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I have written before about our summer program* with Boston Green Academy, and we just finished our two-week institute with ninth and tenth graders from BGA and my students from Boston University. For this summer’s core text, we chose the book He Said, She Said by Kwame Alexander, and it has been fun to watch the students absolutely fall in love with the book.
It is the story of a popular teen named Omar who sets his sights on an ambitious girl named Claudia. She resists at first, thinking he is just a jock with nefarious intentions. In order to win her over, Omar gets involved with a cause that Claudia is passionate about, and their relationship shifts as they come to see each other and activism more clearly.
The essential question we chose for this summer for our anchor text and supplementary texts was, “What matters more, our intentions or our actions?” Omar’s initial intentions in getting involved with Claudia’s cause are, well, less than honorable, but they drive him to commit his time and energy to a great cause. And Claudia sometimes has intentions that aren’t unkind, but they manifest in actions that are harsh.
As students engaged the text and had discussions about the essential question, they had quite a lot to say about actions and intentions, and it allowed us to connect to goal-setting and putting those goals into action. Our students had lots of disagreement about whether intentions or actions were more important, and they were deeply into the book and the debate. In addition to our essential question, we were also able to have great discussions about gender norms, peer expectations, and authors’ intentions.
Throughout the institute, our students kept sneaking books home with them to read all the way to the end as quickly as possible. And when we asked what the best thing was about each day, our students always said the book was the best part! It was a very rich experience for all involved.
* This year’s team also included Marisa Olivo and Rosemary Finley from BGA and Scott Seider from BU.
It's all about the link. Make sure your minilessons link to ongoing work. Link to making choices. Link to all the other minilessons. Link to the charts and resources in the room. Most of all link your minilesson always to problem solving and independence.
I’ve hit an academic dilemma at summer camp this year. For the past three years at this gifted students’ camp, my lead instructor has chosen to teach The Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank). Yes, the book provides an entryway into a very difficult historical topic; yes, it’s pretty amazing to watch Anne’s growth; and yes, she is a role model and a hero for multiple reasons. But I’m so tired of reading and teaching Anne’s diary year after year. Though it’s new to my students every time, it’s become monotonous to me. I’m bored!
I encountered the same problem with another lead teacher during the school year, except she couldn’t stand Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. Having been raised in California, I read this book in elementary school because the narrative explained so much about Native American daily life in California. My lead teacher had used the text for over ten years, so it was understandable why she was simply sick of the book. As her assistant now given the task of teaching Island of the Blue Dolphins, I asked her why she didn’t switch Island of the Blue Dolphins out for another book. Her reasoning was that she saw the value in teaching it despite her feelings.
My solution so far is to find suitable replacements (Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, in case you were wondering) but recognize that this isn’t feasible for most teachers on a regular basis. To choose a replacement means taking the time to find a book that matches what you find value in the original (now boring) book, write a whole new curriculum, and figure out how to teach it. It’s much easier to pull out familiar curriculum.
So what to do about Anne Frank? I still haven’t decided if I want to say goodbye to her forever. But the question still stands: what do you do when you have a book of value and you don’t have the passion for teaching it anymore? Do you continue to teach it because of its merit, or shelve it?
I got a request this past year from my friends at Boston Green Academy (BGA) to help them consider their Humanities 4 curriculum, which focuses on philosophies, especially around happiness. This was a tough request for me, and certainly not one I had considered before. There aren’t any titles I can think of that say “Philosophy: Happiness” on their covers to pull me directly down this path.
But as I thought about it, I got more and more excited about how this topic is tackled in the YA world. The first set of books I considered were titles that dealt with “the meaning of life” in a variety of ways. Titles like Nothing by Janne Teller, Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life by Wendy Mass, and one of my personal favorites, The Spectacular Now by Tim Tharp give lots of food for thought about where we expend our energy and the wisdom of how we prioritize our attention in life.
This, of course, led to stories about facing challenges and finding happiness despite (or because) of the circumstances in our lives. So we pulled texts like The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, It’s Kind of a Funny Story by Ned Vizzini, and Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork, which all deal with characters finding ways to deal with and even prosper alongside difficult circumstances.
Then we happened upon a set of titles that raise questions about whether you can be “happy” if you are or are not being yourself. We pulled segments of titles like Openly Straight by Bill Konigsberg, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz, Tina’s Mouth by Keshni Kashyap, American-Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, and Rapture Practice, which I’ve talked about here before.
And then there were a world of nonfiction possibilities, those written for young people and those not — picture books by Demi about various figures, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas about work and play, and any number of great series texts about philosophers and religions and such.
So I guess the (happy) moral of this story is that it was much easier than I thought to revisit old texts with these new eyes of philosophies of happiness. I left the work feeling as though every text is about this very important topic in one way or another, and I can’t wait to see how the BGA curriculum around it continues to evolve!
Since I wrote recently about using a text set built around the idea of respect and the title Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina, a few people have asked what other texts we used alongside it. Our* essential question was “What makes someone worthy of respect?”
We were aiming for a set that spanned genres, and so the resulting set was both too big to use in our short time but also made of texts that weren’t only from the YA world. It included the some of the following:
Poems like “The Ballad of the Landlord” by Langston Hughes and “Ex-Basketball Player” by John Updike
A series of quotes about respect from famous people
The short story ‘Chuckie’ by Victor LaValle
A couple of articles about bystanding and upstanding when bad things happen to others
Lou Holtz’s famous first locker room speech at Notre Dame
A couple of pieces from the This I Believe collection having to do with self-respect (thisibelieve.org)
Several anecdotes from the book Discovering Wes Moore about choices, misunderstandings, and facing adversity
This group of texts are all related to the idea of respect and who gets it and who doesn’t, and the different readings allowed us to consider respect from a variety of vantage points as we tried to put ourselves in the shoes of Piddy and Yaqui in the anchor novel. They also gave us lots of time to dabble in writing different genres.
Text sets are such a fun way to really think hard about important stuff, and I’m excited to keep adding to this set about respect.
*This curriculum for the BGA/BU Summer Institute was developed in collaboration with my awesome friends Marisa Olivo and Lucia Mandelbaum from BGA and Scott Seider from BU.
Happy National Day on Writing! One way to celebrate this day is to take a moment to reflect on your bottom line beliefs about quality writing instruction.
Happy National Day on Writing! One way to celebrate this day is to take a moment to reflect on your bottom line beliefs about quality writing instruction.
I've been working on compiling the best digital citizenship curriculum links to support educators. I have a wiki of library pathfinders (resource guides) here. I'm also using Pinterest as a more graphic based collection of links. I've also been following folks on Scoop.it but haven't tried curating my own stream yet. Have you?
Please let me know what you think of these alternate ways of
1 Comments on Collecting Digital Citizenship Links, last added: 10/16/2011
I like the visual one. Both are now on my Delicious bookmarks for kids/parents. I like the changes in Delicious since the buyout -- you can make stacks now, and that makes links even easier to find.
Ours is a business of ideas: unique, fresh, high-concept, sweet, outstanding. Without a great idea, your story has little chance of flying in “today’s crowded market.” One new source of ideas is the curriculum that is taking shape around the Common Core State Standards. In the past two years, education reform has swept across the nation as many states adopted these new standards, and many are beginning implementation this year. It will be the face of education for the next decade.
Good bye, No Child Left Behind!
Hello, Common Core State Standards!
What Do New Education Standards Mean For Writers?
Our concern here isn’t the standards themselves. For that, you can read these articles from my sister site, commoncorestandards.com.
Important for us as writers, though, it to know what teachers are teaching and at what grade level. For this information, there are two sites you should know. First is corestandard.org which is the official site for the CCSS, and home of all the pdf versions of the standards themselves. Read these as you find time. The second is commoncore.org which is a non-profit organization, supported partially by the Gates Foundation. They have written curriculum maps, documents which give flesh to the CCSS by suggesting topics and units for every grade level; overall, the combined units should cover all the CCSS standards. These are often recommended by state department of educations, but they are NOT the official standards themselves. Still–they are often recommended, and that means, they are a good source for knowing what is being taught around the country at each grade level.
Here are links to each grade level’s curriculum maps. Have fun reading through these to see what is currently recommended. Use it as a prompt to jump-start age appropriate ideas. Of course, remember that picture books can take 2-5 years to be published and novels can take a couple years. So don’t write something just to jump on this new education bandwagon; but if you find inspiration here, you can be confident that some teacher will be looking for your story and will be more likely to buy it.
If you haven’t had the chance to check out the Fancy Nancy website, you must head over there now and take a look! First, sign up for the Fancy Nancy: Bonjour! E-newsletter:
My name is Dan Gutman, and I love teachers and librarians!
Hey, the most amazing thing in the history of the world just happened. But I’m not going to tell you what it is. So nah nah nah boo boo on you.
Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.
I had to wait a million hundred years, but HarperCollins just started the My Weird Classroom Club! It’s a club for classrooms, and it’s about My Weird School, so it has the perfect name.
“WOW!” (that’s “MOM” upside down) This is the greatest day of my life. If you ask me, HarperCollins should get the No Bell Prize. That’s a prize they give out to people who don’t have bells.
The My Weird Classroom Club is cool. So don’t be a dumbhead. Go to www.myweirdclassroomclub.com today and see it live and in person.
If you don’t, I’ll be so upset that I’ll have to go to Antarctica and live with the penguins.
I have been in a lot of different writing workshops lately. Just this week I’ve been in 13 writing workshops and have met with 13 different teachers in either reflective practice meetings or planning meetings. Therefore, I have SO MUCH I want to record. Which leads me to my current dilemma: what do I not [...]
You are probably familiar with Usborne Books. Have you seen their Science Encyclopedia? It is a beautiful book that has gotten lots of love around here. It's basically a textbook, but one that is pretty enough and interesting enough to just sit down and read.
This book covers the basic topics of Materials, Mixtures & Compounds, Energy/Forces/Motion, Earth & Space, Light/Sound/Electricity, Plants, Animals, and the Human Body in a friendly way that will appeal to elementary age students. Then, when one of the topics strikes your child's interest, he can visit the websites recommended to go along with the topic or try one of the experiments.
We recently grew our own crystals out of alum, based on an experiment in this book.
After letting them grow for a few days, we chose the biggest one, and using it as a 'seed crystal', put it in the jar and watched it grow some more.
It was a fun experiment, and though the Usborne Science Encyclopedia
3 Comments on The Usborne Science Encyclopedia, last added: 8/28/2010
We have the science curriculum from NOEO science and they use the Usborne Science Encyclopedia along with the Usborne Book of Marvels and Mysteries. We have the Physics II version and it also comes with 2 "living books" and an many experiments from the Young Scientist Club. I don't sell their stuff or anything, but it is a really great science program. Just thought I would mention it.
Science is now my son's favorite subject because of these books!
I am always on the lookout for homeschooling materials that are new and different. (Oh yes, and FUN too - my kids always appreciate that!!) When I was asked to join the virtual tour for Download N Go - I had no idea what I was even reviewing at first. When I opened my PDF, I was in for a delightful surprise. I just LOVE this whole idea. Amanda Bennett, has created all different units for parents to use with their kids that are based on many different topics. They are geared to K-4th Grade students and include a wide range of ideas. I was sent "Summer Sensations" - which is a week-long unit study packed with fun things to do that all center around summer. I was impressed - the study includes nature activities, writing, and more - it really is a full-curriculum approach. I think my daughter would LOVE this, but my boys would have enjoyed it in their younger years as well. It is well-rounded and a fun approach to unit studies. I would gladly pay for the work Amanda Bennett put into her studies - and I like how you can choose to buy them separately or in bundles - great idea!! See purchasing options HERE. (There are even some freebies when you purchase!!) I will also mention that they are having a Back-to-Homeschool Sale July 30 - August 15. So don't miss some of the great deals available during that time.
I don't want to limit this to homeschoolers either - I do think teachers would LOVE the ideas and find them very adaptable to classrooms as well.
And I’m okay with a decent amount of math, too. But the bottom line is that the pendulum has swung TOO far and this op-ed article in Monday’s NYT sums up quite nicely the direction in which I *wish* education was headed.
What I wouldn’t give to teach in the (theoretical) third grade classroom described here.
All I can say is… I hope somebody with the power to make these kind of HUGE changes in the way curriculum is developed is listening.
Excerpted from a Lilting House post I wrote in July 2006.
Here is a list of Some Particularly Cool Stuff My Kids and I Have Learned a Ton From or Just Plain Had a Good Time With:
Settlers of Catan, the board game. Jane got this for Christmas last year. We’ve been obsessed ever since. Except when our friends hijack it and keep it for weeks because it is that great a game.
Signing Time DVDs. Catchy songs, immensely useful vocabulary in American Sign Language. I trumpet these wherever I go. We talk about Rachel like she’s one of the family.
Prismacolor colored pencils. Indispensable. I was amused to see that Jane mentioned them in the first line of her “I Am From” poem. She’s right; they have helped color the picture of her life.
Uncle Josh’s Outline Map CD-Rom. Because maps are cool, and maps you can color (with Prismacolor pencils, hey!) are even cooler. The kids are constantly asking me to print out a map of somewhere or other. You can find other outline maps available online (for free), but I like Josh’s for clarity. And once when I had a problem opening a particular map (it’s a PDF file), I called the help number and it was Uncle Josh himself, a most amiable gentleman, who quickly solved my problem.
The Global Puzzle. Big! Very big! Will take over your dinner table! (So clear off that laundry.)
Set. It may annoy you that your eight-year-old will be quicker at spotting the patterns in this card game than you will. There’s a free daily online version as well.
Quiddler. Like Scrabble, only with cards. This, too, can be played online.
Wild Goose Science Kits. Fun experiments with a low mess factor. Best prices at Timberdoodle. Note to self: remember the Wild Goose Crime Kit come Christmastime.
A microscope. Sonlight sells a nifty set of prepared slides with paramecium and other fun stuff for the kids to peer at.
If the scope sparks an interest in dissection, there’s a way to do it online with no actual innards involved: Froguts! The site has a couple of free demos to occupy you while you save up for the full version. (Which I haven’t seen yet, but it does look cool.) HT: Karen Edmisten.
Klutz kits. Over the years, we’ve explored: knitting, embroidery, origami, magic, Sculpey, paper collage, paper dolls, beadlings, and foam shapes. Look under any piece of furniture in my house and you will find remnants of all of the above.
Which reminds me: Sculpey clay. Is it possible to get through a day without some? My children think not.
Usborne’s calligraphy book and markers.
But while I’m on Usborne, my kids also love and use at least weekly: Usborne Science Experiments Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Muse magazine. The highlight of Jane’s month. From the publishers of Cricket.
Classical Kids CDs. Beanie’s favorite is the Vivaldi. Alice’s daughter Theresa does a fabulous Queen of the Night impersonation from the Mozart.
Refrigerator poetry magnets. I gave Scott the Shakespearean set a couple of Christmases ago. Note to self: You are not as brilliant as you think! You were an English major, for Pete’s sake, with a minor in drama. Thou knowest full well old William was a bawdy lad. If you don’t want your little ones writing poems about codpieces, stick to the basic version. But oh how I enjoy the messages Scott leaves for me to find and then pretends he doesn’t know who wrote them:
I am so in love with my delicate wench.
And of course of course of course, Jim Weiss story CDs. I rave about these every chance I get because they have added such riches to my children’s imaginations. For years, they have listened to Jim’s stories after lights-out. Greek myths, Sherlock Holmes, Shakespeare, folk and fairy tales, the Arabian Nights, the Jungle Book: of such stuff are dreams woven.
A good source for much of the above (and lots more): FUN Books.
This is a wonderful commentary from singer-songwriter Tom Chapin on the end-of-year tests that students and their teachers are now focusing on. In addition to core subjects that have been virtually eliminated from the curriculum (like social studies), art, music, drama and author/illustrator visits are almost things of the past.
What kind of society are we creating here? Anyone like to chime in?
0 Comments on Tom Chapin's Protest Song: It's Not on the Test as of 1/1/1900
charlene said, on 4/8/2008 8:27:00 AM
"Rational discourse was not on the test." Great lyrics, but what a sad scene in our schools. Thanks for the post - lots to think about (that none of us will be tested on later). CB
NOTE TO SELF: SINCE WHEN ARE HAIRCUTS PART OF A NURSERY SCHOOL CURRICULUM?
Three year old(!) Tavis Cook has been banned from his Tyneside (UK) nursery school class due to his trendy "tramlines" haircut. His mother, Donna Cook, was informed that the youngster's hair cut broke the rules of Riverside Primary School in North Shields, UK and to keep her son home from school until his hair grows back.
Say what? Since when is a youngster's choice of hair cut part of a curriculum?
North Tyneside Council said it was aware of the matter and was advising Ms Cook on her options. No-one at the school was available for comment (I bet!).
Miss Cook took the youngster to the barber at which point Tavischose the trendy hairstyle. Less than an hour after dropping the youngster off for nursery class the next morning, she was contacted by phone and requested to come pick him up. According to Tavis's mother, the walls of the barber shop were covered with photos of hair cuts and he choose his "tramline" cut. She had contacted the school and been informed that there was no uniform policy for the nursery or reception year.
When Tavis's mother arrived at school, the young boy was in tears.
A spokesman for North Tyneside Council said that they are aware of this issue and currently advising the parent on the matter.
Uh-huh...
A spokesman from Riverside Primary School said head teacher Dame Mary MacDonald was not available for comment.
Uh-huh...
Judge for yourselves as to the appropriateness of the haircut:
I've been remiss in not posting about the latest Growing with Grammar program by my friend Tamela Davis, for Grade 5. More good stuff for home educating families looking for more choice. And more Growing with Grammar posts and reviews (for Grades 1&2, 3, and 4) here, here, and here.
I'm a big fan of Patricia T. O'Conner's Woe Is I: The Grammarphobe's Guide to Better English in Plain English,
0 Comments on Grammar resources as of 9/20/2007 9:16:00 PM
I like the visual one. Both are now on my Delicious bookmarks for kids/parents. I like the changes in Delicious since the buyout -- you can make stacks now, and that makes links even easier to find.