The Best Text for Teaching How to Write and Revise Leads

My fourth graders hate revision. They're often offended by the mere suggestion that they hadn't nailed the perfect lead to their stories in their first draft.

I'm used to this. I see it every year in writer's workshop, especially at the beginning of the year when we're writing in a genre for the first time.

And every time I see this, I become more determined to break them of this thinking.

Today, we were working on the Common Core State Standard W.4.3a - Orient the reader by establishing a situation and introducing a narrator and/or characters; organize an event sequence that unfolds naturally.

My favorite story to use for this is standard -- especially with fourth graders -- is The Teacher's Funeral by Richard Peck.

This book, set in a small Indiana town with a one-room schoolhouse, has the best opening line of a children's book ever.

If your teacher has to die, August isn't a bad time of year for it. 

Richard Peck keeps it going from there, building an incredible introduction. You can read the entire first chapter here.

Today, I started our writing lesson by reading this chapter to them. I have the Kindle edition of the book, so when I read it, I can project it on our ActivBoard so the students can follow along as I read. They laughed throughout the intro and were immediately hooked, begging me to choose this as our next chapter book read-aloud. Score one for the objective of "hooking your readers!"

I then asked them how many of them thought that introduction was the one that was in the first draft of his book.

One or two hands went up.

Richard Peck shared in an article called "In the Beginning" (Horn Book Magazine, September 2006, pp. 505-508) that it normally takes him 24 drafts of his lead before he's happy with it. TWENTY-FOUR!

And here I'm asking my students to take a second pass at their writing.

I shared that little nugget with my students before we reread the first chapter. As we read if for a second time, we focused on the characteristics of his writing that made it such a great lead.

Here's what my students noticed, compiled into an anchor chart:

Once we finished the chart, I had them go back to a piece of writing they've been working on and try to write a different introduction. Some students tried changing the point of view, others jumped into the action or started with dialogue. Whatever the strategy, all of them managed to produce a new version of their introduction, and all were at least a little better than what they'd started with.

We'll get this revising thing down eventually...

What are some of your favorite books to use to teach students how to hook their readers? I'd love to hear about them in the comments!

Idioms aren't always a piece of cake...

I've developed a bit of a love-hate relationship with the Common Core. I LOVE that most states are using the same standards now because it makes finding high-quality teaching materials that much easier. I also LOVE that the standards are set up in a way that makes it easy to see how a skill is supposed to progress from one grade level to the next. I hate, however, that I feel like I'm constantly second-guessing myself. Is this text rigorous enough? Did this student compare and contrast these texts at the level that the CCSS expects? Have I taught this skill as thoroughly as I need to? The questions go on and on, and I know that time and experience will eventually answer those questions for me.

This last term, my school's pacing guide said that I was supposed to teach L5b. Recognize and explain the meanings of common idioms, adages, and proverbs. When I introduced my lesson, I was surprised by how many idioms my students already knew. Hands were raising left and right to share expressions they'd heard before, and I was thrilled by the amount of background knowledge they had. I thought for sure that this would be an easy topic. I gave them some activities from an idioms book I'd had for a while, including one where the students were supposed to think about what the idiom meant based on the context, and then they would match it to a another idiom that had a similar meaning.

To say that this activity was a disaster would be an understatement.

As I quickly realized, just because a student has heard an idiom used before doesn't mean he or she has the slightest clue what it means. That was mistake #1. And making the connections between idioms with a similar meaning is actually pretty challenging work -- especially if the meaning is unclear. So I quickly scrapped the lesson and went back to the drawing board. (Like how I inserted that idiom there?)

There are 100s of idioms, adages, and proverbs, and I knew I needed something more to not only teach students the meanings of the words but to see how they can also be used in context. When I couldn't find anything else that I really liked, I made something myself.

I wanted an easy weekly routine to teach idioms, adages, and proverbs. So this is what I came up with.

On Mondays, students are introduced to 10 idioms, adages, and proverbs that they'll study for the week. The idioms have a common theme like school and learning or cats so that I could organize the idioms better.

I created a phrase card with a QR code that has the meaning of each idiom we'll be studying, and I display these in the room where students can access them. They also have a page where they're able to write down the meaning and try to use it in a sentence. 

I put QR codes on these pages as well since I have 1:1 iPads in my classroom, but I also made a version of the page that doesn't have the QR codes on it.

Throughout the week, students work on completing the meanings and sentences, and they also try to look for examples of the phrase used in context. In addition, I've created a center activity that students can do to help them learn the meanings of the words. It's a matching game where students match the idiom to its correct meaning.

Finally, on Fridays, students take a quiz on the idioms where they match the idiom to its meaning, and then fill-in the blank in a sentence by choosing the appropriate idiom for the context.

So far, I've put together 6 weeks worth of idiom, adage, and proverb study, and it has been going really well. I feel like my students are learning more of these phrases, and it has definitely helped my English Language Learners who tend to struggle more with understanding idioms. The first 6 week unit is available in my Teachers Pay Teachers store, and I'm planning to add more units to cover an entire year of idiom study. It's been an easy routine to introduce and use with my students, so I'd like to keep it going throughout the year to expose them to more idioms, adages, and proverbs.

If you're interested in set #1, please click the image below to get to my TpT store. It's on sale for 20% off through Saturday.

So while my original idioms lesson was a failure, every cloud has a silver lining. I was able to put together this unit, and it's one that I'm very proud of. With over 60 pages of materials, you'll definitely get a lot of bang for your buck. And before I use any more idioms, I'm going to sign off.

Have a fabulous Wednesday!

Text to Screen

Every six week term, I try to get my students to read at least 5 books at their reading level. In theory, they're supposed to take an AR test on each one and blog about two of them. This term, I decided to create a new requirement for my fourth graders: one of the books has to have been made into a movie, and they need to watch said movie after they've finished reading the book.

You see, I'm looking for another way to assess this standard:

RL.4.7 Make connections between the text of a story or drama and a visual or oral presentation of the text, identifying where each version reflects specific descriptions and directions from the text.

In the past, I've done read-alouds or a class novel, and we'd watch the movie when we finished. There were always some problems with that system, though.
1. Invariably, someone had either a) already seen the movie, b) already read the book, or c) done both, so they probably weren't getting as much out of the experience.
2. It really limited our options because I'd have to pick a short book that I knew I'd be able to get through in the six weeks or I'd need to choose one that I had 25+ copies of.
3. The movie watching ate up a lot of class time and always seemed to get interrupted because I wouldn't have a block long enough to watch it or there'd be a fire drill or something.

This year, I decided there had to be a better way. Armed with our new Common Core standards and a vision for what I'd want my readers to accomplish on their own, I set out to design some activities they could complete with any book they chose. I think I've finally done it.

This file, which is now available at my TpT store for an introductory price of $5.00, includes 8 different activities for grades 4-6 that can be used with any book that has been made into a movie. In this file, you will find:

• A resource guide to find books that have been made into movies.
• 8 engaging, higher-level thinking activities that align with CCSS:
• Compare and Contrast with a Venn diagram
• Off the Page - trace characters, events, and settings from the movie back to the original text
• Visualizing Setting & Characters - what happens when our mental image doesn't match the movie?
• Cut! - Analyze what got left out of the movie and why
• Interview the Director - develop questions you'd ask the director and share the rationale for asking those questions
• Casting Agent - evaluate the actors chosen to play different characters
• Red Carpet - create an award for the movie, for better or worse
• Direct Your Own Remake - if you could do it all over, what would you change and why?
• Assessment checklists for grades 4, 5, and 6 that identifies the various CCSS that could be assessed at each grade level based on the activities in this file. 

In the meantime, I've disappeared from the blogosphere for a little while, which puts me woefully behind on my New Year's Resolutions of blogging more. Since my last post less than a couple weeks ago, I've applied to a doctoral program in educational leadership, acquired a student teacher who will be with me for 9 weeks, worked on my early childhood math endorsement, went on my first movie date in over a year with my husband (having a baby really slowed us down on the movie-going), and celebrated three birthdays in my family, including my husband's. So I really wasn't just sitting around watching Real Housewives or eating Ben & Jerry's -- I promise. But this week, I will do better with blogging. Honest!

How are you addressing RL.7 in your classroom? I'd love to hear about it in the comments!

Ordering Adjectives and Other Obscurities

This is the first year that we are implementing Common Core at my school, and one of the first surprises to me was the specificity of the list of language standards. Take this one for example:

4L1d. Order adjectives within sentences according to conventional patterns (e.g., a small red bag rather than a red small bag).

Okay, fair enough. I know that we don't say red small bag, but I couldn't articulate why. And if I couldn't articulate that, it seemed like I would have a hard time teaching it. Hence began one of many research projects for this year.

As it turns out, there are actual rules for ordering adjectives! Whenever you have a list of adjectives, according to most sources, they should be put in the following order:

• Number - e.g., many, few, seventeen
• Opinion - e.g., beautiful, silly, annoying
• Size - e.g., big, small, gargantuan
• Age - e.g., old, young
• Shape - this one is tricky! It can be shape like "round" or shape like a condition - e.g., dusty
• Color - e.g., red, blue, yellow
• Origin - think countries, directions, religions, e.g., Canadian, northern, Catholic
• Material - e.g., plastic, wooden
• Purpose - e.g., sleeping as in a sleeping bag

The wheels started turning with this new knowledge, and slowly the lesson plans came together for this topic.

For the first day, I made a PowerPoint about the order of adjectives and my students made a foldable to record their thinking. 

On day two, we looked at some examples that I pulled from the books they were reading in their book clubs, and I gave them the task at looking for more sentences that used multiple adjectives together. They recorded their sentences, and we shared some of the examples as a class.

Days 3 and 4 involved some word sorts. I made some cards with adjectives on them, and they sorted them by what type of adjective they were. Then they put some together to make sentences. 

On Friday (day 5), we took a short assessment that had students identify the correct order of adjectives in some multiple choice questions, and then write their own sentences.

Overall, I was happy with how the unit turned out, and we all learned a lot about adjectives that we hadn't known before. By getting the students to play with adjectives more, I also noticed them using more interesting word choices in their writing. Win-win.

I've put together all of the resources that I used (and then some) into a unit over at Teachers Pay Teachers. It's one of many units I've been working on to deal with some of the more obscure standards introduced by Common Core, and I hope you'll check it out.

It will be on sale Monday and Tuesday for 28% off with the TpT Cyber Monday sale if you use the code CMT12. 

What are some of the more interesting/challenging standards you've encountered with the Common Core? I'd love to hear about it in the comments section!

Bananas about Scientific Writing

One of the things that's really exciting to me about Common Core this year is how well it integrates with content teaching for Science and Social Studies. Now that I'm a working mom, I really appreciate anything that allows me to hit multiple subjects and standards at once, and last term, I found myself pushing a lot of informational writing into science.

During our first week of school, I was covering science process standards before launching into our first unit on ecosystems. One of the first activities that we did involved writing about bananas.

In the few days prior to this lesson, we spent some time looking at and talking about science notebooks and the importance of recording our thinking. We took a look at some examples of real science notebooks kept by actual scientists (Note: as I write this blog, the sciencenotebooks.org website appears to be down. I really hope this is a temporary thing because it was a tremendous resource!). For this day's lesson, I asked my students to get out their inquiry notebooks, and I gave each student a banana. They were instructed not to eat their banana, but instead, they were to observe and describe their banana in their notebook.

During this first wave of writing (3-5 minutes), students gave very similar descriptions such as "long, yellow, brown spot," etc. 

We shared descriptions at our tables, and then I asked the class how many students felt like they could identify their banana based on their description if I collected all the bananas from the tables and mixed them up. Only a couple of hands went up. We then talked about what kinds of information and details would be helpful to do that and started a list.

What really came out of this discussion was the idea that we needed to focus on unique characteristics. Everyone had a general idea what a banana looks like, but details such as having a brown spot in the shape of a heart approximately 2 inches from the end of the banana sure went a long way in helping us identify the banana in comparison to "long and yellow with brown spots."

I then gave them time to revise their descriptions. Some students traced their banana in their notebooks and then added details and markings from their banana.

Other students asked to get out tape measures to be even more precise in their details and descriptions.

At the end of this revising time, I had students mix up their bananas between two tables and trade notebooks with another student to see if the other person could identify the correct banana based on the description. It was a great check to see if the details were descriptive enough so that others beyond the writer would understand them. If the correct banana wasn't identified, the students made suggestions for additional details that could be helpful.

What I loved about this activity was how it really got us thinking about interesting details. It's the kind of anchor lesson that we can refer to in all types of writing when we talk about spicing up our writing and good word choices. The bananas were inexpensive, and of course, we ate them at the end of the lesson. 

Do you use science or inquiry notebooks in your classroom? What are some strategies you use to help your students write in science? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section!

Weekend Reading 4-21-12

Ok, I'm going to be honest. I wasn't reading as much as I wanted to be this week. I had a little craziness at work and family staying with me from out of state, so my reading list is a little bit sparse. I must say, however, that I have lots that I plan to be reading in the days ahead given the long list of fabulous bloggers participating in the Charity Preston's Five-Star Blog Challenge over at the Organized Classroom Blog. I'm participating as well because prior to this post, all of my posts have included original content. And given how little I've been able to read so far this week, this post may ultimately be original content as well. :)  If you're a teacher blogger and you haven't already investigated the Five-Star Blog Challenge, then you should definitely do so.

Books!

While I haven't been reading blogs as much as I wanted to this week, I've been chugging through a couple of books. I'm still reading How to Assess Higher Order Thinking Skills in Your Classroom, and I still think that it's got a lot of fantastic ideas, but I'm rarely a one-book-till-I'm-done kind of gal. There are just so many other amazing books out there that catch my attention, and then I find myself halfway through five different books until I force myself to finish.

The latest book to catch my eye is Raising the Standards through Chapter Books: The C.I.A. Approach by Sarah Collinge.

It was recommended to me by @annottmar on Twitter, and I love it. It's a new book, so it takes the Common Core standards into account, and it's written in such a teacher-friendly way. The C.I.A. approach stands for C - Collect Critical Information, I - Interpret the Text, and A - Apply the Text to Other Areas of Life. I'm only 38 pages into it so far, but I've really enjoyed everything that I've read. The first chapter was about implementing research-based classroom routines such as instructional read-alouds and building authentic practices. It had very practical suggestions on how to start these in the classroom, and the author included lots of pictures, charts, and directions about what materials to use for each step. I will definitely be referring to this book a lot as I get my classroom organized next year. 

And look what Amazon delivered to me yesterday...

A Lucy Calkins book about Common Core!!! I'm so excited to start reading this. I'm going to start training some of my colleagues on the ELA standards in a couple of weeks, so I will likely be a Common Core junkie for a while. 

I also picked up this book:

One of my colleagues recommended it to me as I was whining about how much my students are struggling with mechanics this year. I might give some of the ideas in this book a test run in these last few weeks of school.

Have you found any books lately that have inspired you? Please share in the comments section!

Happy reading!

Friday Freebie: Reading Informational Checklist

Last week, I shared a 4th grade CCELA checklist that can be used with individual students to assess their progress toward the Reading Literature Standards. This week, I'm continuing the checklists for Reading Informational. You can download your copy by clicking on the image below:

I hope this is helpful to all of you 4th grade teachers out there! Have a great weekend!

Wednesday Writing: Keynote

One of my favorite things about the new Common Core English Language Arts standards is the range of writing standards (W.10). What it basically says is that students will be expected to develop writing fluency; that is, they'll be able to write in many different contexts and subjects, for different audiences, purposes, and effects, and with long and short pieces. I love to teach writing, so I'm excited that it will finally be emphasized more broadly.

This year, one of my favorite apps to use with my students for short writing pieces has been Keynote. Traditionally, I thought of Keynote as the Mac equivalent to PowerPoint, and it can certainly serve that purpose. But Keynote can also be a good tool to use when you want students to write a very short piece or synthesize information and maybe incorporate a picture or two.

A couple of weeks ago in Social Studies, we were studying the invention of the telegraph and how it impacted society. We read a few different articles about it, and then I asked students to synthesize the information by creating an award for the telegraph. They had to create one slide using both pictures and text that said, for example, "Award for Best Communication Device of the 1800s" or something like that. They then had to describe why the telegraph was deserving of that award, and I let them include a message in Morse Code at the end. Here are a couple of examples:

I love how they connect the invention to emailing. I'm sure the concept makes more sense to them that way, but it's funny because there were so many inventions and innovations that had to happen after the invention of the telegraph before we could get to email. But alas...

This project took less than an hour from start to finish, and that includes the time it took to read the articles. We frequently use Keynote for these one-page type projects, so the students are very knowledgeable in how to use the app. 

This is just one example of how we use Keynote to build writing into our daily routines. What kinds of writing have you been doing in the classroom lately? Please share in the comments section!

Weekend Reading

Every Saturday, I'll be sharing my favorite reads from the previous week so you can meet some other fabulous bloggers that you may have missed or find some new teaching resources.

From the Blogosphere

• On Sunday, 5th grade teacher Nancy over at Teaching My Friends posted some fabulous suggestions for how to use all of the plastic Easter eggs that are undoubtedly on clearance these days.
• I've been following Emily Kissner's blog for quite some time, and she's been blogging about teaching inference this week on her blog In My Classroom: The Forest and the Trees. She's the author of two upper elementary resources that I love: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Retelling and The Forest AND the Trees. 
• I loved hearing about this collaborative writing initiative using Google Docs over at Free Technology for Teachers
• Misty over at Think, Wonder, & Teach has been having guest bloggers all week. It's been a great way to discover some new blogs!
• Stephanie at Teaching in Room 6 shared a fantastic lesson that used a Revolutionary War-themed snowball fight to teach about independent and dependent clauses.
• Sandi, the media technology specialist at my school, posted a great collection of resources about teaching students to check the validity of online sources over at her blog, Teacher Technotopia. 

Off the Bookshelf

I'm preparing to redeliver a workshop about the Common Core English Language Arts standards to the teachers at my school, so much of my reading is related to that. One of the big topics we'll be talking about is assessment of the new standards, so I'm reading the How to Assess Higher-Order Thinking Skills in Your Classroom book by Susan M. Brookhart. I'm only a couple of chapters into it, but I really like it so far. It's an easy read, but it has lots of practical ideas and suggestions for planning for and assessing each level of Bloom's Taxonomy. I can tell that this will be a book that I revisit several times even after I finish reading it.

What have you been reading or writing this week? Feel free to share links to your own blogs or those of others in the comment section below as I'm always looking to find new blogs to read throughout the week!


Have a great weekend!

Friday Freebie: Common Core Assessment Checklist

I use checklists a lot. They help me see what I need to teach and where students still need some help. Sometimes I will make checklists that assess the class as a whole, and other times, I will use a separate checklist for each child.

I like to break it down into three categories:

Yes - the student shows evidence of mastery
Sort of - the student is close to mastery but still needs a bit of help, or
Not yet - the student is not yet able to master this standard

I've started to work on some assessment checklists for next year with the Common Core ELA Standards for 4th grade, and I wanted to share the one that I've made for Reading Literature.

Click on the image above to get your checklist.

Do you use checklists? What are some of the ways you use checklists to help you in the classroom? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Happy Friday!