A Melissa Stewart Week

One of my goals this year was to find more nonfiction authors and series that I knew and loved.  I realized that there were so many fiction series and authors I knew and loved, but that was not true of nonfiction. I tend to talk to my students about nonfiction differently than I talk about fiction. I tend to talk topic and rarely know the author. I also hadn't realized how important nonfiction series books could be for upper elementary readers.  So I knew I needed to find more of those.

This week, I realized just how much I love Melissa Stewart.  I knew that I liked her and her name was one I knew as a nonfiction writer, but until this week I had no idea just how many amazing nonfiction books she has written for upper elementary students.

Here is how it happened.  I have a student who loves sharks, dolphins and ocean creatures. I am always looking for new books for him and I happened upon Shark or Dolphin?: How Do You Know? (Which Animal Is Which?) I am trying to add books that are meant to be read cover to cover and this one looked perfect.  I noticed that it was by Melissa Stewart so I figured it must be good. I ordered the book and noticed there were lots of other books in the series. I decided I'd check it out before I ordered the others. Well, the book arrived and it is amazing.  Each page compares a feature of sharks and dolphins and tells how they are different. The text is accessible and the book is packed with information. Even for readers who know lots about sharks and dolphins, my bet is that there is something new in this book! This is definitely a series that belongs in elementary classrooms so I ordered a few more.

A few days later, the book Feathers: Not Just for Flying arrived from Amazon. I forgot that I had preordered it when I read a review for it online.  (I don't often preorder books but this one sounded too good to miss and I was afraid I would forget about it.)  WOW! What an amazing read. Again, Melissa Stewart organizes the information in a way that is accessible, yet packed with information. The book goes through the many uses for feathers--who knew? She gives specific examples for each way feathers are used and the illustrations by Sarah S. Brannen are a perfect match.   I hadn't paid attention to the author when I preordered the book, so when I saw that it was Melissa Stewart, I noticed a little pattern.

The next day, my Scholastic Book Club order arrived. My students didn't order this month but there were a few things I wanted for the classroom. One item I purchased was a set National Geographic Readers set with books like National Geographic Readers: Dolphins. They seemed like a good addition in terms of topic and accessibility and I've been so impressed with everything National Geographic lately that I added them to my order.  What a surprise that every book in the pack was by Melissa Stewart? (and that I noticed!)

Finally, my kids have been reading lots of books in our "Birds" basket.  We have a bird watching area at our school that we are starting to help out with so they've been very interested in anything birds. I have a decent collection of books in this category as it goes well with our science too.  As I was straightening up the basket, I noticed A Place for Birds, a newer book in the basket and noticed that it was again by Melissa Stewart!  Browsing online this week, I realized that this too is part of a series--the A Place For series.  I will definitely have to check more of these books out.

And today, as I was writing, I popped online to see if there were possibly any more great titles I was missing by Melissa Stewart and it seems there is a Good Question Series (How Does a Seed Sprout?: And Other Questions About Plants (Good Question!) that looks like another perfect series for this age.

Finally, I visited Melissa Stewart's website today so that I could link it for this post and again I was floored. Not only does she have a great website with great information. But she has videos that share her revision timeline, video minilesson and more. Her website is a treat in itself. I am trying so hard to do a better job of nonfiction craft minilessons in writing and I am so happy to have discovered these videos!

Really, Melissa Stewart's work is amazing and even though I knew it before, I didn't realize how many things she had that are incredible. Because she has different illustrators and because some of her books use photos while others use illustrations, it isn't obvious to a reader like me that she is the author. I am so glad that these Melissa Stewart events happened so I could finally see her entire body of work and make the connections. This experience made me realize again how little attention I've paid to nonfiction authors' names as I read and share nonfiction with my students.  So glad to see that is changing. Melissa Stewart is definitely one of my favorite authors for nonfiction in elementary classrooms!

Planning for Small Group Instruction: Problem and Solution

Moving from 4th grade to 3rd grade has been fascinating as there is a big difference between the two ages.  And I'm realizing again that 3rd grade readers are at a critical stage in reading development.  As they are becoming more sophisticated readers, the books become more complex. Not only are they building stamina to read longer books over several days but they are also learning to infer so much about a story.  Over the last few weeks I've been working with a small group on inferring problem and solution and I've learned so much from them. My thinking is that this cycle of lessons I've used with them might be the perfect cycle to use in whole class teaching early in the year next year.

I began working with several groups of students on inferring because although my students can infer isolated pieces in a text (what a word means in the context of a sentence, what a character meant by a phrase in a book, what might happen next, etc.), I am noticing a pattern that many of my students do not infer across the text and as texts become longer and more complex, this becomes more of a barrier to true comprehension. I'm finding students who can retell a story with every story part, but they miss some subtle thing that makes the story.  Their inferring is at the basic level and they rush through-making up their mind fast without pausing to think about the whole. So, I planned a few lesson and have continued from there.

I always thought that problem and solution was a rather basic thing to teach but there are so many conversations that have come from it that I am realizing how important it is for 8 and 9 year olds.

DAY 1

We began with Chalk by Bill Thompson. This is a wonderful wordless picture book that I thought would make sense for inferring. I started out with inferring predictions with this group. We did a shared reading of the book as a group, talking and predicting using evidence from the pictures. Kids could predict basic things but it became evident that they were reading for isolated events rather than the whole bigger story.  They seemed to pay close attention to minor details and went quickly over events that worked together to create a story. They didn't seem to have any focus in mind as they read that could help them put the pieces together.

DAY 2

I asked students to go off and read a wordless book on their own. I used A Ball for Daisy
Hippo! No, Rhino!, and Where's Walrus? and each student left with one of these books  I asked them to jot notes on stickies as they read.

We came back together to talk and their stickies confirmed my thinking from our reading of Chalk. I realized  that these students were reading events but not reading for the whole story to come together in some way.  I needed to help them read across a story. There were lots of stickies about little details not connected to the big story. I know that these are important for readers , but only if they can see how they fit into the bigger picture.  So I changed my focus to problem and solution to give these students a way to focus--how to read across a story for the bigger picture in a story--more than isolated events in a sequence.

DAY 3

One thing that struck me in all of our conversations in the first two days was the fact that my students equated "ending" with "last page". Whatever the characters were doing on the last page was described as the ending by these students. I knew if I wanted to change the way they approached story, they needed to understand that the "ending" was not necessarily a final event but the solution or the outcome of the story.  It wasn't always the very last thing that happened.

For the next lesson, I used the wordless book Fossil by Bill Thompson. This one is patterned similarly to Chalk so I figured the kids would be able to dig deeper and see the problem and solution more clearly after having read and discussed Chalk.  For Fossil, I asked students to focus on the big problem and the big solution and we talked through it. They were much better able to do this when they weren't jumping around to lots of unrelated details. Instead, they read with a focus in mind that they wanted to get a sense of the whole story.

In the meantime, during individual conferences, we also talked a bit about the book that each child was reading during independent reading. They were delighted to discover that the books they were reading had problems and that the longer the book, the longer it took to solve the problem!

DAY 4

I decided that once the kids knew that stories had problems and solutions, I wanted to give them ways to look at these more deeply.  I wanted them to learn two strategies for thinking of problem and solution. One was that the title of a book is often a clue about the problem or solution. The other was that the main character often DOES something to solve the problem.

One thing I am noticing is that my students are often missing the subtle things that a character does to solve a problem.  Often a character does something (like in Miss Nelson is Missing) that seems obvious to adult readers even though it is not stated in the story.  I wanted my kids to read knowing that often characters did something deliberate to solve the problem and that readers sometimes read for that.

For this lesson, we read the book, I Want a Dog!. I picked this book for a few reasons. First of all, the problem was hinted to in the title. Second of all, the character does something very obvious to solve the problem and I knew my kids would see that.  Finally, I knew that there were lots of books about kids who want pets and I wanted to be able to build on this lesson later in the study. So,  "What did the character do to solve the problem?" was the focus of this lesson and kids caught right on, excited to know this little trick for finding solution. (They acted like they were in on a big secret!)  The focus was helpful as they weren't jumping all over the place, hoping the random details they noticed would somehow make sense to them.

DAY 5

Following I Want a Dog, I gave each student a copy of the picture book A Small Brown Dog with a Wet Pink Nose. This book is about a little girl who wants a dog but her solution is quite clever and the reader has to infer quite a bit to see how deliberate the little girl is throughout the story in order to solve her problem. I knew that understanding this might be a stretch but I knew that it was a good next step to really dig in and figure out what the character did.

MOVING FORWARD

Before I finish up with this group, I want to give them tools to go a little deeper into their understanding. I want them to see that problem and solution matters and that often a character changes over time because of the problem. I know that they are at the point that they are reading across a whole story now and they are ready to see the impact of the problem/solution on the characters.  So my next few lessons with this group will be around the idea that the main character often changes because of the problem they encountered and that readers often ask themselves, "How does the character change in the journey to solve the problem?"  I have a few books in mind for this conversation and they are all three books that make sense as next steps and for this new focus: Those Shoes, The Summer My Father Was Ten, and A Bad Case of Stripes (Scholastic Bookshelf) are the three books I'll use next. I may only use one or two depending on how much support students need with this new idea.

REFLECTIONS

Planning for this group helped me to think about my planning for all small groups.  I have been involved in lots of thinking around small group instruction at school. A group of teachers is meeting to discuss Jennifer Serravallo's book Teaching Reading in Small Groups: Differentiated Instruction for Building Strategic, Independent Readers and  we have been involved in LLI training. I'm realizing that my small group instruction at 3rd grade needs to be as planned and focused as my whole group lessons.  And they need to happen over more than a few days.  Even though my groups are not really guided reading groups, they are strategy groups that need to move students to new behaviors quickly. When I started thinking about this group, the change they needed seemed too big to happen in a short time, but when I really looked at the students' behaviors and what they had in place, I was able to break the idea down into smaller chunks and change behaviors quickly. My students quickly learned to read across a story, to find the problem and solution and to focus on character actions.  Next I am confident that they will be able to see the changes a character has on their journey in the story.  These little behaviors have changed in a two week period and has transferred to their independent reading so that they are more engaged and thoughtful readers.

These kids are not necessarily struggling readers but they are struggling with this idea and it is keeping them from truly understanding what they read .  I am all about discovery, but sometimes kids need some ways into discovery. They need to know what to read for and some things to remember as readers. Then when they move into complex texts they know these things will hold true and that's where the real thinking and discovery comes in.  I've been careful to choose books that really make visible the things I want them to see that are true of many stories so that they differently on their own.  In less than 2 weeks, they've changed their expectations of story.

I am rethinking small groups to be a bit longer than usual (over 2-ish weeks) to really change several behaviors that add up over time. This cycle has taught me a lot about what transitional readers need and about how to better plan small group instruction so that in a short period of time, students can become more independent readers.

Changing My Stance on Charts and Chart Creation

So, I've been fascinated and blown away by Smarter Charts by Marjorie Martinelli and Kristi Mrax since I picked up the book a while ago.  I had a basic understanding of charts but after reading this book, I realized that I wasn't as thoughtful as I needed to be about the charts in my room.  I usually just used easel paper to capture thinking or post ideas around a topic, etc. There were charts everywhere and kids used a few.  After reading Smarter Charts, I realized I had to play around a bit and figure out how to do a better job.

I did a podcast with Kristi and Marjorie for Choice Literacy and one comment from the interview stayed with me.   At one point in the interview, Kristi said, " I feel like planning out chart goes right alongside with planning our units in reading, writing, math, and inquiry."  She talked about how planning charts was part of the planning and I had never really done that. I just picked up a marker when I thought we needed to capture something. Of course, I had an idea of what kinds of charts would be part of a study but I never really thought them through, planned them out and built them over several days as part of the learning.  Then they blogged sharing their process and the blog post made it much more clear to me.

For a while, I tried to play around with the specifics that Kristi and Marjorie talk about. They are so great at drawing and sketching and I am hopeful I'll get more comfortable with these at some point. But in the meantime, I wanted to just rethink the planning of my charts-the purposes, the supplies, the visual support, the construction, the student piece, etc.   So, for our nonfiction study that we are doing, learning to build stamina in nonfiction reading while we write informational pieces, we created this chart over the last two weeks.

This is a chart of the learning we did around nonfiction series books in our classroom.  I chose 7 series or authors that seemed to be books most 3rd graders could read on their own--books that stretched from the skimming and scanning I've noticed they do in nonfiction.  We studied several stacks of these books in small groups, looking for the decisions authors made to make the informational interesting and accessible to readers.  This piece of the study served a few purposes.  First, it gave my kids lots of time with nonfiction books I am hopeful they'll want to read in the near future--books they haven't looked closely at. It also gave them time to have conversations about the decisions authors made and the features they used in each book.  It gave us a common set of books to talk from and it also started conversations about stamina and how these books were all designed to be read from cover to cover.  Although we created this chart in a study of reading, I plan to build on what we learned as we move to write our own informational texts.

Here is what I took from the brilliant Chartchums girls that really helped me:

-I actually planned out the chart. I chose the books, pulled stacks and sketched out the way I envisioned the chart.  Part of planning was finding books that matched my learning goals for the kids.  I planned it along with the planning of the unit of study.  

-I changed up the visual piece. I made color copies of book covers to kids could revisit the chart easily as needed throughout the unit. I used 24 X 36 construction paper to give it a background different from those non-thoughtful charts they've become used to ignoring.  

-I involved the kids in the process as they added the information about their stack to the chart.

-We built this over days and the chart grew as the understanding grew.

-It is a chart we'll use for more than a few days.  It is one that will carry us for several weeks as we've anchored our thinking and can use the books and ideas generated to build our strategies as writers.

I still have a lot to learn about creating better charts and I know Marjorie and Kristi may be cringing as they read this, seeing how much of their brilliance I've missed in this first chart.   I do want to get more comfortable with drawings and lettering. I want to play with restickable glue sticks and having min-versions of charts available for kids in the classroom.  I want to revisit the book and the blog to see what else I've missed. But,  I feel like this first step was about changing my stance about charts. And I feel like I did that.  I approach them differently now.  I no longer just pick up a marker and fill my classroom with charts no one uses.  And I think over time, I will see a huge difference in the ways my students use them because of that.  

Love the Chartchums girls and highly recommend their book if you haven't read it.

(And, there is a great new post on Chartchums sharing lots of great posts that go along with the thinking in book and podcast!)

Book Clubs

Wednesday is Book Club Day in Room 228.

Before we get deep into Book Clubs that address specific skill needs, we are getting used to thinking with partners, and digging deeper than the surface.

We started with fractured fairy tales last week.

This week, we will read wordless picture books.

I have Chalk on Kindle on all of my personal devices in the classroom, so one lucky group will read digitally.

The two newest wordless picture books in my collection are

Journey
by Aaron Becker
Candlewick, 2013

and

Zoom (Picture Puffins)
by Istvan Banyai
Puffin Books, 1998

I'm not sure how Zoom fits with the narrative work I want my students to continue with...perhaps I can find several more in my collection that are simply visually stunning and we can do some compare/contrast work with books that tell a narrative story and books that simply help us to see the world with new eyes...

Poetry Friday: Thug

As seen/passed around on FaceBook

THUG

All summer it's been cool
but just in time for school
the heat comes back,
like a big muggy bully.

One afternoon, regardless of the math lesson,
the air conditioning goes out.
Just up and leaves.
Walks out of the room without permission,

leaving the door open
for the bully to swagger in,
disrupt the lesson,
and make us sweat ourselves.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2013



Tara has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at A Teaching Life.

Poetry Friday -- The Speed of Time

Photo by Mary Lee Hahn

A Teacher Turns the Calendar Page From July to August

It's the same feeling you get

just after you've nudged the sled 

over the shoulder 

of the hill.

Movement becomes momentum

and quickly shifts 

to catapulting and careening.

You relinquish control

and hold on 

for the ride.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2013

Sherry has the Poetry Friday Roundup today at Semicolon.

Poetry Friday -- Bracketology

Last Friday, we introduced the Battle of the Books to our 5th graders and showed them the tournament brackets that will be posted in the hallway.

Every 5th grader will enter a favorite book into the tournament by writing and presenting a summary of the book. This coming Friday, each of the four classes will vote the entries down to the 16 books that will enter the brackets. Competition will continue with head-to-head paragraphs about the books' main characters, the settings, key events in the stories, secondary characters, etc. The day before we leave for spring break, the entire grade level will vote for the overall winning book.

So tournament fever was in the air when we began Poetry Friday last week. One of my students made this bracket for his 16 favorite poems in David Elliott's In the Sea

The poem that wins the book for this student is

The Sea Turtle

Swims the seven seas
for thirty years,
then finds the beach
where she was born --
by magic, it appears.

How can she know to come upon
that far and sandy place?
Rare instruments of nature,
fair compass in a carapace.

© David Elliott, used by permission of the author



In his response to my request for permission to use this poem, David wrote, "...it's also my favorite poem in the book. One of the things I like about it is the juxtaposition of far and fair and how just the addition of one letter can change a word completely. I wish I could say that was a conscious decision on my part, but I'm not sure that it was. (Uh . . .can't remember.) Happy accidents can sometimes make a writer look much better than he is."

I got the "Bracketology" in the title of this post from Burkin and Yaris' post, "March Madness in the Classroom."

To try Bracketology in word study, check out this post at Thinking Stems.

Heidi has the roundup at my juicy little universe. Welcome back to Poetry Friday, Heidi!

Poetry Friday -- Take a Deep Breath and Count to Ten

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Claudio Vaccaro

SOME DAYS ARE LIKE THAT

My teacher’s sitting in her chair,

her head between her hands.

She’s mumbling and muttering…

I think she just said SAND!

This really isn’t like her.

I know she lives to teach.

But that was unmistakable…

my teacher just said BEACH!

© Mary Lee Hahn, 2013

It's been a rough week. Sometimes the only thing that kept me sane was my poetry writing goal. 

Linda has the roundup today at TeacherDance.

Nonfiction: An Update

I posted in early December about my plans to make December a month of nonfiction reading.  I had big goals for my students and met many of them.  The process took a little longer than I planned and much of the month was spent finding great books, building stamina for nonfiction, etc.  I was getting a bit discouraged but then I started noticing things. I noticed a child hand off a nonfiction book to another child as they were lining up for lunch. I noticed a few books begin to circulate and become popular in the classroom. I noticed some readers stick with a topic. I noticed kids finding series or authors that they wanted to read more of. I thought I'd share the books that have been popular in the last few weeks in our 4th grade classroom.  Lots of books are books I predicted would be well loved but others are surprised.

I have a group of kids reading lots about baseball history. These books seem to be circulating between 5-6 kids in the classroom. The books they are currently reading include:
We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball Home Run: The Story of Babe Ruth Teammates
Henry Aaron's Dream
Heroes of Baseball: The Men Who Made It America's Favorite Game

Two authors students seem to like are Nic Bishop and Irene Kelly:
Nic Bishop: Butterflies and Moths
Frogs
It's a Butterfly's Life

There is also a group interested in reading anything and everything about dogs. Some current favorites include:
Why Do Dogs Bark? (Penguin Young Readers, L3)
National Geographic Kids Everything Dogs: All the Canine Facts, Photos, and Fun You Can Get Your Paws On!

Several books that are popular based on (I imagine) topic are:
Venom (Junior Library Guild Selection)
Micro Mania: A Really Close-Up Look at Bacteria, Bedbugs, & the Zillions of Other Gross Little Creatures That Live In, On & All Around You!
Life-Size Sharks and Other Underwater Creatures (Life-Size Series)

A few students have become interested in some nonfiction series books such as:
Face to Face with Lions (Face to Face with Animals)
Kakapo Rescue: Saving the World's Strangest Parrot (Scientists in the Field Series)





Overall, it's been a great month of nonfiction reading. I have seen more voluntary nonfiction reading with this group than I ever have. The time to dig in and find books they love was necessary. Now, I think we are ready for some work on becoming better nonfiction readers, writing in response to nonfiction, stretching ourselves as nonfiction readers etc.