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!

First Day of School Schedule: Sixth Grade

    This is the week in which I have to take a sketchbook filled with notes, ideas, and sketches and turn it into a cohesive plan--yikes!
    One of my most important tasks for the Sunday before school starts is to get a good schedule for the first day. I teach sixth grade in an elementary school, and I will have a mostly self-contained class this year. For the first day, I keep the first two stages of group dynamics firmly in mind:

            -Forming

            -Norming

My main goal for the first day is to form a friendly, productive group. There will also be some norming involved as kids test our group.  I want to keep a fast pace with lots of different kinds of activities throughout the day. Over the course of these activities discussions of rules and expectations will naturally arise. Students won't have to sit down and listen to a long lecture on rules--instead, they'll be actively involved in creating our group expectations for the entire day.

Here is my tentative schedule for the first day. What do you think?

First day of school for sixth grade from Emily Kissner

    You'll notice that the day is chunked into blocks. This is because there are always unexpected things that happen on the first day, and thinking in terms of shorter time blocks makes it easier to be flexible. Also, if an activity flops (and they sometimes do!) I can move on and tweak my other times from there.

    What does your first day schedule look like?

Notes
    If you want to purchase UV beads for your students, check out this link to Educational Innovations. They also have a blog post describing how the beads work. One bag of 250 beads is plenty to provide beads for a class.
    TpT Sale: I was on vacation for the first one, but I have a sale set up for the bonus sale on August 22! You can check out my store here.

September Read-Alouds

Well, this September has not been so hot as 2009--although we could have done with less rain! Even though it's been relatively cool, choosing read-alouds for September is always an important task. I want to choose books that are engaging, books that are quick to show their gifts of enjoyment and pleasure. This isn't the time for the subtle and slow books. I have about 15 books behind my desk, all great candidates...but when it comes for the actual read aloud, I think and re-think about my choices. Here are the ones that worked out wonderfully!

Face to Face with Lions
by Derek Joubert and Beverly Joubert
I chose this book to use for modeling thinking about text. The opening section is a gripping personal narrative about an encounter with lions. (I admit that I left out the "mating lions" part as I read it aloud. It worked fine without it.) It was a great choice for this purpose. The text is exciting nonfiction, and it gave us many opportunities for questioning, predicting, and connecting. I also had the opportunity to talk with my reluctant readers about thinking about what's in the text, instead of just looking at the pictures.


Toys Go Out

Emily Jenkins
This book is a gentle story about toys. I love the way that readers are pulled right into the story, wondering along with the toys where they might be going. The writing style is lyrical and rolls right off the tongue, with just enough silliness to keep readers listening. My readers figured that the toys were going to school, which gave us a chance to talk about making inferences and understanding text clues. In the next chapter, the character "Plastic" tries to figure out what she is. The answer is on the cover of the book, but most of my students didn't notice this until the solution is revealed. Then we were able to go back and trace through the clues that added up to Plastic's identity.  (I read this aloud to my own two boys--12 and 6--over the summer, and they both listened eagerly and asked me to keep going!)


Dr. Xargle's Book of Earthlets

by Jeanne Willis
Get this if you can! It's not currently available to buy new, but it's probably at a local library. I used this one to help students to understand the rubric for the trait of ideas. One of the characteristics of a 6 on the rubric is that the piece of writing helps you think about things in a new way, and goes beyond "common knowledge". Well, the idea of common knowledge is tough for fourth graders. This book was a great tool to use. We talked about babies and what they already know. Then we read this book, which is written from the perspective of an alien professor. Even though we knew a great deal about babies ("I know way too much, especially about diapers," moaned one fourth grader), the details in this book were still fresh and interesting.

Classroom Decorating for the New Year

This is my fifteenth year of teaching! So that means that I have had 14 years of experience with getting a classroom ready--and 8 classroom moves. 

Classroom arranging always begins with the furniture. My husband is a teacher as well, so we have a nice division of labor at the start of the school year. He figures out the best way to arrange my furniture, and I do the cursive writing for his desk nametags. (I know--I totally have the better end of the bargain!)

This year, I've decided to try something a little different. Instead of putting all of my books together in one classroom library, I'm going to separate the parts of the library into three sections in the room--fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Why will they all be separated? Crowd control! I like to have kids browsing, but 5 kids in a tiny corner doesn't work very well. I hope that by separating the sections, I can have more kids browsing at once. We'll see how it works.

After the furniture is put in place, I attack the paper. Or rather, the paper attacks me. I have a hate/hate relationship with bulletin board paper. In my first seven years, I taught at an open space school with flexible walls. So I had to put paper up every year to cover the dull beige--and I made the place look like a circus with just about every single color of fadeless paper. Now, I stick to just one or two colors on my much more manageable bulletin boards. If I'm really lucky, my husband will do this step for me too.

Then there is the most important decision of classroom preparation--what kind of border will I use? I have to admit that I love border. Lately I've been liking the border with the nature photographs. This year, I have calm leaves, cool forests, and peaceful bamboo. I like border that is not busy with lots of pictures and text. The rest of the classroom will be busy enough.

Then I grapple with a decision--to theme or not to theme? On the one hand, a theme is a fun way to start the year. On the other, a theme can be a thankless pit for energy and creativity. I never want a theme to overshadow the really important work that we'll be doing in the classroom.

This year, having just returned from a trip to Disney World, I decided to give in to the urge to theme. My husband arranged the 27 desks into 7 clusters. Seven groups? Hm...7 themed lands! Although I strongly wanted to have Frontierland, Adventureland, Fantasyland, Tomorrowland, and the like, I resisted the impulse and went with a much more teacher-ly 7 continents, which led to a World Travel theme.

I love this because it's filled with learning. As I call tables to line up, I'll be naming continents. It will also give us things to talk about in our first few days--pictures of the continents, characteristics of different places, what we'd take on our journeys.  I also made a little suitcase writing prompt that we'll do on one of the first few days.

After I worked a bit on the decorations, I spent some time making labels. I have lots of cabinets in my new room, so I have to label them all or no one will be able to find anything. I also made labels with students' names on them and my classroom checklists. Even though I could have used mail merge, I like to type in the names of my students--this helps me to learn them so that I'll be quicker at matching names to faces on Day 1. (My goal is to know everyone by 10:00!)

Furniture, paper, border, theming, labels...that's about all I've done so far, and I'm still two wonderful weeks out from Day 1.

The First Day!

Three more days...and then the students will arrive. While I'm sad to see the end of summer, I am starting to feel a little bit of excitement for the new school year. (Thank heavens!) I can't help but think about what I'm going to do the first day, scribbling down notes on whatever paper I can find.

My focus for the first few days of school will be to help students realize how they can be great learners. Most of my fourth graders are a little anxious about the challenges of the new grade. I want them to get learning and feel successful right from the start.

I've already planned to do the What's Missing game from the Think-ets set, probably during my first few science sessions. While my first day's schedule is not entirely finished, here are two things that I know I'll be doing.

Distraction (from The Forest and the Trees): Too often, students don't realize that they have control over their attention. They allow themselves to be distracted by all of the little things going on in the room. I have to get students to realize their role in paying attention right from the start. After all, in my room, we can have two fans blowing, classes walking by in the hallway, birds chirping outdoors, and even the town's volunteer fire siren going off right down the hill. If students allow each little noise to be a distraction, they will have a very fractured learning experience.

The game of Distraction is simple. A student reads aloud from an informational book. During the reading, I zoom around the room, trying to be as distracting as possible. The kids think that this is really funny! After the reading is over, I ask students five simple questions based on the reading. Their success depends on how well they were able to tune out the distractions and focus on the reading. Then we talk about how they were successful or not. Invariably, some students are good at this, and can explain their strategies to others. We try it a few more times so that students can try out the strategies and see success.

Schema Maps: One of the tasks for the first day of school is a school tour. My fourth graders are new to the school, so a tour is definitely needed. This year, I'm going to combine the tour with a discussion of schema.

Early in the morning, I'm going to ask students to try to create a map of our school, labeling as many features as they know. They will probably find this challenging! Then, we'll walk around the school with our original maps on clipboards. Students will be able to make changes as we go. When we return to the room, we'll make new maps to show what we have learned. This will be an introduction to schema. Students will have a concrete example of how they can add to and change their schema. And our school tour--one of my least favorite first day chores--will have an added dimension of learning.

Back to School Poems...

Just three more days until my room is filled with students! I have a new way of thinking about being "ready". There is no magical ready moment. For the last several years, I have worked through August, trying to make things neat and tidy and perfect. And the first few days still hit me like a ton of bricks. Even worse, I had worked so hard ahead of time that I was exhausted and drained before my students even walked in the door.

So, since I cannot be absolutely ready, I'm saving my strength. I'm saving my enthusiasm, my excitement, and my energy for my time with the students. This means that I won't have a tabbed binder of student names ready for the first day of school, won't have every student name written neatly on every folder, won't have an organized library. But I will have more emotional resources to learn names, play games, and eat lunch with my students. These are the things that will be more important in the long run. My students don't ever come to me and say, "I'm so glad that you have an organized tabbed binder with all of our names in it!" But they do say, "Could you eat lunch with us? I'm a little nervous about the first day."

How will this approach work? I'll find out this week and report!

Of course, I haven't stopped thinking about school. I've just decided to focus on doing what I like. And what I like is planning. We're doing found poems and sharing some poems together on the first day. On the second day, I'm going to introduce a set of point/counterpoint poems that I wrote last year and posted over on TeachersPayTeachers. These two poems showcase two opposing feelings about coming back to school. One speaker is excited and enthusiastic, while the other wishes for more weeks of summer. Kind of the way I'm feeling right now! I hope that this will generate some good discussion with the students, and maybe lead into us writing point/counterpoint poems together.

First week games

This time last week, I was at Disney World with my family. This time next week, I'll be in the middle of my third day with students. What a change!

I've been trying to shake off my vacation drift and focus on what those first three days will look like. Doing this helps me to avoid the blind panic of what is ahead of me (I went on VACATION a week before school starts? Am I insane?)

The poems and cut out words are ready for Found Poetry. But now I have to figure out how the rest of the day will look. To do this, I'm thinking back to the best preparation for teaching I ever had--my days as a camp counselor.

Because, for the first days of school, I need to think like a camp counselor. The emotional and social lives of my students will be foremost as we come together. This means getting myself prepared to do some things that teachers don't usually do--eating lunch with the students, planning extra recesses to practice routines, playing lots of games. But the time spent in all of these extras will have big payouts later in the year.

Here are some of my favorite games for the first few days of school. They all have some common characteristics--they are quick to explain and easy to play. The more complex, longer games I save for a few more weeks.

Train Wreck: Seat students in chairs in a circle. Have enough chairs for all of the participants except one. That person is in the center, and is the caller. The caller will make a statement, and everyone who fits that statement will have to find a new seat at least two seats away. (Examples: Everyone with long hair, everyone wearing shorts, everyone who has a sister.) The caller, of course, tries to take a seat, and the person who is left standing is the new caller. For the first day of school, I try to set it up so that students use descriptors that will teach us about the other students. And, of course, I explain that all descriptors must be positive! At "Train Wreck", everyone must find a new seat. It's fun, it's some movement, but it's not too crazy.

The Blanket Game: This is a game made for rainy Sunday afternoons. I first learned it as a camper myself. It sounds simple, and it is! You will need two volunteers to hold a blanket, or tablecloth, or whatever you have, making a screen between two equal teams. At your signal, each team sends someone up to right beside the blanket. The holders lower the blanket, and the two contestants try to say the other's name as quickly as possible. The first one to correctly name the other is the winner, and the other student has to go join the other team. It's fun as the size of the teams goes back and forth, and students have a real reason for learning names.

Zoom: This is from The First Six Weeks. You will need a timer. Students stand in a circle. Choose a student to be the start. At your signal, this student will turn to the right and say, "Zoom". The next student will pass the word to the right, and so on, going around and around the circle. The goal is to get the word back to the start as quickly as possible. This is great for team-building, because all members of the class are working on a common goal. Keep a poster with times to show progress! Once the class has gotten super fast (below 5 seconds is definitely possible), switch it up. What if they go to the left? Would the score be faster or slower? Why? This game is fun to play all through the first few months.

Distraction: I made up this game as I was writing The Forest and the Trees, and it's described in the third chapter. It's based on a segment on the HBO show Crashbox, and is a great way to explain to kids that they are in charge of their attention. Choose a student to read a paragraph from an informational book. (For the first week of school, the school handbook is a great choice!) While the student does this, zoom around the classroom doing crazy things--making faces, jumping on a chair, whatever you can think of that will get the students' attention. Then, when the reader is finished, stop being silly and ask five questions based on the reading. The point is for the students to try to ignore your silly behaviors and focus on what is being read. After the first round, brainstorm strategies for paying attention, and try it again. Kids can improve quickly at this. Keep the list of strategies for paying attention and refer back to it when you start teaching meaningful lessons.

My least favorite game: The one where you have to go around the circle, say your name, and an adjective that describes you, and then recite everyone who came before you. Played with twenty kids or more, this is an exercise in torture. Only one person is actually participating at a time, which leaves lots of down time for mischief. Too many Sunday afternoons of this game have led to my dislike for it!

Any other favorite first week games? Share them!

Planning and Poetry

As July turns to August, I make a transition in my thinking. The upcoming school year slowly morphs from a vague idea into a specific reality. I have to go from the sun-soaked brainstorming of early summer--"Next year I'll do this, and this, and this!"--into the practical realities of what will and will not work with my students.

For me, the hardest day to plan is the very first day. I don't know the students, and they don't know me. In four weeks, we will be a cohesive community, with our own jokes and culture and ways to spend time. But it's a challenge to get to that good place.

This year, I'm going to tweak a Responsive Classrooms idea. I've had great luck with having students decorate the labels for different places in the room--the art supplies, the different closets, the pencil sharpener, the library, the dictionaries, and so forth. This gives students something meaningful to do right from the moment they walk into the room. I'm going to take this one step forward by moving from decorating the labels into decorating posters of poems that we'll be sharing this year.

Although I don't specifically tell them to do so, they always decorate the labels to go along with the text. The library sign has books, the pencil sharpener sign has pencils, and so forth. This will be a great way to jump into decorating the poems. "Just as the sign for the library has a picture of books, we can decorate these poems with pictures that go along with what they are about." Then, students will work in small groups to read the poems and decorate them. The poems that I've chosen are kid-friendly, with lots of specific imagery. (Bobbi Katz's Once Around the Sun has a poem for every month. Pieces, by Anna Grossnickle Hines, has poems for different seasons, illustrated by photographs of beautiful quilts.)

One poetry thought led to another. My mailbox has been filled with Back to School catalogs lately. Why not put those to good use by having students create found poems? To create a found poem, students just choose and arrange words from various sources in a new way. It works well to have a variety of words cut out ahead of time--a perfect task for a student who will be volunteering in my room right before school begins. After we talk about what a found poem is and I share an example, students choose their color of paper, and select and arrange the words. A back to school/autumn theme will work perfectly.

Found poems can be funny and thoughtful. What makes them so much fun to do is that every kid can create an interesting product, and the word selection often leads to unexpected combinations. Sharing the poems will be a low-stress, funny way to get to know everyone and see what they can do.

So, that's the first day partially planned. Now, just 179 to go...

Here is a lesson on using found poems from ReadWriteThink.