second quarter ideas

I haven’t written for the blog for a while, and there has been something on my mind for a while, so I figured it would be a nice way to dip my toe back into the writing waters. But before I do that, I’ll touch on some “school” stuff.

We’re now into the second quarter. Our reading focus is now on fiction. Students are to read six books this quarter, as with all quarters. The choice of genre is as follows: three different types of fiction, one nonfiction, and one poetry; the sixth book can be of any genre the students’ desire. Along with all this reading, we’ll be studying literary elements: plot, setting, character, conflict, theme, and mood. In response to the reading, students will either participate in the Letters About Literature writing contest or write a response to literature, journaling as if they were a character in a fiction book of their choice. Hopefully, should we find the time and seek the depth of learning, students will get to create their own fictional stories; I’m still seeking ideas and thinking about how this might take shape. 

As for writing, we’re moving beyond the “building blocks”—capitalization, parts of speech, end punctuation, internal punctuation—and looking to increase our sophistication as writers by continuing to practice diversifying our sentence structure through sentence combining. Along with growing more sophisticated in our sentence structure, we’re hoping to see variety and sophistication in the organization of our writing—moving beyond five paragraph essays or rigid story structures to something a bit more pleasing and a bit less predictable. It won’t be easy work; it will be challenging and hopefully push us beyond our comfort zones a bit, but this is necessary for us to grow as readers and writers and thinkers.

I’ve added an open ended feedback form on the blog, so if you have any type of feedback, it could even be a question or a concern, please feel free to send it my way. Thanks!

And now, since I've been writing all weekend but am not quite "there" yet for sharing the other bit of writing that I've been doing, I'm only going to post this. Look back soon and hopefully you'll get a bit less school and a bit more "real world" writing.

first quarter reading reflection

We’ve now (almost) made it through the first quarter, and are (basically) one-fourth of the way through the school year. The students have turned in their first quarter reading records and used this document to complete a reflection that (hopefully) helped them process the information.

One of the main goals of all of the reading we do this year—other than developing skills to comprehend, analyze, and evaluate nonfiction, fiction, and poetry texts—is to develop life-long, passionate readers. Passionate readers, who continue to read for the rest of their lives, know themselves as readers: they know the authors they prefer, they know what genres they enjoy, they know the length and level of writing they can work with, and they know how long they can work with a book before they need to abandon the book and move on to something else. These aren’t necessary “skills” that I can teach the individual students, but these are discoveries the students can make for themselves, as they track their reading and process each quarter, looking for trends and information that can inform their future decisions. That is why we read lots of different types of books, and track our reading using the quarterly reading records, and reflect upon our reading.

So, here are some things that I noticed, when looking at all of the different student reported results from the reflection. *NOTE: this quarter, students were asked to read six books: three different nonfiction (one “informational” text, one “instructional” text, one autobiography/biography/memoir), one fiction of any subgenre, and one poetry of any type.

•       Students read a total of 730 books this quarter.
•       3^rd period read 205 total books, for an average per student of 7.59.
•       4^th period read 162 total books, for an average per student of 7.
•       5^th period read 179 total books, for an average per student of 7.78.
•       6^th period read 184 total books, for an average per student of 6.81.
•       The student that read the most books, read 22 books this quarter.
•       62 students chose fiction as their favorite genre this quarter
•       31 students chose nonfiction as their favorite genre this quarter
•       8 students chose poetry as their favorite genre this quarter
•       It’s great to see a lot of diversity in the choices for favorite books, but we did have two books chosen by two people: Slam by Walter Dean Myers and Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. No other books were selected multiple times as favorites.
•      The authors that had their books chosen the most, for favorite book, were: Rick Riordan and Margaret Peterson Haddix.

Students were also asked, “What did you learn about yourself as a reader, this quarter?” Here are some interesting responses. *NOTE: No corrections made to student writing.

•        I learned that i enjoy fiction and poetry books alot more than nonfiction, which caused me to read fiction and poerty alot quicker than it took me to read nonfiction.
•        I still like mythology and Rick Riordan
•        I learned that I like reading about Engineering, and that nonfiction isn't as bad as I thought it was.
•        That reading can and is fun so im going to read more.
•        I learned that i hate non-fiction and that i'd prefer a world of magic and mystery over the rea world (Fantasy > Non-fiction).
•        I like sports books the best
•         I learned that just because I like Fiction, probaly more than anyother gerne, I can still enjoy books of genres, like nonfiction. This quarter also chanellenged me to read more genres.
•        I learned that i can read any book i want to if i put myself upto the challenge.
•        i learned that i am not as fast of a read that i thought iwas and if you speed through a book at the end you wont understand what happend in it
•        That I need to read more and not abandon as many books this quarter.
•        I like books about Tornadoes, Titanic and the Holocaust because I guess they're just really interesting to me . But, if a book is pretty lengthy I'll probably lose interest soon . I like having a short read , sometimes . Also , I like a challenge so if a book has a high reading level I'll more than likely try to read it 
•     I like reading books about science and historical things , whether it be non-fiction or fiction . 
•     I learned that I love reading books about music or musicians or about someones life , in their own words .
•        i learned that i really like science fiction books. i mean i argued with my sister that i didnt and it turns out she was right.
•        I learned that I actually like to read poetry and nonfiction a lot more than I thought I did.
•        I learned that I am very interested in instructional non-fiction and dislike informational non-fictions. I also learned I am not likely to stay interested in a very lengthy book for very long.
•        I learned that I am attracted to fictional books about magic and other unrealistic things. I love characters with strong wills (expecially if they are girls). I hate nonfiction books, because I believe that history is really deppressing.
•        I need to actually take the time to read the books instead of rushing through them
•        Before, I wasn't really sure what genre I enjoyed reading. But after having to read different types of books, I realized that I lean towards fictional books, especially mysteries, much more than I do nonfiction. But I also like reading some nonfiction, but only informational books about the brain.
•        That it's not so bad to just sit down & read for 30 minutes. 30 minutes isn't going to kill you, you'll never get better if you never try. ( :
•        I didn't know that i liked Realistic Fiction so well until i realized that after i finished the reading requirements that, that was all i was reading.
•        I learned about myself this quarter, that I can read longer books. They just have to be in my intrest, and Side Effects was! I've always been pressured into books I had no interest in, and I will be honest... I just "read them", cause youre not gonna read something you don't wanna read, right? The only time I'll read something I don't want to, is when it's for like a HUGE grade! Haha!
•        I learned that I really enjoy memoirs. I think if I hadn't been required to read nonfiction books, I never would have found this out.
•        That I should've tried new genres earlier. Take non-fiction for example: as I mentioned earlier, I've never really liked non-fiction, so it was - all at the same time - a great way and an awful way to start of the year when you made one of the requirements reading 3 non-fiction in a quarter. I knew I could READ the books, that wasn't my problem, it was LIKING them that was it. As I started reading, I realized I actually enjoy non-fiction and am going to read more of it.
•        I learned that while I still enjoy fiction a lot, I also like biographies, because they are more touching, as well as informational.

These are some exciting results! I can't wait to launch in to the second quarter, and see what we accomplish and learn together.

practicing for the big game

As my last post detailed, I’ve been reading Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway, and Katie Yezzi. Reading this book, along with continual discussions with other teachers at school, has helped me make some changes to my teaching this year that I believe are already reaping some pretty neat rewards. This week though, we will see if the changes have taken root.

I titled the post, “practicing for the big game” because, that’s essentially what we’ve been doing for the past several weeks. On the second week of school, we began freewriting as a class. At that time, it was a low-stakes opportunity to increase the quantity of writing and to work towards a more thorough and specific understanding of revision, rather than editing. Since then, we’ve studied parts of speech, types of sentences by purpose along with end punctuation, internal punctuation, and types of sentences by structure. I emphasized that good writers learn from other good writers by reading good writing and imitating good writing. (Often, “good writers” came to be defined as the published writers that the students were reading on a regular basis, and “good writing” came to be defined as grammatically correct writing that held the reader’s attention over time and offered some sense of ending or resolution.)

In practice, we found examples of how parts of speech were used in sentences, and different types of sentences and different internal punctuation, and we discovered and explained how each of those grammatical elements were used for effect (or to the writer’s advantage). We also noticed that elements of each of those seemingly separate skills—parts of speech, punctuation, and sentence structure—were intertwined. If we wanted to identify a compound sentence (sentence structure), we needed to first identify two independent clauses, which in turn required us to identify subjects and verbs (parts of speech), and then we could move on to the internal punctuation used for the sentence to be a compound rather than a run-on.

Building upon the identifying and imitating practice, we challenged ourselves during our freewriting in different but intentional ways: to use certain parts of speech while avoiding others, to try out internal punctuation that we don’t normally use, and to include different sentence structures throughout our freewriting. All in a limited time and space.

And all of this practice was for the big game. Last Wednesday and Friday we played several practice games incorporating many of these grammatical elements of writing. Questions were asked and hopefully answered, and examples were found and parsed and imitated. It was pretty fun too. But now one of the big games of the year is upon us.

Monday we will begin working on a Book Review assignment that will be due on Friday. Some students will type their book review and some will hand write, but hopefully all will utilize the skills that they have acquired in understanding how to use grammatical elements for effect, or to their advantage. Students will use much more than grammatical skills, though, to write their book review. Students will summarize the book with a bias; from the beginning the students should be intentionally arguing on the book’s behalf or against the book—for any number of reasons, including: writing style—word choice and sentence structure, narrative structure--organization, presentation. Students will attempt to describe the type of reader who might be interested in this book, based on the cover, title, and content. Students will provide at least two quotes from the book, again with the intent of arguing on the book’s behalf or against the book, for we know and have known long before the CCSS came along that evidence is essential to any argument. And then, in the end, the students can make their personal claims regarding their opinions of the books they have read and are reviewing.

It’s a lot to accomplish, but all the practice has led us to this point. The end of the first quarter is nearly here, and so is the “big game.” We won’t stray far from nonfiction structures just yet, but in the second quarter we will dip into fiction elements, and all the while, I have a feeling that the methods of our practice will be influenced by Practice Perfect, especially my top five rules so far: rule 4, “Unlock creativity … with repetition,” rule 5, “Replace your purpose (with an objective),” rule 8, “correct instead of critique,” rule 10, “isolate the skill,” and rule 12, “integrate the skills.”