Useful Questions to Ask Kids About Books

1. If you were to make a movie about the book, what would you change? Who would you cast in the book?
2. What if happened differently?
3. If you met in school, would you want to be friends? Why?
4. Why do you think made that choice?
5. What do you think is going to happen next. Why?
6. That event in the book reminds me of when happened to you. 
7. What if and met? What would happen?
8. What made you choose this book?
9. If you could change something in the book, what would it be?
10. What choices by
    made sense? Which ones didn't?

Writing Memory

The good:
When I was in second grade, a dear friend and I wrote a song together. My teacher, who played the guitar, helped us put the words to music. The song was called, "Let's Go See a Beaver Dam." We taught the song to the other students in the class, and then we all sang it together while another teacher recorded us. Then, MY SONG was played on the radio. I remember how much fun it was to come up with the lyrics and how special my friend and I felt when we got to stay inside during recess for a composing session. When I heard my song on the radio, I felt like a real writer. I was so proud. I'm positive that my feelings about that moment fueled my in-school writing for ages.

The bad:
In sixth grade, there was a girl who was incredibly mean. She had been picking on me for ages, and I decided that I would get back at her. My weapon? A note. I started writing it in science class, and I remember that I poured all the feelings I had into that note: anger, bewilderment, powerlessness, sadness. Then my teacher saw me writing. He took the note. He didn't say anything about it. He just kept teaching, but he had MY NOTE in his hand. At the end of class, I ran out of the room and headed back to my homeroom teacher's classroom. It wasn't over, though. At the end of the day, my homeroom teacher pulled me aside. My science teacher had shared the note with her. My homeroom teacher spent fifteen minutes telling me how horrible of a person I am and how in all her days of teaching, she had never seen such an unkind piece of writing. I didn't even bother to tell her about the bullying. I just let her yell at me and went to catch my bus home. I didn't cry until I got on the bus.

(Note: these two paragraphs are writing memories for my students to use as examples for their English homework. I chose one happy memory and one not happy memory. Why? Brandt did an amazing study where she asked people to tell her their earliest reading memories and their earliest writing memories. Overwhelmingly, people's earliest reading memories were positive. People's earliest writing memories? Not so much. When students mine their feelings about writing, it helps them think about why they might have developed preconceived notions about whether or not they are good writers)

The Writing Blerch - in Honor of the Oatmeal's Running Blerch

Click on the image to visit the Oatmeal's cartoon about running.

I started running long distances when I turned 30, and I love, love, love the Oatmeal's comic about the blerch. I'm actually wearing my Blerch tech-shirt right now because I try to go on a run in the morning before I start dissertating to counteract all the sitting I do while I'm working.

I tend to write the same way I train - I set up specific amounts of time for work, and I try to make mini-goals. For running right now, I'm doing a couch to 5k training program because apparently, after you have a baby, jumping right into training for a half is frowned upon by your midwife. Also because I need to in order to get back in shape. But it feels better to blame it on someone else.

For writing right now, my goal is to write two pages a day. Today's other goal is to get 2 more descriptive review transcriptions done.

Every day, I assume that, because I wrote two pages the day before, psyching myself up for today's two pages will be easy.

It's not.

Every day, I think, "Oh, I'll just skip my two pages today," and then I have to force myself to start writing. Right now, I'm putting off the two pages by writing a blog post.

I don't get it. I like the part where I'm actually writing, so why is it always so hard to get started?

The answer is clearly that there is a special Blerch for writers.

I will now tell the Blerch to shove off, and I will actually write my two pages.

So there, Blerch.

Writing = Complicated

This is me bouncing my new daughter Ella (7 weeks. Awesome baby) on my knee while I review transcripts because writing = complicated. She woke up early from her nap, and if this dissertation is ever going to get written, sometimes she has to help by snuggling while I write 1-handed.

As a recipient of a grant from the Agnes & Sophie Dallas Irwin Foundation, I wanted to document my summer writing, partly to ground myself as I try to keep working through moments like this, and partly as a way to say thank you to the Agnes & Sophie Dallas Irwin Foundation. 

When I wrote the application for the grant, I said, "When Virginia Woolf said that a woman needs a room of one’s own to write, I wonder if she ever thought about the impact of a five-year-old." And here is Ella, on my second day of working, demonstrating just how true that is. I wouldn't ever want to give up the hugs and cuddles and time with Ella, and so my first entry is written one-handed while I bounce her on my knee.

Collaborative Close Listening: Spanish Class VoiceThreads

Last week, I had the chance to collaborate with Señora Marrecau and her Spanish students as they used VoiceThread to describe one person in their family or to describe themselves.

Señora created one series of  VoiceThread slides per class and posted the link to the slides on her Google Classroom page. Señora wrote a comment on each slide that said which student should post on that slide. For homework on the first night of the project, each student made an audio recording responding to the three prompts on the slide.

Listen to one of the student's recordings here.

The next day in class, Señora paired up the students and had them listen to each others' recordings. Each student then wrote a transcription of what their partner had said in a comment box on VoiceThread. In addition, students then shared ideas with each other about ways to improve their pronunciation, clarity, and fluency.

Since the class is an immersion class, this use of technology slowed down the pace of speaking and translating so that each student had the chance to speak in the target language, listen to her own speech, make corrections as necessary, and listen to others' speech with the purpose of understanding.

Making the Hallways Speak: QR Readers and Vocaroo

A quick and wonderful way to merge posted work with digital publishing: students read their poetry out loud and record on Vocaroo. Then, they take the QR code for the recording and post it at the bottom of the page.

It's not just an English class idea. Consider some of these ways of using Vocaroo-based QR codes in other content areas:

• Math: students complete a new style of problem, explain how they solved it, and put the QR code on a class blog.

• Science: Students take photos during a lab. They explain the observations they made of the photos.

• History: Students have an asynchronous virtual debate and save their responses in a Google Doc using QR codes.

• Modern Languages: Students make posters of their families and place QR codes on the posters explaining details about the families in the language being learned. 

Need more info about using QR readers?

How to install a QR Reader by Susie Simmons

We have Macs at my school, so a QR Reader App for your computer. (I usually use the one on my phone, but it's nice to have access on other devices, too)

3 Connected Reading Ideas

I've been meaning to document these ideas from NCTE 2015 for awhile now, and today feels like the right day.

First, connected reading involves both traditional print-based books and also digital forms of reading - that article that your friend posted on Facebook, your Twitter stream, a series of memes that you think are hilarious.

At NCTE 2015, I went to a presentation by Kristen Hawley Turner, Troy Hicks, and Sara Kajder where they both talked about some of the ideas from the book and shared what they're doing in classrooms.

Here are three that I really enjoyed:

Building a community of readers: On the first day of class, assign students to make a book spine poem and then have that be each students' first post on a class blog or Instagram page:

Audience & Book Selection: At the end of an independent reading project, students make a book trailer. Then, they link the book trailer to a QR code that's placed on the spine of the book in the classroom library. Free QR Code generators are easy to find, so here's a link to a Google Search for them.

Bringing Digital Reading into the Classroom: Some sites are great for digital reading, but the world of teen (and adult) brains might get distracted by all the places you can click to. Symboloo is a great site for gathering together often-visited sites (like The Atlantic, Huffington Post, NY Times), and Adblock helps you stay focused.