Author Studies

Happy Monday, everyone!  Today I'd like to share with you an author study project we worked on a couple weeks ago.  We were blessed to have author/illustrator Todd Parr visit our building in November, and since his visit, my students have been asking to learn about more authors and/or illustrators.  As we near the end of the year, I knew I wanted to fit this in more than just sharing a tidbit or two about some of their favorite authors.

Students were in 5 groups, and each group was given a choice of 4 different authors.  I tried to choose authors whose books students would be able to read relatively independently. I did not give authors we already knew a little bit about as options.  Once authors were chosen, I worked with my school librarian and visited the public library to get as many books by each author as I could.

We began by researching the author using Wikipedia, each author's website and author interviews on Scholastic.com.  One student in each group volunteered to be the recorder and took notes for the group.  Authors chosen were: Eric Carle, Doreen Cronin, Laura Numeroff, Peter Reynolds and Leo Lionni.

After learning about the author, students began reading the different books the author had written. They would talk to each other as they were reading and many noticed some similarities or took note of things they learned from their research as they read.  These books quickly became popular picks during independent reading time and in our classroom library!

Once we had learned about the author and read many of their works, it was time to plan how to share our learning with the class.  Each group had the opportunity to make a presentation in any way they would like, but there had to be at least 1 visual element.  They were also encouraged to have a group member share one of their author's books, though this was not required.

Three groups chose to make posters about their author, and two groups were feeling adventurous and decided to try a new app, Adobe Voice.  Each group had at least 1 student volunteer to read; in fact, one group had all 4 want to read, so they read two books in total, each reading half of a book.  The groups that made posters were each given a piece of poster board and some garage sale sign type cutouts (Dollar Tree).  They also downloaded images of the author's books using Google Images to include on their posters.

The final step after projects were complete was to share them with the class.  They love to share with one another!

This group struggled to find photos on Google Images, so decided to use clipart, which I thought was a kindergarten-appropriate decision!

My students loved learning not only about the author their group researched, but they were interested to know what their friends learned as well.  One of my students was so excited to learn about Laura Numeroff, she has decided to write her own book in her style during our free writing time.

What types of author or book studies have you done with your students?  How to you make these connections with students?

Summer Reading Programs

Each spring, I usually post the summer reading programs offered by local retailers on my blog (Literacy Spark).  I decided to share them over here for Adventures in Literacy Land readers this time.  I like to print the actual calendars for students and put them in a folder that I give them on the last day of school with their report card and other things.

First, make sure to check with your local public libraries and see what programs they will be offering for kids throughout the summer.  Often, the librarians will be willing to come into the school and speak to students before summer starts. Many libraries hold summer reading challenges as well as special events and story times.

Barnes and Noble is having its usual summer reading program which rewards students with a free book upon completion of a simple reading journal.  Stores will be holding opening ceremony events on June 4th.  Find more information here.

Chuck E. Cheese has a bunch of reward calendars on its website available for use any time of the year.  One of them is for reading.  Kids can bring in a completed reading calendar and get ten free tokens.  Calendars are available here.

Half Price books is offering a $5 gift card with the completion of a reading calendar for the months of June and/or July.  The calendar can be found here.

Kids that read ten books can get $10 added to their TD Bank account. More information can be found here.

Scholastic is also hosting its summer reading challenge.  Schools, teachers, and/or parents can sign their children up to record the number of minutes read over the summer.  There are a lot of resources on the site that are great including rewards and things of that nature, but my favorite are the book lists by ages.  These would be great to send home with your students.  They can be really helpful for parents who aren't sure what their kids should be reading. The resources from Scholastic can be found here.

Sadly, I feel like I find fewer and fewer programs each year!  So if you know of any others, please leave a comment and I'd be happy to add them to this list.

The Research Paper Made Simple

Even young children can write simple research papers with an easy mentor text and model for writing.

When I help students write their first research paper, I love to use The Important Book  by Margaret Wise Brown. If you haven't seen this book, you really need to check it out! It has a simple way of telling about something that makes it easy for students to learn more about something and provides a great mentor text for helping students write in an easy way.

After reading the book aloud to them, I started out by modeling what I wanted them to research. I used a Tree Map to show them the information I found about horses. This also served as the information I wanted them to search for their research. I put a star next to the "important" fact and circled the other information I wanted to include.

After I created my Tree Map, they chose their animals to research and researched to create their Tree Maps.

They chose their important thing with a star and the others were circled.

Then I wrote my paragraph using the information and creating a model for them to use.

They used my model to write a rough draft to edit and revise. Their final copy was complete with a picture at the top.

Overall, these second graders learned a lot about some simple research to get them ready for third grade. They really enjoyed working on this and took great pride in it ~ something they all need!

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May The Force Awaken Reading

The Star Wars bug hit our house this past year.  My husband finally felt that my girls were ready for all the Star Wars movies...and they were hooked. This led to also reading ALL the Star Wars books that they could get their hands on.  And through this, I learned that there is quite a variety of books that are available to all our different readers, learners, and Star Wars enthusiasts.

So in honor of "May the 4th (force),"  I am highlighting some of the Star Wars books that are currently out there.  It may not be an interest of mine, but as teachers, we always need to be on the lookout for books that are going to "hook" our readers in.  Especially the readers that are awfully hard to "hook."  Some of these books (or ones like them) may just do the trick.

Fiction stories...There is a wide array of book available that tell the different stories within the Star Wars movies.  These range from leveled books, bedtime story books, to chapter books.  Some books are illustrated, while others have photographs of scenes from the movies.

Jeffrey Brown has also put out some Star Wars books that explore a new side to Darth Vader...fatherhood.  They are humorous books that examine what Vader's household may have been like when Luke and Leia were younger. You will want to pre-read these books to ensure that the humor matches the age of your students.

Some graphic novels called "Star Wars Jedi Academy" were also written by Jeffrey Brown. The story is about a boy, Roan, that is rejected from pilot school and finds himself headed to middle school at a Jedi Academy.  Woven throughout the books are journal entries, notes, letters, emails, and much more.  These additions make it so much more than a graphic novel.

Nonfiction texts...It is really interesting that Star Wars is a fictional set of stories but there are so many books available that are written in a nonfiction style.  One example is the Character Encyclopedia.  It is a large book that is chuck full of information about the different characters within the movies.  Captions, labels, diagrams, photographs, and biographical information are all included.

There are also books that focus on the technical side of Star Wars.  Some of these books are thinner, with less challenging words for our younger readers.  They may include diagrams of the different ships, details about items sold in shops, or facts that compare and contrast lightsabers.

Although Star Wars books are not my first choice of reading material, they may just be a hot-ticket item for some of the students in my class.  And I know that many of us will do just about anything to reel our reluctant readers into this wonderful world of reading! 

Theme with Text Cousins

Each year poses its own unique set of challenges, changes, and surprises.  This is one of the reasons I love teaching so much!  We get the opportunity to try again, change, and grow with each new year.

Last year I had the amazing opportunity to invite Tanny McGregor, author of Comprehension Connections, into my first grade classroom to model a lesson on theme. As we planned for this current year, my teammate and I were excited to add this lesson into our curriculum calendar.  And I wrote about what we planned to do for the Growing Readers and Writers Blog Hop. But...as we all know too well...planning and actually teaching are two very different things.

Our goal was to teach our first graders how to uncover the theme across several texts.  We have devoted a lot of time this year to deep thinking, so we hoped that this would build off what they could already do.  We would use three texts each day throughout the week.  This would provide them with multiple opportunities for practice with theme or author's message.

We started off the week with the introduction of the word theme and a discussion about all the other words that can sometimes be used for the same concept: author's message, central message, main point, main idea, author's point, etc.  Then we dug right into what our students already knew.  And what they discovered is that they have been studying theme all year.

Throughout the year we read all the Otis books, Tacky books, and Tippy-Toe Chick Go.  So this is where we started: with texts that have already been read, examined, and discussed.  This proved to be a great decision because our time was not spent on the reading of the texts but on the bridging of three texts and their themes that had been previously discussed throughout the year.  We brought these three texts out again and asked our students to brainstorm what connections or possible themes that these three books have in common.

Wow!  We wrote down all their ideas.  This was one tip that Tanny was sure to model for us.  There does not have to be one correct theme but possible theme ideas.  And she was right!  They came up with some great ideas.

And so our lesson continued each day with three different texts: a poem, pictures from a story, and a book.

They used those three different texts to come up with possible common themes.

WOW!  What we found was that the lesson proved to have the right amount of challenge for them. At times they wanted to revert back to surface level.

For example, we used the texts This Way, Ruby, a poem The Secret Song, and Sidewalk Flowers.  One of our classes wanted to point out that there was a bird in all three texts or that there were flowers in all three.  These were connections that but they were not digging deeper into the theme or message of the text.

At the end of the week, my teammate took one of the themes for each set of text cousins and had it framed.  She explained that the theme or message is so important and special that it needs to be framed.  I LOVE this idea because it is another visual for our first graders to understand the importance of deep thinking when reading.

I look forward to using these lesson again next year and seeing where it takes us.  What texts would you use to do this teach theme?

Making Decoding Strategies Automatic: 3 Easy Steps

Hello, Everyone.  This is Cathy from Cathy Collier's The W.I.S.E. Owl.  I am a reading specialist in a K-2 school.  I do both pull-out interventions and coaching, but have a soft spot for my pull-out kids. Two of my students this year are first grade students diagnosed with a "learning disability." (My undergraduate degree is in special education, so you know I love them.) They are the highlight of my day...and I won't deny I'd love to teach them all day!

When we started in late fall, these two were on a Level B and as of March they were moving into a Level D.  THEN, we hit a wall.  The D to E wall.  E seems to be the time when students are faced with lots of long vowel words, blends and digraphs, and word endings.  Here's what I know:  they can decode almost any word, IF I ask them questions and guide them.

For example, If they come to the word "gate."

     Me:  What do you know?        
Justin:  There is an "e" on the end?
     Me:  What does that mean?      
Justin:  The "e" makes the "a" says it's name.
     Me:  So, what is the word?      
Justin:  /g/ /a-a-a-a/ /t/,  gate.
     Me:  Great job!

What can I do?

My greatest challenge is getting the students to have their own internal dialog when using decoding strategies.  After a conversation with my Assistant Principal, we decided to try and practice the automaticity of the decoding strategies.  What does that mean?  I want them to come to an unknown word and think strategy first.  I have always "taught" and "practiced" the strategies, but I'm taking it one step farther.

1.  Play "Slap Jack"

I created a strip of the 3 strategies they seemed to need the most.  I chose 1 known and 2 unknown strategies.  We had been using CVC Sliders to practice our "slide and sound" with cvc words.   They have gotten pretty consistent with that strategy, so that became their "known" strategy.  The second strategy was the silent e "making the vowel say it's name (most of the time)."  We have talked about this strategy, but they needed concentrated practice with it.  The final strategy was "chop the endings."  We covered up or "chopped off" the endings to look at the base word for decoding.  To begin, I wrote 5 words for each strategy on an index card and when I flashed the card, they had to "slap the strategy" they would use to decode the word.  THEY DID NOT DECODE THE WORD.  This wasn't a decoding lesson, it was a strategy lesson.  We played this game for a week.  I let them sit side-by-side and slap the strategy together, but by the end of the week it was a race.  I wanted the strategy to be automatic.  The video below is Justin identifying the strategy for me.  (He said he didn't want to slap it, if it wasn't a game.  He thought he looked silly doing it alone.)

I hate that the video doesn't show all the strategies, but you get the idea.  By the end of the week, he was pointing to the strategy and saying the name of it.  That's what I want:  automaticity.

2.  Sort 

Part 1, we sorted with the cards from the week before.  I gave them the cards to sort under the strategy mat.  Yes, I should have made the cards smaller.  Lucky for you, I made small cards for you at the end of the post.  They would sort the cards as quickly as they could, then they would "prove" the cards belonged in that column.  They are still not reading the cards, they are just choosing a strategy.  Part 2, was a sort sheet.  This was an independent activity at the end of the week, but the students were still asked to "prove" the word belonged.  I also wanted to send a sample of a competed sort home to their parents.

3.  Read.

Finally, we read sentences I constructed with multiple strategies in each sentence.  As they came to an underlined word, they touched the strategy on the mat and then decoded the word.  They did a great job.  My favorite moment was when looking at the word "running" Justin said, "After I chop the ending, I can see a word to "slide and sound."  WOW...that's a moment, if you ask me.

I made a Decoding Strategy FREEBIE set for this idea.