Still Learning to Read: Organizing Assessments

This is one of a series of blog posts that continue the conversation around Still Learning to Read--teaching reading to students in grades 3-6.  This series will run on the blog on Tuesdays starting in August 2016 and continue through the school year.

"Try the Starbucks App. It's life-changing," my brother told me a few months ago. He was right. I can order my morning tea from my house right before I leave and it is ready for me when I arrive.  No more long lines. No more trying to predict how long my morning drive with tea stop will take. My mornings are calmer and more predictable now.  A small change, but life-changing nonetheless!

A similar thing happened a few years ago as I was trying (still...in my 28th year of teaching) to figure out how to manage all the assessments and things I wanted to save through the school year on each child.  I used to have file folders that worked fine but assessments have become a bit more complex.  And for assessments to be useful, I want to have access to them and full file folders are not always that easy to access! Even though much of what I keep, I can keep online,  I like to keep a lot of paper things. I've always believed that every piece of work can tell you something about a child and I know having lots allows me to see change over time.  When I moved to 3rd grade and tried to make sense of our 3rd Grade Guarantee Law, I had to figure out a plan for all the paperwork that went along with that, This new mandated paperwork, along with the daily classroom assessments I have always kept became a bit overwhelming (well, maybe more than a bit...).  I needed a new plan.  Our Literacy Coach, Gretchen Taylor, shared with me the system she had used the year before as a middle school teacher--she had a mailbox/file type slot for each child in her 5 middle school Language Arts classes. That way, when she wanted to add a new note, assessment, piece of student work, etc. she just dropped it in.  Easy and quick and very accessible at all times.

So, I set up the same thing and have kept it going ever since.  I have cabinets in my room for storage. They are above the student cubbies. I have taken over the front portion of 3 of those and house 8 student files in each one.

So each student has a file that I can toss things in when needed. I can also easily access anything I want. This helps me in a variety of ways:

• First of all, I don't have to spend a lot of deciding what to keep. I do that a lot--try to decide if something is worth keeping.   With this system, there is plenty of room to drop things in and there is no reason to keep them forever--I can keep them as long as I need to.  So any student samples that may be worth keeping, any quick checks I do, even a sticky note with an observation about a child can go right in these files.
• This is the perfect system for sharing information with others.  When I get ready for parent conferences, I can pull the pile of information out. I have lots to look at when finishing up comments for report cards. And when the Reading Support teacher or the ELL teacher comes in to look at some of the assessments or wants to add something new, they don't have wait for me or sort through my piles for what they are looking for. They have access to these anytime they need them.
• I rely a great deal on digital tools for collecting and reflecting on work but there are mandated assessments, test reports, reading plans and work samples that are better saved as paper copies--better for me because I can spread them out and look at them when needed. This system lets me look at individual work more easily. It also invites reflection across time.

Because I am a person who make piles and who likes to look again and again at student work, this is the perfect organization tool for me.  It is a simple idea that really changed my teaching life as it made all of the paperwork more manageable and more useful for me.

(You can follow the conversation using the hashtag #SLTRead or you can join us for a book chat on Facebook that began this week by joining our group here.)

Our new edition of Still Learning to Read was released last week!  You can order it online at Stenhouse!

Poetry Friday -- Quite So Much

Quite So Much

If it weren't for the clouds
I wouldn't love the blue
quite so much.

If it weren't for the cold shock
of the first step into the river
I wouldn't love dry land
quite so much.

If it weren't for the surprise of bright yellow fungus
I wouldn't love dead trees
quite so much.

If it weren't for the constant chatter
and the loud enthusiasm of children
I wouldn't love silence
quite so much.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2016


Our fifth graders went to Highbanks Metropark last week for a field trip put on by the Ohio River Foundation, a group that works towards "protecting and restoring the Ohio River and its watershed." The Olentangy River, which runs through Highbanks, is a part of the Ohio River watershed. Our students took part in several activities that determined the health of the Olentangy River, and that reinforced the need to conserve our fresh water resources. This poem was inspired by our field trip.


Violet is hosting the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Violet Nesdoly | Poems.

My Adult Reading Life

September - May is a frustrating time of year for a teacher to be a reader. Because there is no way to do our jobs within the parameters of the contract hours of our days/weeks, work spills over into our personal lives and threatens to rob us of one of the identities at our very core -- that of Reader. Luckily, I eat breakfast every day and I have a twenty minute commute to work.

I manage to keep a middle grade novel going in 20 minute increments as I eat breakfast. I tell myself that I should weave a professional book into that time slot some days, but I'll be honest -- I rarely do.

My drive time is my adult reading time. I read with my ears. If it weren't for Audible and the TED Radio Hour podcast, I would not have an adult reading life. I also wouldn't have very much to talk about in adult conversations since I'm not a sports fan, I fall asleep when I watch TV or movies, and I don't pay close attention to the news (for sanity's sake).

It would be easy enough not to be a reader, but as a teacher of reading (and as a person whose core identity is Reader), that's simply not an option.

There's no such thing as MAKING time to read. We all have the same number of hours in each day. So it's all about being creative in FINDING time and using it to keep my reading life alive in the September - May drought so it can flourish June - August.

Still Learning to Read: Tracking Our Thinking in Read Aloud

This is one of a series of blog posts that continue the conversation around Still Learning to Read--teaching reading to students in grades 3-6.  This series will run on the blog on Tuesdays starting in August 2016 and continue through the school year.

I want my students to have experience with a variety of ways to track their thinking during reading.  There are so many tools and right now, I just want them to see how powerful it is to stop and notice your thinking. I want them to be able to choose tools that work for them and I use the first 6-8 weeks of school to make sure they have experience with several ways to annotate.  Since our focus is on the thinking and process, the tool is really up to the child once they see some  possibilities. So for read aloud this time, I chose the book Lucy by Randy Cecil.  This is a book that I fell in love with this summer.  I chose it for several reasons.

• The illustrations in this book are key. There is a black and white illustration on each page and I want my 3rd graders to talk around both words and pictures. I find that often, at this age, readers are more apt to talk about what they notice or wonder in a visual than in text so this combination seemed perfect. I also know they will naturally find evidence in the illustrations as they talk and the "What in the book makes you think that?" type of conversation will grow.
• I was able to get 12 copies of the book from our public library.  This makes it possible for groups of 2-3 to share a book. 
• I assigned them a Thinking Partner for this read aloud. So they share their book with the same person and will think through this book with one person. Thinking with the same person across a book is different than thinking with different people every day.  There are benefits to both but as we build relationships and conversation skills, having the same partner through the book is important.
• There are 3 characters in the book whose story lines come together--Eleanor, her father, and the dog, Lucy.  As readers begin to read more complex text, I want them to think about characters and how characters stories and relationships are often key to narrative.

So each pair of students was given a copy of the book and a stack of sticky notes and they have been jotting and talking every day before we come together and share thinking as a group. 

The book and conversation are inviting great talk and we are learning so much about tracking our thinking, backing our thinking with evidence in the text, character development and having good conversations. 

(You can follow the conversation using the hashtag #SLTRead or you can join us for a book chat on Facebook that began this week by joining our group here.)

Our new edition of Still Learning to Read was released last week!  You can order it online at Stenhouse!

Hat Back Trilogy

Imagine how much I was jumping up and down (and up and down) when I opened a box from Candlewick and found this inside!! I have been waiting for this book for so long! We Found a Hat by Jon Klaassen!!!!

I am a HUGE fan of Jon Klaassen and especially of his hat books. If you read this blog, you already know this because maybe you read our posts, I Want My Hat Back,  I Want My Hat Back, Revisited, the John Klassen Blog Tour or 10 Books in Which Characters Are Eaten. I have been #teambear from the day I read I Want My Hat Back and this book remains one of my favorite picture books of all time and I've been anticipating the new book since I heard about it a long time ago.

I am not the only one who has been looking forward to this book. The anticipation for this third and final book in this series has been going for a long time.  In February, The Guardian revealed the cover and interviewed Jon Klassen about the book.

The book is officially released next week. The official release date is October 11. I think you'll want to have it in your  hands that day so I'd suggest a preorder! Here is the book trailer for a sneak peek!

I don't want to spoil the book for you but I can tell you that I LOVED LOVED LOVED it. I've given it to a few friends to read and some hugged it before they gave it back. I read it to my class and they loved it. It is better than I could have imagined. A perfect ending to this fabulous trilogy.  It was definitely worth the wait.

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#DigiLitSunday -- Conferring

My fifth graders did lots and lots of work on their narratives of "imagined experiences or events" in their writer's notebooks before we ever brought a draft into their Google Apps for Education account. While we were in the notebooks phase of these pieces, I conferred with writers on an as-needed basis. When we were planning, I could listen in on small group conversations or I could take a pulse during share time to get a sense of who was struggling and needed one-on-one help. I could borrow all of the notebooks for an evening and do a quick read-through of their possible leads to sift for those who needed help and those I could use for minilessons under the document camera.

When it came time for a handwritten draft outside their notebook, I didn't give my students much time to pull together all the bits and pieces of planning, leads, and snippets of dialogue. They had a tight deadline and I was brutal -- meet the deadline or forego Genius Hour. I wanted these drafts to be rough because I wanted them to understand that their work on the computer would be to create a new and better draft, not just type up what they had written on paper and call it good. By having every draft on paper, I could easily carry them all home, read carefully through each draft, and make +/- notes for each child on my clipboard chart. Once they began their drafts on the computer, I would gain the ability to have a quick conference with each student by leaving digital comments on their work.

I made sure the initial session on the computer was a short one. All they had time to do was log into their Google account, go to Drive, open a new Doc, name it with the conventions I gave them, and share it with me.

After that first quick computer session, I used my notes from their handwritten draft and left a comment for each student that might guide their work on this next draft.

Every day or two, I read through each student's work, taking notes on what they've improved and what they still need to work on. I have a little digital conference with every student in the comments, and I know exactly which students need my personal attention, and for what. I can group students who have the same needs and do small group work, and I have digital examples of exemplary writing, along with pieces that (with student permission) I can use in minilessons for craft, revision, and editing.

Conferring is the heart of writing instruction. It's what makes the teaching personal to the words the writer has put on paper or screen. Technology has given us another very powerful way to confer with our student writers.

Poetry Friday -- You Are There

photo via unsplash

You Are There
by Erica Jong

You are there.
You have always been
there.
Even when you thought
you were climbing
you had already arrived.
Even when you were
breathing hard,
you were at rest.
Even then it was clear
you were there.

Not in our nature
to know what
is journey and what
arrival.
Even if we knew
we would not admit.
Even if we lived
we would think
we were just
germinating.

To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.

I have lived the last two weeks at full tilt. Life has come at me non-stop. It has felt like perpetual motion, but perhaps Jong is right. Perhaps it was just two week's worth of intense arrival. I was definitely there, even though I wasn't here to comment on your posts. 

I'm looking forward to a slower period of arrival. I'm looking forward to visiting the roundup this week and seeing what everyone's up to.

Thanks for your patience with my silence.

The roundup the week is at Karen Edmisten's blog. The one with the "Shockingly Clever Title."

Still Learning to Read: Deepening Our Conversations Around Books

This is one of a series of blog posts that continue the conversation around Still Learning to Read--teaching reading to students in grades 3-6.  This series will run on the blog on Tuesdays starting in August 2016 and continue through the 2016-2017 school year.

I received a review copy of A Bike Like Sergio's from Candlewick. I immediately fell in love with the book and was anxious to share it with my students. The picture book is perfect for inviting talk around important issues and decisions.  The book trailer is a good sneak peek into what kids might talk about.

When I shared the book with our literacy coach, Lynsey Burkins she reminded me that this author, Maribeth Boeltz also write Those Shoes , a favorite of mine from last school year. I looked up the author and then remembered that she also wrote Happy Like Soccer   I had never thought about the 3 books together but I pulled them out as Lynsey suggested and planned the week's worth of mini lessons around these three book.

My big goals for the week were to deepen our conversations around books and to begin to understand the ways books can change our hearts a bit. I also wanted my students to look across an author's work to deepen their understanding around individual books and issues across books. I knew we'd do rereading of one or two of the titles and I wanted to introduce the idea that rereading helps us deepen understanding. I knew those were my big goals and I also knew that I would have to listen to student thinking to move the conversation forward from where they were in their thinking.

On Monday I read aloud A Bike for Sergio. The big question throughout the book was whether or not Ruben would get the bike or not.  At the end of the book (SPOILER ALERT) when Ruben does not get the bike, my students were livid--I heard comments like "There must be a sequel!" and "That's the worst ending ever." and "He'll get the bike in the next book."  I left the conversation there and told kids that this was a book I'd been thinking about since I 'd read it last week and maybe they'd find themselves thinking about the book and the characters later too.  

The next day, I told my kids that I had been thinking about the book again and that there were some questions I had as a reader that I just didn't have answered yet. My biggest question was, "Was this a book with a happy ending?"  I put that on a chart and asked them if there were things they were wondering now that we had had time to think about the book. Our chart looked like this.

• Was it a happy ending?
• Did Ruben do the right thing?
• Was Sergio happy or sad that Ruben didn't get the bike?
• Is Ruben's family poor?
• Will he ever get the bike?
• Will the lady in the blue coat ever give him something as a thank you?

Each of these questions gave us a great deal to talk about and because there was no "right answer, we could agree, disagree, and change our thinking as the conversation moved on.

We moved onto the next two books by Maribeth Boelts.  We read Happy Like Soccer next and the children felt better about the ending. One child said, "When we read A Bike Like Sergio's, I didn't feel right at the end. When you read a book, you start to really like the character and I didn't feel good about how that one ended but I this ending seemed like a happy ending."

We read Those Shoes on Wednesday.  Our conversations before reading the book focused on what we might expect now that we knew Maribeth Boelts better as a writer. The kids predicted that family would be important in this book. They predicted that by looking at the cover, the child wanted something everyone else had like Sergio. They thought maybe the character would have to decide something important.  

After reading all 3 books, my students shared the following insights about Maribeth Boelts:

• She has a way of writing about characters who figure out how to solve their own problems.
• She writes about kids who want things that other people have.
• Her books are realistic.
• Family is important in her books.

And they still can't decide whether the families were poor or not.  This was a topic of conversation each day and they never came to an answer they were sure of--or what they actually meant by "poor".  

We reread A Bike for Sergio on Friday.  By Friday, the class had pretty much come to a consensus that the book did have a happy ending.  They still hope that Ruben gets the bike someday but they have a better understanding of the decision he was faced with. In this last read, kids stopped me on almost every page, asking me to reread a line that gave them a clue into something they were thinking about--lines they didn't quite get during the first read.  

Reading these 3 books together was a great idea (Thanks Lynsey!). We didn't do much writing or recording during these lessons as I really only wanted to deepen the ways in which we talked about books. Reflecting on the week, I think we certainly deepened our conversations and the ways we talk about books. We also changed our expectations of books and how they impact us. We learned to use what we know about an author to understand important ideas in  new ways.  And we know that there are some books and some things that we'll think about long after we are finished reading. This week, we came to love Ruben and Sierra and Jeremy, characters who I think will come into our conversations throughout the year.

(You can follow the conversation using the hashtag #SLficuciaryTRead or you can join us for a book chat on Facebook that began this week by joining our group here.)

Our new edition of Still Learning to Read was released last week!  

You can order it online at Stenhouse!

Which One Doesn't Belong?

Which One Doesn't Belong? is a brilliant new math book from Stenhouse. A MUST-HAVE if you teach math at any age I think.  The book is a picture book to use with kids along with a Teacher's Guide that is really a professional book by Christopher Danielson (whose website is also brilliantly amazing and one you'll want to visit often if you are a math teacher.)

Which One Doesn't Belong? is a book of conversation starters around geometry.  Each page of the picture book gives readers 4 shapes and asks the questions, "Which One Doesn't Belong?"  I know this opener and love it and have used lots of the resources on the website Which One Doesn't Belong? and other resources and I've always found the routine to be a good one for math learning and supporting conversations around math.

But there was so much I didn't know!  This teacher guide--which is not so long but long enough to have depth and lots of new learning--helped me to understand how much more powerful this routine could be if I were more intentional as a teacher. The focus on geometry is interesting to me because it is an area of math teaching that I need to learn more about.  The book has an entire chapter called "How Children Become Geometers". This chapter helped me see the big jump kids do from elementary school to high school geometry and how much better we can do to help them build understanding by understanding the levels of understanding kids have and build around geometry.

The book is not a teacher's manual. Instead it is a way for teachers to use this routine in ways that empower students. Christopher Danielson shares language he uses when he introduces Which One Doesn't Belong. He shares examples from classrooms and he helps us better understand how children make sense of geometry through inquiry. He also puts the teacher in the decision-making chair as he invites us to make our own decisions about which pages to introduce to children when.  He also has tips for creating your own WODB set.

I love the answer key in this book.  The thing about this WODB sets is that they are designed so every answer could be the correct answer. So the answer key shares insights kids may notice about each shape and how they might respond.  It is a great resource and a great place to understand how to create your own sets (and help kids create their own.)

I love so much about this set of books. We had a conversation around the first page of the picture book last week and it was incredible. I introduced it as Danielson suggests in the book and we could have gone on for a very long time with ideas and thinking around these 4 shapes. I am excited to see where the conversation goes over the next several months.  This was a great way for me to take a routine I know and really deepen my understanding of it which will help my students.  Not only that but it helped me understand geometry in general and I now see the connection between this and several of Danielson's blog posts. I can't recommend this book enough.  If you are interested in inquiry based thinking and routines that empower kids AND if you want to learn more about quality talk in the math classroom, you need this book immediately!

Poetry Friday -- Truth

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by tubb

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
by Emily Dickinson

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

It's data analysis season in our schools. We've been looking hard at the various "truths" that different pieces of data tell us about students. Each one has its own slant, and to get at the core truth of each child as a learner -- the TRUE true, as it were -- there are so many things to consider that we're all feeling a bit dazzled.

But the more we know, the better we teach: "Success in Circuit lies."

Catherine has the Poetry Friday roundup at Reading to the Core.