Power of One: Last Stop on Market Street

your driver,  Suzanne

I am soooo excited!  This is day 1...part 1...the first installment...oh, you get it...of what I hope to be a multi-part series: The Power of One.  The gist is that we need to teach deeply.  One way to do that is to find one slamma-jamma text and park it there.  
If you've been a part of The Curly Classroom for any length of time, then you know that we love picture books.  Well, it's been a little while since a picture book made my heart go pitter patter, and I was in a funk.  Fear not- my picture book love is alive and well!  I have Last Street on Market Street by Matt de la Pena to thank for that.  This verbiage on the second page sealed the deal, "The outside air smelled like freedom...".  I mean come on!!  

So let's get started!

Old or young woman?

Chalice or faces?

This book deals with the idea of perception and choosing to look on the bright side.  To start, show a series of perception images.  Students always have lots of fun listening to others' reactions and trying to see both pictures!  To get students thinking and prepare them to read, have them consider the following questions- Was any view wrong?  How can we apply this activity to our own thinking?  How does it relate to positive thinking? 

Pop a copy of the book under the document camera and read aloud.  Even the toughest of kids will crack at a good read aloud!

To work with the reading, I wanted to focus on our Figure 19 inferencing skills.  And I'm so excited about this NEW activity!! Do you know and love Nine Squares like we do?  I present to you a similar activity called Literary Dominos.  Have students work in small groups and divide the dominos evenly among the partners.  One student will go first and lay down a domino.  Students will read what is on both sides of the domino.  When a student finds a way that one of their dominos will connect to an idea presented, they will play their domino and explain the connection to their group.  If multiple group members find a connection, have each student explain and the group will choose the best pair.  If all else fails, you can always be the tie breaker.  The goal is to use up all of your dominos first.  I like this instructional strategy because it values creative and higher level thinking- create, justify, evaluate.  

Talk time: How can thinking positively change your outcome?

Give your students time to extend their thinking by asking them to write about this big idea.  You can use a mentor sentence from the book to teach/review a sentence pattern or grammar rule.
"His friend Colby climbed in, gave CJ a wave, and drove off with his dad." 
Mini-lesson: pitchforking verbs

"Nana squeezed the man's hand and laughed her deep laugh."
Mini-lesson: compound predicates

What is a favorite text that you would like to see with the Power of One?

AND...

Happiest of Birthdays to our favorite curly co-contributor, Lori!!

D.O.N.E.

crawling toward the finish line, Suzanne

You're soooo close!  We're almost there.  You've worked hard; your students (most of them anyway) have worked hard.  Now we're just kind of biding our time until test day.

I wanted to do something nice for you and thought the nicest thing would be to provide a lesson- ready made- just waiting for you to print and teach.

Last week, we worked with The Quiltmaker's Gift by Jeff Brumbeau.  (Full text here)  It is a picture book written at a 4th grade reading level.  Now, if you've been a curly friend for long, you know I love a picture book at any grade level, so don't let that stop you.  

Before reading, I chose key words and phrases and students completed a Probable Passage.  This link to the strategy shows snazzy manipulatives.  I, on the other hand, Googled for a Probable Passage graphic organizer and we completed it that way.  My key words:

• blue misty mountains
• castle
• giving
• greed
• king
• never smiled
• poor
• quiltmaker
• treasure

The next day, we folded paper and completed a Cube It activity for the story.  

You can download the questions here.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen- 1 1/2 to 2 hours of reading instruction ready and waiting at your fingertips!

A Real Page-Turner

Barely hanging in there, Lori

This first week after a good break has me almost in tears as I pull myself out of bed! I find myself constantly yawning throughout the day, and I have had so much coffee that I practically vibrate. Friends, I am dragging by the time I get home. That said, I thought it would be nice to throw a fun and easy to use resource your way. 

Using picture books in class is a great idea especially in the secondary classroom, but it is often difficult to put our hands on just the right book. Once we find it, it's difficult to display it with the document camera without a terrible glare. And believe it or not--teenagers care about pictures too!

Check out the International Children's Digital Library. This is more than just a beautiful way to display a picture book. Their easy search allows you to find titles by author, age range, characters, and...get this...LANGUAGE. My district has students that speak a wide variety of languages, and that's precisely how I landed on this website. A colleague had a Filipino student who spoke Tagalog. He was new to the English language and she needed a way to help him feel comfortable with reading in her classroom. She used the ICDL and designated times to allow him to read books in his native language. 

Harlem by Walter Dean Myers
from the International Children's Digital Library

Some titles can also be read in a variety of languages, so that is a nice way to provide practice for ESL students. Let them read the text in their native language and then try some skills-based work with it in English. 

The titles in the data base are somewhat obscure, but I've lost probably a good hour searching and flipping through titles. [There is a very old and cool version of Aesop's Fables that I just couldn't move away from!] 

It is free...yay! While there is no need to set up an account, you can if you would like to bookmark and save titles. 

I also love pop-up features that some books have. For example, when you flip through the pages of Harlem by Walter Dean Myers, the text pops out as you progress through the book.

This weekend, as you recover from venturing back into your classroom, I hope you find some comfy time on your couch to play around in the ICDL. 

Poetry in Motion

beret-wearing* and coffee drinking, Suzanne
*Let's be real- I'm not really a beret-wearer.  My hair is way too big for that!

This class activity sent me to the floor of the children's section in my local public library.  Obviously, right?  Do you ever have those moment when you think to yourself, "How is this part of my job?!"  You know, times where you're learning how to operate a movie-theater popcorn machine or hopping on one foot balancing a ball on a small, plastic spoon or have marshmallow in your hair from toasting 75 of them for s'mores.
*Lori wants it known that she has a SCAR from the popcorn machine.

Well, as part of our research/historical poem activity, we needed to address and pinpoint poetic devices students should have mastered and be able to integrate in their poem.  Children's books would do the job nicely, don't you think?  Thus the public library.  

Aside:  If you don't have a copy of Using Picture Storybooks to Teach Literary Devices by Susan Hall on your campus, I highly recommend it!  It takes the guesswork out of finding mentor texts and points you to a plethora of good books that illustrate a term well that you just might having sitting on your bookshelf.  

The terms that we targeted were: diction, point of view, simile, metaphor, personification, and alliteration.

These are all terms that our students have learned and added to their visual dictionary throughout the year.  As a refresher, student pairs played a quick (seriously, 3 minute) pyramid review game.  This guided their thinking and prepared them to work more independently in stations.  


At each station, student read through the children's books pages and identified examples of the targeted device.  On their handout, they would write the examples they found.  Before, moving on, they were challenged to create a metaphor or sentence using personification that could be added to their drafted poem.  I like how students went from identify to apply all within a 10 minutes station.  

The last 15 minutes of class were spent choosing their best sentences and thinking about where they would fit in their draft.  We did not require them to use all 6 devices but to choose 4 that would best fit in their writing.

Are you ready for the best part?!  Here's everything you need to run this lesson in your own classroom.  I even saved you the trouble of driving to the public library (and getting up out of the floor while there).  
Station Directions
Children's Book Pages
Student Handout

Just for grins- what's the craziest thing you've done in the name of education??

Let's all pretend to be cows...

brought to you by Lori

• 
  
  Here in the great state of Texas, we've worked ourselves into a tizzy over persuasion. What is it? How do we teach it? How is it different from expository? Aren't those two the same thing????
  
  
  And even better...how do we help our kids understand persuasion? Well. I'll tell you...
  
  
  Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type (D. Cronin).
  
  
  
  
  
  Please understand that I have 6 pull-out tutoring groups of retesters that need work with persuasion, so I've read this book aloud to a group of 11th grade students no less than 6 times. Plus once more to our lock-in bunch (that's a whole other post). Plus an additional once to Suzanne because she wanted to know how I used the book.
  
  
  The book is about some ornery cows who are cold at night and pretty much demand that stingy Farmer Brown give them electric blankets. When they don't get their way, they essentially shut down the farm. All of this is done through their typewriter and it's a very fun book to read. [Except when your office has very thin walls and the people next door in the sped office can hear you saying "click, clack, moooooo" again and again for what seems like a week straight and then they begin to look at you funny every time they pass by your open door or see you in the hallway.]
  
  
  Here's why it's great: since the cows' first attempt is an (udder) failure, you can have your kids pretend to be cows and re-write the letter to Farmer Brown using any persuasive structure you'd like.
  
  
  Persuasive Structure Option #1
  ·      I believe…
  ·      Other people believe…
  ·      I still believe __ because…
  ·      We should all (do? value? believe?)
  
  
  Persuasive Structure Option #2
  ·      I believe…
  ·      I believe this because…
  ·      I also believe this because…
  ·      Although,…I still believe…
  
  
  The sentence stems help the kids write Gretchen Bernabei-style kernel essays. If you’re concerned about the repetition, that is solved with small-group instruction and having kids read their letters aloud.
  
  
  Seeing my tutoring kids work with this, the most powerful part has been the reasons that they come up with. They cite reasons from decreased milk production to quality of life. The letters can be very funny!
  
  
  Working with picture books is always great fun, and even though I need a break from reading it, Click Clack Moo has now become a personal favorite.