, carefully considering the meaning. I have taught this poem many times, but I have never had students try to get so much out of it. Feeling brave by the end, I asked, "Who is the speaker?"
   Of course, some answered, "You are," because I was the one reading the poem. But another student protested. "No, she's reading it, but she's not the speaker. The speaker is inside the poem." Tentative answers were offered--"The speaker is someone who likes the ocean" "A person who works on a boat".

What Worked 
   Several things came together to make this lesson work well. First of all, I chose a high-quality poem to share. Something about this poem resonates with students--we are about 4 hours from the beach, close enough to visit every summer or two, but far enough away that students really do feel that longing to get back to the beach.
   The visual format of the poem also changed the experience for students. Many of the readers in this group have trouble accessing the right background knowledge to help them visualize effectively. The simple photographs in the video gave them a cue to access their "beach scenery" schema. Also, showing the poem one line at a time helped to give students a clear focus.
   Finally, I have to remember to keep an open, encouraging attitude, especially when we look at text for the first time. I went into this with a very low-level expectation for a first read. The students totally overwhelmed me by going beyond my expectations. I knew where I eventually wanted to go, and so I could steer the conversation onward when students showed that they were ready. But it was so wonderful to have students move beyond what I expected, instead of feeling like I was in the position of "pulling teeth" to get students to an expected level of understanding. This is something worth remembering for the rest of the poetry unit and beyond.

Clicking and Clunking into the New School Year!

Well...I have now had my class for seven school days. What a huge change! Now I have matched names with faces and faces with handwriting. I know who likes to run errands, who loves our class catfish, and who takes the initiative to take a poll to name our fish. I feel much more settled.

Last time, I wrote about starting the year with clicks and clunks. It really worked out pretty well. What I like about the terminology is that it doesn't take much explaining--kids already know what the words mean.

There are many different books to model clicks and clunks. Over in third grade, my husband used Earthlets: As Explained by Professor Xargle to great effect. Some kids totally clunked the first time he read the story aloud--they just didn't realize that "Earthlets" are babies. After they talked about it and the kids adjusted their mental models, he reread the book. There was much more laughter the second time around as the kids turned their clunks into clicks.

I have two reading classes, both in the afternoon, and I like to change up the books to keep things interesting for myself. I used the document camera to share The Goldilocks Variations by Allan Ahlberg with the first class. Right away we had a clunk on the first page: What does the word cheeky mean?
In this case, I explained the meaning of the word, and the students quickly understood. The word cheeky is used repeatedly through the story. (And it is such a great word!) When we got to "Goldilocks and the Bliim", we really had the opportunity to discuss using context to solve words. And the author helpfully provides an English-Bliim picture glossary.

With my next class, I went right into the first chapter of Toys Go Out. I love this book so much for transitional readers! We had a great discussion about what they were visualizing. We also talked about how sometimes authors give us clunks on purpose. It's so tricky as a reader to figure out when we have to fix up a clunk right away, and when we can just relax and read on. Chapter Two is even better for visualizing--what is Plastic?--and will be a treat for next week.

I extended the thinking about clicks and clunks into independent reading. This year I have tried to move kids faster from the easy, fun books and into books that will take them several days or weeks to read. It's not always successful. I had them use the page "Keeping Track of Clicks and Clunks" to think about what they were understanding. What if a reader has no clunks? Then that book is too easy! (Or they're playing the Pretend Game.) This conversation is so important, but we just had the chance to get started with it before the end of the week.

Keeping track of clicks and clunks from Emily Kissner

I knew that it was working when a student brought up a science paper to me and said, "This part just clunks," pointing to a sentence. So he was able to find where he was having a problem and point it out...a first step to success!

Then at the end of the day we finished up with a game of Streets and Alleys outside over the hill. (It is so lovely to teach at a school that has space "over the hill"! It just sounds fun and exciting to say.) If you are not familiar with the game, you really should try it with your students: here are directions. The directions say it is a small space game, but we spread out quite a bit.

News and Notes
-It's not too late for the September reading homework--they don't actually say "September", so you can use them into the fall. I am working working working on an October set.

-If you have an intervention group, try out the Puppet Plays that I wrote for my husband's class last year. The kids loved them, and appreciated being able to go perform for kindergarteners! (Please note: Puppets are not included, but there are some awesome basic sets that you can purchase.)

-I'm about to pull out my Max Mission stories for another year. These are short texts that give kids practice in making text-based inferences.

-We're trying out using Daily Sentence exercises in writing class this year. Based on the work of Don and Jenny Killgallon, these exercises will (hopefully) help students to become more aware of how sentences are put together. Edit: These are now available here and here.

Common Core Workshop Resources

Thanks for everyone who attended the workshops about the Common Core today! Maybe it wasn't the most fun way to spend a summer day, but it gave us the opportunity to talk about some important new concepts and ideas that will be having a big impact on our reading instruction. Hearing different perspectives on the standards and the suggestions helped everyone to see how this will affect instruction across the grade levels.

We started out by talking about how the Common Core relates to reading strategies. It requires a bit of shifting of priorities, but we saw that there are some nice relationships between various standards and reading strategies.

In the afternoon, we explored close reading in depth. Using some of the exemplar lessons and videos, we talked about how close reading can fit into our classrooms. At the end of the workshop, teachers used a variety of texts to build a close reading experience for their students.

Here are some of the resources that we used throughout the day, as well as some additional thoughts on the matter.

The Common Core website includes the standards. Download Appendix A and B for more details on text complexity.

The Pennsylvania Common Core resources page includes eligible content, text exemplars, and student writing samples.

Close reading examplar lessons from achievethecore.org

Institute for Learning blog post about background knowledge and the Common Core. Our group had a lively discussion about the importance of background knowledge and how we should build it in our classrooms.

Guidance on prereading
Tim Shanahan's post on what is good and what is not in prereading

Common Core Publishers' Criteria
This document outlines suggestions for publishers, many of which are useful for classroom teachers as they create and plan lessons on their own.

Text Structures, the Common Core, and the New York Times
This article includes links to NYT articles with various text structures. Interestingly, many big names in literacy weigh in on the topic in the comments section.

The Art of Slow Reading
In the workshop, we used close reading methods and text dependent questions to look at Thomas Newkirk's essay "The Text Itself". To find out more about slow reading, check out this book.