Edcamp Atlanta 2013

I hope this qualifies as a post! I almost forgot my blogging challenge!

Got up at 4:30 am to drive to Edcamp Atlanta. It was full of awesome!

Stay tuned for future post with all the good stuff! 🙂

Notice and Note Book Chat

1 down and 2 to go! Our 1st ever twitter chat was tonight on Notice and Note-Close Reading by Kylene Beers and Bob Probst. It was an hour long conversation with MANY educators contributing their thoughts on this idea of noticing what we read and making note of it!

We were even TRENDING on twitter and that is a BIG DEAL. To me. 🙂

Look on the left side of my twitter page. Yep, we were #2 on trending!

Here’s the archive of tonight’s chat if you want to check it out.

TWUBS No, you don’t have a speech impediment when you say it. It’s really pronounced like that. 🙂

If you haven’t bought this book yet stop what you are doing. I mean like right now. And go to Heinemann and BUY THIS BOOK!! 🙂

It’s one of the most practical PD  books I’ve read in a long time. I’ve coined the term-It just makes sense. 🙂

Join us for our next 2 chats on this book June 13th and June 20th at 8pm CST. We will be discussing Part 2 and Part 3 of the book.

You can also join our facebook group- Facebook Notice and Note Group

Everybody loves a good book party!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

National Writing Project-Day 1

This will be my life for the entire month of June, and my blog posts will probably reflect it!!! Of course, I’m already 1 day behind in blogging about it….. 🙂

If you want to learn more about The National Writing Project and the forces behind it you can visit the website of The National Writing Project.

Here’s the JSU Writing Project Facebook page to see what we are up to this summer!! Or you can follow the Writing Project on twitter.

For even more updates (in case those weren’t enough!!) you can follow me on twitter at @shannonclark7 or on my facebook page-Reading is Thinking.

I’m going to TRY to blog a little about each of the 16 days of this FANTASTIC writing project!! So here’s a little from Day 1:

A lot of this 1st day was basic information about the project itself and the requirements.

1. Four major writings with revisions- 2 of these are free choice and the other 2 have to focus on teaching-response groups will collaborate and help with revisions of rough drafts

2. Daily Journals- Each morning someone will present a journal entry from the day before-I have to do this only 3 times

3. Professional Reading-Annotated bibliography of at least 8 sources 🙂

4. Teacher Demonstrations- Responsible for 1 teacher demonstration-Each participant will have to teach a 75-90 minute lesson-WOW!

5. Response to Teacher Demonstrations-Brief writings after each demonstration

6. Read and discuss 2 required texts

7. Round table discussions on hot topics that we vote on

Also, this week the university is conducting their CORE Academy Workshops so we are attending 3 of these.

WHEW!!!! Does that make your head spin like mine? 🙂 But in a good way!!

On day 1 we wrote a poem-“I Am a Rock Star”. You can find a model at Read Write Think-even though I couldn’t find it. 🙂

Here’s the one I wrote:

I Am A Rockstar In My Classroom1

We checked out the books we want to read and write about. Here’s what I checked out!! Love.To.Read.

Words, Words, Words by Janet Allen

Breathe In, Breathe Out by Ralph Fletcher

Side by Side: Essays on Teaching to Learn by Nancie Atwell

Everday Editing by Jeff Anderson

Writing About Reading by Janet Angelillo

Teaching Middle School Writers by Laura Robb

When Kids Can’t Read by Kylene Beers

We talked about Dropbox and Google Drive-places to save documents.

One of our instructors did a teacher demonstration on imagery using Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher poem.

1. He had us draw a picture of what death meant to us, then we shared

2. Read the poem

3. Highlighted the words that brought vivid images to mind

4. Found 15 pictures on the internet to show meaning of words

5. Created a video in Animoto using those 15 images

It was an AWESOME day just full of awesomeness! 🙂

Stay tuned for Day 2.

The Book Whisperer Read Along-Student Surveys

Hey ya’ll! I am hosting the “Whisper” about student surveys in Donalyn Miller’s book-The Book Whisperer. Isn’t this book a true motivator to make us step back, look at our teaching practice for reading, reflect, and MAKE CHANGES???? 🙂

Last year was my 1st year teaching 6th grade reading/language arts, and I did not give my 6th graders a survey about their reading-however, I did give them one at the end of their 5th grade year when I found out I was going to be teaching 6th grade. I read them, and read them again, to find out about my upcoming students. BUT, I didn’t do much more with them after that. THIS WILL CHANGE!!!

After reading Donalyn’s book, my plans on using student surveys will be more aligned with what she does. It seems like the best way to find out LOTS of information in about 15 minutes for EACH child!

I have not had the time to create my own student survey to use in my classroom (I will not be home from Chicago until July 7th), but I hope to post one on my blog for viewing by this Friday! 🙂 Do you have a favorite survey that you have created that you want to share? Please post a comment about it with a link to your blog so that we can all learn from each other!

I’m looking forward to reading everyone’s thoughts! 🙂

HAPPY READING AND SURVEYING!!!!!

Shannon

Workshop Part 2-Phonics Strategies

There are a couple of things I forgot to mention in my last post about the phonics strategies workshop that I went to. Heather also talked about actively engaging the students. We watched a video clip of Dr. Anita Archer (who is a guru on this). One of her biggest points was that you do NOT need to call on individual students who raise their hands to answer questions-instead elicit choral responses from the whole class. Her reasoning behind this is: ” You are teaching the best and leaving the rest.”

She also emphasized having enough wait time for students to think.

Here are some active engagement strategy ideas: (You can google them to learn and read more about them)

VERBAL

Turn and talk/choral responses/asking questions/graphic organizers/think-pair-share/KWL/reciprocal teaching

WRITTEN

Underline the text/highlight the text/code the text/quick write/white board/post-its/KWL/graphic organizers/Exit slips/3-2-1/ABC brainstorm/anticipation guide/jigsaw

Heather’s book recommendation is:

Locating and Correcting Reading Difficulties

 

Workshop Part 1-Phonics Strategies

This will be the 1st of 4 posts about the reading workshops that I went to in Anniston-presenter was Heather Wible with the State Dept. and Alabama Reading Initiative. She was awesome and so were her presentations!

I FORGOT to take pictures of the visuals/activities for this workshop, but I did remember for the other ones.

She started each workshop out by having us read a few quotes and then highlighting our favorite one:

1. Every job is a self-portrait of the person who did it. Autograph your work with excellence.-Anonymous

2. The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.-Mary M. Bethune

3. The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.-Robert Hutchins

4. The best teachers teach from the heart, not from the book.-Author Unknown

In each workshop we talked about what skillful readers do.

The words that I highlighted in my notes about phonics instruction were: blending, segmenting, manipulating tasks, and letter-sound correspondences. Even though we don’t usually teach “phonics” in the upper grades, we still have students that need that instruction because they missed it along the way. One way to assess the phonics background that students have (to see if any are in need of remediation) is to give a nonsense word fluency test. (Yes, I said the dreaded words-nonsense word fluency test) 🙂 But, this is given at the beginning of the year to determine the reading ability of a child-which SHOULD DRIVE OUR INSTRUCTION! This is what the assessment may look like for the uppergrades (and you could make your own):

fim               yain          snitting

sep              bire           bathtail

lat               nool           inteakness

dob             pote          overtodded

huz             jeek          rebenderable

See? It would tell you so much about a student and what their strengths/weaknesses are in decoding! 🙂

One biggie, biggie, biggie thing that she told us is: If you use DIBELS as an assessment you have GOT TO LOOK PAST THE SCORE!!!!!! 2 students may have around the same range in test scores and need totally different instruction!!!!! For example:

Jane-80 words per minute-Left endings off words, reversed letters/sounds, called out words incorrectly, had lots of phonics gaps BUT either skipped words or waited on that 3 second rule

John Doe-80 words per minute-only missed 3 words but took the time to figure out the words-however, read in phrases and not fluently

SO: if you ONLY group your students according to DIBELS scores, they would be in the same group yet they need 2 different types of instruction.

Heather said to try out this website: http://www.fcrr.org for LOTS of activities on all 5 big ideas-phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency

One activity that she did for multi-syllabic words was: wrote a large word on a sentence strip-she folded parts of the word back so you could only see 1 part. You have the child read that part, then unfold another part and read, then unfold another part and read-you get the picture! 🙂

Another cool idea was to use a chalkboard eraser to hold letter cards in a making words activity-this was way cute!

This workshop was great-hope you learned something from this little snippet that you can use in your classroom to make every child a great reader! 🙂

Stay tuned for more workshop tips!

 

Workshops about strategies

I have been to 4 FABULOUS workshops this week:

Phonics strategies/Fluency strategies/Vocabulary Strategies/Reading comprehension strategies

I am going to post what I learned and the many wonderful ideas from these workshops over the next week so stay tuned for some great information! 🙂

Heather Wible, who is with the Alabama Reading Initiative and AL State Dept.) was the presenter for all 4 workshops. She was incredible! She trains, presents, and coaches in the Montgomery, AL areas. I could listen to her present everyday, never get bored, and walk away with a plethora of great, practical information.

I will do a series of posts (probably about 4) for each workshop because there is so much information that I want to share with you. I will begin with the phonics workshop (which I forgot to take pictures of) and continue from there.

Happy reading! 🙂

Awesome workshops today

I went to 2 fabulous workshops today in Anniston, AL:

Fluency Strategies

Phonics Strategies and Active Student Engagement

They were geared to 3rd-5th grade, but I knew I could ge something out of them for 6th grade-and I was right! Heather Wible with the Alabama Reading Initiative (AL State Department) was the presenter, and she did an awesome job!!! 🙂

Stay tuned-later this week I will be posting some of her wonderful strategies for phonics and fluency!!!