Ferlazzo: “The Books Everyone Must Read”

"The Guardian newspaper created a great word cloud infographic showing The Books Everyone Must Read.  They used “the results of over 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100’s.” It’s definitely worth a look…"

The Learning Network: Briefly Noted: Practicing Useful Annotation Strategies

The Learning Network: Briefly Noted: Practicing Useful Annotation Strategies: "Lesson Plan | Practicing note-taking methods and reflecting on the value of marginalia."

Ferlazzo: The Best Resources Documenting The Effectiveness of Free Voluntary Reading

Extensive reading (also known as Sustained Silent Reading or Free Voluntary Reading), the idea of having students read text of their own choosing without necessarily having to do book reports, etc, is an important instructional strategy that many of use. Its academic benefit has been widely documented, especially by Stephen Krashen.

I thought it would be useful to pull together some of research that backs-up its effectiveness.

Feel free to offer additional suggestions.

You might also be interested in My Best Posts On Books: Why They’re Important & How To Help Students Select, Read, Write & Discuss Them.

Here are my choices for The Best Resources Documenting The Effectiveness of Free Voluntary Reading:

81 Generalizations about Free Voluntary Reading is by Stephen Krashen.

The Benefits of Extensive Reading (ER) is by Richard R. Day.

Extensive reading: why it is good for our students… and for us, by Alan Maley, is from The British Council, and cites multiple studies.

Extensive Reading: Why? and How? is by Timothy Bell.

Extensive Reading: Why? and How? and is another study on extensive reading and ELL’s."

Ferlazzo - Talking To Students About Their Reading (& Their Data)

"As regular readers know, our school works closely with Kelly Young from Pebble Creek Labs on our curriculum and instructional strategies. One of the Pebble Creek-designed assessments we use in our English classes is having students complete the same two clozes three times each year — September, January, and June — to assess reading comprehension and vocabulary development. In addition, we have students read to two passages for one minute each to us during the same three times during the year in order to measure reading fluency. You can see The Best Resources For Learning About Formative Assessment for more information about these assessments.

But these assessments, especially the one for reading fluency, is about much more than data. Those few minutes are also opportunities for us to check-in with students to find-out how they’re doing. In addition, individual conversations teachers have with each student after the results of the assessments are known are good times to converse about their future hopes and goals (see My Best Posts On Students Setting Goals). These conversations help us connect genuinely useful data to genuine student self-interests. This, in turn helps students develop intrinsic motivation to achieve goals that they set for themselves — with some teacher assistance. I write more about this process in my upcoming book, Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers to Classroom Challenges.

This week I’ve been talking with my ninth-grade students about their fluency scores (next week we’ll be having similar conversations about their cloze assessments, and they’ll be using them to complete goal sheets and actions plans for the semester).

Here is how I talk with them about their reading and their data, especially mid-year — all in short, private conversations:

First, I begin by telling them I’m going to ask them a question, and that I’m going to ask them to answer it honestly. I promise I won’t react negatively to anything they say, and there won’t be any grade consequences at all. “How much time to read each night?” I ask (students are supposed to read for 1/2 hour each night). Almost universally, I’m convinced that students answer candidly.

Next, I take one of three tacts — depending on their fluency scores (of course, it’s not always as clear-cut but, for the sake of this post, you’ll get the idea):

IF STUDENTS HAVE NOT MADE MUCH PROGRESS: When this is the case, almost always students have answered my question by telling me they don’t read much. I tell them that it shows in their scores. They’re going to have to do a lot of reading in high school, and it’s going to be hard to keep up if they can’t read faster — homework will take a lot longer. The student and I might take a few seconds to calculate how much faster they could read a text if they are able to increase their reading by ten, twenty, thirty and even forty words a minute, and how much time they would be able to save. I know the interests of each student, and what they say they want to do after high school, so I might ask them how much reading they think they’ll have to do to study for that profession or to actually do the profession. I’ll ask if they are having a hard time finding a book they find interesting, and we’ll discuss ways to find one. I’ll end my asking them to think about what they want their fluency goal to be at the end of the year so they can be prepared to complete their goal sheet next week, and ask them to think about specific things they can do to achieve it.

IF STUDENTS HAVE MADE GOOD PROGRESS, BUT ARE STILL NOT READING AT THE LEVEL THEY NEED TO BE: When this is the case, I’ll tell them that the average student increases their reading fluency by ten words per minute in a full year, and that they’ve exceeded that goal in five months. After that pat on the back, I’ll say something like, “Boy, if you were able to make that amount of progress in half a year by reading _______ minutes each night (whatever amount they told me initially), imagine the progress you could make if you increased that amount — even a little bit — or read a little more challenging book?” Then we’ll have a conversation similar to the one I recounted in the first instance — doing a little calculation, talking about it’s impact on their future, asking them to think about their goal and action plan.

IF STUDENTS HAVE MADE PROGRESS & ARE ALREADY READING WELL: When this is the case, I’ll tell them that I’m going to be honest with them — they’re doing fine and will do fine in school. I’ll also ask them if they want to settle for “fine” or do they want to go for “great”? We’ll then have a conversation about their hopes for the future. I’ll tell them that one thing they need to remember, though, is that it can sometimes take more work to go from reading 190 words per minute to 200 than to go from 100 to 110. It’s like a competitive runner — it can be harder for someone to go from running a four minute mile to someone running a 1:55 mile than someone going from a ten minute mile to running a mile in nine minutes. A person might go from 100 to 110 words per minute reading a Goosebumps book for 30 minutes a night, but it’s unlikely someone is going to go from 190 to 200 by doing the same thing. They’d need to look at reading more challenging books and for reading for a longer time.

The backdrop for these conversations are multiple life skill lessons we’ve done (and which you’ll find in my book) on the effect of learning on the brain, how perseverance and self-control affect future success, and on the importance of taking personal responsibility. Of course, another key element is the relationship I’ve built with each student.

Contrast how we use data with students — authentic assessments, personal conversations & relationships, connections to student’s future hopes, and self-selected goals — with how data might be used in schools. In fact, I’ll end this post with a video showing one of those other ways.

But before you watch it, please take a minute to think of any suggestions you might have on how I can improve the quality of my “data-informed” conversations with students. I’m all ears….


"

The Learning Network: Dark Materials: Reflecting on Dystopian Themes in Young Adult Literature

The Learning Network: Dark Materials: Reflecting on Dystopian Themes in Young Adult Literature: "Lesson Plan | Six ways to approach 'dark,' post-apocalyptic young adult fiction.

Ferlazzo: The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New “Books Ngram Viewer”

The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New “Books Ngram Viewer”: "

I’m still trying to “get my head around” how to use Google’s new “Books Ngram Viewer,” the amazing application announced yesterday that allows you to easily analyze “the 500 billion words contained in books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.” I’m sure there are ways to use it effectively with students — English Language Learners and mainstream — but I just haven’t had a chance to think about how.

Please feel free to share ideas in the comments section.

In the meantime, though, I thought I’d start collecting posts and article that provide information about the service itself.

Here are my choices for The Best Posts To Help Understand Google’s New Books Ngram Viewer:

In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture is from The New York Times

New Visualization Tool from Google With Data From 5.2 Million Digitized Books is from Read Write Web

The cultural genome: Google Books reveals traces of fame, censorship and changing languages is from Discover

New Tool Tracks Culture Through the Centuries via Google Books is from Scientific American

Peter Pappas shares some good ideas on how to use it with students at his post, How To Quantify Culture? Explore 500 Billion Published Words

Word-Wide Web Launches is an interesting article and video from The Wall Street Journal

You can see great examples of the Ngram Viewer in action over at The Atlantic, which has created a slideshow of comparing the usage of a number of words over time.

Here are more examples: 10 Fascinating Word Graphs, From 200 Years of Google Books

Some Myths About Reading

TERI LESESNE’S  EXPLODING  SOME  MYTHS  ABOUT  READING . . .

MYTH 1: Kids must read only “good” books and not be allowed to wallow in popular fiction. WRONG! We all have an appetite for some food that is not good for us. We all share some guilty pleasure when in comes to reading and books, some book that is not literary. We must extend the same courtesy to our students. See the discussion of subliterature in Chapter 2. There is another myth that generally follows from this one: It is not quantity but quality that matter in reading. WRONG! How much we read does matter. 

Take these statistics from NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress:

Achievement Percentile	Amount of Outside Reading in Minutes/Day	Word Gain/Yr
90th %ile	40+ min/day	2.3 million
50th %ile	<13 min/day	6000,000
10th %ile	<2 min/day	51,000

 MYTH 2: Readers are easy to spot; they always have their noses in books. WRONG! Readers go dormant from time to time. Weeks pass without my picking up a book due to my schedule or my level of fatigue. Kids are no different. And not all readers select books to read, either. They may prefer magazines, comics, or even e-books.  Sometimes it is tough to spot the readers. Occasionally, someone who presents as a nonreader is actually a reader between books.

The Value of Pleasure Reading in Middle School

The Research Says . . .

Research based Facts from Stephen Krashen’s  The Power of Reading

1. FVR results in: better reading comprehension, writing style, vocabulary, spelling, and grammatical development.
2. Readers are better at writing.
3. Reading as a leisure activity is the best predictor of comprehension, vocabulary, and reading speed.
4. The relationship between Free Voluntary Reading and literacy is remarkably consistent.
5. Each time an unfamiliar word is seen in print, a small increase in word knowledge typically occurs.
6. If children read 1 million words in a year (easily attainable for middle class children) at least 1000 words will be added to their vocabulary.
7. Students who read a novel with many unique words actually learned the meaning of many of those words from context clues only.
8. Teaching vocabulary lists is inefficient—the time is better spent reading alone.
9. The less literate are the first to fail and drop out of school.

Meeting Readers Where They Are: Mapping the intersection of research and practice

Meeting Readers Where They Are: Mapping the intersection of research and practice

Edutopia - Using Literature the First Weeks of School

by Elena Aguilar

As a teacher, on the first day of school, I wanted my students to know that in my class we would read a lot and we'd read great literature, literature that would help us understand our world better, and ourselves. In the first weeks of school, I also needed to build community in my classroom, define routines and procedures, and particularly in middle school, get kids re-anchored in the purpose and pleasure of learning.

I used stories to accomplish all of these objectives and in doing so, I began to build a community of learners bound together around literature. The stories we read invited my middle schoolers to tell their stories; the writing assignments I gave allowed students to share their lives, experiences, thoughts and feelings with each other.

Here are a few of my favorites books that might be best used at the beginning of the year:

10 Ways to Use The New York Times for Teaching Literature

10 Ways to Use The New York Times for Teaching Literature: "New York Times resources to complement the teaching of any fiction, nonfiction or poetry.


"

Educational Leadership:Good Teaching in Action:Reading That Refreshes

Educational Leadership:Good Teaching in Action:Reading That Refreshes

Some reading suggestions and lists for summer reading and replenishing the libraries...

Useful DOE Curriculum Resources

The Department of Education released a short manual to complement the new middle school library we received one copy of at the beginning of the year. After thumbing through it I think that it can provide solid support for developing the ELA side of our curriculum. The "core texts" identified in the guide come with a wealth of teaching ideas, essential questions, and strategies, and in some cases complement historical units we are studying. This may be something you want to take a look at and something we can discuss as a team for our future planning.

In addition, the DOE has posted sample units of study based on "trade book units" for Social Studies. Schools had the option of purchasing textbooks or trade books a few years back as the basis for SS curriculum. Here you can find examples of units, which may be helpful for thinking about how you plan a unit and the considerations you make when planning. These units also offer various templates that may help you get started.

Some other helpful resources from the DOE will be archived on the right sidebar.

Free Book Online About Independent Reading

Tony Stead's new book, Good Choice!, is a comprehensive guide for creating lifelong readers through independent reading and response. You'll discover how to:

• establish routines to make independent reading a natural part of each day;
• excite your students by providing a range of reading materials—including magazines, newspapers, maps, and computers—based on their interests and abilities;
• make the best use (and avoid pitfalls) of leveling for independent reading;
• use mini-lessons and conferences to expand kids' reading repertoire;
• help them discover the many purposes for reading, become active participants in the selection process, and read more at home;
• assist students as they respond to their reading, for both engagement and assessment.

Throughout the book, Tony provides classroom transcripts and student samples for grades K-2 and 3-6, with special sections that tailor ideas to kindergarten and grade 1. You'll find dozens of graphic organizers and reproducible forms and rubrics, as well as a list of useful websites for independent reading and research.

Good Choice! will be released early next week. You can preview the entire book online now:

http://www.stenhouse.com/0732.asp?r=n151

Good Choice!
Supporting Independent Reading and Response, K-6
Tony Stead • Foreword by David Booth
248 pp • $22.50 • Available 11/11
http://www.stenhouse.com/0732.asp?r=n151

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.

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

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?