Tag: lesson plan

Close Reading: Screenshots

We tell our students of the importance of maintaining a safe, long-view oriented presence online, but what would happen if our phones were taken or observed by someone who didn’t know us? What would give them clues?

I wanted to find out, so I’ve uploaded a few screenshots from my phone yesterday. I’ll post them as a gallery so if you want to use them without my commentary, you can. (Thanks to Morten Hendrickson for introducing me to galleries at WCNYC’14)

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Let’s start with my lock screen.

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I’m pretty much perpetually running in low battery mode, because I go to plug in my phone and get away from it for a while, but then I think of something I want to look up or get others’ perspectives on, and then I head back into the bedroom to unplug it.

((Irene I am Sherlocked pic))

Depending on your schema, you might also recognize the art as the Blessing of Worlds emblem from the video game Destiny. It’s been my lock screen for as long as I can remember, which supports the idea that I’m not much invested in the visual aesthetics of my phone. I couldn’t get a shot of my phone case to deduce from that (because I’m too wimpy-fingered to prise it off), but I’m definitely not one of those people who have a dozen or more cases (tho I wish I were).

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From my home screen, you can see I’ve kept the default Apple background, which perhaps is an indicator that I’m not deeply invested in the aesthetics of my iphone in the same way that, say, I was obsessed in the late 90s/early aughts with crafting the perfect AIM combination of text font, size, and color (Times New Roman bold in a deep green color, in case you were curious).

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From this second of two homescreen pages, I’m VERY interested in what you think of my app downloading habits.

 

(Irene adler in white dress and phone smiling))

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Selfieeeeee. It’s taken on the porch, which if you know me, means I’m writing in my journal and probably sipping some tea. (I’ve had to cut out all but decaf coffee because of med interactions)

Clothing is a costume for me.

((Image of Sherlock in firefighter costume in bedroom)

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This is the screenshot that made me really start getting excited about this post. You want to talk about elevator pitches? I feel like people can get a pretty clear picture of who I am and what I value just from this one image.

Marie Curie? Bucky Fuller? Splitting my time between Seattle and Michigan (no one’s emerald city)? It’s all there in one portrait-rotated image. “No matter the costume, it’s always a self-portrait.”

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Twitter is amazing.

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This is my about page on Facebook. I feel like it speaks for itself, which is kind of the point. The fact that I didn’t “write about myself” there speaks to my reticence toward being too self-promoting in my work and my life.

((John Watson “nothing ever happens to me”))

You may notice that there’s only one quote that isn’t attributed. The person who said it was Dr. Stephens, who for many, many years was both my mom’s and my OB/GYN. He’s the man who managed my parents’ care while they tried for a decade to conceive yours truly. I was hesitant to post his name because I didn’t want people to think that I was  bragging about a PhD fellow thinking I can have and do whatever I want, because that sounded grandiose to the extreme.

The funny thing is that now, in 2016 (he passed in 2005), rereading this quote makes me think immediately of Teachers Who Game. “The world is yours to play with.” Isn’t that lovely? Life is our most important game.

Here’s hoping this has been an enjoyable endeavor!

(laters) http://gph.is/1hF9kl2

Brush of the Gods Math Lesson Plan

mathlessonscommoncore

IT’S TIME TO GET ROCKING WITH A LITERATURE-BASED MATH SITUATION!!! Woooooo!!!

Our unofficial-but-kind-of-official district math module recommends starting the year off with understanding multiplying by 0, 1, 2, 5, and 10. It aligns with an Engage NY module and a Georgia module, but I wanted to start our unit off with a problem-based activity to gauge their understanding and to give us an anchor for future learning.

Last week, I read Lenore Look’s magnificent Brush of the Gods, and my kids adored it. Math specialist Siobhan and I plotted a pretty rad activity based on the main character’s huge fresco murals. I’m excerpting some of our lesson in the text of this post, and the whole activity is available for download at the end of the post.

I am posting this activity on a Sunday and I plan on launching this in class tomorrow. So check back in later this week and see what modifications I needed to make on the fly!

NOT an image of Wu Daozi! This is his portrait of Confucius.

Wu Daozi was a legendary muralist and painter who worked in Xian during the Tang Dynasty. I shared these photos from my 2009 trip to Xian (the first two photos in that post are actually from the Forbidden City in Beijing) to provide a sense of scale for the city walls. Then I’ll share this task with my students (it’s explained using the GRASP model for classroom-based assessments / problem-based learning activities).

Wu Daozi Memorial Fresco

Goal

  • Your task is to create a mural in the fanciful calligraphic style of Wu Daozi. Your mural will be a fresco, using plaster, along with any colored pigments you choose.

Role

  • You are an artist inspired by Wu Daozi visiting the Chinese city of Xian.

Audience

  • Your artwork will be seen by all who travel into, out of, or around the city of Xian. 32.9 million tourists visit Xian every year (http://www.chinatouronline.com/, 2008). The tourism board of Xian needs to know how much your mural will cost in Yuan, the national currency of China.

Situation

  • The challenge involves designing a mural on a grid. You have one week to submit your design to the tourism board.

Product, Performance, and Purpose

  • You will create a mural design, and you will also present a cost analysis of your design. The tourism board of Xian needs to know how much money to budget for the mural, as well as the amount of supplies you will need.

Standards and Criteria for Success

  • A successful mural and budget need to include:
    • The total cost of your plaster, pigment, and other supplies.
    • A breakdown of your costs.
    • A mathematical justification of your costs.
    • Your mural, designed on grid paper.
    • A reflection sharing budget suggestions with aspiring artists.
  • Your presentation might include:
    • A budget planning sheet.
    • Photographs of your budget calculations.

We designed a price sheet that would encourage students to perform repeated addition on numbers they have experience skip counting with.

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We also included some items students would need only one of (like the brush), to gauge how they choose to add that toward their total budget.

Siobhan helped me plan a 2nd and 3rd grade rubric with standards from both Common Core mathematical practices and content. Feel free to use these plans however you see fit, but comments are always appreciated so we know how successful things have been in your class!

I acknowledge that there are many other directions I could have taken this activity. I plan on revisiting it later in the year for an area/perimeter situation that BLESSEDLY DOES NOT INVOLVE GARDENS, but for now, my main goal is for students to explore repeated addition and patterns with 0, 1, 2, 5, and 10.

Goodies here! Click click click! Brush of the Gods lesson plans & rubrics.

Book of the Week: The Judge

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

The Judge, by Harve Zemach

Cumulative stories are one of the six main types of predictable books, perfect for early readers. Apparently, “children get comfort from repetition,” although I can’t put my finger on the official research-y studies to back this up. This one offers some insight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about cumulative stories. Why they’re so catchy, why they’re so timeless, and why the Caldcott committees seem to ADORE them (Drummer Hoff, House in the Night). This isn’t limited to just their selections of the Caldecott medal winners, as evidenced by this week’s honor book. The Judge follows a pompous counsel as he rejects the excuses and warnings of a creature whose eyes are scary, tail is hairy, etc. etc.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: Big, Bad, and a Little Bit Scary

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Big, Bad, and a Little Bit Scary, by Wade Zahares

We have two copies of this book, in case you want to develop a team lesson around it. It’s guided reading level P, so it’d be perfect to use as a formative assessment for end-of-3rd-grade standards (Federal Way 3rd graders should be at an instructional level of O-P by June).

Each poem is by a different author, and at least three of the poems meet the cognitive rigor detailed in Common Core Appendix A. I’ve copied “The Alligator,” “The Eel,” and “The Barracuda” into a document for your shared reading pleasure.

"Fall is Flying By"

On an unrelated note, you should definitely take a look at Zahares’ website, which includes a pretty impressive body of work. If I had unlimited funds, I’d get this print for our classroom. They feel like super-color-charged versions of art deco era WPA posters.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

 

  • Check for understanding. Remind students that although many of the poems are short, it’s still important to pause and make sure they fully understand what was read. One reason this is particularly important is the use of figurative language. If a student reads too quickly and is somewhat familiar with the animal featured, they may assume some qualities, such as “They’ll strip off your flesh like you’d skin a banana” (from Dick King-Smith’s “Strippers”) can be taken literally.
  • Determine and analyze author’s purpose and support with text. November’s literacy focus of the month at Wildwood is author’s purpose, so I’ve been a bit fixated on this skill lately. Each of the poems (particularly the three I shared in the link above) are written in a distinctly different style, each of which seems influenced by the animal that’s the subject of the poems. Talk about the word choice, rhyming patterns, and phrase length in each of the three poems. How did the author’s choices change the mood of each poem?

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Author’s Purpose Performance Task

Wildwood’s literary focus of November and December is author’s purpose, so I used some of the ideas I got from our district’s Standards-Based Assessment team.

For the fiction task, students are picture book publishers trying to convince elementary school teachers to purchase books for their lessons. For the nonfiction task, students are interns at National Geographic trying to score a top photographer to shoot images for a new nonfiction text. Students have a variety of ways to show their understanding of both the surface-level author’s purpose as well as their deeper themes or messages.

I designed this assessment for my 2nd/3rd GATE class, but I think it could be modified for 4th and 5th grade just by changing the text grade levels. I’m basing the end-of-the-year Fountas & Pinnell grade levels off district standards, with an eye toward our future adoption of Common Core Standards. If your students aren’t ready to be assessed at the end-of-the-year reading level, no worries — just give them more appropriate texts.

Here are the books I’m using for the fiction task. I picked books we had multiple copies of in our school library, so I could get a few extra copies checked out from the public library and then have enough for my whole class.

2nd (Guided Reading Level L-M)

  • Alexander, who’s not (do you hear me? I mean it!) going to move, Judith Viorst (M)
  • Barn Dance!, Bill Martin (L)
  • A Chair for my Mother, Vera B. Williams (M)
  • Cinderella’s Rat, Susan Meddaugh (L)
  • Galimoto, Karen Lynn Williams (M)

3rd (Guided Reading Level O-P)

  • Animal Snackers, Betsy Lewin (O)
  • A Bad Case of Stripes, David Shannon (P)
  • Legend of the Bluebonnet, Tomie DePaola (O)
  • Mrs. Katz and Tush, Patricia Polacco (P)
  • Sam Johnson and the Blue Ribbon Quilt, Lisa Campbell Ernst (P)

4th grade would use level S-T, and 5th grade would use U-V.

There are rubrics included with both the fiction and the nonfiction tasks. Download and enjoy; I always appreciate comments and feedback!

Author’s Purpose Fiction Performance Task — Book Publisher

Author’s Purpose Nonfiction Performance Task — National Geographic

Book of the Week: It’s Catching — Head Lice

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

It’s Catching: Head Lice, by Angela Royston

Look what I discovered in the library office! A book ALL ABOUT LICE! And wait, it gets better! We have THREE COPIES of this book, so an entire grade level team could use it as a mentor text! I can’t wait to hear if this sparks any powerful conversations at collaborations this week. I can’t wait to bring it up at MY collaboration TODAY! Haha.

I ALSO can’t wait to see if we have any of the other books in this series (featuring warts, eczema, etc). Back in our school’s SFA Roots days, this book was originally paired with The Very Quiet Cricket by Eric Carle. (You can watch a video of The Very Quiet Cricket here) I think the pairing of those two books is awesome for several reasons:

  • The discussion of the differences between fiction and nonfiction.
  • Talking about why publishers choose to use photographs or illustrations.
  • Pondering why bugs in some books are seen as cute and in other books it seems like they’re included for the gross factor.
  • Discussing the positive and negative roles insects and bugs play in our lives.

Honestly, this is getting me very excited about our upcoming Insect science unit later this year. WOO!

Can’t get enough sweet books about lice? Check these out! Do you love Rookie Read-About Books? You Have Head Lice! is perfect for you. Interested in a spiritual exploration of lice? Try Head Lice… What Do I Do Now?? Looking to not be limited by lice? Learn more about other icky ailments in Tapeworms, Foot Fungus, Lice, and More: The Yucky Disease Book.

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

  • Practice common sight words and high frequency words. Chances are, students have never read a book on head lice before. Despite this, there are probably plenty of words in the text that they already do know. Talk about the idea that knowing a good number of sight words is particularly important in nonfiction text, where your comprehension energy will probably be spent learning new information.
  • Adjust and apply different reading rates to match text. If sight words aren’t a classwide concern, you might want to take this opportunity to slow down when you learn new information. Chances are, students who go to school are probably familiar with lice in a general way, but model and talk about slowing down and/or pausing when encountering new, surprising, or interesting information.

Behaviors that Support Reading

  • Work quietly. Head lice are pretty gross. Chances are, your students probably had a vocal or physical response to share while you were reading the book. Discuss and brainstorm examples of how students can express their emotions or reactions appropriately while they work independently so they don’t feel stifled, yet they don’t interrupt students around them.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

I have been itching my head throughout the entire time I’ve been working on this post, but let me affirm that I have NEVER had head lice. Additionally, HEAD LICE is the reason, ladies and gentlemen of my classroom if you’ve read down this far, that students cannot wear hats at school but teachers can. Students have a tendency to share hats, but teachers usually do not.

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Book of the Week: How Animal Babies Stay Safe

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

How Animal Babies Stay Safe, by Mary Ann Fraser

You can see a Google Books preview of this book here.

Author/illustrator Mary Ann Fraser blogs pretty regularly. It’s always neat to see into an illustrator’s process, so you should check it out.

There is a lesson for first graders included with this mentor text. It includes suggested conversation ideas along with page numbers. The question prompts are also included as labels stuck to pages throughout the book. The included lesson focuses on these standards:

  • 1.5 Locates Information
  • 2.1 Comprehends important ideas and details
  • 2.1.2 Summarizes a simple text with guidance
A brief aside: WHY is it that when humans are featured as minor characters in a book about some totally different topic they are almost always straight-haired blonde/brunette white folks? This book was written in 2002. I wish there were more non-white characters in books that weren’t just about “issues.” See rad Michigan educator Colby Sharp’s views on this matter here.

Anyways. This book would work perfectly with The Bird Lady, a Level J guided reading text available in our bookroom. The information section in the back talks about what humans do when animals lose their support system, and Bird Lady is a critter rehabilitator.

There is also a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Comprehension

  • Monitor and Fix Up. If you follow the lesson plan included, you will create a chart showing the different ways animals carry, protect, and provide shelter for their young. You can explain that this graphic organizer can help you monitor your comprehension — if you notice that you haven’t recorded anything in a page or two, there’s a chance that you missed some key information.
  • Recognize and explain cause and effect relationships. The book discusses many different actions that animals take to take care of their babies, all with the effect of keeping them safe. Talk with students about the idea that a cause (i.e. a crocodile putting her babies in her mouth) can also be an effect (A predator had to cause the crocodile to put the babies in her mouth in the first place). At the end of the book, Fraser talks about why it is that animals are so keen to protect their young. This could be used to explore the idea that although there are many smaller causes and effects in the book, they all fit under the overarching idea of protecting young animals.

Expand Vocabulary

  • Use prior knowledge and context to predict and confirm meaning. The lesson plan included in the book bag features a conversation about the word “instinct.”

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!

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Book of the Week: Olly and Me

Every Monday, I highlight a book from our school bookroom along with lesson plan suggestions. I hope you find this useful, and please leave a comment with any suggestions or additions!

Olly and Me, by Shirley Hughes

This book is out of print, but we do have two copies in the mentor text bag in the bookroom. Although it looks like a regular children’s book (perhaps in the style of Eve Bunting), it’s actually a book of poetry. If you’ve been searching for a solid collection of free verse poetry, you’ve found it.

The author, Shirley Hughes, is apparently a household name across the pond in England. Her book Dogger was featured as The Guardian’s Classic of the Month in 2004.

The Guardian also posted a lengthy interview with Ms. Hughes in 2009, the best quote from which I believe is, “The idea that pictures are sternly removed from you as soon as you learn to read is a truly terrible one.”

I’d love to use this book to bridge from personal narrative writing into poetry, especially helping students realize the ideas they’ve generated for narrative can be transfered to another writing form.

One poem features a visit to the Natural History Museum. Poetry would be SUCH a neat way to reflect on a field trip!

There is a CAFE menu included with this mentor text, and I’ve highlighted these as suggested lessons:

Accuracy

  • Use beginning and ending sounds. The poem “Happy Birthday, Dear Mom” features a goodly collection of B words, without being a ridiculous tongue twister. In primary grades, this could be a good authentic text to pull /b/ sounds from.

Fluency

  • Voracious Reading. Voracious readers choose books written by both US and foreign authors. It could be worthwhile to talk about how a British accent might change the rhythm of poetry — sometimes rhyming words won’t rhyme if you say them in a standard Midwestern American accent. Many of our students have accents as well. How do our individual accents impact our oral and silent reading? This might even be an entry point into examining whether students are subvocalizing when they read silently.
  • Use punctuation to enhance phrasing and prosody. I’m not gonna lie, I still really struggle with figuring out how to read free verse poetry out loud. Do I stop at the end of the line? This runs counter to what we teach younger readers when they’re reading blocks of prose text. Or do I stop at the punctuation marks? What if there are no punctuation marks? If you need more practice like I do, The Writer’s Almanac often features non-rhyming poetry in its daily broadcast. Click on the “Listen” link, then fast forward to the end of the recording, which is when Garrison Keillor reads a poem out loud.

Please add any lessons or supplemental materials to the book bag so future teachers can utilize your good thinking!

Comments and constructive feedback are always welcomed. Please let me know if these lessons were useful in your class!