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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.

The post Intentions and He Said, She Said appeared first on The Horn Book.

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?

The post Frankly, tired of reading Anne Frank appeared first on The Horn Book.

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!

The post Happiness and high school humanities appeared first on The Horn Book.

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. 

The post Yaqui’s text set appeared first on The Horn Book.

Having a teacher's guide for your book will help sell more copies. 

http://bookmarketingtools.com/blog/create-education-materials-to-sell-more-books/

Make it easier for teachers to incorporate your book into their lessons by providing a detailed curriculum guide.

http://kathytemean.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/tying-your-novel-into-the-core-curriculum/
http://kathytemean.wordpress.com/2014/05/28/curriculum-guide-darlene-beck-jacobson/

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.

Teachers love when they can reference curriculum guides to help further classroom discussions and activities. 

http://kathytemean.wordpress.com/2013/04/09/curriculum-guides-for-books/

Should you be making a curricular guide for your books?

http://throughthetollbooth.com/2012/01/26/self-marketing-part-ii-discussion-and-activity-guides/

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

Things to look for if you hire someone to write your teacher guide.

http://cynthialeitichsmith.blogspot.com/2011/08/guest-post-natalie-dias-lorenzi-on.html

Find out the curriculum standards for each state.

http://commoncorestandards.com/ela/k-12-curriculum-maps/

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.

• History of National Standards: Where Did They Come From?
• Who Wrote the Common Core Standards
• Authors of the Common Core Standards
• 6 Shifts in Learning: CCSS Sytle
• FAQ: List of Common Core Required Texts
• Text Complexity: Choosing Exemplar Texts
• To find out what YOUR state is doing for the CCSS, find a link here to the State Department of Education for your state.
  States: Links to State Departments CCSS Standards

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.

Links to the K-12 Curriculum Maps

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:

You can also see adorable photos of fancy families and read the Fancy Nancy blog.

Hosting a Fancy Nancy soiree in your library?  Download the event kit.

Prepping for a poetry unit?  Take a look at our ideas to use FANCY NANCY: POET EXTRAORDINAIRE! in the classroom.

Use this template to help kids explore their family tree!

The possibilities are endless, mes amis!  How have you shared Fancy Nancy in your libraries or classrooms?

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.

My Weird Classroom Club is full of teaching guides, activity sheets, puzzles, games, comics, checklists, cards, Mad Libs, and other awesome stuff you can use in your classroom to get your kids excited about reading.*

“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.

*It’s gonna sell a lot of books too!  What a scam!

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.