Kinds of Text Mini-Books

I'm in the middle of classroom preparation right now, trying to balance the fun tasks--setting out the classroom library, making posters, and planning lessons--with the more mundane tasks of schedules and seating charts.

As I was trying to tidy up my files, I found some pictures that I had made last spring. I created these while my own children drew at the dining room table, photographed them, and forgotten about them. With a little enhancing, they turned out to look pretty neat.

Why did I make miniature books? Well--why not? I love to draw miniature little pictures. (I have an entire fairy tale clothing line in a notebook that I use during faculty meetings. Trust me, it will make you actually like meetings.)

But these were drawn for a purpose. I start each school year by talking with students about different kinds of text--informational, persuasive, poetic, and narrative. Years ago I had made some basic black and white texts for students to sort into a 4-frame graphic organizer. Kids always enjoy working with the tiny little books, and love being able to make their own. This spring, I decided to make the task a little more glamorous by creating some colorful pictures. And I would have forgotten all about it if I hadn't been cleaning up my files! There is probably some lesson there about the virtues of cleaning up, but I will pretend that I have not learned it.

You can find some lessons and activities to go along with the mini-books here. The rest of the mini-books are embedded below. Follow the link to Slideshare, where you can download them. Just let me know if you use them and what you do with them.

"Mini Texts" from Emily Kissner

Thank-You Notes, Part Two

Earlier I wrote about a unit that I planned for teaching students how to write thank-you notes. Now that I've started the unit, I am so happy with how it's going! Parents responded enthusiastically to the letters that I sent home asking for addresses and stamp donations.

And students enjoyed reading about letters from the past. I pulled out some of the old letters that I have on hand (read here about how I used them to teach about inferences). We looked at the letters and talked about how some features have stayed the same, while others have changed. Why do letters still have greetings? Why do we not use hot wax to seal letters anymore? (Thank goodness.)

When it was time to write, students jumped right in. Some of them struggled with the form of letters--we'll work on this in the next few days! Others, though, struggled with the rhetorical task of letter writing. How to express greetings to a grandmother you see every day? How to start out a letter to someone you hardly know?

At the end of class, we shared their writing challenges and successes. For students who were frustrated, I told them, "You are joining a long line of letter writers, through the centuries, who have had trouble with getting started writing a letter." There is something that is so neat about joining a club of writers!

Writing Thank-You Notes

Thank-you notes are one of my least favorite writing genres. I always struggle with expressing my true appreciation in a way that does not sound stiff and over-formal. It's not surprising, then, that I often put off this rhetorical chore.

But thank-you letters are an important genre for students to learn. Even as other forms of writing become less formal, thank-you letters are still required in many situations. I decided that a quick dip into thank-you notes would make a nice transition back to school from the holiday break. 

But, given my own problems with the genre, I decided to do some research before I created the assignment. Why are letters put together as they are? How is the form changing?

I did some searching and found a treasure trove of old letters--the Paston letters, from five hundred years ago. These letters are from various members of a gentry family in England. Margaret Paston, even though she couldn't physically write, still composed many letters to others in her busy household, sharing news, asking questions, taking care of business. Letters from her children had much in common with what children ask of parents today. They are fascinating to read.

 After reading some of these letters, and commentary about them, I knew that I had to share these interesting details with students. I wrote a short article to explain to students how these old letters are similar to the letters of today, and how they are different. My fourth graders wouldn't get very far with the irregular spelling and archaic language of the letters, but I included some snippets of the texts so that they would get a feel for what this kind of writing sounded like.

I didn't stop there. As I was reading the Paston letters, I started thinking about levels of formality in writing. When students write thank-you letters, getting the right tone is essential. Tone is easy for kids to hear in speaking, but harder for them to notice in writing. The correct tone for a thank-you letter to Grandma is going to be different from the tone to use as a thank-you for an interview. To help students start to notice this, I wrote a few example letters using appropriate and inappropriate tones. By the time I was done, I had an entire mini-unit with a writing checklist, compare and contrast article, examples for students to rate, and a rubric.

I posted the entire unit at TeachersPayTeachers:
 http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Thank-You-Letter-Unit

The Acorn Mystery

Last week, Aidan and I visited a local park. We found some really neat acorns--smooth, shiny, and already starting to sprout! We filled our pockets to bring them home to see if we could get them to grow.

Well, the next day, we had a surprise--all of the cups and pots had been knocked over! Aidan was upset, and at first blamed his older brother. But we soon realized that Zachary wasn't to blame. Two days before, Aidan had seen a squirrel in the yard, and had taken me to see where it hid under the shed. Well, it became pretty obvious who stole all of our acorns.

This was too good of a story to pass up! I wrote it for my husband's third grade class, changing a few details and adding a flashback. I added some teaching pieces too, like a multiple meaning word page and a sheet with multiple choice questions. Here is the link to it:

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/The-Acorn-Mystery-Story-and-Activities

When it came to making pictures, I had a problem. Should I draw a picture of a squirrel (much harder than acorns!) or not? I consulted with my husband, who decided wisely that a picture of a squirrel would change the entire reading experience. He is trying to get his third graders to read without relying entirely on picture clues. A picture of a squirrel would give the solution away. Instead, the reader needs to read the text to solve the mystery.

Whew! I'm not sure if I could have drawn a convincing squirrel.

Fiction Genres

It might seem strange to be teaching about genre at the end of the year. After all, shouldn't that be a topic for September? In September, though, it's hard enough to get fourth graders to tell the difference between narrative and expository text. Adding all of the fiction genres would be just too much.

Now it's quite a different story! As we talk about the fiction genres, the students leaf back through their reading lists, looking for examples of the genres from their reading. They have become talkative and animated, ready to debate the distinctions between genres. (Where does A Series of Unfortunate Events fit? Even though Percy solves a mystery in The Lightning Thief, why is this not really an example of the mystery genre?) Several kids really perked up at the mention of hybrid genres. Many were eager to share their love for science fiction. It really shows how far these students have come!

I made a Powerpoint to introduce the different genres. We did it over several days, talking about examples and sharing stories along the way. (They loved acting out trickster stories when we got to folktales!)

Here is a link to the Powerpoint over at Slideshare.

Fiction genres

View more presentations from Emily Kissner.

Reading Procedural Text

This year, I decided to spend some extra time with procedural text. How-to texts, directions, instructions, whatever you want to call them--these are going to be the backbone of students' future reading lives. Not all of my students will pick up novels to read for pleasure when they are adults. But they will all need to read and understand directions in one form or another.

So, for the past week, my students have been immersed in how-to text. I've gone to tic-tac-toe choice menus for reading homework, and one of the favorite activities was to make a recipe with a parent and bring in the recipe to share. (Not the food, I emphasized to the students. The recipe!) We've looked at their similarities and differences, and students shared their experiences. I'm trying to be more conscious about bridging home reading and school reading, and I wanted students to recognize the wealth of reading opportunities they had at home. We heard some beautiful stories of parents taking the time to put treasured recipes on paper--and other stories of students who reminded their parents of the need to follow the recipe!

We also tried to follow directions together--with mixed results. Let me just say that origami is not my strong suit. I found these directions and printed them out for students to try. I wanted to draw students' attention to the features of how-to text: a list of materials, pictures, steps. Then, I thought, we could all have beautiful snowflakes to share.

Well, it didn't turn out that way. As it happens, Step 5 in the directions is tricky--so tricky, in fact, that we just couldn't do it. And what started as a reading lesson turned into a writing lesson. How did the writer let us down? What information did we need that we did not have? It also underscored an important lesson of procedural text. While directions may look dull and boring, they have an unseen drama that only unfolds when the reader jumps in and tries to carry them out. Will this turn out the way it is supposed to turn out? (If you're looking for a good set of directions, try these. They are similar to the first set, but have slightly different steps.)

Because I wanted students to try their hand at narrative directions, we also read a text about how to make a lay-up, and then went to the gym to try it out. I knew that the students would have more trouble with the narrative directions, directions that were organized as a paragraph instead of a numbered list.

I was right! They didn't read these directions as closely as they should. But what makes a better life lesson? Not reading the directions well and answering some questions wrong, or not reading the directions well and failing to complete the task? Well, judging from the expressions of my students, they learned more from realizing that they needed to read the lay-up directions with more care. Tomorrow, they'll have the chance to translate the narrative directions into steps and try again. They are excited to be working with how-to text...and I am excited to see their learning!

Layering inferences

I love surprise stories. I love it when an author strings me along to think that things are going to unfold in one way, only to have them unfold completely differently. For very young kids, Kathy Mallat’s Trouble on the Tracks is a good example of this kind of book. As an older reader, I loved The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner, because the first person narrator is hiding something the entire time.

But I need to be cautious in using too many surprise stories with my students, because these kinds of stories are often the exception instead of the rule. For every book that has a blinding surprise at the end, there are at least five others that unfold along more predictable lines. It’s far more likely that a reader will encounter a story that leads to a deepening and refining of predictions.

I wrote “The Magic School” story to try this out with students. (It showed up as a presentation at Slideshare, but it's really a Word document, formatted to copy double-sided) I wanted a story in which small clues lead to larger clues, a story that would be supportive to students as they make inferences. I embedded the questions to help readers pause and think at certain spots. It's bare of illustration because I wanted to give readers more of an experience in visualizing from scratch. It's set in a familiar location, with familiar items, so they should be able to create the pictures in their heads.

When I used it with a small group of students, “The Magic School” worked wonderfully. The students liked being able to write on the books, and the questions served their purpose. It was interesting to see which students could use the clues from the beginning of the story to help them figure out the events—for example, making the connection that the librarian had been the largest flower in the enchanted library. Some of the students picked up on it intuitively, while others needed coaching to recognize that, usually, the details in a story are there for a reason.

If you want to find out how your kids are making sense of text, try changing a few of the pronoun references in the story to see if kids pick up on it. This can work with any text and is a quick way to find out which of your students are not reading deeply. If they notice the pronoun mismatches, they have a picture in their minds which they are carrying forward through the text. If they breeze right through the mismatch, then you know you need to work with this child to read more deeply. (Thanks to Kameron, who noticed my pronoun mistake in the original story and brought it to the reading group's attention!)

The flower at the top is jewelweed, blooming abundantly now around wet areas. It has a surprise ending--the seed pods will pop when you touch them, leading to its other name, touch-me-not.