A Metaphor

"Vowels were something else. He didn't like them, and they didn't like him. There were only five of them, but they seemed to be everywhere. Why, you could go through twenty words without bumping into some of the shyer consonants, but it seemed as if you couldn't tiptoe past a syllable without waking up a vowel. Consonants, you knew pretty much where they stood, but you could never trust a vowel. To the old pitcher, they were like his best knuckleball come back to haunt him. In, out, up, down -- not even the pitcher, much less the batter, knew which way it would break. He kept swinging and missing."

from Chapter 27, Maniac Magee

Quotes

"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me."

Sir Isaac Newton

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.

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

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.

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
  

Logonauts

This always makes me smile.