New (Online) Literacies for Your Elementary Researchers

Posted on June 10, 2013 Written by Donelle Blubaugh Leave a Comment

TeachRead_5Are your 3rd-5th grade students learning the skills they need to conduct online research? Last year the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project conducted a survey of over 2,000 advanced placement (AP) and National Writing Project (NWP) teachers to determine their perspectives on students’ research habits and the impact of technology on their studies.

The survey report How Teens Do Research in the Digital World concludes that virtually all (99%) survey participants agree “the internet enables students to access a wider range of resources than would otherwise be available.” At the same time, a significant majority of these teachers strongly agreed that students expect to be able to find information quickly and easily using the internet. 83% felt that the amount of information available online is overwhelming to most students. 71% agreed that today’s technologies discourage students from using a wide range of resources for their research. 60% agreed that these technologies make it harder for students to find credible sources of information.

There’s a lot that 3rd to 5th grade teachers can do give students the foundational skills they need to tackle rigorous research projects throughout their academic careers AND address the Common Core State Standards that concern informational text:

  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.7 Draw on information from multiple print or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve a problem efficiently.
  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.8 Explain how an author uses reasons and evidence to support particular points in a text, identifying which reasons and evidence support which point(s).
  • CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.5.9 Integrate information from several texts on the same topic in order to write or speak about the subject knowledgeably.

Check out session 5, “New Literacies of the Internet,” in the video workshop Teaching Reading 3-5. In the video, Donald Leu of the University of Connecticut clarifies some of the differences between reading narrative text and reading informational text, and then defines five skill areas that students need to draw on to learn from online information.

  1. Identifying important questions: In the video you’ll see educators helping students generate questions on topics such as global warming and colonial American history. Good questions lead to good searches.
  2. Searching for information: Young researchers can too easily get in the habit of clicking on anything that turns up on a search results page. The teachers in the session 5 video walk students through taking a close look at search result summaries to make inferences about which sites will be the most useful.
  3. Analyzing and evaluating information: You can learn a lot from an “About Us” page. When was the information created? Who created it and why?
  4. Synthesizing information: Dr. Leu points out that synthesis is different on the internet. In print, the text is contained. Online, the text is constructed as students navigate from link to link. Skimming and scanning with purpose are important here. Students need to practice monitoring themselves to keep from getting distracted from their purpose for reading. Graphic organizers to the rescue!
  5. Communicating information: Students can practice safe and authentic online communications by sharing their research efforts with other students. How about 3rd graders creating a shared list of the “best” sites for learning about Egyptian civilization?

You can use the session’s Literacy Practice Portfolio to reflect on your current practice and to plan for implementing new techniques. And when today’s third grader astonishes his future AP teacher with his online research acumen, you will hear distant applause.

 

Filed Under: Across the Curriculum, Literature & Language Arts, Social Studies & History, Strategic Classrooms Tagged: , , , ,

Multicultural Literature Helps Middle Schoolers with Search for Identity

Posted on May 31, 2013 Written by Donelle Blubaugh Leave a Comment

TeachMultiLitAs immigration reform is debated in the halls of Congress and in communities across the nation, now is a good time to shine a spotlight on the contributions that immigrants are making to American culture and commerce. Annenberg Learner offers dozens of resources for teaching and learning about immigrant experiences, but in honor of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, I’m going to hone in on some strategies for teaching multicultural literature. The workshop series Teaching Multicultural Literature: A Workshop for the Middle Grades demonstrates how teachers across the country are using literature to engage students in reading and responding to the work of writers such as Gish Jen, Tina Yun Lee and Lemsey Namioka.

The works that you will see students exploring in Workshop 1, for example, focus on the theme of dual-identity and the challenges of trying to fit into a new culture while honoring family heritage. These themes are a perfect fit for middle grade students who are often struggling to form and express their own identities.

For example, students will relate warmly to Gish Gen’s character Mona Chang from the story “What Means Switch” who was “ad-libbing [her] way through eighth grade.” As teacher Carol O’Donnell points out, “Junior high school students are really travelers between worlds. On one hand, they’re very young children who need a lot of nurturing and support and encouragement. On the other hand, they’re young adults who really need an incredible amount of challenge and independence and pushing.”

O’Donnell uses poetry, short stories and biography to give students insight into the authors’ experiences with being perceived as “other.” The literature also serves as a springboard to discussion of their own experiences with identity issues, bias, and self-discovery. O’Donnell uses structured Peer Facilitation Circles as a strategy to help students make deep explorations of the readings and appreciate these authors’ voices as part of the American story. In the Workshop 1 video, you will see students who take responsibility for their own learning and show genuine respect for their peers’ thoughts and opinions.

The work of many Asian-Pacific American writers is featured throughout the eight Teaching Multicultural Literature workshops. You’ll find content and strategies that fit your students’ interests and needs. When you introduce these writers to your students, some will see mirror images of themselves; some will see worlds they didn’t know existed. How do you use the richness of multicultural literature to engage your students?

 

Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts, Special Days Tagged: , , ,

Monday Motivation: Teaching Kindergartners to be Story-Tellers

Posted on May 20, 2013 Written by Annenberg Learner Staff Leave a Comment

Arts_Bringing Artists_warmups In The Arts in Every Classroom, “Bringing Artists to Your Community,” theatre artist Birgitta De Pree involves a kindergarten class in a storytelling activity that engages the imagination while reinforcing story structure skills. She warms the students up with activities that relax them and build trust. Watch the video until 14:00. While Ms. De Pree served as an artist-in-residence in the school, these engaging activities can be adapted by any language arts teacher willing to take on the role.

Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts, The Arts Tagged: , ,

Laughing and Learning with Limericks

Posted on May 15, 2013 Written by Donelle Blubaugh Leave a Comment

WGBHTeaching Math K-4 LibThere once was a poet named Lear

Whose fondness for nonsense was dear.

His verses were short

And silly, of course.

And that’s why we fete him each year!

As I see it there are at least three good reasons to introduce your students to limericks this month:

1. May 12 was Edward Lear’s birthday and Limerick Day. Children today enjoy Lear’s sly sense of humor and the limerick’s manageable structure as much as the children for whom he wrote his verses in 1846. You can use the illustrated, closed-captioned audio book to introduce your students to the silly fun and rhyming challenges of limericks. Although limericks have a reputation for being bawdy or coarse, you can find many kid-friendly examples by searching limericks for children. Visit the Limerick Factory on Learner.org to give students practice with the form, permission to be goofy, and the urge to write their own poems.

2. Testing season is upon us and it’s likely you and your students could use a little comic relief. Humor is a healthful stress reliever. Sharing a limerick “moment” will take only a few minutes of class time. The resulting giggles (or groans) will be a refreshing break from test-itis. Provide students with a physical break as well by inviting them to stand up and clap their hands to the pronounced rhythm of a limerick.

3. Analyzing patterns in poetry is similar to recognizing patterns in mathematics. Using the Limerick Factory on Learner.org, you might have students devise codes for communicating the rhythmic and rhyming structures of limericks. Students who have not yet picked up on number patterns may benefit from the practice of finding patterns in accessible poems or nursery rhymes.

You can get a lot of brain-building mileage out of a five-line rhyming poem. May I challenge you to finish this one?

There once was a teacher named West

Whose students were scared of the test . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts, Mathematics

Teaching the Magic of The Great Gatsby

Posted on May 13, 2013 Written by Shea Irick Leave a Comment

The Great GatsbyJazz, silver, gold, champagne, opulence, New York City.  The decadence of the Roaring Twenties is brought to life in my all-time favorite novel to teach, The Great Gatsby. From the moment I enter the world and thoughts of Nick Carraway, I am swept away to another time and place, which for each future generation is becoming increasingly erased from the collective consciousness. Teaching the novel keeps an important voice and piece of American culture alive.

To give context to the novel, it was helpful to have an exposition on the era of the Roaring Twenties. We looked at the changing lives of women and how the emergence of the “new woman” who smoked, drank alcohol, and dated was a major cultural shift in society. It was amusing to see students wrap their minds around how a woman showing her knees could be considered scandalous. It was also helpful to build an understanding of what was considered the “modern world” in Fitzgerald’s time, especially to a generation of students who can’t imagine a world without the internet, let alone a world where electric light and automobiles are the latest thing. American Passages, unit 11, “Modernist Portraits,” provides historical and literary context for this time period and biographical information on F. Scott Fitzgerald.

My teaching of the novel revolved around introducing the concept of The American Dream. Students were asked to give their own definitions of the concept, which usually included words like money, success, happiness, education, love, property. After they established their own definitions, I began to introduce the earliest mention of the concept with Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and built on the idea with the teachings of Benjamin Franklin. See American Passages, unit 4,“Spirit of Nationalism.”  As we moved through the novel, students were given the opportunity to examine how The American Dream was attained, or not attained, through the lives of the characters. They began to peel away at the imagery and magic of Fitzgerald’s words to see the underbelly of the dream, the “valley of ashes” that lurks throughout the novel. They drew personal connections to current social and political issues and argued if indeed we are all “borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Another fun way to build connection to the novel was to have the students modernize a scene from the novel. Jazz became hip-hop, “old sport” became “dude,” and Model-T’s became Mercedes.Fitzgerald

To end the unit, I showed the 1974 version of the movie, giving the students a chance to see how their visualization of the novel matched the vision of writer Francis Ford Coppola and director Jack Clayton.  Students generally liked the movie version, finding some aspects a little over-dramatic or corny at times. Clayton’s affinity for highlighting Fitzgerald’s symbolic use of silver and gold with camera angles to make objects and eyes literally sparkle usually got some chuckles.  I often wished someone would do a remake and bring a modern cinematic eye to the beauty of the novel. Well, I don’t have to wish anymore!  The Great Gatsby starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, Tobey Maguire as Nick, and Carey Mulligan as Daisy premiered on May 10th.  Check out the trailer for the movie.

I can’t wait to see how the other Gatsby fans react to the new version and if the remake is bringing new life to the teaching of the novel.  Are you building your unit with the remake in mind? What creative ways do you bring the novel to life?

 

Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts Tagged: ,

National Environmental Education Week (April 14-20)

Posted on April 16, 2013 Written by Annenberg Learner Staff 1 Comment

HabPlanet_earthDiscuss current and future environmental problems, including possible solutions, with your students. The following resources provide ideas for science, social studies, and literature classrooms:

 

 

 

  1. Hear thought-provoking views and research findings from experts in the field, including entomologist E.O. Wilson in The Habitable Planet, unit 13 video, “Looking Forward: Our Global Experiment.”
  2. Two interactives in The Habitable Planet allow you and your students to manage an energy crisis. The Carbon Lab explores how human influence on carbon output affects the future health of the Earth’s atmosphere.  In the Energy Lab interactive, try developing a portfolio of energy resources that cuts back on CO2 and considers the pros and cons of multiple sources of energy.
  3. Gage Reeves asks his 5th graders to relate their reading about global warming and climate change to events and products in their community in Teaching Reading 3-5 Workshop, classroom program 13, “Reading Across the Curriculum.”
  4. Consider the possible conflicts that arise when living in a future society affected by significant global warming and other challenges by reading “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler.  The Expanding Canon: Teaching Multicultural Literature, session 7, “Critical Pedagogy,” includes an audio clip of the author and a synopsis of the story.
  5. Learn about where oil comes from, how it is extracted and used for energy, and the effects of using oil as an energy source on the environment in Earth Revealed, program 26, “Living With Earth, Part II.”
  6. Explore environmental mysteries like the causes of ice ages and consider how life shapes the earth in Planet Earth, program 3, “The Climate Puzzle,” and program 7, “Fate of the Earth.”
  7. Economic stories show how pollution is a “negative externality” that can have serious consequences for economic efficiency in Economics U$A, unit 8, “Pollution and the Environment.”
  8. The World of Chemistry, program 17, “The Precious Envelope,” explains ozone depletion and the greenhouse effect on the earth’s atmosphere.


Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts, Science & Nature, Social Studies & History, Special Days Tagged: , , , , , , ,

Monday Motivation: Cultivating Young Poets

Posted on April 15, 2013 Written by Donelle Blubaugh Leave a Comment

Write in the Middle_3A 7th grader recently gave me a wonderful gift. She invited me to read an anthology of poems she wrote in 6th grade. Zoe’s poems were sensitive, wistful, beautiful, and silly. As I read them silently, she was drawn back to them and read each one aloud as a critical reader of her own work. I saw a frisson of pleasure when a poem hit its intended mark. Some, from her more mature 7th grade perspective, she pronounced “childish.”

In Zoe’s poems, I could also see her 6th grade teacher’s approach to teaching the art of writing poetry. The anthology included cinquains, haiku, clerihews, and acrostics. In other words, Zoe’s teacher had given her students accessible models of poetic forms and content, laying a safe foundation on which young writers could express their own emotions and observations.

Whether your students are eager to read and write poetry or are resistant to the craft, they will benefit from this approach. Two learner.org video workshops demonstrate techniques that you can use to cultivate your young poets.

In “Gaining Insight Through Poetry” in Teaching ‘The Children of Willesden Lane,’ high school teacher Chris Mazzino uses “copy change” to help students thoughtfully empathize with the children portrayed in the holocaust memoir they read as part of a citywide reading program. Copy change involves using another writer’s structure as the scaffold for your own work.  Here, Mr. Mazzino and his creative writing students are exploring what it feels like to be an outsider. He uses the student-written poem “Will They Ever Learn?” (page three of PDF) to instigate a discussion of “otherness.” Afterwards, students copy change the poem to express their own experiences and emotions. In this instance, the copy change technique provided an accessible model and a safety net for encouraging teens to share emotions they might otherwise keep to themselves.

In Write in the Middle: A Workshop for Middle School Teachers, workshop 3, “Teaching Poetry,” two master teachers—Vivian Johnson and Jack Wilde—share how they help their students develop as readers and writers of poetry. Both teachers emphasize the importance of immersing their students in poetry throughout the school year to ready them for formal writing units. Mr. Wilde breaks down resistance by providing his students with accessible poems than can be understood on the first reading. Ms. Johnson makes the writing process non-threatening to her 8th graders by presenting forms such as found poetry and list poems.

These teachers agree that close reading of model poems is essential, but they don’t dwell on interpretation of abstractions. They do hone in on structure, word choice, rhythm, and line breaks. They examine techniques students can transfer to their own writing and use with power and purpose. Mr. Wilde uses Mekeel McBride’s poem “The Truth About Why I Love Potatoes,” a fun five-stanza poem that views the potato from five perspectives, to help students discover how ideas can be handled in poetic form and what poems can do that prose can’t. He asks, “What can you learn from Mekeel about writing a poem?” One student responds, “You don’t have to say a potato is a potato, but what else could it be.” At this point, his students are ready and eager to write their own poems based on McBride’s model.

The poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “Imitation, conscious imitation, is one of the great methods, perhaps the method of learning to write.” And, as you’ll see in these videos, imitation can put students on the road to profound and beautiful invention. What a gift!

Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts, Special Days Tagged: ,

A Jazz Festival in Your Classroom

Posted on April 9, 2013 Written by Donelle Blubaugh Leave a Comment

World of Music_jazzAs the weather warms, jazz festivals will be springing up all over. Why not celebrate spring and Jazz Appreciation Month this April by holding a jazz festival in your classroom? A key word search for “jazz” on learner.org returns a host of resources that you can use to guide your students to appreciate this uniquely American musical genre and to understand its influence on culture here and around the world.

For example, American Passages: A Literary Survey, unit 11, “Modernist Portraits,” describes the dramatic social and cultural changes that Americans experienced during the years between World War I and World War II.  Jazz provided the soundtrack for these changes and had a profound influence on visual artists, poets, and novelists who sought to capture its images and rhythms. Use the American Passages archives to find audio and visual artifacts from the Jazz Age that illustrate the innovation and energy of musicians and writers such as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jacob Lawrence.

Try asking students how structure, improvisation, and collaboration—aspects of jazz adopted by so many artists working during the modernist period—can be applied in their world. The Problem-Based Learning activities included in unit 11 could be presented as a way to put a jazz spin on collaborative projects in school.

Jazz up this historical exploration by inviting a local performer or your school’s jazz ensemble to play for your students and to discuss the unique interaction of structure, improvisation, and collaboration in jazz. Or check out Exploring the World of Music, program 11, “Composers and Improvisers.”  At 9:09 you’ll find a great discussion from saxophonist Joshua Redman about the role of improvisation in jazz. In program 10, “The Shape of Music,” the segment that begins at 8:52 illustrates why collaboration is essential to improvisation in a group performance.

What are other ways to use jazz to inspire learning in the classroom? I’d love to hear your improvisations!

 

Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts, Social Studies & History, Special Days, The Arts Tagged: , , , ,

Monday Motivation: Maxine Kumin and Setting in Poetry

Posted on April 8, 2013 Written by Annenberg Learner Staff Leave a Comment

Literary Visions_12_KuminLandscapeAre you and your students writing poems for National Poetry Month? Watch Maxine Kumin read her poetry and hear how setting echoes the themes in her work in Literary Visions, program 12, “A Sense of Place: Setting and Character in Poetry.” Start at 21:54 in the video. Kumin says, “I’m a poet of the seasons. I’m a poet of the natural world.”

Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts, Monday Motivation Tagged: , ,

Monday Motivation: Read and Write Poetry to Explore Identity

Posted on April 1, 2013 Written by Annenberg Learner Staff Leave a Comment

NaomiShihabNye

Carol O’Donnell’s students discuss dual identities, being caught between two worlds, in Teaching Multicultural Literature, workshop 1, “Engagement and Dialogue.” Poetry written by Naomi Shihab Nye is used to introduce the concept of exploring one’s own identity.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in Missouri to an American mother and Palestinian father. She has lived in old Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas and traveled to the Middle East and Asia.  Her work incorporates the voices and perspectives of Mexican Americans and Arab Americans. Nye is inspired by small things and everyday events, and she journals “because I wanted to remember everything. The quilt, the cherry tree, the creek. The neat whop of a baseball rammed perfectly with a bat. My father’s funny Palestinian stories.”  See more about Nye here and read her poem Half-and-Half here. Use her story and poetry to inspire your students to think about their own identities and what it means to be part of a multicultural community- whether your definition of community is as small as a classroom or as big as the world.

Nye says in an ALAN review: “Anyone who feels poetry is an alien or ominous force should consider the style in which human beings think. “How do you think,” I ask my students. “Do you think in complete, elaborate sentences? In fully developed paragraphs with careful footnotes? Or in flashes and burst of images, snatches of lines leaping one to the next, descriptive fragments, sensory details?” We think in poetry. But some people pretend poetry is far away.

 

Filed Under: Literature & Language Arts, Monday Motivation Tagged: , , ,
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