Ideas for the First Week

Check out the Educators for Social Responsibility (ESR) book Partners in Learning, which you can borrow from me before school starts for great community building ideas and even day-to-day ideas for starting the year.

Here are some other sites:
http://wilderdom.com/games/InitiativeGames.html
http://www.stenhouse.com/8904.asp?r=n119
http://www.education-world.com/back_to_school/index.shtml

Grammar/Spelling Program - Update on Vocab

Hello everyone. I have been working on our 15 minute spelling and grammar program. I'm making alot of progress and I've been getting some helpful input from literacy specialists and fellow teachers. I am excited to introduce the material to you when what I have is more finalized.

In terms of vocabulary, I don't think that it is beneficial to include it in this format. It doesn't make sense to me to choose vocab words to use for all of us when they would probably be chosen arbitrarily from a vocabulary book. I think it probably makes the most sense for us to generate vocabulary from our students' difficult words from their independent reading and from the vocabulary required for our units. If you feel passionately that vocabulary instruction should be included in this program, please do respond and let me know and I will try to find a meaningful way to incorporate it. Otherwise, I think it is probably best for us to plan our vocabulary instruction individually or in grade teams.

Check back for updates on the program! I will be posting the procedures soon.

Best,

Danielle Giusto
dmgiusto@gmail.com

Our Writing Program
Based on the research we have been reading, we will undertake the following actions to improve our students’ writing and academic success:
1. Students will write more. A lot more. They will get a lot more writing practice.
2. Teachers will model good writing. Writing will be taught, not just assigned.
3. Students will have grammar instruction.
4. Students will read and study other writers.
5. Students will have practice with timed writing instruction and test prompts.
6. Students will have choice when it comes to writing topics.
7. Students will write for authentic purposes and for authentic audiences.
8. Students will get meaningful feedback from their teachers and their peers.

Students often don’t get why they have to write so much. We will be teaching them the following eight reasons for writing:
1. Writing is hard, but “hard” is rewarding.
2. Writing helps you sort things out.
3. Writing helps to persuade others.
4. Writing helps to fight oppression.
5. Writing makes you a better reader.
6. Writing makes you smarter.
7. Writing helps you get into and through college.
8. Writing prepares you for the world of work.

Throughout the year we will be focusing on four types of student writing, which we describe below. All four types are essential for developing students’ writing and thinking skills.
1. Writing to Learn: Students will write everyday in a variety of modes to extend their thinking and learning about reading, history, social issues, and their own learning. Writing to learn takes such forms as:
· Note-taking
· Book Letters and reading responses
· Social Studies Skits / Drama
· Social Studies Projects
· Journal Responses to social studies topics or readings
· Graphic Organizers
· Self-Assessments
· All other writing

2. The Writer’s Notebook / Independent Writing: Students will experiment with and practice their writing on a weekly basis. We will teach students how to become independent writers, to use brainstorming techniques, and how to generate and extend ideas. This is the place where students will have the most choice and freedom.
· 5 pages per week will be due
· Mondays (60 minutes)
o 20 minutes – Writer’s Notebook Minilesson and Teacher Modeling
o 20 minutes – Independent Writing + Conferencing
o 20 minutes – Partner and Class Sharing
· Wednesdays (30 minutes)
o 5 minutes – Writer’s Notebook Check-in Minilesson
o 15-20 minutes – Independent Writing + Conferencing
o 5-10 minutes – Partner and Class Sharing
· All of this writing will be the source for larger writing projects (esp. MultiG)


3. On-Demand/Prompt Writing: Students will learn how to develop and organize clear and meaningful short essays in response to academic prompts like they will see on standardized tests, college applications, etc…
· 1 timed, on-demand essay per week (In the first quarter we will scaffold up to this, teaching how to “attack the prompts” before we get into the actual writings.). The lesson and writing assignment will usually be on Fridays for 30 minutes. This will be connected to Humanities content.
· During test-prep, this will become more intensive.

4. Extended Writing Projects: Students will go through the writing process to develop real world modes of writing in mandated discourses, such as expository, persuasive, narrative, and instructional. We will teach students the craft of writing through revision, including voice, organization, clarity of ideas, sentence fluency, presentation, and word choice. We will also teach students how to edit the conventions of their writing.
· We will have 1 – 2 extended writing projects per unit…
o A Narrative Account: Students will write a narrative account from the perspective of a turn-of-the-century immigrant as an “immigrant journal”.
o A Persuasive Essay: Students will write a persuasive essay related to the topic of war and questions about why we fight and if it’s ever worth it.
o A Functional Document: Students will write an instruction manual for sixth graders on an aspect of good test-taking.
o A Comparative Literary Analysis: Students will write a literary analysis comparing two short pieces of literature. This will be test-prep based.
o A Literary Response / Book Review: Students will write a book review or literary response to a work of historical fiction about the Holocaust.
o A Social Action Letter: Students will write a letter to someone in the community related to a civil rights issue of their choosing.
o A Multigenre Paper: The culminating writing project will be a multigenre paper of roughly 10 to 15 pages, in which students explore a social issue of their choosing.

· Minilessons and time to write for extended writing projects will take place throughout the unit, but will become more intensive toward the ends of each unit to support the completion of each unit’s performance task, which will be writing-based.

Our Plan for Teaching Reading

After much thought, reading, and discussion, Reena and I have come up with the following plan for incorporating the teaching of reading into Humanities:
Each day, except Wednesday, we will set aside 30 minutes for "Reading Workshop", which will include 5 minutes for either a systems minilesson or a booktalk, 20 minutes for independent reading with conferencing, and 5 minutes for partner talk and class debriefing.

• Systems Minilessons are very short reading minilessons that address the systems of reading in the class, such as how the library works, how to read and conference quietly, how to choose a book, strategies for talking with a partner, how to keep track of books read, how to write "book letters" to friends and the teacher, and how to give booktalks.
• Booktalks will be performed by the teacher and/or the students. All students will need to give one or two booktalks per quarter. Initially we will have to scaffold the teaching of how to give a booktalk. The purpose of the booktalk is to grow enthusiasm for books in the class and "sell" books to the right kids.
• "Book letters" will be written responses to reading on a book of their choice. Thus, we are not saying they will need to respond in writing on a daily or even bookly basis. Writing these letters effectively will also require good scaffolding and modeling.
• The teaching of comprehension, fix-up strategies, literary conventions, etc... will take place both during conferencing (one-on-one), through responses to book letters, and in the "humanities block" (i.e. the other 90 minutes of the class)

During the "humanities block" we will teach comprehension strategies through the short story read alouds or nonfiction read alouds we are using in the class. For example, we are beginning our immigration unit with a short vignette called "Orientation Day" about a Chinese-American girl who is questioning her identity. We will think-aloud about the author's purpose, main idea, and analyze her character, in addition to having students journal responses to it to scaffold their understanding about "what it means to be American". When we are reading nonfiction we will pay attention, thinking aloud / marking up / chart, the textual structures. There is a great book that is a great synthesis between teaching historical thinking as well as good reading strategies for learning history / social issues called "Making Sense of History" by Myra Zarnowski.
We are going to focus on the following reading strategies the most in the beginning because they are most important for test taking: main idea / determining importance; author's purpose; word study; text structure; and inferencing (which we will do through character analysis: theories with evidence). In conferencing we will focus mostly on the struggling readers who need the most explicit teaching in terms of visualizing, fix-up strategies, and prior knowledge activation.
There's more.
Mondays we would like to set aside for extended reading and writing workshop. So, on Monday, we would still have our 30 minute structure for reading as described earlier, but we may extend the class discussion about our reading, and add time for students to actually work on and get help with their book letters and booktalks. The same would go for writing. Students would get extended time to "play" in their writer's notebooks and share their writings with the class. Mondays would be a time for us to take stock, as a class, of how we're growing as readers and writers. It would set the stage for the week in terms of minilessons and independent reading and writing foci.
Spelling and grammar would reserve a 15-minute place every day of the week except Mondays. The 30 minutes on Wednesday, normally reserved for Independent Reading will be taken over by Independent Writing.
We have also developed some more planning templates, including conferencing guides, conferencing assessment sheets, yearly and daily reading logs, and unit and daily planning sheets that you may find useful, which we will post in the next few days.

Plan for Low-Performing Middle Schools

Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan yesterday to grant New York City's 50 lowest performing middle schools an additional 5 million dollars and appoint an administrator to design professional development programs for middle school teachers and principals. The following article from the New York Times describes the announcement:

Citing Learning Slumps, Mayor Presents Plan for Low-Performing Middle Schools

By JENNIFER MEDINA
Published: August 14, 2007

Calling middle school students the hardest to reach, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced yesterday that he would direct an additional $5 million to about 50 of the city’s lowest-performing middle schools and appoint a high-level administrator to devise professional development programs for middle school teachers and principals.

He acted as the City Council released a report detailing problems in the city’s middle schools, including teacher retention difficulties and large class sizes, and issued a number of recommendations to address them. The council report noted that the percentage of eighth graders who perform at grade level is just 45.6 in math and just 41.8 percent in reading. Those were sharp drops from elementary school.

“That’s when many students begin to lose their footing,” the mayor said, referring to middle school. “Generally speaking, those in elementary school do what you tell them to do. And I think it’s also true by the time they get to high school, they don’t. It’s in those middle years where they transfer from one to another.”

Driven by newly documented slumps in learning, by crime rates and by high dropout rates in high school, educators across New York and the nation have been struggling to rethink middle school programs and the best way to teach adolescents at a transitional juncture of self-discovery and hormonal change.

In a show of widespread support for the changes, the mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein appeared yesterday next to Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn; Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers; and dozens of members of the Coalition for Educational Justice, a group of parents who had agitated for increased attention to the city’s middle schools and their 220,000 students. The group released its own report in January.

But the mayor shied away from adopting the most far-ranging changes recommended in the reports, like significantly reducing class sizes, creating a special middle school academy to train teachers about early adolescence, and removing police officers from city schools to create a more welcoming atmosphere.

The mayor said the city would work to expand the number of advanced level Regents classes in middle school, which prepare students for tests they are required to pass in order to graduate from high school. The effort will first be focused on about 50 of the lowest-performing schools; those students will be able to take advanced-level classes at other schools if their current ones do not offer them.

“New York City’s public schools have had a particularly high and unacceptable level of academic underachievement for the over 220,000 middle school students citywide,” read the report released by Ms. Quinn.

The administration was right to focus on the neediest schools first, Ms. Quinn said, adding that that by 2010, all middle schools would be offering high-level classes.

“But we don’t have to wait,” she said, to loud applause at the news conference at William J. O’Shea Junior High School on West 77th Street in Manhattan. “What we are going to do today will help, but it is not going to be all we need for middle schools.”

The City Council’s report made it clear that many parents complain about large middle schools and large class sizes, and the task force recommended that education officials work to cap classes at 25 students. Although the mayor and chancellor did not make any pledges to reduce class sizes, the speaker said she was not disappointed.

“I don’t think the focus today should be what didn’t happen, what we still need to talk about,” she said. “It should be what we accomplished.”

National research has shown that middle school teachers are often trained to teach in elementary or high schools. A minuscule fraction of the city’s middle school teachers have been certified by the state as “middle school generalists.”

While the task force recommended creating a special middle school academy, Mr. Bloomberg instead said the office overseeing middle schools would first create a “catalog” of available professional development classes for teachers and principals. Teachers from the 50 lowest-performing schools will be able to attend those classes free.

Other school systems, like those in Baltimore and Philadelphia, have considered folding middle schools into elementary and high schools, shifting to kindergarten-to-8th grade or 6th-to-12th grade. The Department of Education has experimented with such ideas, but the mayor says there are no plans to overhaul the system.

“It would be great if kids could go to elementary school and then come back to us for high school, but I think we have a responsibility to do something in the middle,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “There’s no easy answer when you have a transitional period.”

“I think the real answer here is to take a look at the schools we have and make them work,” he said.

Book Lists for Book Orders

I found a bunch of book lists that may help us compile our book orders. You may be familiar with some of these. But hopefully there is something new and useful for everyone here.

1. Great Middle School Reads -
http://www.ala.org/ala/alsc/alscresources/booklists/MiddleSchoolReads.htm

2. Suggested Books for RIF List -
http://www.ala.org/ala/alsc/alscresources/booklists/suggestedbooks.htm

3. 101 Out-Of-This-World Books For Kids Ages 8-13 -
http://als.lib.wi.us/MRList.html

4. Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers -
http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards/quickpicks/quickpicksreluctant.htm

5. Great Graphic Novels for Teens -
http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards/greatgraphicnovelsforteens/gn.htm

6. Best Books for Young Adults -
http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards/bestbooksya/bestbooksyoung.htm

7. Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults -
http://www.ala.org/ala/yalsa/booklistsawards/popularpaperback/popularpaperbacks.htm

Welcome to Our Blog!

I'm not really sure how we can best use this blog, but I figured we should give it a shot. I'm thinking that we can use this space to have extended conversations about our planning and our practice. We can also keep updating the links section with helpful links.

In the coming weeks we can try to have discussions here about some of the issues we left open after our planning last week... assessment, grading, independent reading, writing, classroom management and setup, book orders, etc...

On my googlepages page I will try to stay up to date with posting any documents we use, including some of the templates from last week as well as add a page that will compile our book order wishes and library information.

Independent Reading

Things to think about in terms of independent reading:

1. How will I set up my classroom library? Will I have a reading area?
2. What system will I use to check out and keep track of books?
3. How often and how will students respond to books in writing?
4. What sequence of minilessons do I want to teach?
5. How will I track reading progress through independent reading?