If you haven’t checked out the blog MotherReader yet, do it! Below I’ve copied a post describing her blog name. F-U-N-N-Y with an important educational twist.
Here’s one of my favorite MotherReader stories: I am a Mother and I am a Reader.
When my oldest daughter was five, she asked me to play house. “I’ll be the mommy and you’ll be the little girl,” she said. I agreed and prepared myself for my role. Meanwhile, she sat down on the couch, opened a book to read and, looking over the top, said, “Go play with your sister.”
Never have I felt so much angst and pride at the same time. Of course, my mother guilt kicked in. Did she think that all I did was read? Did she feel so neglected? What kind of mom was I? But at the same time, I felt proud of the lesson she had picked up from me ? namely that Moms read, and reading’s important.
As a mother of two (now) school-aged girls, I get asked occasionally how I find time to read. I can only pat the questioner on the head with an air of pity (well, mentally), and answer that one doesn’t find time to read, one makes time to read. Looking at reading as something that’s done when everything else is finished means that you’ll never even crack open a People magazine. (Not that I read this particular journal, understand.) And this goes double, maybe triple for mothers. Every minute I read, I’ve carved that time away from something else. Sometimes I don’t put the laundry away. Sometimes I don’t shower, but I make the time to read.
While I’m taking time for myself in a self-care, Oprah kind of way, I’m also conveying an important message to my kids. Moms read books for fun. I couldn’t talk to them about reading being important and then never open a book myself. My actions speak louder than my words ever could, and believe me, I can make my words LOUD.
I’ve also been asked by parents that with today’s busy lifestyle, how can I find time for my kids to read? For this question, I allow a quick wide-eyed expression of shock so the questioner realizes the very seriousness of the inquiry. For me, it’s as if they’ve asked how I find time for my children to eat dinner. In my family, reading is a necessary and vital part of our day. We formed the habit early, and rarely break it.
Since my daughters were babies, the last part of every evening has been given over to reading. When the girls were younger, my husband or I read to them. Then each child went through a stage where we would alternate fun picture books with the beginning-reader series of the month. Now sometimes we read a book to them–a great picture book or chapters from a harder book–and sometimes we all read our own books. Often one daughter and I will recline on the couch, each leaning against the opposite side arms, our legs sharing the space in the middle. It’s comfy. It’s fun. The dishes can wait.
Want to raise a reader? Then read. Read to them, read with them, read beside them. Take it from a MotherReader.
Today I’ve been working on some new lessons for upcoming units of study. Even though we’ve gotten a lot of new books, finding the exact right one is hard. Today as I’m trying to locate poetry about sharks and examples of essays, I ran across these two helpful online sites for possible mentor texts.
“Notice that I do not phrase the teaching point like this, “Today we will think of turning point stories.” That wording would have simply assigned children a task. That is not my goal! A minilesson is not a forum for telling children what we want them all to do in the upcoming workshop. Instead, it is a place for explicitly teaching children the skills and strategies of good writing—skills and strategies we want them to call upon as needed not only today, but always. In today’s minilesson I am hoping to teach children one more technique that they can carry with them in their invisible backpacks of strategies. (From Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing, Session 2, p. 19 Lucy’s Coaching Commentary.)
This week teachers pushed forward moving through the sessions and offering children new strategies for generating ideas, reading like writers, and reviewing their own work. Children practiced considering what they are really trying to write about and were again introduced to using the “Monitoring My Writing Process” checklist.
It is hard to change. It is even harder to change when you aren’t exactly sure what the change is supposed to look like/feel like. I think the changes we are beginning to employ in our teaching of writing at ACS are working, but also still uncomfortable. This is a very difficult place to be in, and one I hope we can work through. Coaching Notes: I have learned two valuable lessons as a coach this week. First, my attempt to “sub” for teachers who were gone didn’t work. Our goal was for me to continue the WW so kids would maintain the flow. It seemed daunting to get a sub up-to-speed on the teaching needed when we are still so new to this. However, because I was only popping in for 45 minute lesson and wasn’t the sub the whole day, I had a very difficult time settling the kids and getting them focused. If I had been there the whole day and could have set the tone, then the WW lesson would have worked… So, after some consideration I think the best way for me to “coach” in a teacher’s absence is to help that teacher go through the lesson and create sub-friendly plans. If I can assist in distilling the lesson down so the teaching can continue, that will be more successful. We are all learning and improving…
Focus We are in one of those moments at school when things are unbelievably busy. So busy, that I often feel like I’m in a “mosh-pit” at a concert, just being pushed and carried along by the hands below me. I’m not controlling the journey anymore; I’m just along for the ride. This is a feeling I’m used to. Every year, I think… “If we can just get past Halloween, things will slow down…” So changing the pace isn’t my goal, surviving it is. To survive, I try to focus on the MUST-Dos. Below is my list of “Must Dos” for a WW implementation. Keeping it simple and focused will ensure we survive, but more than that, I want to ensure we enjoy the work, and that the kids are our focus.
Please click HERE for my November newsletter. This month is a busy one!
To honor the new United States National Day On Writing (Oct. 20) Lucy Calkins has a video post on Heinemann. I thought it was inspirational. It might inspire you. It might inspire your students. She talks about honoring writing… and writing powerfully.
Give it a look by clicking HERE.
Yesterday I was snuggled up on the couch reading the September issue of Elle magazine when I came across several examples of small-moment personal narratives. These stories were compiled by the director Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle) to accompany her new NYC show “Love, Loss, And What I Wore.” In each small story, the author writes about a memory based on an outfit. Although I’m not sure they would be useful in the classroom, I have copied these stories as Mentor Texts for teachers to study and discuss. Check the stories out for yourself by clicking HERE. (Three that I felt were particularly strong were Meg Ryan’s “In the Soup” Samantha Bee’s “Body By Gram” and “Kind of Blue” by Rosie O’Donnell.)
Early this month I had trouble with my blog, so these notes are delayed. However, please click HERE to see my October 2009 Newsletter. (It will open in Scribd where it can be read online or downloaded.)
“Many of us have…children who have been taught to regard writing as a display of spelling, penmanship, and punctuation. For some children, this means that they focus more on the shapes of their letters than on the content of their texts. They sit before the empty page saying “Nothing happens in my life,” and what they mean is, “Nothing happens that I can spell.” The most important thing we can do for these students is to help them write freely and unselfconsciously… Our students need to realize that it’s okay to make editorial errors as they write; all of us do, and then we correct them as we edit. Although it’s important to teach our students to edit, probably the single most important thing we can do for their syntax, spelling, penmanship, and use of mechanics is to help them write often and with confidence. (p. 289-290- The Art of Teaching Writing by Lucy Calkins)
This week all classes (grades 3-5) began Unit #2: Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing. Our goal is for students to write everyday. However, the reality is that most of our teachers can fit in quality writing lessons four times a week. Knowing this, we’ve mapped out our year and we will be able to finish all the units. Each grade has at the very least, a responsibility to introduce all of the lessons. That way our students will have a foundation to build on throughout the spiral.
Again this week I was needed in grade 5. My role as a coach isn’t to substitute for teachers, however with this implementation it seems important that students are provided an experience, which flows. If teachers are out for an extended period of time or don’t have coverage to support this implementation, I am offering to step in. However, for this to ultimately be successful, our goal needs to be for teachers to learn how to communicate the teaching of our WW lessons to substitutes and teaching assistants in their absence.
We started the week introducing students to new strategies for generating ideas: turning points and feelings. Reading like a writer is a skill worth developing, so students also had a fair amount of practice this week doing just that… see my post “Teaching Texts” for information about our new mentor texts. In Lesson 4 we asked each writer to consider his final, published piece from the first unit. Asking students to reflect on a piece of writing they believe they are finished with, and showing them how to refine and revise that work is powerful. Not only does it help to convey the idea that all writing can be changed and improved, it asks students to be responsible for becoming better.
As we move to Units of Study in Reading and Writing Workshop at my school, we have also moved to using real, high-quality literature as teaching tools and to stock our classroom libraries.
Last year we developed a 3-year ordering plan which plotted out how grade levels could order books to support WW, RW, and their classroom libraries. Our orders were placed with the company Booksource who would bundle the books we needed… bundles for Lucy Calkins WW, bundles for The Complete 4 in Reading K-5, bundles for high-quality classroom libraries, and even bundles for Everyday Math and Fountas and Pinnell Phonics.
These books arrived late, along with the rest of our shipment so we’ve been organizing them this week… and THEY ARE FABULOUS! Honestly, I could not be more pleased. Booksource delieverd on their promise. We now have beautiful, amazing, engaging books for classroom libraries and high-quality texts to support our teaching in Units of Study in both Reading and Writing. We will be placing our 2nd large Booksource order for next year before we break for Xmas.
Interested? Check out: www.booksource.com. If they don’t have what you need, email a rep and ask if they can bundle a set for you. I did, and it works!
“To me the mark of a great book is that it can move a variety of people, even though each person is connecting in a different way. The purpose of a story is to be a crowbar that slides under your skin and, with luck, cracks your mind wide open.” By Jodi Picoult author of My Sister’s Keeper
This was our official Units of Study Celebration week!
Grades 3 and 4 held students celebrations to share their first published pieces from Unit 1: Launching the Writer’s Workshop. Grade 5 acted as audience members having celebrated their work last week.
The other big celebration was for the STAFF who have successfully implemented this first unit of study. We met for just over an hour as a whole grade 3-5 group to share, learn, and plan for unit 2.
Nobody said this would be easy. But I think we are beginning to feel like it is doable. To help focus our staff celebration, I prepared the attached Powerpoint. (All of the attachments here in blue will open in Scribd.) Each teacher brought a chart and we displayed them on the walls around the meeting room. Our celebration started off with a discussion of how all the pieces were going (How’s It Going- Reflection page) including charting. Then we moved on to an activity designed to help us notice and celebrate the work in a student notebook (Notebook Protocol Page). Finally, our meeting turned toward the next unit and teachers were given a chance to look over the pacing calendars we created and think about the final product and celebration for Unit 2: Raising the Quality of Narrative Writing.
Make time to reflect and collaborate when you move to implementing Lucy’s Units. Even though we were too busy, even though we could have said “yippee” passing each other in the halls or in an email, even though we might not be sure if it all went well enough to “celebrate”, we needed to pause and catch our breath and talk to each other about this experience.
Teaching can be an isolating experience. But it doesn’t have to be.
