Treasure Chest of Thoughts

Lisa Huff has created a Ning entitled Literacy Lighthouse for English teachers.

A Ning is site that allows individuals to form social networks, place to discuss and collaborate.

Please join us!

Thanks to the seven teachers who attended a workshop I hosted for our educational co-op today during which we learned more about thematic literacy units.

From five school districts, these ladies shared ideas and allowed me to share my passion for this multi-genre approach to teaching our curriculum area.

I look forward to hearing from each one and to obtaining a newly developed unit to utilize within my own classes!

Again…thanks!  May your school year be grand as you  go forth as a “different type of reader”!

Other than the Bible, I have never read a book that has affected me so intensely.

Please consider purchasing this book…do not borrow one, for this is a book that you will want to keep so that you will have your very own personal copy and also so you can re-read it again and study what the author William P. Young has to say.

Young is gifted…both in story-telling and in the craft of writing.

Here’s a descriptor from Amazon.com:

The only regret I have?  I cannot use this book within the classroom because of the religious emphasis.

Please check out the novel’s website to read, if nothing else, an excerpt.

By the way, this novel is fiction….it’s just so hard to keep that in mind, though, as you turn page after page and are revived once again.

Who do you have to thank for helping you create your blog?  Who do you need to thank for even knowing the term “blog”?

I have been following an interesting discussion at The Academia Gap and the New Philosophers  and the author’s frustration with this very topic…his frustration with the arrogance of veteran bloggers.  Yes, arrogance.

This was my comment to his blog entry…the 33rd comment (by the way!):

After seventeen years of teaching, I have learned many things…one of which is that I have not, cannot, will not be able to read all the books that I want to…but I am trying!

Likewise, new to much of Web 2.0, I can only try out as many of these new Web tools  as my schedule and family and work responsibilities…or, in essence, as time allows for me to do so, but I am certainly enjoying learning!

Just as I really appreciate some authors/books more than others…so do I enjoy some of these new 21clc techniques also.

A year ago, I did not know what a blog was, but thanks to a peer (Lisa Huff at JustRead!), I now have two blogs, have our school newspaper online (using a blog there also), and have my students creating blogs and learning to express their ideas with this grand tool…and that’s just utilizing one tool that I have learned!

Yet I feel Joel’s concern, for if in education, we all know teachers who will continue to do what they have always done, for they are very comfortable getting what they have always gotten.

Thankfully…I am not one of those such teachers.

First, please read the referenced blog entry and thirty-plus comments.  Check out the names…many well-know bloggers got involved in what became a “hot” topic!

Then, send a thank you note…thanks, Lisa!…to the person(s) who opened your experiences to all the new relationships formed through blogging…even if it’s just a better one with yourself!

Next, share this knowledge and love with someone else.  Not everyone will jump on board…but one will…then two.  

When you look back at any revolution and evolution of any new idea…most great ones did not take place in a day, a week, a month, even a year.  Not everyone jumped on board and many fought the concept of change.  But where would we be today without all those who are now veterans in their fields of expertise?

So I say…thanks to all the verterans! 

A special thanks to those who do go in the schools, the teachers’ lounge, the classrooms, who keep sharing their love of technology.

Thanks, Joel at The Twain Blog and author of the above referenced blog entry/topic, for all the reminders…you, too, are a veteran!

Okay, I am impressed…can’t help it!

I stumbled upon the BHS 21st Century Learning Community wiki which also contained a list of the blogs for first team, a brain-child of Lisa Huff who should be grandly commended for the energy she brings to our building for implementing technology within the classroom.

Please check out these works in progress!

• Russell: Dirty Labcoats
• Hance: polliwog’s blog

Are you impressed yet?  Yes, me, too!

The grammar debate is still on-going.  Should we drill, drill, drill…because those teachers that had these students before us simply cannot be teaching grammar?!  Or should we do as the research suggests and teach using anchor/mentor pieces and mini-lessons?

Well, I have a theory…as I expressed today during one of these very discussions with other teachers…good teachers at the APSI

We should drill, and we should model…using mentor texts and student examples.  Yes, student examples.

The combo method is the best.

I am convinced that teachers teach grammar, but the step we do not get to is requiring students to implement whatever grammatical skill that was just covered within their own writings…and covered extremely well, mind you!  Just ask any English teacher!

Why do we not get to this step?  When you already have several sets of essays to grade, who wants another pile of paragraphs to read!

I have a theory about that also…for I do not want another set of papers to grade! Let the students check…self-checks, peer checks. 

Mechanically Inclined is a great book.  Author Jeff Anderson offers some stimulating tips that support a shift in my teaching style:

If our struggling readers need to see a word forty times to learn it (Beers 2002), then I’ll make a leap and say students need to see grammar and mechanics rules highlighted in different contexts at least that many times to own them.

How many of us can say we do that…model forty times?  Twenty?  Ten?  Five?  Do we just give up?

Vicki Spandel (2005) gave a name to something I had been doing for the last few years:  “sentence stalking.”  I am a self-professed sentence stalker.  I am always on the lookout for great mentor texts:  sentences, paragraphs, essays, articles, advertisements, and novels.  I also constantly look for well-written student sentences, paragraphs, and essays…Kids love seeing what other kids can do.

I have just spent several hours attempting to re-organize myself…my hard drive crashed during the middle of the school year (with no back-up) and I have had to re-create/re-type much of my supporting materials.  Now, though, I am ready to begin placing mentor texts within my units.

Got to.  Need to.  Have to. 

For school starts in only month.

Today I began my first day of my first Advanced Placement Summer Institute (APSI).  It’s quite the natural high to sit in a room with twenty-plus teachers who have the same dream:  to become an even better teacher than they were before arriving on the Arkansas State University Campus.

Still over-whelmed with what to teach and how to organize what I will teach, I did come away with something very valuable for an AP English program:  vertical alignment. 

The example we were given begins in third grade! Wow! 

I like the idea of knowing as a team, a department, what we expect our students to know when they graduate from our institution of learning. 

To be strong, to be proud, to enable our students, this is a step that we must further consider.

Open content vs. traditional textbooks.  A cheap idea.  Go green! 

Sounds so at first, but….

In “Educators Assess ‘Open Content’ Movement,” the author Andrew Trotter reports on teachers using wikis on which they and their students post content for their classes because their textbooks are so outdated that students are not receiving even an adequate education.

While I respect what Trotter has to say, he could have just as easily taken an entirely different slant on this topic.

So here goes…

According to the article, teachers are using wikis (and they are a grand tool!)and anything else they can get their hands on (free or not….copyrighted or not) because school districts are NOT utilizing textbook money to replace books that, in my case, are literally falling apart, even the duck tape no longer keeps the books bound!

This method of no longer purchasing textbooks does save money while it costs teachers endless hours of searching, reading, printing, copying, and binding…or placing these texts when allowable on wikis…so that their students still receive a quality education.

Yes, you are sensing an underlying layer of anger here.

Until a few years ago, I have always had an anthology from which to pull my literary units that I, of course, also enhanced with outside sources.  This past year I felt like a first-year teacher…one without a textbook.  It was not a pleasant experience, and one I dread repeating.  Thus, I am spending hours of my summer reading as I attempt to find the sources to supplement…no, wrong word…as I attempt to find the sources to further create the literary units I started last year.

Also nowhere in Trotter’s article did he acknowledge what to do about the shortage of computers in schools and in many homes.

I am blessed to have ten computers in my room and frequent use to a larger student lab…but the word is blessed, for I realize that many schools do not have these opportunities.

With this in mind, I am ever-learning how to utilize techie tools so that my students can use these computers even more.  To learn these, though, I am either self-taught or lean heavily (thanks Lisa at JustRead!) on peers for continued support.

Thus having said this, I will preach copyright to my students, try not to think about it when choosing texts, and not-save-money as I print literally thousands of pages a year to provide my students with adequate material and a hopefully more than adequate education.

Yesterday, I completed James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series, The Final Warning.  A good read.  A easy read.  A must read.

James Patterson is an excellent author to use as a model for multiple-genres, point of view, style, fluency, voice…and the list goes on.

Fang, one of the characters in the series, begins a blog in book three…what a great way to show my students the use of blogs and genres, all in one interesting lesson.  Throughout the third and fourth novels, several chapters are some of Fang’s blog postings.

Max, the main character, now has her own blog…yes, a “real” one.  Good site to send students as they learn to navigate blogs. 

I have never been a great fan of reading in the first-person point of view, but maybe my style is changing (that does happen…just stop and reflect what you have read throughout your life) or maybe, just maybe, Patterson has mastered this craft.  Yes, I think that is it! 

(Should my students ever read this entry, I will never hear the end of the previous sentence!  Two no-no’s in one sentence!  “I think” and “it” ~ sorry, readers-of-mine, I will work on that!)

I also appreciate the underlying messages that this series promotes. Before beginning this series, I had heard that one of the themes was Patterson’s stand against animal testing.  Good use of foreshadowing…for I watched for this as I read, and, yes, the message is clearly there.

This fourth book’s messages was definitely about global warming…learned some scary facts about global warming.  Good messages, though, for young adults to read about also…and in a captivating genre as an young adult novel!

Oh, yes, Max’s on-going mission?  Of course, to save the world!  Her latest blog is about the use of sunscreen!

Thanks to peer teacher Ms. Sharp for recommeding this series.  She works with resource students, and I can also see why this series would be a wonderful way to hook slow readers onto to reading, for Patterson’s chapters are very short; therefore, the slow reader would feel as if he/she is accomplishing/reading faster.  Maybe?

Interested in this series?  Patterson is giving away a class set of ten books!  Before Spring Break I filled out the application and was very pleasantly surprised to find the box of books on my desk upon returning to school.  Go for it!

One of the thematic units I cover with my English 11 classes is Antibullying…this set of books will definitely become a lit circle/independent reading option.  Check here for curriculum resources.

Patterson has a new young adult series coming out this month…The Dangerous Days of Daniel X.  Going to have to pick that one up!