Feeling strategies at work

I started thinking the other day about how much has been written lately about getting kids to use their strategies as they read. We want them to use these strategies to make sense of text and to help them get unstuck when they get stuck. In one 5th grade class, the teacher and I have been talking about, modeling, and doing shared demonstrations with the kids since September on all kinds of useful strategies, but I decided to come at it from a different angle. I wanted them to feel how natural and automatic their strategies came into play when the text was something that was extremely easy. So the day before Thanksgiving I did some storytelling for the class (now don’t stop reading because you are NOT a storyteller; you can do this same lesson with a read aloud book.)

I storytold the folktale “Tinderbox” first. After the kids did a quick turn and talk about what they liked about the story, we looked at a chart with pre-written words — visualizing, predicting, making connections, questioning, inferring (and under inferring it said, “characters, underlying ideas, word meanings.”) As we talked about each one, the kids had so much to say. I was amazed! There was no “pulling teeth” to keep this discussion going. Here are a few snippets from that conversation:

Pat: When I was telling this tale I had no book or props in front of me. Did you get any pictures in your mind? What mental image was clear to you during the telling?

The 5th graders described in great detail the chamber with three doors, the enormous dogs sitting on top of each sea chest, the witch sitting by the large oak tree, and many more scenes.

As we discussed predicting, almost every student said they predicted that the third sea chest would contain gold. Following that, other kids shared ideas of when their predictions didn’t come true. One student said, “I thought sure the witch was going to kill the soldier when he wouldn’t give up the tinderbox, but I was surprised that she was the one who burst into 1,000 pieces.” Another said, “when you said the princess was locked in a tower, I thought this story was going to turn into Rapunzel, but it didn’t.” It was easy to lead the discussion into the idea that sometimes we need to rearrange our predictions as we get more information. The discussion continued with connections to other books and questions or wonderings the students had during and after the story.

My favorite part of the discussion came when the kids realized how easy it was to infer word meanings when they were totally engaged in the story. I asked them to figure out what it meant when I told about the witch having a hard time pulling up the soldier with the rope “because he was so laden down with all that gold.” Though that’s certainly not a word they use, they quickly figured out what it meant. Several students were also able to come up with a word that described the main character of the soldier (another way to infer) — greedy, clever, self-centered, careless with money — and gave evidence from the story to back up their idea.

Pat: We also said that inferring had a lot to do with reading deeply and trying to “see more.” Did you get any idea about how women were treated back in these medieval times?

Serena: Not so great. That princess didn’t get to decide who she wanted to marry. Her parents wanted to decide for her.

Chris: Yeah, and the soldier wasn’t very respectful of the witch. I mean, she was just an old lady, but because she was ugly, he called her a witch. And she made him rich, but he still wouldn’t give her back her tinderbox.

I ended the discussion (which could have gone on and on!) with reminding the kids that what they were doing was feeling their strategies at work. I said, “You see, you own these strategies. They are yours. It’s like you have powers – thinking powers – that can help you understand what you are reading. It was so easy for you to do it with a story that’s not hard to comprehend, but they will work just as well when you are reading on your own in your chapter books.”

I felt this lesson had a strong impact on the struggling readers in the group, and yet everyone in the class enjoyed the telling of “Tinderbox” and later “Tailypo.” How visible are you making those comprehension strategies for kids? Are you giving kids time to really feel how the strategies can work for them?

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Playing with Books

Our read aloud time is one of my kindergarteners favorite times of the day. They love to listen to books and to talk about the books we read. Whenever I can, I will use realia or puppets while reading a book to my class. It makes the story come alive, engages all my kids and helps my ELLs connect with the book. Our Pete the Cat stuffed animal and Very Hungry Caterpillar puppet are favorites for the kids to play with after hearing the stories many times. I recently got props to go with Mrs. Wishy-Washy (a tin bucket, a cow, a horse and a duck) with the intention of using them during math for storytelling problems. While they are great for that, my kids started getting them out during our literacy stations to retell the story. They were retelling the story, sometimes using the book, sometimes not , capturing the different voices, dialogue and general storyline. They pretended to be the characters, changing their voices to go along with the story and retold the story numerous times. This is going to become a regular literacy station in our classroom with props for other books available to play with as they retell the story or make up a new story. Thanks to a picture I saw on Twitter from @TeachLearnLive, I’m planning a Knuffle Bunny station with a cardboard box for a clothes dryer, a clothes basket and a Knuffle Bunny doll. Hattie and the Fox props are ready to go next week too. I’m looking forward to seeing what else comes out of this book play over the next several weeks. I plan on observing, listening and joining in on the play during our literacy station time. What books do you use props for? So many possibilities!

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Writing for a Reason

We’ve been making books in my kindergarten class since the first week of school and I am amazed at the wonderful books my students have written already this year. Most of my writers write wordless picture books, although a few are adding letters and names of their friends, as well as dedication pages. When students share their texts, they do a great job “reading” the pictures as they tell their story. When I talk with the kids about their books, I notice that the majority of them are on one topic, even though the blank books I give them have five pages of paper. Some books are personal narratives, some are made-up stories; others are list books and nonfiction books. Our bookmaking time is supported with LOTS of read aloud books, conversations about what authors do when they write books, and invitations (not prompts) to make books like our favorite authors.

“Mo Willems uses speech bubbles to help Elephant and Piggie tell the story. You could try that in your book.”
“David Shannon makes us laugh when we read his books. You might want to make a book that makes your reader laugh.”
“Pumpkin Circle teaches us about something real that happens in nature. You’ve learned a lot about pumpkins and monarch butterflies. You could write a book that teaches someone about those things or something else you know a lot about.”
“Bill Martin, Jr. writes about the alphabet having an adventure in Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. You could write a book about the alphabet too.”

My kindergarten writers have an hour-long writer’s workshop every day. They are never at a loss of what to write about and they complain when it’s time to stop. They truly love writing and already see themselves as authors. Standing on the shoulders of favorite authors and envisioning themselves making books just like Mo Willems, Eric Carle and Jan Thomas keeps our workshop thriving daily.

This past week we decided that our kinder classroom needed some labels to help us put supplies away and to direct visitors to specific areas in our room. We made a bunch of labels together using interactive writing, with me sharing the pen with my young writers. Our bathroom was carefully labeled (to help the preschool kids who visit our room during art), the window, the block area, the clock, the books, and so on. Since enthusiasm was high, I decided to take this meaningful activity and link it to the writing my students do every day.

After labeling the room, I invited the children to try labeling in their books. “You might want to try labeling some of the pictures in your books today. That will help someone else read your book – just in case you aren’t sitting there to tell them about it”. It was a huge “a-ha” moment for many of the children. There was an explosion of letters and words filling the pages of their books. They saw a reason and a purpose for adding words to their stories and moved to a new level of bookmaking. I can’t wait to see where our writing goes from here!

How is writer’s workshop going in your kindergarten or first grade classroom? What real world writing are your students engaged in?

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Inferring themes and more

The classroom teacher of the 5th grade class I work in suggested I do the interactive read aloud the other day — my favorite thing! Since this is a Literacy Collaborative school, reading workshop is opened with a ‘readers’ statement,’ (a short statement about something readers do that helps anchor our instruction and focus our students) so I began with “Readers often read deeply and try to ‘see more’ than just the surface storyline.”

Since the start of school we have been talking about inferring, reading between the lines, figuring out the underlying message of a picture book if there is one. The class had read Ish and Crow Boy, along with a few others, and had some great discussions about the message or theme. (By the way, the teacher and I don’t worry much about whether students can define the words ‘infer’ or ‘theme’. We feel it’s more important that they actually DO infer, read deeply, support their opinion about a theme they’ve discovered, comprehend well and so on.)

We’re finding that the students are not familiar with a lot of themes in the literature they read (after all they are only 10 and 11 years old), so we’ve been trying to support them by guiding their thinking as we discuss texts together. They don’t realize as easily as we do that themes can be things like: courage, honesty, standing up for what you believe in, fighting against peer pressure, survival, the power of friendship, believing that everyone has strengths and weaknesses, and so on. The more experiences we give them with interactive read alouds, allowing time to negotiate the deeper meanings of texts together, the greater the chance that they will be able to do this on their own. Basically, it’s just another way of scaffolding their thinking processes.

I wanted to begin with an easy theme to spot, so I told the students that a very popular theme in books is the idea of ‘good vs. evil.’ Some students quickly suggested books like the Harry Potter series and Lightning Thief. From there we talked about Fairy Tales and how the characters in them are often so clearly all good or all bad. As we wondered why ‘good vs. evil’ is such a popular theme and has been around for centuries, I shared with them what I learned from reading the note in the front cover of Rough Face Girl. The note suggests that humans have always craved justice. We like to see good get rewarded and evil punished.

After a fun read aloud (I love doing the voices of the characters in different ways) the students talked with partners about the evidence supporting the theme of ‘good vs evil’ as well as ideas comparing this book to the Cinderella tale. They were interested to learn that there are 1500 versions of Cinderella. Next week I’ll read Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters (another Cinderella tale from Africa) and our conversation will continue.

Here are a few questions for you to ponder: What picture book do you enjoy reading to kids that has some sort of theme or underlying message? How do you support students in learning about themes? What sort of lessons are you doing in primary grades related to ‘reading deeply’? We welcome your comments.

Also, Katie and I talk more about inferring (it’s not just about identifying themes) in Chapter 9 of Catching Readers Before They Fall. We also did a video webcast for the Reading Recovery website. You can view our presentation slides and link to the video webcast here.

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Wordless Wednesday – Collaboration

(OK – not totally wordless, I apologize.) Last week I (Katie) attended the NAEYC annual conference. One of the highlights of the conference was meeting a group of extraordinary educators from Twitter – the founders of #kinderchat, a large group on Twitter. These people are the core of my Personal Learning Network, and it was simply amazing to meet them in person and continue our discussions about education face to face. We live in an age where communication and collaboration has no boundaries. Just think about what’s possible in education with all these minds problem solving and sharing together. It’s an exciting time to be a teacher!