Spreading the Revolution! Food for Thought

Hello, friends,

This will be a quick post to highlight a few celebrations of literacy and early childhood education you might want to know about:

The entire month of April is School Library Month.  Kiss a media specialist for all she or he does for you (or at least take a few minutes to send a "thank you" email or, better yet, a sincere "I appreciate" note to that person's supervisor (principal, school administrator, district media and information services director).

Barnes and Nobles Bridge Street in Huntsville, AL is hosting a special event to kick off  Week of the Young Child (see below).  It's April 10 from 12:00 until 3:00PM.  (Don't worry if you see "Kathy Miller" in the announcement at this link - it's a typo that's being corrected - it is me!) 

If you live nearby, come join us for fun interactive activities for both parents of 3-6 year old children and educators from preschool AND kindergarten plus giveaways for teachers and book signings.  After the tea, we'll be having a book signing for me and other authors.

Don't live nearby?  See if your local bookstore might do something similar with local literacy advocates, authors, librarians, teachers, etc.  Either way, email me at tla@readingisforeveryone.org and you can receive a flyer to distribute about our event (or copy to create your own).  Be sure to include APRIL 10 FLYER in the subject line.
 
April 11-17

This year both the American Library Association's National Library Week and NAEYC's Week of the Young Child fall at the same time.  You can find tons of resources on these organization's websites to help you celebrate.

April 12 is Drop Everything And Read Day.  If your school can't devote an entire day to this event, try giving every teacher a kazoo, a whistle, or a bell and encouraging each to designate 3-5 times during the day (not announced ahead of time to the students) in which they will signal it is "drop everything and read" time.  You can set up the "watch for the signal" earlier in the week so students bring ANYTHING they want to read.  Involve parents if you like.

On the very day, be sure to have some juicy reads for those who "forgot" theirs, re-announce the "watch for the signal" (how your day will run), surprise them with a quick 5 or 10 minute break to read several times during the day.  Let the last "drop everything and read" be an explosion of sharing where as many read the best part of what they read (only a sentence or short paragraph each) and see how many you can squeeze into the designated time.  Be sure to capture the titles your students are reading so you can create a list or bulletin board to extend the excitement of the day.

You might also be on the lookout for the annual state of library's report (to be released April 13) and check out last year's plus a few quotable quotes on libraries.  Most of us dread April 15 because of tax day but did you know that it is also Teen Literature Day?

Let your students check out their favorite author's birthdays in April at http://kids.nypl.org/reading/childrensauthorbirthdays.cfm.

Do you know of other reasons (and dates) to celebrate reading (or writing) during the month of April?

If so, post them here or share your own ideas for any of the celebration days above so we can all learn and celebrate reading together!

More on RTI

PART II

The second point that jumped at me from the IRA Guidelines for RTI is that RTI is a framework, not a specific program or model.  I like that because it brings the leadership back to the teacher.  How will you use these tools in your classroom to maximize service to your students?    If you need help, did you know that there is an organization (the National Center on the Response to Intervention), funded at two universities (Vanderbilt and University of Kansas) that can offer you free resources and support?  They can provide support to your center or your district.  Check them out!

RTI is about modifying the standard classroom approach if it doesn't work for a group of or an individual student.  Again, in my mind, that goes back to a renewed respect for the professionalism of teachers and educator-teams.  What a refreshing idea.  But with that renewed respect, comes a great deal of responsibilty.  Responsibility to stay on top of what works, best practices.  Responsibility to connect to your fellow educators and experts in the field and keep up with research.  Responsibility to take that part of your job seriously.  When I travel the country, I hear teachers tell me they are fed up, up to their eyeballs with the wrong type of staff development:  boring, etherial approaches without "take back to the classroom" tomorrow ideas that are confirmed by the experience of the teachers.  One more part of the responsibility of a professional is to communicate what you need.  Here are a few print and Internet resources to get you started:

Evidenced Based Reading Practices for Response to Intervention, a book that includes the voices of respected reading researchers speaking to the subject.

RTI Actual Network's Blog.  Every teacher needs a place to speak her mind and share her ideas, ask questions.  One of the greatest things I've discovered about blogs and listservs and online groups is that you can learn so much from that virtual community and contribute your knowledge at the same. For those of you that live in Florida, specifically, there is a blog on literacy from your state DOE.  Other states may offer the same type of interactive format. 

Webinars.  Tired of professional development that you don't select?  Try a webinar.  The IRA has listed a February event which will talk specific about RTI.  Hurry and you can get in on Missouri DOE's free one.

My friend, Emma McDonald of Inspiring Teachers (who just happens to be the publisher of my e-book, Powerful Picture Books), is on the same channel.  Her recent newsarticle on Tiered Instruction fits well into this list of resources. You'll notice that she created a personal copy of my newsletter but you just need to scroll down a page or so to find the article.  She brings an interesting idea: considering Montessori methods within the context of differentiated instruction.  I found it fastinating and it immediately gave me an idea. 

I always encourage teachers to look for those activities during small group time that work with students on a variety of levels.  For instance, in preschool or kindergarten when you have children on different levels of phonological awareness, activities that fit the range of the spectrum from not understanding rhyming, to being able to read rhyming pairs and recognize rhyming patterns in print.  Think about pulling activities from that range.  There's a great little puzzle I found called Find The Rhmye: A First Rhyming Puzzle.  I'm not into "advertising" but this is a great little tool.  I'm sure you know of plenty of other sets of materials or ideas that will work with a variety of students.  Organizing them by skill level is key to being able to pull them quickly to meet the needs of your particular group of students for a given year.

If you know of other resources you have found beneficial, please share them with a post to this blog.  If everyone shares a bit of what they find, we'll have a tremendous resource built on the subject.

A Treasure Chest of Nonfiction Resources

Nonfiction writing for children represents a pool of unique tools for educators teaching knowledge learning areas. Certainly nonfiction gives educators ways to build content knowledge. Don't forget that it also serves as a window of opportunity to motivate all students, to turn them on to reading. I've always said, "there's a book for every child" and, when you open the selection to include nonfiction texts, you raise the likelihood that each student finds that book.

I know educators and librarians don't have a lot of time to find these gems on their own so here are a few great new resources that will help you in your search:

My friend, and author, Vicki Cobb, and many of her fellow non-fiction authors just this week introduced a brand new database, website and blog, dedicated to helping busy educators and librarians tap into this world. To quote their introduction on their INK THINK TANK website "The real world has never been so interesting!"

Search this resource by subject area, national standard, grade level and much more on the database included here. There are more than 20 different contributing authors on almost any subject matter you can think of. They also have a corresponding blog where the authors of these great tools visit, share ideas and thoughts, and help us all maximize resources.

Ever feel as though your students have no hook, no foundation of knowledge, on which to build new content area knowledge? Need a quick tool to find picture books to use when introducing that content area subject matter? Powerful Picture Books: 180 Ideas for Promoting Content Learning is an environmentally-friendly, easy-to-use resource you can reference all year long. An annotated list of over 180 quality picture books, suggests one title to read for every day of the typical school year. Most of the entries represent picture books readily available in your local public or school libraries. Read aloud book 1 to book 180 in your classroom or use the interactive index to help you select the content area you need.

Each annotation includes the title, author, and publication details plus ideas (and some hyperlinks) for extending the learning. These recommended reads cover such content areas as history, writing, the arts, geography, science and more. You can find picture books applicable for use with elementary, middle and high school students.

Get your media specialist involved! Sharron McElmeel, from in Cedar Rapids Iowa Community School District, shares some great ideas for promoting nonfiction with the youngest readers in her article entitled A New Section for Young Readers: J is for Junior Nonfiction.

Maximize the use of nonfiction with your students and turn more of them on to reading as a tool for life, a way to feed their interests and explore new worlds.

Revisit the Read Aloud

Do you miss read alouds? In many of today's classrooms, reading aloud with children has been squeezed out or, perhaps even worse, has become a clinical, teacher-directed instructional piece to the point where it's lifeblood and impact have been depleted.

Take a look at an abbreviated list of values for reading aloud with students:

Pure enjoyment of great stories/growing motivation and interest in reading
Taking students to a different level of understanding of the story (Bloom’s
Taxonomy concepts)
Discussion and reinforcement of story elements
Reflecting on the text and searching for multiple meanings
Exploring the elements and format of print and story
Practicing and modeling specific comprehension strategies such as questioning,
predicting, clarifying, etc.
Building and activating background knowledge
Using inference
Understanding of the writing process, use of grammar, point of view,
writer’s voice, word choice and other writing-related skills.
Introducing and reinforcing vocabulary
Reinforcing content area learning
Modeling and Practicing “think-aloud” and visualization
Introducing and/or reinforcing summarizing skills

This list reads like a list of standards. I expect you can find at least a few of your state's embedded here.

So what's the deal? What I recommend to many teachers is to step back. Look at what you do as a reader when you read text. It is an active and interactive process. You draw on all you know about how to figure out those squiggles on the page and the meaning behind them, almost effortlessly. Our students are still learning about those through comprehension strategy instruction, decoding instruction and fluency practice. So open up your brain. Get off the "lesson" channel and just explore, think, wonder, figure out and celebrate great writing.

It doesn't have to take 30 minutes - try 5 or 10 (most picture books can be read in that length of time). Evaluate the "down times" in your day - waiting for students to arrive, during the "morning meeting"/first few minutes of class, before or after lunch, closing out the day. There IS time.

When you take this approach to reading aloud with your students, it will have an incredible impact.

Do you know about the research behind read alouds (there is actually quite a bit)? Dr. Wesley Sharp has written an excellent article summarizing some of it on Educationworld.com. Dr. Maryann Manning's take includes not only references to research but also personal experiences. My favorite principal of all time, Dr. Reba Wadsworth, has great insight into this area as well. One more resource: Katherine Goldner's action research in conjunction with her graduate studies. It so clearly illustrates the value of such "in the classroom" experiments and evaluation.

I'd love to hear from real teachers out there using (or not using) read alouds. What have your experiences been?

Tim Rasinski and The Role of Fluency Instruction

I was thrilled when my copy of IRA's The Reading Teacher came in the mail yesterday. If any of you are members of the International Reading Association, this journal is one of the best in terms of practical ideas.

This month Tim Rasinski (as he does so often) pairs with a classroom teacher. This time the two discuss how reader's theater can create an academic pathway to grow students' fluency. I hope that those of you with experience with reader's theater review this article's abstract as well as the article itself if possible. On the online version, there is even an idea for using Jan Brett's book Hedgie's Surprise in a reader's theater environment from Read Write Think. If you have not used reader's theater in your classroom, now is a great time to try it, especially with the detailed approach outlined. Tim's website also provides a great list of sources for reader's theater scripts. You can even have your students create their own as part of a writer's workshop or groupwriting experience.

One point of the referenced article is particularly important in today's classroom with an increased focus on fluency. The purpose of improving fluency is increased comprehension. I fear that in the past few years, many schools have swung the pendulum too far in the direction of focusing purely on speed and the result, as Tim and Chase talk about in this article, is children that can read like a house afire but have little understanding of what the meaning behind the text is. That can be terribly damaging to their ability to read increasingly complex text as they move forward in their schooling.

I saw this first hand as I conducted a research study on fluency and the influence of family reading on first graders' growing fluency. In a study conducted in schools in GA, AL, TX and TN, about 80% of the students we asked to read a leveled piece which included inference could not identify what the children in the story were doing (building a snowman). Many students immediately upon finishing the one minute reading (timed so we evaluate all the students within a reasonable time) asked, "how many words did I read?". It seemed they had nearly been "programmed" to ask that, even when there was no direct evidence that this is what our assessment was attending to. In fact, I recommended this response to our evaluators who heard that comment: "I wasn't paying any attention to that; I wanted to listen and see if you sounded like you were talking when you were reading and whether you understand what the story was about." Although this was not the focus on the study, it was indeed a wakeup call.

Educators must be very careful as we work with students to improve their fluency that we do not minimize or sacrifice expressiveness, pacing, automaticity in word recognition, and decoding. Worst still, if speed is our primary focus, children get the mistaken idea that fast word calling is reading. That is simply not what makes a good reader. Whether we are working with beginning readers in kindergarten or first grade, or older students still struggling with reading, we must be sure that we are sending the messages that fluency is a tool, that reading is squeezing the juice of meaning out of text. If we do not send that message loud and clear, we may see children benchmark on fluency assessments but their comprehension (tested more frequently that speed of reading and much more important) will suffer.

Certainly we want our young and maturing readers to be fluent, but we also want them to be able to think deeply and widely, analyzing and evaluating what they read, rather than simply regurgitating facts. That takes excellent, engaged teaching, giving some time to fluency, but always going back to the focus and purpose of reading, to gain meaning from that text.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with reader's theater and how you are using it in your classroom. How are you putting fluency in its correct perspective with your students?

Enthusiasm is Key!

With all the competition with TV, video games, DVDs, texting, and the whirlwind of life in general, it is more important than ever that teachers are commercials for reading. When you read aloud (and I hope all of you use this terrific teaching tool no matter what age you teach), use your voice, speed up at the intense parts, building to a climax, slow down and even pause when you hit the parts that need to be savored.

Think aloud while you read (so you show students how expert readers do it). Being conversational with interjections and questions occasionally does not impact the story line or detract from it. In fact, the more you do this, the better you get at it. When I read picture books to teachers, modeling this approach which I call "engaged reading", I ask them at the end if they lost the storyline and they always say "no". Because they were engaged in the story and the conversation surrounding it.

I'd love it if every one of you added a title you can do this with to the blog this week. Include the interest level!

I'll start: I'm beginning to read "The Desperado Who Saved Baseball" by John H. Ritter. I'd recommend anything John has written (great for upper elementary and middle school, on into high school).

Here's my list of the benefits of reading aloud. No other instructional activity I know touches so many levels:

Purposes for Read Aloud for 3rd Grade and Up


Pure enjoyment of great stories
Taking students to a different level of understanding of the story (Bloom’s
Taxonomy concepts)
Discussion and reinforcement of story elements
Reflecting on the text and searching for multiple meanings
Exploring the elements and format of print and story
Practicing and modeling specific comprehension strategies such as questioning,
predicting, clarifying
Building and activating background knowledge
Using inference
Understanding of the writing process, use of grammar, point of view,
writer’s voice, word choice and other writing-related skills.
Introducing and reinforcing vocabulary
Reinforcing content area learning and building background knowledge
Modeling and Practicing “think-aloud” and visualization
Introducing and/or reinforcing summarizing
skills
Targeting a specific grade-level standard:_________________________

As we develop our list of books, I encourage you to pick one up and read it yourself. Just dive in and enjoy it. Later, after you've finished (and when you are closer to school beginning), go back and identify what you can teach by exploring this book with your students.

Happy Reading!

Student Overboard!

As the end of the school year closes, I start a brand new blog for teachers. There are all kinds of places you can go to learn about the newest research, techniques, and strategies for teaching the mechanics of reading. I do believe strongly in the importance of teaching those mechanics but it cannot be everything we teach. What we will do here is talk about "lighting the spark of literacy (reading, writing, listening, communicating and viewing) with children of all ages.

Why is that even important? I think the best way to answer this is to quote Jim Trelease. He says, "What we teach children to love and desire will always outweigh what we teach them to do." Now I know there are a few teachers who are just in the profession to do what is minimally required, just meet the standards and be done with it. But I also believe that most of you who are teachers are in it for more.

NCLB has been frustrating and curriculum driven instruction has become so often restrictive. My aim here is to talk about how to go beyond what is required and light a fire that will serve your students long after you are dust.

So, here's my question for you: Are you interested? Do you want to start a quiet (or maybe not so quiet) revolution? Do you want to learn what it takes to get kids fired up about using reading and writing as tools for life? Then you've come to the right place.

Feel free to post questions, comments, wisdom and ponderings.