I’m a big fan of Ralph Fletcher’s books, both his fiction and his professional writing books for teachers. So it was exciting today when I received the Stenhouse Newslinks (bi-weekly news via email subscription from the publisher) with an opportunity to participate in an online book club to discuss Ralph’s new book: Pyrotechnics on the Page: Playful Craft that Sparks Writing. The book club will offer four opportunities to comment/discuss the book from July 12- August 2.
What a fun way to do some professional reading and collaborating this summer! ACS teachers attending TCRWP with me this June- I’m certain we can pick up a copy of this book while we are there.
For more inforamtion and to register, check out the Stenhouse Ning here.
Beginning next year our KG1 (PK4) classes will all be moving to a full-day program. This exciting move enabled us to consider different curriculum options for this grade level. This winter, our visiting consultant, Carrie Ekey, led the KG1 teachers through a series of workshops focused on best practice in early childhoood curriculums. The KG1 staff will begin using the project-based approach and specifically the studies and method outlined in the Creative Curriculum. To help us shift our teaching to this model, Carrie suggested I order several materials with strong video components for professional development work with KG1-G1 next year. The two items below just arrived. (When I get a minute I’ll post more about our future/intended use with these books.)
Speaking and Listening for Preschool Through Third Grade by Lauren B. Resnick (with over 2 hours of DVD footage of children in grades PK4-3).
Literate Days: Reading and Writing withPreschool and Primary Children by Gretchen Owocki (This is a series of “minilessons” grounded in EC reading and writing work. As with the above resource, there is a solid emphasis through DVD footage in oral language development.)
This year my learning curve is even steeper as I am leading our early-release day professional development sessions. To guide me through this work (I’m in year 2 as a coach and this is my first time working as a staff developer) we purchased Regie Routman’s Transforming Your Teaching Through Reading to Understand kit. It has been the foundation needed to define our work, but I’ve also been able to add some school-specific information. (Practice what you preach… I am a responsive teacher of teachers.) Two books I’ve shared bits from lately are Beyond Leveled Books and Still Learning to Read, both written by Franki Sibberson and Karen Szymusiak.
Which brings me to a blog I love… Franki’s blog: A Year of Reading: Two Teachers Who Read. A lot. This blog has reviews of new professional books, literature, weekly poetry posts (Poetry Friday) and sometimes even interviews with authors. If you are venturing into the literacy blogosphere, it is worth a look.
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.)
As I posted last week, we have started to receive bits of our shipment. My orders consisted of professional books aimed to help us grow as teachers in the areas of reading, writing, and word study. Here are the writing books we’ve received so far…
Mechanically Inclined: Building Grammar, Usage, and Style into Writer’s Workshop by Jeff Anderson This book is going to be a favorite when we begin to write lessons specifically on identified grammar needs into our units. The author understands how to embed the teaching of these important skills in to a workshop format.
Text Forms and Features: A Resource for Intentional Teaching by Margaret E. Mooney- This is a little gem of a book. In it, the author details very deliberately each type of written text, such as “Procedural Texts” and then lists why it is written/used, what it is, and the features of that particular text.
The Power of Grammar: Unconventional Approaches to the Conventions of Language by Mary Ehrenworth and Vicki Vinton- Thinking again about teaching grammar within a workshop framework, this book provides among other things, “a wealth of mentor texts that allow students to examine conventional and unconventional constructions from the work of published authors…”
Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6 by Lynne R. Dorfman and Rose Cappelli- To preview this new book I went directly to the last chapter titled “A Treasure Chest of Books” where there was an extensive bibliography of books to use as mentor texts for such topics as Discovering Personal Stories, Discovering the Heart of the Story, Zooming in on a small idea, and Analyzing and Modeling Syntax From Mentor Texts.
The Revision Toolbox: Teaching Techniques That Work by Georgia Heard- This book is a favorite of many of my mentors. A quick preview tells me we too will find this book invaluable to our writing workshop work. In fact, I’m taking this one home tonight!
The shipment has arrived in Abu Dhabi and we are slowing seeing the fruits of our ordering labors. My orders consisted of professional books to help us with our work in Reading Workshop, Writing Workshop, and Word Study. As a preview, I will post up the new titles and a brief description of each here in the next several posts. If you are reading this, love or know one of the books, and have a suggestion for using it with teachers at my school please add a comment below.
Comprehension Through Conversation: The Power of Purposeful Talk in the Reading Workshop by Maria Nichols- Reading the back cover of this book I feel like I am least familiar with it as a PD resource, and yet the most excited. Allowing, using, and learning from intentional talk, is skill we teachers can work to improve.
Conferring with Readers: Supporting Each Student’s Growth and Independence by Jennifer Serravallo and Gravity Goldberg- Both of these authors are staff developers at Teacher’s College, so I’m hoping this book and the advice inside will support our work as we move into Reading Units of Study across the grades. Conferring is a transferable skill, between not only reading and writing, but all curriculum areas-once teachers get good at it.
Still Learning to Read: Teaching Students in Grades 3-6 by Franki Sibberson and Karen Szymusiak- In the introduction to this book Regie Routman and Katy Wood Ray are both listed as inspirations, so my hopes for this book are high. We will begin pulling from here when grades 4 and 5 dig into reading this spring.
Beyond Leveled Books: Supporting Early and Transitional Readers in Grades K-5 by Karen Szymusiak, Franki Sibberson, and Lisa Koch (Forward by Sharon Taberski), Second Edition- This text is going to be useful in all of our vertical Reading Team discussions as we better understand the use (and limitations) of leveled texts. Two of my favorite chapters already have to be: “Chapter One: Challenging Leveled-Book Mania and Chapter Two: Expanding Our Definition of Just-Right Books in Our K-1 Classrooms” This should spark some lively learning and discussions!
Day-to-Day Assessment in the Reading Workshop: Making Informed Instructional Decisions in Grades 3-6 by Franki Sibberson and Karen Szymusiak (Forward by Nancy Atwell)- Although this text is primarly offering ideas to intermendiate teachers, I’m hopeful our primary can gather some too. The book offers assessment ideas to use during independent reading, read-aloud, and whole class instruction: mini-lessons, small-group instruction, individual reading conferences and share time.
Reading with Meaning: Teaching Comprehension in the Primary Grades by Debbie Miller- This book is one many teachers here were familiar with, but we couldn’t find copies last year when we needed them. More importantly, I hope to help teachers use this wonderful resource within the context of our newly planed Units of Study in Reading.
As we head off on Spring Break my mind is already thinking about next year. In fact, most of the work I will do as a coach in the 4th quarter will be prep work for orientation in August and for the curriculum teams I will facilitate during the 2009-10 school year.
As luck would have it, a book I believe will help us create aligned reading units in grades K-3 arrived via Amazon yesterday- just in time for me to take on break.
I first read about The Complete 4 For Literacy by Pam Allen in a review by the ladies at the blog A Year of Reading. On first glance, the book offers a clear, easy-to-use framework for creating units of study.
Check back in a few weeks. I hope to have an update about how the K-3 Reading Team is planning to use The Complete 4 in conjunction with Kathy Collin’s Growing Readers, our standards and benchmarks, and BCH’s developmental continuum in reading to write our own units of study.
What I need is a year off to read.
There are so many professional books out there it is hard to keep up with them all. Which are good? Which are dated? Which will help me lead professional development next year? Which can I hand to a teacher tomorrow?
The good news is that I have two things working in my favor:
1. I am part of the Literacy Coaches Cohort at NESA which means I can get help and gather information from the best and brightest in my international sphere.
2. The site Goodreads will allow me to keep track of the professional books I currently have at ACS as well as those I ordered for next year, and hope to order in the future.
It is a partnership made in heaven. My hope is that my lit coach colleagues will accept the invitation I just sent to keep track of and review professional literacy books on my Goodreads page.
Together we might just be able to keep up!
