Undercover Readers: RTRW 2010

In the Teaching & Learning Community, we celebrate reading 365 days a year. It's so nice, though, to have an official week of festivities that gives reading the honor it deserves. After all, reading gives us knowledge, pleasure and escape anytime, anywhere. And compared to the cost of other entertainment, it costs next to nothing!

The twelve schools in our district observed Right to Read Week in a wide variety of ways, with varying themes. Activities included everything from reading parades to crazy contests to book fairs. Students and teachers read together each day, responding to the reading in book clubs, nings and at evening events.

Our schools have celebrated Right to Read Week for decades, but this year our district office decided to join in on the fun. We work together each day, know a lot about each others families and interests. But we don't necessarily know each other as readers. We captured images of our favorite books, tucked away our photographs underneath, and created an interactive hallway display entitled, "Undercover Readers". Here's the district office custodian, Edith. She loves Gone With The Wind, but we didn't know it until now!

Next year promises to be bigger and better. Our community of readers will have read millions more words, turned thousands more pages, and scanned as many screens of text.  We're all thankful for the right to read!

Tanny

Welcome to Reading Street

Thank you to the West Clermont Board of Education for adopting Reading Street for our young readers, grades one through five at the March 22 Board meeting. The Teaching & Learning Department shared teachers' and students' voices about the program via a VoiceThread. Hear what they had to say:

Credits: Cheryl Turner, producer

Lisa Canter

Natalie Crawford

Cathy Cumbow

Jody Davis

Krista Devine

Devon Glassburn

Jeanne Halladay

Jackie Hospelhorn

Mimi Ladenburger

Gail Matheny

Layna Stiles

Mary Taylor

Stephanie Walker

Monte Wilson

West Clermont third graders

March Madness: Thanks, Warren!

From Warren Bennis, an encouraging quotation:

"One of the marvelous things about life is that any gaps in your education can be filled, whatever your age or situation, by reading and thinking about what you read."

This is good news. I didn't pay much attention in Problems of Democracy in 11th grade.

Tanny

March Madness: Gotta Keep Reading

On December 11, 2009, students at Ocoee Middle School near Orlando, Florida recorded a video to inspire kids to read. With over 74,000 views on YouTube, their message of literacy has spread around the world! These kids were granted permission from The Black Eyed Peas to use the melody of the hit song, "I Gotta Feeling". They rewrote the lyrics, choreographed a routine, and stepped out into the warm Florida sunshine to have some fun.



Ocoee Middle School's Gotta Keep Reading on TeacherTube.

Tanny

Tween Tribune

Guest post: Tina Wolfer Grade 8

I introduced Tween Tribune to my class last week and was blown away by how engaged they were.

TweenTribune offers teachers and students an opportunity to read high interest news stories about everyday people from around the world.  Introduced in such an appealing way, Tribune stories are interesting to middle schoolers and are a great way to get students to read newspaper articles—and then to hear them comment. 

After reading the stories, the students are able to post a response.

Students log on in a very safe manner and are able to access TweenTribune at home. I’m able to check the blogs before they are published and able to print them.   

My students were sharing stories with each other and having a great time writing a response. They are proud to be published writers. I introduced this website on Thursday and many students logged in at home over the weekend! 

The responses have to be at least 25 words.  At first students were unhappy with that number, but as they started to respond, they realized how easy it was to accomplish.  Students came in the next day and asked if we’re going to read new stories again. 

In response to the article, “Suspended over long hair. Is it fair?” Korie posted: I don't think that it is fair that a four year old would get suspended for having long hair. There are students in my middle school with hair longer hair than him that don't get in trouble for it.

I recommend this site to all teachers.  The students are engaged and they are reading and writing at the same time.  Check it out: http://tweentribune.com/.

Getting a Word in Edgewise: Wordle

Missed the Just One Hour workshop on Wordle? A recap:

Horizontal, vertical, or any-which-way, Wordle makes it fun to, well, get a word in edgewise—visually. Wordle is an easy web-based program at wordle.net that allows you to create a graphic representation of text. Because it quantifies text (the more often a word or phrase appears, the larger it is represented), it can be used to compile or summarize data.

Most important, students love it.

So, how can you use it to promote student thinking in your classroom? What kinds of text can you use?

21 Ways to Use Wordle
1. Visualize a brainstorm session

2. Compile data from classroom polls

3. Create a graphic autobiography

4. Guess the ___________________ (story, novel, event)

5. Write a headline for a current event

6. See similarities and differences

7. Identify criteria for ____________

8. Show class rules

9. Present spelling lists in various fonts

10. Examine student writing (Overused words? Important details missing?)

11. Study an author’s tone

12. Display your syllabus

13. Discover main ideas in text

14. Look for key ideas in important speeches

15. Draw inferences

16. Summarize

17. Show synonyms or antonyms

18. Make a custom illustration for a blog, story, essay, book report

19. Compare news stories for bias

20. Customize your word wall

21. Reflect on your thinking

On his blog Copy/Paste, Peter Pappas shares ways to use Wordle to promote literacy skills. Pappas suggests:

Defining skills
Before the dictionary comes out, give your students a new vocabulary word and ask them to brainstorm all the word they associate with it. Gather up all the brainstormed words for a Wordle. After the term has been formally defined, repeat the process and compare to the "pre-dictionary" Wordle.

Summarizing skills
As a pre-reading exercise, copy/paste text of reading into a Wordle and ask students to predict what the main ideas of the reading will be. Another pre-reading option: give them a Wordle of a non-fiction reading and ask them to use the Wordle to generate a title or headline before they see the real article. Post reading: ask them to reflect on the reading based on a prompt (for example, main idea, what you've learned, funniest element, etc). Then collect all their reflections into a Wordle.

Comparison skills
Give them two different accounts / essays on the same theme / event - let them compare the Wordles generated by each. Or you could generate Wordles for two different readings, then let student see if they can match the Wordle to its corresponding reading.

For GREAT Wordle ideas and tips created by teachers, see the collaborative project Tom Barrett and colleagues created as a PowerPoint slide show:


How to create your own Wordles for class (or, better, have your students create them)? Start here with a copy of our Just One Hour workshop handout, Then head to wordle.net.  It's really as easy as 1-2-3:  Click create, paste in any text, and click go.

A word of caution, it's addictive. In a good way. Have fun.

M.E.

PS Just found this great post by Iowa teacher Becky Goerend with sample student work!

Sources:
http://www.wordle.net/
http://peterpappas.blogs.com/ (Twitter: edteck)
http://edte.ch/blog/ (Twitter: tombarrett)
http://mrsbmg.blogspot.com/ (Twitter: MrsBMG)

What We Really Read

Love this graphic! Meant to spoof, perhaps, but LOL true. It illustrates the perennial teachers' conflict: teaching the classics ("the canon") or nurturing a love of reading. Forced to choose, I'd go with the latter. I'd rather be a reading catalyst. And you?

M.E.

So, what are you really reading? For me, it's Barbara Kingsolver's newest, The Lacuna, with Curtis Bonk's The World is Open on deck.

Graphic from graphjam.com. 

A PLAYful Idea

I'm watching the Tony Awards tonight. Now here's a novel idea. Actually it's a PLAYful idea. For this summer's reading I going to read...some plays. Here's a terrific article I read this morning about the joys of READING drama. I love to watch the playwrightt's words come alive on stage. So I haven't read drama since I taught ninth grade English (Romeo & Juliet, anyone?).

But Dwight Garner inspired me to try reading some drama again. He says, "To encounter plays on paper is to encounter them in their platonic form. You’re glued to the playwright’s words, not sitting in Row K jostling for an armrest. While reading, you can submit more perfectly to the author’s spell and, what’s more, you are your own casting director." Convinced! I'm off to order Yasmina Reza's Tony Award winner God of Carnage.