Wednesday, June 30, 2010

More Skills, Strategies, and Behaviors

List of skills and strategies from Still Learning to Read: Teaching Students in Grades 3-6.
by Franki Sibberson & Karen Szymusiak (subheadings mine).

Identity:
  • Knowing yourself as a reader.
  • Choosing books to match individual needs.
  • Having conversations in a community of readers with an increasing level of sophistication about different types of texts and reading experiences.
Perseverance:
  • Using skills and strategies to get through the hardest sections of a text.
  • Having the skills to get through a text that is not interesting.
  • Sustain interest and understanding throughout a challenging text.
  • Trusting that texts that aren't immediately engaging might have value.
Flexibility
  • Reading a variety of texts with a repertoire of tools for working through different text conventions, formats, and features.
  • Using strategies flexibly for different kinds of texts.
Comprehension
  • Understanding complex meaning.
  • Reflecting on thinking and monitoring strategies and behaviors.
  • Changing thinking while reading to revise predictions and clarify understanding.
  • Keeping track of characters.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Summer Reading

More choices for summer reading after I finish the genre challenge.

Horn Book Fanfare winners.

Planet Esme's "Read-Aloud Resuscitation: Must Reads by the time you're 13"

Nancie Atwell's Center for Teaching and Learning, Kids Recommend page

Sunday, June 27, 2010

New Book and DVD

Number Talks: Helping Children Build Mental Math and Computation Strategies, Grades K–5

3 computational Goals
accuracy (self explanatory - often the sole focus)
efficiency the ability to choose an appropriate, expedient strategy for a specific computation problem
flexibility the ability to use number relationships with ease
(I would add a fourth, communication.)

tip: with weekly fluency tests, ask students to solve all problems 2 ways.

Friday, June 25, 2010

Word Savvy: notes from Max Brand

Sound
  • letters and letter sounds
  • consonants
  • short vowels
  • long vowels
  • blends and clusters
  • single-syllable words
Pattern
  • rimes
  • r-controlled vowels
  • syllables
  • high-frequency words
  • polysyllabic words
  • stressed syllabels
  • unstressed syllables
  • drop the e and add -ing or -ed
  • drop the y and add -ies or -ied
Meaning
  • root words (or base words)
  • affixes
  • word origins
  • word use

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Skills and Strategies of Proficient Reading



Oh boy! Assessments

I'm reading Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Grades 3-5 by Lucy Calkins.
Text is supported by work from Columbia University's Teachers College Writing and Reading Project. I'm anxious to acquaint myself with their reading benchmarks. Of course, my lucky boys come to mind...

Upon further investigation:
Levels A-K require that you purchase a text set through Scholastic. Levels L-Z are regular trade book titles available from the library. Joe you're off the hook.

Sunday, June 20, 2010

Quote of the Day

Lucy Calkins The Art of Teaching Reading

If our teaching is going to be an art, we need to remember that artistry does not come from sheer quantity of red and yellow paint or from the amount of clay or marble, but from the organizing vision that shapes the use of those materials. It's not the number of good ideas that will turn our teaching into something significant and beautiful, but the selection, balance, coherence, and design of those ideas.

Saturday, June 19, 2010

Summer Challenge #1

Always start with a robin singing.

My current professional goal is to read a lot of third grade literature.
A lot probably needs to be narrowed.
How about a genre game?
Books Selected from "100 Children's Books that Belong in Every Library" by Elizabeth Bird

realistic fiction - Year of the Dog
fantasy - The Book of Three
science fiction - A Wrinkle in Time
mystery -
biography - Isaac Newton by Katherine Krull
nonfiction - The New Way Things Work
adventure - The Whipping Boy
historial fiction - The Watsons Go to Birmingham
poetry -

Summer Challenge #2

Where are all my professional books?

Two teachers, two houses, and too many books.
How to sort them?
Here's a stab from the Heinemann page:

Reading
Writing
Math
Teaching-General