What to do with a classroom bird feeder

Choosing Feeders

    For the widest variety of birds, think about your levels. Some birds like to eat from the ground, others from hanging feeders, others from suet, and still others from elevated trays. Of course, your classroom location will determine which birds visit your feeder. When I was on the playground side of my school I was visited by very different birds than we see on the forest side.
    I decided to start small with the free feeder from BirdSleuth (offered occasionally). Over the past five years, I've added more and more! It's important to choose something that is easy to clean, inexpensive, and sturdy.

     Trays: A plastic tray is a great starting point because it's easy to clean and easy to replace. Because I have a heating unit right outside my window, I have the perfect spot to place a tray of sunflower seeds. (I buy the 40 lb. bags at Tractor Supply, which last about 2 months for $20)
     My students love the juncos, cardinals, chickadees, and finches that come to the tray. We sometimes put out unsalted peanuts, which attracts my class's favorite: the blue jay.
     Tube feeders: These are cheap and attract a nice variety of finches. Last year, though, we had record rainfall, and I did find that mold sometimes grew in the nyjer seed.
     Suet feeders: Suet is inexpensive and attracts woodpeckers and nuthatches, which are fun to watch. If you are not near a forest, you may find that starlings come to get your suet, which is also interesting.
     Peanut butter: In the years that I don't have any students with allergies, I purchase peanut butter to put outside as well. You can see the feeder in the photo above, but honestly it's easy enough to just smear peanut butter on some branches or put it on some wired pine cones. The Carolina wrens love it! Plus, it's way cheaper than many other kinds of seed.
     Feeder cam: No place for a feeder? No problem! The Ontario FeederWatch and the Cornell Birds Feeder are great to display for students.
    Feeder cleaning: Whatever kind of feeder you use, be sure to clean it frequently so that you are not inadvertently spreading disease.

Identification

     Part of the fun of observing birds is learning their names. I like to use a classroom birds slideshow as a fun icebreaker at the start of the school year. Kids like practicing their identification skills with photos I've taken at the window. They're often amazed to find out how many different species we can see just from our classroom.
     The allaboutbirds.org site is excellent for teaching students website navigation skills. I especially appreciate that it doesn't have external ads! With these webpages, you can teach all about digital text features, navigation, and browsing. There are great nonfiction texts there for the reading as well.
     Will your students make some identifications that sound silly at first? Absolutely! It's only through practice that students learn how to find the maps to see if a bird lives in their area, how to sift through the photos of similar birds, and how to connect bird behavior to different types of birds. Be patient and make the identification process a learning experience from start to finish.

Bird Observation Journal

     Once students get to be good at identification, I get out the bird observation journal. This is a place for students to record what they are seeing at the window. Kids may get up and look out the window, one or two at a time, as long as they write down what they see.
    Each year, students decide how they'd like to organize the journal. Sometimes students prefer to go by hour, while at other points students like to just write down what they see in a more casual way.
     There are occasionally discrepancies and problems with our data, which just means...we're doing science! When there are issues (wait, that wasn't a white-crowned sparrow, it was a white-throated sparrow!), we can discuss what these mean for our data and what to do next.

Phenology

     The records in our observation journals then become data for future years! We can track when the juncos will arrive, when the white-throated sparrows will leave, and when the goldfinches will turn yellow. As I tell my students...it's all because we noticed what was there and wrote stuff down.

Closing Thoughts

     I'm not sure when the process of knowing what lives around us and following the patterns of season and sky became unworthy of teaching. When I was in fifth grade, I told my teacher that I wanted to be a naturalist when I grew up. She said, "That's not a job."
     This is the kind of thinking that has brought us here--facing a future with insect populations in collapse, monarch butterflies disappearing, once familiar birds of field and forest now rare and unseen. You can't love what you don't notice. Taking the time to help students appreciate and love what surrounds us is worth the effort.
   

Building Content Area Reading Experiences

I'm delighted to be presenting about content area reading experiences at Shippensburg tomorrow! Well, I admit that I'm not delighted about driving "over the mountain" on the first day of hunting season...but I know that it will be enjoyable to talk about content area reading.

Content Area Reading Presentation
You can find the link to the presentation here. Because I do periodically clean out my folders on Google Drive, you may want to save a copy to your own Drive if you think you'll refer back to this later.

Other content area reading posts
Anticipation Guides: Read more about one of my favorite content area reading strategies.

Nominalizations: No one ever talks about these word constructions, and in my mind, that's a shame. Nominalizations really wreak havoc with the reading comprehension of learners, and understanding their role in text helps students as readers and writers.

Animal Adaptations Synthesis: A reflection about an activity that I led with fourth graders.

Previewing Content with Phenology: How to find out what vocabulary words your learners already know.

Concept Maps: How to develop knowledge with students by making concept maps

Building Content Area Reading Skills: Anticipation Guides

A few weeks ago, I wrote about exploring nominalizations as a tool for helping readers to understand content area texts. Today, I'll be writing about a teaching tool for content area texts--anticipation guides.

Anticipation guides are tools that help readers to consider the propositions in a text before, during, and after reading. Simply put, the teacher creates 4-7 statements related to the big ideas in a text. Students rate whether they agree or disagree with each statement before reading, and then reflect again after reading. 

There are lots of resources available for creating anticipation guides. Here is the overview from ReadWriteThink, but a simple search will yield many more. Interestingly, each resource shows a slightly different twist on the anticipation guide--which I really like! I am always wary of educational approaches which must be implemented under exact conditions to be effective.

Vocabulary Preview + Anticipation Guide

In the example to the right, you can see how I've combined a vocabulary preview with the anticipation guide. The text is an introduction to decomposers, and there were key words that I wanted students to be able to read and understand. 

Students read this text with a partner, and it was interesting to observe the conversations that arose. Some pairs read the entire text first before going back to the text to consider the statements, while others considered each statement as they read. I suspect that preferred methods has something to do with working memory capacity...difficult to prove in the classroom, but intriguing to consider! Whichever method was chosen, students were carefully considering details and main ideas in the text and matching them up to prior knowledge--really important processes.

Column Headers--Consider Carefully!
Many of the widely available anticipation guides focus on the affective statements which can be interpreted and argued in multiple ways. As I work with fourth graders, I like to use a mixture of affective and factual statements. When I do this, I use the column headers "Yes" and "No" instead of "Agree" and "Disagree".

The guide to the left goes with Follow the Water from Brook to Ocean, one of my favorite picture books for teaching about water and watersheds. I chose statements that would direct student attention to some of the key vocabulary in the text, such as the word reservoir, and some key ideas in the text, such as the movement of water.




Unit Anticipation Guides
A unit anticipation guide can work to bring focus to a series of connected texts. This Antarctica anticipation guide was one of my favorite tools over many years. As we read and explored the topic, students referred back to the anticipation guide again and again, talking about which statements were supported by texts and which they were still curious about. 

The Eraser Game
Will students erase their first answers? Yup. It's frustrating at first to see students erasing their "Before Reading" replies to make them all correct. Students want to be right, and they want to be able to say that they knew it all before the text.

The Eraser Game goes away with careful modeling and cushioning. I like to talk about how great it is to learn from texts--"I didn't know that before, and now I do!" In fact, a change of answer from beginning to end is to be celebrated. That's what reading is all about! (It takes a bit for this lesson to sink in, of course.)

How often?
Any good instructional tool can become overused. As Graham Nuthall put it, "...when students experience a narrow range of classroom activities they rapidly lose the ability to distinguish one activity from another in memory. As a consequence, they lose the ability to recall the curriculum content embedded in those activities." 

I'm very careful to not overuse such a meaningful tool, and I use anticipation guides about once or twice per unit, or every 3-4 texts. 

As you can see, anticipation guides are great tools to help students get engaged in content area texts.


References

Nuthall, G. 1999. The Way Students Learn: Acquiring Knowledge from an Integrated Science and Social Studies Unit. The Elementary School Journal, 99:4.

Pegg, J. and Anne Adams. 2012. Reading for claims and evidence: using anticipation guides in science. Science Scope.

Building Content Area Reading Skills: Nominalizations

This summer, I'm reading The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons at the recommendation of my 16-year-old. While I would never use this with elementary students, reading this book helps me to think about content area reading and the challenges that our students face as they read in the content areas. As I look toward a switch to sixth grade, I'm looking at more sophisticated content area reading selections, and so I want to be ready! 

Content area reading brings some big challenges for readers. Readers have to learn new vocabulary, figure out the style of the writer, and understand new concepts. One aspect of content area reading that I find especially intriguing for readers is the idea of nominalizations. 

Here is an easy example of a nominalization:

Northern water snakes can be brown, gray, or reddish. These differences in coloration can cause confusion among wildlife viewers.

In this sentence, the word coloration refers to the different colors that are possible for the northern water snake. Nominalizations are great for writers. Writers can change a verb into a noun and flexibly refer to a whole range of concepts. This is why we see nominalizations so often in formal, content area text--they are efficient, they are precise, they carry loads of meaning in a little space.

However, nominalizations can be tough for readers, especially when they refer to an abstract concept. Consider this example:

The word "restoration" is important to the text. However, readers may have trouble making the connection between the previous sentence and the meaning of restoration. Instead, they may think that the paragraph beginning with restoration is introducing a new topic. An entire section of the text will be fuzzy for them, which will cause problems for making inferences later in the text! 

Clearly, teaching content area text means that we need to find and teach these tricky words. Here are some ideas to remember.

For further reading:

Academic Writing from Uni Learning

Bergen, Benjamin, Shane Lindsay, Teenie Matlock, and Srini Narayanan. 2007. “Spatial and Linguistic Aspects of Visual Imagery in Sentence Comprehension.” Cognitive Science  31: 733-764.

Fang, Zhihui, Mary Shleppegrell, and Beverly Cox. 2006. “Understanding the Language Demands of Schooling: Nouns in the Academic Registers.” Journal of Literacy Research  38:3, 247-273.