Percy's Complication

To round out last year, my colleague and I cranked out a unit of learning based on Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson The Lightning Thief. We covered a ridiculous amount of ground in the last couple of weeks, and the kids loved it.  Who am I kidding? I loved it.

So, when I found out that the history topic my current class needed to learn about was Ancient Greece, I could feel Percy tapping me on the shoulder. I quickly bought the ebook for my iPad and set to work planning.

The learning outcomes for this unit are quite different (and the kiddos are brand new to me) so our learning is, of course, very different. One thing I was super keen to keep though was a narrative project. The basic premise: choose an Ancient Greek god and write a narrative with the demigod child of that god as the protagonist. The god must be involved in either the complication or the resolution somehow.

And therein lay the problem or the complication.  I discovered pretty quickly that the class needed a review of narrative structure. (Ha! See what I did there? Oh dear, I'm laughing at my own jokes. That's sad.)

I gave out sticky notes and we used everyone's contribution to co-construct a shared understanding.

Plot Mountain Anchor Chart by Markeeta Roeis licensed under a 
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Plot Mountain Anchor Chart Introduction Detail  

by Markeeta Roe is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Plot Mountain Anchor Chart Series of Events Detail

by Markeeta Roe is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Plot Mountain Anchor Chart Characters Detail 

by Markeeta Roe is licensed under a 

Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Again, the anchor chart has been a great scaffolding tool for many of the kiddos. They've also been working with a graphic organiser I created to mirror the chart. I've built the organiser into the project's assessment rubric and conferred during this pre-writing stage to offer 'feedforward' (rather than 'feedback').  As fate would have it, I happened to read a blog post (that you can read here) about this very idea over the weekend.

“Avoiding Masterchef style feedback” a new post about feedback and critique https://t.co/XiwiUE9pjc

— Tom Barrett (@tombarrett) June 13, 2016

@tombarrett Great piece. Highlights -for me- the importance of giving feedback at sts' pre-writing point. Need to do more of this. Thanks!

— Markeeta RoePhillips (@MarkeetaRP) June 13, 2016

It was rather affirming to read, and a timely reminder to keep it up.

I'll update as the narratives take shape. I can't wait to see how the kiddos incorporate their inquiries into Ancient Greece into their narratives.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers:

Standard 1 Know the students and how they learn

Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it

Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

QR Code Trail Update & Reflection

I'm super tardy in posting this update on my book week QR Code Trail (the original post is here). Sorry! All I can say is that during book week I found a whole pile of new YA novels that I wanted to read before releasing into the wild my classroom. I finally reached the point of being ready to read Divergent. (Gotta say that I'm loving it way more than the movie, but when do bookworms ever enjoy a movie more than the book.)

The codes went all the way around the school.
Parents had to visit many classrooms to find them.

Back to the topic at hand: here's the update.  We had a small but significant number of parents participate in the trail on the first day of book week.  Some others came back the next day to do it. (Yay!) Some of my kiddos met them, with their iPads, and acted as tour guides. Thank goodness they did! Not all parents had wi-fi, and some didn't have QR readers.   Our school internet connection decided to play hide and seek for most of the afternoon too which didn't really help.

However... The parents  enjoyed the experience. My kiddos were able to talk them through both the process and the literacy concepts that each video covers.  From what I could gather, this aspect of the trail was particularly appreciated. Pretty proud of the kiddos for stepping up like this. 

What did I learn from the process on the day?

In terms of the videos themselves: my learning journey continues. I need to improve the sound quality and reduce background noise. The best comments came from children who were guided through very specific - almost leading - questions rather than allowed to freely discuss the topic.  You're welcome to view the videos on the school's YouTube channel.  We've set them to 'no comments' but I'm keen to hear your feedback through this blog or via twitter (@markeetarp).

In terms of the logistics: iPads don't have the world's loudest speakers. I need to provide headphones, especially if it's windy (as it was). 

In terms of the 'entry form': people rarely carry pens these day so I needed to provide those (which meant my kiddos had to run back to the classroom to grab them). I think a better option would be to set up a google form but that would reduce the drama of pulling a winner out of the hat when we choose the winner of the book voucher (to entice participation). Having said that, it would certainly give us another opportunity to demonstrate another of the e-tools we use in the classroom (random name selector).

I'm inspired to build on this experience in the classroom - both the videos and the QR codes.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments

Standard 6 Professional engagement

Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

To Sum It Up

One of the things that constantly surprises me is the way middle school kiddos struggle to take notes of key ideas and then summarise what they've read. Summarising plays a big part of our school's reading scope and sequence so it's somewhat of a mystery but it is what it is, and so we'll work with it!

We do a lot of research in middle school; a lot of  inquiry learning. To my dismay more than a couple of kiddos have recently fallen into the ol' trap of copying and pasting 'facts' that 'answer' their questions. *sigh*  As we're heading into quite a large inquiry topic I decided that it's time to revisit a couple of ways of notetaking and summarising.

One particular lesson really grabbed the kiddos' attention.  I started by sharing a short article from the British Museum's Ancient India website. (We've just started investigating Ancient India. We'll be building a website and would love your input. You can check it out here.)

This is a screen shot from
www.ancientindia.co.uk

After reading the text aloud - it's a little complex for some of my kiddos, and we had a friend visiting from the small class for a reverse integration session - I left the article on the screen and asked everyone to choose one word that stood out to them as the most important one in the whole text. I quickly entered these onto wordle.net and we came up with this:

Each word was justified by its contributor which was quite thought provoking and meant that the next step of writing a one sentence summary of the article was probably easier for everyone.

Here is a selection of the sentences at this stage:

• India is an extreme land with lots of challenges and powerful rivers.
• India is extreme and challenging.
• In ancient times, the subcontinent of India was challenged when civilization had to make extreme changes to their lives by the Indus River.
• Ancient India has powerful rivers flowing through it.
• The subcontinent of ancient India has varied, extreme weather and it is a challenge for the civilisations that live there.

Quite a range of understanding!

The next step involved each student choosing a phrase from the text that they thought carried the most information. Again, I entered them into wordle.net and here is our outcome:

Again, each phrase was justified by its contributor and everyone wrote a one sentence summary based on both word clouds.

Here is a selection of these sentences.

• India is an ancient land full of insane rivers and hectic lands.
• Water flows through ancient India’s land.
• Ancient Indians lived on rivers which passed as an obstacle with the wild weather.
• Ancient India has a rough landscape and rough rivers.
• Ancient India is land that you need to adjust to and is hard to live in.
• It is very remote and hard in ancient India.
• It is a strong meaningful article telling us about the rivers and land.

I'm not sure about the mental health of the rivers but on the whole the sentences give a pretty good - brief - summary of the article.

And the kiddos 'got it'. They didn't have the article in front of them to write the sentences, just the word clouds. We discussed the idea that summarising means distilling the important parts out of the text and focussing on them. The word clouds help us do that by showing us visually which we thought were the important words and phrases were.

We looked at one other technique during this lesson.  I, again, chose a short article from the same website and read it aloud.  As a class we decided what the important word or phrase in each sentence was, and highlighted it in orange. We noticed that not all sentences really added anything new and so we didn't need to highlight anything, but that some sentences really had a couple so we went back and added some green highlights.  These words became the keywords that students used to write their summaries. 

This was originally a screenshot from
www.ancientindia.co.uk

We've still got a long way to go, but we're making progress.  What techniques do you use to teach notetaking, key words and summarising?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments

Thinking about Book Clubs Part II

Remember those infographics I created for my book clubs? I blogged about them here. At least one of you asked for a follow up post on how they were received. Here it is! This one's for you Adrienne.

This could, in reality, be a super short post because the individual cards were received extremely favourably and have been described as changing the way a particular book club runs. However, we all know that short, sharp and shiny is not really how I roll.

The first group I used the cards with I was in a bit of hurry and assumed - because they're cluey kids - that they would take the time to read the cards and just know how to use them. Yeah well. We can all guess how well that went can't we? The kiddos returned some time later with miserable looks on their faces because they'd had an argument over how much they needed to read during the book club time. Cue deathly silence.

"You weren't reading during your meeting though were you?"

"Yes. We'd made a couple of predictions and couldn't think of anything else to talk about so we just got on with reading."

I'm surprised I didn't inhale the child standing closest to me as I took a very slow and deep breath. 

"Let's go over the book club process again."

We revisited the process and the purpose of book clubs before reviewing the cards. It was delightful to see the little bulbs of recognition and understanding lighting up as we talked. Less delightful was the growing realisation that I'd left this group to independent meetings way too early. I was left hoping that the damage the premature independence had caused wasn't permanent.  

The following week I offered to join the club - as an observer - but was turned down. They'd talked about my likely offer and had decided to give it another go on their own first. Watching them walk out of the room actually made my stomach churn. 

It shouldn't have.  I went out to check close to the end of the lesson and they were still deeply engrossed in their discussions. They were flipping through their novels and talking about the strategies they were using. I saw all of them refer to the card to help find the words to describe their thinking. And they didn't even notice me loitering in the doorway watching. 

Phew!

We had our 3-way interviews very soon afterwards and one of these kids described book club as one of his highlights of the year, with the last meeting being an extraordinary experience.  Not bad hey?

The other ongoing book club is a little further along in their development. They've all done it before and know the drill. BUT... They've enjoyed the reminder the cards have offered them. I recorded their meeting last week (for a school wide literacy QR trail that I'm building for book week) and was overjoyed to hear them describe the pleasure, learning and challenge they get from book club.  Listening to them bounce ideas off each other and make connections to other books they've read reminded me of my own book club (with the notable absence of coffee and wine). 

Reading is such an important part of my life, and my book club offers me a different - richer - way to experience reading. I'm pleased that my infographic cards are helping my students along their journey to this experience.

Are you part of a book club? I'd love to hear your reading stories.

Sidenote: if you're in Adelaide I highly recommend the shop that hosts our book club. You can check it out here or on this short video. 

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments

Thinking about Book Clubs

One of the exciting parts of my school's literacy programme is the inclusion of book clubs.  Not just as extension for our high flyers but for everyone.  I'll admit that it's part of our programme that I'm not brilliant at implementing but I have big plans this term to improve that.

One of my existing book club groups has not loved their experience so far; I know that this is, in large part, my fault. I haven't given them as much guidance and input as I should have done. With this in mind I've created a couple of info graphic style posters and hand outs.

This first one is in response to some confusion about how a book club is meant to run.  If you click on the image you'll be able to download a copy. (I think? Please let me know if you can't!)

This second one is a quick little 'cheat sheet' to prompt the sorts of discussions that can happen in book club. Again, feel free to download it if you like.

What do you think? I'm keen for feedback.

Edit (August 17th 2015): You can read my follow up post here.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 4 Create and maintain supportive and safe learning environments

Anchor Charts

Toward the end of last year I was exceptionally lucky to have our Deputy Principal/Literacy Guru Miss Sally (@sslattery22) come into our learning space to observe and coach my reading teaching.  She observed my teaching, and modelled a range of strategies she uses. It was a brilliant experience, although I will admit that the first couple of times I was quite anxious - it reminded me of being observed by my university supervisor while I was a pre-service teacher!

As part of the feedback process, Miss Sally asked about the lack of literacy anchor charts in our learning space. Until that point in the year, I hadn't made many anchor charts at all.  The way we'd set up the space wasn't particularly conducive to displaying them NOR was I overly confident in making them for some reason.

The first point was relatively easy to overcome: we were in the habit of changing up our learning space quite regularly so we went ahead and set up some areas to display anchor charts. The second was a bit more of a personal challenge but in keeping with our class belief in the power of a positive mindset I grit my teeth and gave it a go. And whaddayaknow? Each anchor chart was better than the last and I grew to quite enjoy the process.

This year has seen more anchor charts grace our boards, wall and cupboards.  We've all benefitted from them more than I ever imagined. I often see one kiddo or another standing at an anchor chart checking their thinking, or referring to them verbally during class discussions. Many photos have been taken on iPads and emailed to parents. I've printed copies of a few to have glued into books.  I'm making sure I take shots of them all so that when they are rotated off the walls to make room for others I can still refer kiddos to them.

There's still LOADS of room for improvement in my chart creation and I want to have more of them made by the kiddos but I'm pleased to have come this far and am excited about the next steps on the journey.

So Miss Sally... Thank you.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning

Mentor Sentences - Part II

Remember my mentor sentence from yesterday?

I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.

As promised: I asked my students if they would share some of their sentences. Not everyone was keen but here are some from the those who were:

I have abandoned the bloody shackles of prison and moped the land on long-forgotten charms. (Gab)
I have killed the anger inside of me and brought the best on I could be. (Jaz)
I have travelled the adventurous ocean of Atlantica and swam the darkest reefs with my sharp brown  spear. (Tiahnee)
I have sung the beautiful music of Australia and performed on bright-shimmering stages. (Sara)
I have surfed the light-hearted waves of shores and swum the waters on giggling-golden beaches. (Tayla)
I have left the tight hold of worlds and escaped the Earth on small-angel wings. (Avril)
I have caught the beautiful birds of Adelaide and brushed the clouds with the softest-white feathers. (Kyra)
I have driven the dry roads of Australia and jumped the jetty on sandy-wet beaches. (Nikita)
I have stomped the monster on Pandora and jumped off the castles on mountains. (Corey)
I have run the muddy track of Mount Magnificent and jumped the finish line on quivering legs.  (Riley) 
I have spun the sticky webs of spider and wrapped the flies on joyful webs. (Blaed)

I'm impressed. I hope their parents (with whom I've also shared this blog post) are too!

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 3.7 Engage parents/carers in the educative process 
Standard 5.5 Report on student achievement
Standard 7.3 Engage with parents/carers

Mentor Sentences

My husband dropped me to school today and, being the gentleman he is, he carried my book bag into my learning space. He has a sweet habit of letting the kiddos know he's been in the room in their absence by leaving a quote or powerful word on the whiteboard.  Today was no different, except that it was.  He wrote the first few lines of High Flight by John Gillepsie Magee, Jr and as I read them I realised what a gift my husband had left me. (He's a gem! Really!)

I found the rest of the poem and started our literacy block by reading it to the class.  It's a beautiful poem:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth  

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; 

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth 

Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things 

You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung 

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there 

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung 

My eager craft through footless halls of air... 

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue 

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace 

Where never lark or even eagle flew -- 

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod 

The high untrespassed sanctity of space, 

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

 The discussion following my reading was nothing short of astounding. The inferring, visualisations to help clarify, the use of morphemes to clarify, identification of metaphorical language... I let them talk without interruption until I was asked what I knew about the poet. I shared the little I knew and this changed the discussion. They read even more into the poem and made even more inferences. The word 'prophetic' was even used!

That was just the start of our lesson. I then wrote out the first two lines (as one sentence) on an anchor chart and we talked about what we noticed. It was a pretty mechanically focussed discussion and that was OK by me. I have a few kiddos who need to review parts of speech.  We marked up the sentence and made a few more observations about the role of the co-ordinating conjunction.  It dawned on a couple of kids - after we talked about the co-ordinating conjunction and what the two simple sentences would have been - that a sentence MUST have a verb. Woah! Yes! They must. For some of my kiddos this was an earth shattering revelation. I can't wait to see how they transfer that epiphany.

I'm not actually sure about the adjectival phrase...

Any helpers?

We then had a go at verbally replacing a few of the words to form new sentences and talked about how we could use this structure or even just part of it in our own writing.   Tonight for home learning they are creating new sentences modelled on this mentor sentence. In hindsight we would have spent longer on this. Next week we will.

So, it wasn't what I had originally planned for this morning, but I am SO glad I threw away strayed from my lesson plan.  I've been reading about mentor sentences for a while now. I've been fascinated and inspired by some of the programmes I've read about and work samples I've seen, and whilst I'm not comparing this lesson to those, I am pretty proud that we had such a great lesson.   We will follow it up tomorrow to share some of the student created sentences and recap what we noticed.  Should be interesting!  I'll ask if I can share some of them here.

Do you use mentor sentences?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it.
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.
Standard 6 Professional learning.

Margaret Wild

One of my favourite children's authors is Margaret Wild.  I'm sure I've mentioned her before. In fact, I know I have at least once just recently: here. Last year my class indulged my passion by agreeing to go along with an author study focussing on her. Our school's literacy scope and sequence suggests that year 6/7s undertake an author study during term 4 so it all worked out quite nicely. 

Studying an author of picture fiction enabled all of my students to access multiple texts.  Last year's cohort had a reading age spread well over 10 years from well below year level. Assigning a shared text was NOT an easy option: welcome the picture fiction books of Margaret Wild!

With over 30 of Margaret Wild's book in our class library we were able to compare, contrast, respond, identify patterns, find common themes, and much much more.  Different people found interviews with her (our favourite can be read here), and it was fascinating to see the different ways she is profiled on different publishers' websites.

Some of our favourites that I'm sure the VRPs would be happy for me to recommend to you:

What is treasure to you? This tale of a refugee
 child's life journey examines this beautifully.

A beautiful story of family and friendship.

A story about friendship, trust and betrayal
told with strong imagery and descriptive writing.

Guaranteed to make ME cry.
Poignant story of love and death.

Do you have a favourite picture fiction author? Or other children's author? Or even an illustrator? (I LOVE Julie Vivas!)  I'd love to hear about them.  (I'm not so sure my husband would love it... I have a problem restraining myself when it comes to buying picture books!)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know the students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

Quick Writes

Today I heard something that made my heart sing. I had asked the kiddos to get out their writing books because we were going to do a quick write. One of my very reluctant writers responded with

"Oh yeah, I love quick writes!"

Without a drop of sarcasm.  Oh yeah indeed!  He went on to write nearly half a page in ten minutes. That might not seem like a lot, but for him it's a massive improvement. And the pride on his face was spine tingling.

Our quick writes play an important part in our writing block. I provide a prompt (such as 'the door slammed...'), and occasionally some sort of parameter (such narrative), set the timer and say GO. Ten minutes later I say STOP and depending on whatever else we've got going on during our writing block we may swap with a critical friend or just move on.

There are multiple purposes and benefits of quick writes. For the kiddos:  improving stamina and creative fluency; regular chances to practise being a critical friend; playing with different styles without committing to a lengthy piece; and as it turns out a great sense of success because ten minutes is long enough for confident writers to get stuck into it and short enough for less confident writers to get something on the page without being overwhelmed.

For me: during the ten minutes I roam the room and observe physical writing practices (I'm amazed at the range of pen grips of my kiddos!); reading the responses allows me to see 'raw' writing giving me a wealth of information on which to based specific feedback and give NSLs; and lots of giggles.

The topics are sometimes serious and sometimes silly. The results are always interesting.  Check out  these gems:

"I sit in a lonely room with only a vase on a table." 

"Some creepy sicko had created a vase of death."  

"The vase's pattern was quite intricate, made up of runes and symbols and drawings depicting a beautiful planet." 

"What took so long?" [the character had claimed he needed to go to the toilet but was gone for 30 minutes] "Because I drank lots of water I needed a really long wee." 

"My heart was beating out of my chest." 

"Roses - red as blood." 

"He was very picky - he wanted the taste of human flesh in his teeth."

I'm always happy to take suggestions for future topics.  (It's a bit like #28daysofwriting really... In MANY ways.)

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 5 Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning

Ticking Words in My Sleep

I spent less than 5 minutes in my classroom today. For most of the day I was within ten metres of our main door but I didn't go in.  No fancy new 'hands off' teaching technique: just an assessment day. Today I ran Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Assessments on my kiddos.  Most of them anyway.

Prior to today I had run precisely two F&M assessments on my own, and observed two others. Today I did seventeen - many of which included two or three levelled texts. To say that my head is spinning right now is an understatement.  I think I'll be ticking words and writing SC in my sleep...  As I dream of, tomorrow, assessing the four kiddos who weren't at school today. 

These are the last assessments I have to do to complete the battery our staff agreed to perform as our baseline data for the year. As with most schools, we benchmark our reading levels a couple of times a year. Our school will, over the course of this year, be moving from using PM Benchmarking to F&P. Our literacy committee and leadership team decided that F&P was a more appropriate assessment tool for our school as it assesses right through to a reading age beyond primary school age.  (Check out the correlation between colour banded levels and F&P here.)

I was pleasantly surprised by the comprehension section of F&P.  There are no question, just a range of prompts and some some suggested key understandings.  Beyond the broader age range, this is, in my opinion, the key advantage of F&P.  Through these 'comprehension' discussions I was able to hear the reading strategies my kiddos are using - or not. One student told me that he'd made a text-to-self connection with one part of the story which helped him clarify an unfamiliar word. I nearly wept at hearing this: we've been focussing on clarifying in our reading block for the last week and a half. Another student told me that she'd used her prior knowledge to infer the feelings of a character. Still another predicted that cacophony had something to do with sounds because she knows the morpheme phone.  

Then there were the kiddos who came across an unfamiliar word and just skipped it.  And the ones who couldn't explain how the author had achieved a particular effect.  And those who couldn't retell the story. As each kiddo left me, I placed their name into the boxes on the small strategy group sheet my deputy principal had suggested I used.  It's an A4 page with 20 squares. Each has a strategy or small group focus at the top. It sounds like such a simple idea but it works brilliantly! (I'd previously used something much less formalised so I felt like a bit of dill for not thinking of it myself. (I'd scribbled areas of growth as I discovered them and added names as I went.) I've come away today with a plan.  Hooray!

I don't love spending time away from my classroom, but today the benefits far outweighed any other problems that arose. (And arose they did...  The kiddos were mostly self-regulated but not in the same way they usually are.  They were pretty engaged but not like normal.) I did love being able to spend some one-on-one time with each kiddo talking about their reading; and I loved learning about them. I can't quite say I love having a range of data on which to base my planning but I do appreciate it.

I feel the need to link this to my recent post about assessment. My take home message from that post was that my kiddos don't mind assessment if they understand its purpose. Today I made sure to explain to each of my kiddos that this assessment was for ME to learn about their reading strategies so that I could better meet THEIR needs. A couple really took this to heart and pointed out things that they don't feel confident doing: "I need help with inferring, make sure you write that down".  Now that's what I call students taking advantage of an opportunity!

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know the students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning
Standard 5 Assess, provide feedback and report on student learning
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning

Just like Dobbie!

Our library borrowing time is Friday right after lunch. I'm pretty transparent in my reasons: we're all tired by the end of the week and most of the kiddos are hot and bothered after running around like mad-men during their lunch break.  We all benefit from sitting down and relaxing over a shared picture book. My love of picture books is well known (here and at school) and so it makes sense to harness that obsession passion to help us through an otherwise challenging afternoon.

Sometimes we pick something topical and chat over the connections we can make between it and our other learning.  Other times a student will slip a book into my hand and give me a quick nod or a shy smile that makes it all but impossible to say no to them. If there's something on the 'new books' shelf that catches my eye I throw caution in the wind and read a book to the class before previewing it. (I figure that if our teacher librarian has chosen it for the school it can't be horrendous!) My favourite is  when we read old favourites and share text-to-text connections we've made over our time together.

It's a bit early in the year for any 'old' favourites with this class but my loopers (a term my husband coined this morning because he's tired of hearing me distinguish between my old kids - the ones who've come with me this year, and my new kids) have been pretty vocal in reminding me of some of last year's favourites.  I read one on Friday because it happened to also be one of my all time favourites, and we studied it during our  'author study' so I wanted to see what my loopers came up with during the discussion.

And boy was I amazed. They lead the discussion. They discussed Margaret Wild's craft in this book and linked it to others; they talked about the relationship between the text and the illustrations; they helped the younger students draw inferences and find evidence in the text or their own schema to support them. I sat in shock delight.

In case that wasn't brilliant enough?  Toward the end of the discussion, one of my loopers who struggled a little last year piped up with,
"And right at the end, I think Little Humpty talks about himself in the third person doesn't he? Just like Dobbie does in Harry Potter?"  Words failed me. Well, that's a lie. Words never fail me. I grinned. Like a cheshire cat. And asked her to explain why the author may have done that.
"Well, my little brother talks like that sometimes, so maybe Margaret [yes, they referred to the author by first name!] to remind us that Little Humpty is a kid?"
Yes. Yes indeed.

I sometimes worry that in a year 6/7 class I rely on picture books too much, but then consider all the novels, poems, graphic novels and non-fiction books we also use.  And I think of examples like the one I've just described. We read this book, in part, probably half a dozen times last year. Individual students poured over it many more times. It is familiar to my loopers in a way that a novel couldn't be, and that allowed for my student to make her connections.

Picture books. Gotta love 'em right?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know the students and how they learn
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning

A Duck's (Late Night) Adventure

It's 10:30pm and I just finished making those few last minute changes to my plans for tomorrow.  Ordinarily I'm finished well before this time but tonight we had a dinner guest and so I didn't get started until well later than usual. Still. It's 10:30pm.  Past this little duck's bedtime on a school night.

I know I'm not the only teacher who comes home and packs in another couple of hours.  It's one of the reasons I describe teaching as a lifestyle instead of a job.

It's a great lifestyle if you ask me though... How many other adults get to count reading picture books as work? For someone like me (picture book LOVER), it's the icing on the best cake ever.

My last minute changes tonight were focussed on my need to do a narrative structure pre-assessment, and a prior knowledge of natural disasters of my kidlets tomorrow. I had things planned but with one thing and another (read that as I forgot that I am being released for an extra lesson tomorrow because of a leadership role I've taken on) I need to rearrange my day and the previous plan wouldn't work. Back to the planning book!

I've decided to present out the text of one of my all time favourite picture books and have the kids mark it up. Pamela Allen's Alexander's Outing is perfect for early discussions about narrative structure because it has all the features.  And the illustrations are BEAUTIFUL.  Win!

The natural disaster session is a little more difficult because I won't be in the classroom. I completely trust the teacher who's going to cover me, but as we all know from previous posts - I'm a control freak. So I've set up a padlet for my class to use after the initial conversations. My class used it in a few different ways last year, so I'm hoping my 'loopers' remember and can mentor the others. Padlet is such a fun way of sharing ideas and collaborating, and it's free which is, as we all know, an ENORMOUS advantage.  Depending on when you read this blog, you may see my students' comments on the padlet below.

Created with Padlet

Despite the late hour, I love my job/lifestyle. Planning activities like these two, which are pretty every day ones, makes me happy. I know the kids will enjoy them. And that means learning. And that's why I do it. (Well, that and the picture books.)

Speaking of the late hour: it's now 11pm. Well past this little duck's bedtime on a school night. Still. I was determined to keep my commitment of #28daysofwriting. (3 days done!)