Classroom Resource: Wordless News (and metaphors found in art)

Wordless News. If you don't subscribe and use this resource in your classroom, now's the time to start. Creator Maria Fabrizio has been away for a few months, busy with a newborn and a toddler, but she's back with an image at least once a week.

The images she creates are perfect for "notice and wonder." I noticed that the shadow was actually hands, and I wondered about the lines, but I didn't notice one key thing about the lines until I read the related article. I hadn't heard about this interactive art installation, so when I read the article, I had a huge WOW! moment. I'm saving this one to share with my students even though it will be old news in a couple of weeks. I want to open their eyes/minds to art as a response to current and historical events.

Earlier this week, at the Columbus Museum of Art, I saw this installation and had another WOW! moment:

What looked like a huge barrel balanced on a rope took on layers of deep meaning when I read the explanation outside the room:

We study the indigenous people of the Americas, including the effects of colonialism. So this image will be a great starting point for those studies, and another example of the way art can help us to think about our world.

Math Books for the Classroom

How Many Guinea Pigs Can Fit On a Plane? by Laura Overdeck is a fun new book that I discovered thanks to someone sharing on Social Media!  It was released a week or so ago and I ordered it right away. This book is a full of questions you can answer yourself using math. There are chapters that categorize the questions--Animal Math, Nature Gone Wild, Math for Your Mouth and more. Each two page spread poses a question and gives the info you need to solve the problem. It also answers and explains the reasoning for the answer. For example--How many times do dogs take a bath a year?--and then goes on to investigate. I see this as a great book to use for openers for Math Worksop or in a variety of ways to just have fun with math.

Animals By the Numbers: A Book of Infographics by Steve Jenkins is a book of visuals. The infographics on each two-page spread are all about animals and each infographic is very unique.  Reading each page takes time and attention to detail and I can see doing Notice and Wonder thinking routines with these pages. These are great pages to linger over as you talk about data, displaying information, comparing things and more. And of course this book has Steve Jenkins fabulous illustrations so it can be used in coordination with some of his other books like Down, Down, Down.

Finally I need to thank my friend and colleague Maria Caplin for introducing me to this book.  Mind Boggling Numbers by Michael J. Rosen is another one that is great fun!  This is a book that is similar in concept to How Many Guinea Pigs Can Fit On a Plane? as it also asks questions of readers and then goes on to think through the math.  This book also includes great graphics and. visuals....and some humor!


I am happy to have discovered three books that have great ideas for young mathematicians. And these are definitely for older elementary students. Excited about sharing these 3 books with my 5th graders in the fall.

Baseball: Then to Wow!

I always love to find a new nonfiction sports book to add to our sports basket, so I bought this one when I saw it.  Sports Illustrated for Kids seems to publish stuff that is really interesting for kids. I figured (just by the cover) that kids would like Baseball: Then to Wow! but when I opened it I realized how packed it was with single-page spreads that I could use for mini lessons and small group instruction too.

The visuals in this book are BRILLIANT.  Every page focuses on a different topic and then shows how things have changed over the years.  Some pages, show a timeline--for example the page on Catcher's Masks starts in the 1870s and goes decade by decade showing what they looked like and some facts about them over the years.  Another page, The Five-Tool Player compares two players in a Then and Now table. Mickey Mantle and Mike Trout.

I don't know a lot about baseball but this book is engaging as a reader because of the amount of information and the way it is displayed.  There is a lot for kids in this book. First of all, I think they will just enjoy it for the book that it is. It is a great read packed with fascinating info. As readers, they can learn a lot about how to read visuals--there is such a variety of visual information that I can see using several pages in lessons as we learn to navigate nonfiction. I also think as writers, they'll want to try some things out.  I have lots of kids who write about sports and start out in pretty traditional ways. This gives them new ways to think about how they might best share information with readers.

This book is packed with information as well as real photos, artifacts, maps and more.  It is definitely going to be one of my go-to nonfiction texts next year.  (If you go to the book on Amazon, you can "Look Inside" and see some of the visuals.)

20 Ways to Draw a Tree by Eloise Renouf

It is that time of summer when I am thinking hard about those first messages I want to give my new students about the classroom they'll be entering.  Peter Johnston's words have lived with me for years and as I think about routines and classroom organization, I am always thinking about the subtle messages these things in schools give to our young children. So, I was thrilled to discover a new book called 20 Ways to Draw a Tree and 44 Other Nifty Things from Nature: A Sketchbook for Artists, Designers, and Doodlers. I was immediately drawn to the title and checked it out.  I love so much about this book and am thrilled that there are others in the series.

I am not an artist and I don't actually pay much attention to visuals. I've only started to a little bit recently as the world is made up of more visuals.  So this book is all the more fascinating to me. I guess I never realized how many different ways there are to draw a tree or a leaf or a bird or a flower.

So, back to why I bought this book. I want my students to get the message right away that there are lots of ways to do things. That there are not "right' and "wrong" answers and that there are so many ways to problem solve and to think about things. So many ways to approach things. So many amazing ways to see something and so many ways to think about something. And I think this book gives that message.   Although this book is designed to help you experiment with drawing (and I imagine it will invite lots of kids to do just that), it will also give the messages I want them to get when they walk into our classroom.

I'm not quite sure how I'll use the book--whether I'll figure out a way to make it some sort of invitational wall display or whether we'll do some playing with it the first few days of school or what. But I know it will serve some purpose during those first few important weeks of school. And I can see kids going back to it throughout the year and just looking at it. There is so much to see. Such an amazing book!

I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN by Steve Moline

I have been thinking a lot about 21st Century Literacies over the last several years. I know that the definition of literacy has expanded and I have been trying to work through what this means for our work with kids in school. How do we help kids be successful with reading that is becoming more complex. And, with the Common Core, I have been thinking about how to really include more nonfiction into the classroom in a way that really supports deep reading. A book I read recently that helped me think more about both of these important issues was I SEE WHAT YOU MEAN: VISUAL LITERACY K-8 by Steve Moline. This is a Stenhouse book that was first published a long time ago--before anyone was really talking about Visual Literacy. It was a book I loved long ago and one I love again with Moline's fresh thinking.

This book seems even more important now than it was years ago when I first fell in love with it. I've been working
working with elementary children for years and have really been observing the ways they are approaching information that is both text and visual.  I have seen lots of skimming and scanning and a huge need for teaching around how to putting information together in a way that builds deep understanding.

This book really helped me think through how to better support students in their reading of all things visual.  On page 1, Moline states, "Visual literacy is not a cute new toy for children to play with; it is the means by which we manage in the every day world."

The book is organized into chapters based on the different kinds of visual texts that make the most sense in the classroom. It is by no means comprehensive but the way in which Moline talks about each one of these, helped me see a new way to look at visual texts as a whole. There are chapters on simple diagrams, maps, analytic diagrams, process diagrams, structure diagrams, graphs and graphic design. I learned a lot of important vocabulary that helped me learn about the differences in the way information is shared. Moline takes some time to help us see the difference between analytic diagrams and process diagrams. I'm not thinking that our kids need to understand these words but for us to understand visual texts in a deeper way, we will be better able to teach our students to read with meaning.

I love that there are whole chapters on things like maps and graphs. It was easy for me to dig in and to see where this teaching might fit in across content areas.  But even more than the specifics around the types of visual texts our students should be able to read and understand, Moline made big points that will really help me throughout all of my work in visual literacy.

One point that Moline makes over and over is the importance of creating visual texts.  He says, "There is a big difference between asking students to label a preexisting diagram (on a worksheet, for example) and asking them to draw the diagram themselves as well as to label it. This is because a large part of the understanding that students gain from these texts lies in reconstructing the pictorial elements of the diagram."

Moline also makes the point about purpose--what is the purpose of the visual. When do readers need to read the entire piece and when might they skim and scan for certain information.  Moline talks a lot about this understanding of the reader as a teaching point--if we want our students to be creators of visual texts, we must help them understand how the reader will make sense of it. He says, "Instead, by focusing students on matching form to purpose, we can show them that writing is above all communication with a reader who will expect our text to be accessible, memorable, concise and clear."

As I was reading, I was constantly jotting notes in the margins--ideas I could use in Social Studies, ways I could incorporate things like Google Maps, a good minilesson idea, etc. There are lots of clear examples throughout--published pieces as well as student samples. A website is also included that has color images of the images throughout the book.

One more point--Moline gives us clear guidelines about assessment, helping us to think about what it is we'd be looking for if we asked students to create their own map or diagram.  Each section helps us think through the visual texts, their purpose and possibilities for assessment.

This seems like a must read book and one that will cross lots of professional circles. It seems important for classroom teachers and librarians who are working on visual texts and thinking about 21st Century Learning. It seems important for people digging into the nonfiction components of Common Core. It would be a good read for content specialists and visual texts are so important to science, social studies and math. And I can see technology specialists wanting to read this book as there are huge implications for their work with children and teachers.

I am really excited about this book and plan to return to it over and over throughout the school year. I know that I need to make the visual piece of information more important in my teaching and this book has helped me think about how that will be possible.