Non-Fiction All About Books

Hi everyone!  It's Jennie from JD's Rockin' Readers!  I thought I would share with you today a little about what my class is working on during Writing Workshop!

This is my favorite time of year for writing with my first graders because we get into writing non-fiction (All About Books and How To Books).  The kids go CRAZY over writing non-fiction!  They honestly can't get enough!  

Before Christmas, we wrote an All About Reindeer book together as a class.  We did research together and learned about how to add different features to our books including a Table of Contents, Diagram, Glossary, and About the Author page.

Now, they are working at their own pace, writing All About Books.  They first started with topics that they knew a lot about without having to do research.  

I knew I wanted them to be able to write about a topic by doing some research too.  This is how it ended up working out best…

We have "computer" as one of our "specials" during the week.  We have a computer lab teacher that is working to teach them the basics with computers.  This is the first year we have had this and I think it is WONDERFUL!  When the kids went there this past week, they each got to do a little research of their own.

First, we decided to use the website Wild Kratts from PBS Kids.  The kids all went to this website- 

From here they could search for an animal that they wanted to learn more about.  I gave each student a recording sheet to write down different things that they have learned about their animal. Click on the picture if you would like a copy...

Once the student finds an animal, they can click different buttons that tell about the animal.  What I like about this website is that they can listen to facts as well as read them.

My students recorded the different things that they have learned and now they can write an All About Book about an animal that they just learned about!

I would love to hear about how you do Non-Fiction (informational writing) in classroom!

4

Writing Across the Curriculum

Hi everyone! It's the end of the year- can you believe it? I want to wish you Happy New Year from everyone here at Adventures in Literacy Land! I'm Bex from Reading and Writing Redhead and I am stopping by to talk about writing across the curriculum.

Whether you are a reading specialist, a literacy coach, or a classroom teacher, you know writing is a major part of all of the content areas. I am currently working as a second grade teacher and we use the Everyday Math series. All of you Everyday Math teachers know that this program is language - heavy. Just this fall, we got the "beta" version of the new edition. This new edition is very, very writing heavy. There is a ton of work relating to the standard of mathematical practice for explaining your mathematical thinking which is part of the CCSS. Not only are students expected to explain their mathematical thinking in writing (not just during class discussions) from the very beginning of the year, but they are often given mathematical situations with fictional students and they have to explain how the fictional student may have thought through the problem. There are also some problems in the challenge section of the quizzes where they have to act as the teacher. Students have to read a math problem, look at what a fictional student did, and explain why he is correct or why he is wrong, and if so, how he could fix the problem.

Phew! I am exhausted just talking about it. Teaching it is no cakewalk and it has been challenging for the students. I am interested to see what happens next year when I get students who have been exposed to this new edition in first grade. 

Blogger and writer Deva Delporto said, "The Common Core requires students to think and learn in a much deeper way, and one of the best ways to facilitate that deeper learner is to get kids writing. Not just in English class, but all the time." Steve Peha, founder of Teaching that Makes Sense, commented, "The Common Core and its associated tests set a much higher bar  for student achievement...kids are going to have to be much better writers than they ever have been before. Writing regularly in all subject areas, but especially in math, science, and social studies, is going to be crucial".

What's my  take on why writing in math (and other) class is important? I like to think beyond the Common Core and beyond tests and school. When students grow up and begin looking for a career and success in their chosen field,  think about what they will need to succeed. Writing is one key to success with social media - which isn't going away anytime soon. Plus, if she is trying to convince their boss to give her new idea a chance, she is  going to need to explain it either in person or in writing why her idea will work. She will need to be proficient at explaining her thinking in writing. I also strongly feel that many of our current students will become entrepreneurs and/or be self-employed. In order to "sell" his new product to customers, or to investors, he will need once again to be able to clearly and thoroughly explain it.

So, let's talk about writing in math class. Why is it important? How can you help your students (and you)?

• When students write in math class, they use higher-order thinking skills to come up with mathematical explanations that support their thinking.

• When students write in math class, they are forced to really reflect on how math works, and not just (like I did) memorize the steps to solve a problem without having any clue as to how or why it works.

• Writing in any subject area gives students more math practice, and more practice leads to improvements in writing. 

• It gives teachers a glimpse into how students think about math. This gives us more information about our students and can inform our instructional decisions.

• It gives teachers a way to communicate with parents about how their child is doing in math and about their progress in math.

• It tells us if they understand and can use math terms.

• It helps us see common errors in students' work and enables us to address them with the whole group.

Let's take a look at some student's writing in math and talk about how to support our students as they write in math, science, and social studies (I wish I had more examples of student writing but I did not come up with my topic until I was already home on vacation so I had to go with what I happened to have at home).

First, in math class, I have to say: practice, practice,  practice. Almost every day we do something like this as a class. The students also have a problem like this on many of their math journal pages. I also have incorporated rubrics to help students see their progress. The rubric needs to be in kid friendly language. We also look at exemplars so student can see different types of writing and can see what a successful explanation might look like. 

Check out this sample, the one for part C. He explains how he solved 9-7 by using both making a 10 and by working backward. To solve 9-7, he thought that 7 + 3 = 10, and he knows 9 is close to 10. His explanation gets a little confusing halfway through but it is clear he knows 7 + 3 can't equal 9, so to adjust for the fact 9 is 1 less than 10, his answer must be 2. (7 + 2 = 9). I know he understands the math but could use some help finessing his answer. We might try to write an explanation together that is a little more succinct.

Here is a different student's explanation for the same problem. He makes more connections, stating all the steps  that got him to the solution, and he is doing a nice job of starting out his answer by telling that he figured out that 9-7 = 2 because... Some students don't state which problem they figured out, leaving me to have to guess if they are talking about a or b. 

Here is an example of when a student has to read a sample problem and think about how a fictional student may have figured it out. This student did a fairly good job at explaining that 8 + 2 = 10 is going be the first step and then they need to add 2 more to get the answer to 8 + 4. I would probably push her a little to explain more about why she added 2 more (the 4 in 8 +4 is 2 more than the 2 in 8+2) but I gave her credit for this answer -it was only October! Everyone has to start somewhere.

I'm not going to lie, it is hard to me to explain and talk about these second graders' math writing. I think that I would benefit from working with a math coach myself or to do some professional development with an expert (can we get Marilyn Burns to come to my school?) .

Time after time, I have seen Marilyn Burn's book Writing in Math Class, as the essential go-to resource for teachers who need to teach students how to explain their mathematical thinking in math class. I guess it is time for me to go shopping! Click on any of the book covers to get more details or learn how to buy them. 

As for writing in science and social studies, I have a few social studies examples. I would not call the second grade social studies curriculum terribly interesting (basically geography and immigration) but we do learn about different holidays around the world. I like to incorporate narrative and opinion writing into social studies. Of course we did this assignment in December, so you know what holiday everyone wrote about...

         

One thing that I think is important in writing across the curriculum is to hold students to the same standards as they use during writing workshop or language arts. The checklist is the same we use during L.A. and I routinely send students back to edit writing in the content areas when they have no capital letters, punctuation errors, etc. A few things I am going to incorporate to help my students with their writing this spring: make them read their writing aloud to me or a peer before saying, "I'm done". They catch so many errors by doing that; having them then transition to reading it to themselves when they are done; try peer editing of writing in the content areas; edit backward- i.e. cover up all of the words except the last one, check for spelling and other errors of just that word, then work backwards, one word at a time, finally checking the entire sentence, then doing the last word of the previous sentence, and so on and so forth.

I am by no means an expert in writing across the curriculum, but I have been working hard to help my students with it this year. What are your favorite tips for helping your students? What is hardest for you? Please comment and let us know!

0

Working Walls with Guest Blogger Pixie Anne

Welcome to another guest blogger ~ Pixie Anne with some ideas to help you with 

Hello!

I'm Pixie Anne from Growing Little Learners and I am delighted to be blogging here at the amazing Adventures in Literacy Land today to share how we use a Working Wall in Literacy in my classroom.

 

Working Walls are such a great way to have an up to date, relevant, child led display that supports learning in the classroom and helps the children to see the bigger picture and learning journey they are on! 

An added bonus is that they are so easy to throw together throughout the week as you are doing the work in class anyway - no extra cutting and laminating at home, no hunting for the perfect image or trying to be super creative with ideas! I love mine! 

So today I've decided to share how my most recent one came together and there's a freebie for you at the end so keep on reading... 

The Working Wall always starts with an example of what we are aiming for by the end of the week (What A Good One Looks Like).

We began our week of instruction writing (inspired by George's Marvelous Medicine) by Gathering Content. We investigated bossy verbs and adverbs by playing some simple games (Simon Says and Adverb Charades) and then looked at a whole bunch of different instruction texts to hunt for examples of each to add to the working wall.

To understand and explore the features of the genre and create a Success Checklist I brought in lots of recipe books from home. They were out on tables with post it notes when the children arrived in the morning and I challenged them to work in pairs to find and label some of the features they could see. 

We had a class discussion about the features they spotted and I jotted them down on strips of paper to refer to in the next activity. I gave out copies of recipes for them to annotate with the features. This was a perfect chance for me to gather a bit of reading evidence too - understanding the features of a non fiction text!

The wall so far...

Next came the Planning. We had a lot of fun coming up with disgusting ingredients together in some shared writing (my poor Learning Support Assistant was looking a bit green by the end of the session!),

This girl had lots of good ideas!

We also planned ideas for the method using time connectives and all the bossy verbs and adverbs we had previously generated.

 Here's how the wall was looking at this point. I desperately need a bigger wall but have no space in my classroom so I have to squash it all in as best I can!

Then comes the Drafting! We recapped what we had learned so far (using the wall!), I modeled my own recipe and then asked them to work on their own. 

My support group still really struggled to set the instructions out correctly even with a writing frame and had the method written in the 'you will need' section but the content and what they were trying to write was good!  Here is one from one of my stronger writers and this was added to the wall as a best example.

We ran out of time and I couldn't squeeze on the Editing and Improving heading. We will bring to a published form for a class recipe book next week but for now the working wall is complete and shows the learning journey we went on when writing our instruction texts!

I really do love these displays and strongly feel they support the learning in the classroom. 

I feel a little embarrassed by the tatty headings I have on the board, so I have created some new ones to use which I want to share with you! Click here or on the picture below to grab your freebie! There are different choices of headings depending on how you phrase things in your classroom.

I hope you've found some inspiration or ideas here that you can use! I'd love to hear how you use working walls in your classroom or any tips you have on how I can improve mine so please leave a comment or contact me over on my blog (Growing Little Learners)!

Thanks again to Adventures in Literacy Land for having me join you for today - it's been great!

Take Care

8

Teaching English Language Learners: SEI

Hi everyone! It is Bex here from Reading and Writing Redhead! This summer, I have been engrossed in studying Sheltered English Immersion. In Massachusetts all non-English speaking students need to be enrolled in mainstream English-speaking classrooms (with a few exceptions). ESL instruction might be done in a pull-out setting but the majority of an ELL student's day is spent in the classroom. The state realized that we teachers needed to learn more about effective strategies to meet the needs of those English Language Learners, so all of us have to either take a  course or pass an SEI exam. Since I have been thinking so much about SEI lately, I realized many of you have English speaking students in your classroom and it might be the right topic for a post!

So if you are new to this, you may need to start at the beginning - what is SEI? In Massachusetts, SEI is Sheltered English Instruction. I know in other states, it stands for Structured English Immersion and has slightly different characteristics, but I will tell you what I know. By no means am I an expert- if you want to know more I will give you some resources at the end but if you want to learn more about teaching ELL students in your own state check resources at your school and your state Department of Education Website. Let us know what you learn and comment below.

The short answer is that every classroom in Massachusetts that has at least one ELL student is a SEI classroom. Each SEI classroom must have a Highly Qualified Teacher of English Language Learners- that means the teacher must be certified in ELL, taken and passed the required state SEI course or taken and passed the state teaching exam for SEI.  Basically, classroom teachers and school staff who interact with ELL students in any way are learning what are the best practices for teaching these students in the English speaking classroom.

I'd love to share with you some of the strategies I learned about being a teacher in an SEI classroom. There was a lot of information I had to learn about levels of English Proficiency and how to assess what level students were and a LOT of information on setting both content and language lessons for every lessons, plus differentiating lessons for students at  different levels of proficiency- too much for one blog post.  Here are a few tips I picked up on.

  

 I had done some reading and taken a course in teaching ELL students last spring, and combined with the materials I studied the summer, I picked up on some vocabulary strategies to try when working with ELL students.  There are a ton of effective strategies and each works best in different situations depending on the word, the content area, the age of the student, and their level of English proficiency.

Word Wheels are great to try. You write the word you are learning in the center and then it is flexible - you can write synonyms, antonyms, word forms, or semantic connections around the outside. Here are a couple examples with detailed directions on Word Wheels: Primary Education Oasis' Blog Post and Widgit.com's preteaching vocabulary brochure pdf.

A word form chart was another suggested strategy for teaching vocabulary to ELL students. I couldn't find a good example of it online but, basically you chart a vocabulary word that has different forms (great for verbs - you can do past tense, present tense, etc) and discuss how the meaning changes and how to use each form. A goal of vocabulary instruction is giving students the tools to unlock word meaning on their own and this is a good way to start!

Focusing on cognates is a solid strategy to use with ELL students. Cognates are words in different languages that are derived from the same original word or root (for example family - familia and conversation and conversacion). There are tons of words in Spanish, for example, that are cognates with words in English.

There are many more great strategies. I will provide links below so you can check more out!

  

There are many writing strategies that will support your ELL student. One that would be useful for students with lower English proficiency is sentence frames. Sentence frames are sentences the teacher writes, then removes one or more word from . A word bank can be provided for students with content specific words, for example. So a student who has limited writing skills in English can complete sentences such as: Plants need, ________, air, and light to grow.  The _______ of the plant take in water from the soil. The ______ of the plant carries the water to the leaves" and so on instead of having to write an open response stating what they know about plants. 

Here are a couple places where you can find more information on sentence frames:

Fairfax County Schools' First Grade Team Post on Sentence Frames

Positive Engagement Project's Sentence Frames Information

For students who are early in their English language development and need a lot of assistance with literacy skills you can try the language experience approach. A student would verbally tell you their story and you write it down, word for word as he tells you. Then you read it back and discuss how the story sounds, if the message was communicated, and so on. Then you and he can edit it a little together. I am not an expert on this one, as I have never tried it myself but you can learn more here:

Professional Learning Board

Literacy Connections

One more strategy that came up a lot as I was reading about teaching ELLs in the SEI classroom was graphic organizers. Graphic organizers have endless possibilities in the classroom anyway, and are so beneficial to ELL students to organize their thoughts and get their ideas written down. There are so many graphic organizers for skills like sequencing, cause and effect, etc. that can be use in writing assignments. Check out these ideas in detail:

Color in Colorado Project

ESL Partyland

BusyTeacher.org

I have even more ideas for strategies on teaching reading to ELL students and assessment but I am going to save them for a future post! For now here are some great resources from around the web if you are interested in learning more. Thanks and please comment below and let us know your thoughts and strategies for meeting the needs of ELL students in your classroom!

Mrs. Dailey's blog post on vocabulary
Color in Colorado
Adventures in TESOL
Sharing Learning- Teaching English with Technology 
Ed.gov Blog
Everything ESL

And a thank you to Ashley Hughes for the beautiful frames and Dollar Photo Club!

2