butterfly project

This year, as part of our Holocaust unit, students are reading poems from children at the Theresienstadt Concentration Camp (referred to also as Terezin). They are then making a butterfly to represent the poem, using ThingLink to annotate their creation, and sharing with the class (and all of our readers!) via their blogs. Students will also find out the fate of the child who wrote their poem, as that is revealed in the appendix of the I never saw another butterfly book, which was used to create the project. Huge thanks to Sarah Larson for her helping me enhance the way I had done this project in the past!

Here's my version of the project. 

The Butterfly, click here to listen to me read the poem.
by Pavel Friedmann

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzingly yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing
      against a white stone...

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly 'way up high.
It went away I'm sure because it wished to
      kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto
But I have found what I love here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut branches in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live here,
     in the ghetto.



I like this project for many reasons. First, it's art, and we have so many artistic students, so it's great see learning happen in new ways! Also, this project has meaning. Each day, as students find out the fate of the child who created their poem, they are so happy to find out if they survived, but can be so devastated to find they perished. The strings hanging in the room is a good visual for all the deaths that happened as a result of the Holocaust. While the whole thing is such a tragedy in our world's history, studying it is so important so that we can work to stand up for everyone in our lives who needs a friend.

Creating Relevance

Last week I was at the Illinois Reading Council Conference and I had so much fun. One thing that is still new to me are the Notice and Note books by Beers and Probst. These books are built around strategies for Close Reading.

The big theme of their sessions was relevance. Obviously we want to take into account student interests when we teaching, and ideally we would give all students readings that were directly related to their interests. But, we also have to instruct classic texts, books and articles that students read at various grade levels as a whole class. The Outsiders. Romeo and Juliet. The Scarlet Letter.

I get differentiation, but I also see power in one class, one book. This year, I'm only going to have one book that the whole class reads, and it's The Giver, which we are immersed in now. I've read The Giver with 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, and I say it's best interpreted by eight graders, but I digress.

Back to relevance, though - since we can't give kids readings on their interests all the time, we have to build relevance into our teaching. The strategies that Beers and Probst modeled to us last week are called Possible Sentences and Notice and Wonder. (Well, I'm naming the second one Notice and Wonder!) I used these strategies yesterday with my ELA class and they worked so flawlessly to engage kids to the text. Here's how to do it.

Possible Sentences
Create a group of words and phrases that are about the coming chapters of your book. There should be a bunch of choices. What I did is wrote sentences about the book - things that were actually going to happen, and then I broke them down into a set of names, a set of actions, and a set of descriptors (I'm sure there's a better grammar way to explain that third column!) Here's what I came up with:

Then I modeled to students how to write sentences, using words and phrases from the chart. I showed them a few I created, and then asked them to write two. Then they did a pair share. Then the pair wrote a third. Then silently they wrote two more.

After each kid had five sentences, I had them share out to me and I recorded them on the board:

Notice and Wonder
Now the cool part, I ask students to notice sentences, consider them, and then wonder about them. Here's a lot of questions we had about Jonas and his medication:

As you can see, they were concerned about the pill that Jonas takes and were wondering many things. As the class began sharing, it stemmed more questions. We were rolling!

Prior to that one, we wondered about the other Possible Sentences:

Genius Strategy
These Possible Sentences were created by kids but used the language from the teacher who has already read the book. When you use this strategy, you create an easy way for students to predict using language you give them (so great for ELs) and then you invest them into the story by wondering together.

The engagement yesterday was awesome after this strategy. I highly recommend it!

Other Applications
Think of all the other readings we do in other content areas! When Beers and Probst modeled this strategy, they did so with a NF article about child labor laws in an African (African? Can't exactly remember where...) country. They didn't read the article with us, just did this pre-reading work, and it really stimulated our interest in the topic. I can see this being HIGHLY successful in any content area!

Have you tried these strategies? Have you taught with Notice and Note? Keep the conversation going in the comments below!

illinois reading council review

Just came home from the Illinois Reading Council Conference. It was awesome. If I had to sum it up in three words, I'd go with volume, relevance, and giggles. Here's the story...

Reading and writing volume matters
I read Readicide years and years ago, but this was the first time hearing Kelly Gallagher speak. He talked about how we need to repurpose our middle and high school classrooms away from 4 big novels and 4 big papers to something different so that kids are reading and writing in crazy quantities.

His schedule looks like this:
2 min     Book talks
10 min   Reading and Conferring
10 min   Daily writing to launch units
8 min     Mentor Text Study
20 min   Writing Workshop and Conferring
3 min     Debrief and sharing of beautiful words

This was so reaffirming to me. I try and emulate the experts - Gallagher and Penny Kittle (they are co-authoring a book together due out next November!) and so now I have some ideas to tweak my schedule further. If he can do this with 53 minutes, I can definitely get down to biz in 88!

Our district is awesome and sends so many people to IRC, so we had to get a picture with the Selfie Stick:

And then I had him sign my book and I got to sit down and talk to him a bit.

He is seriously such a great teacher, I feel so blessed to have met him!

Authors Speak: Jordan Sonneblick & Laurie Halse Anderson
I had never heard of Jordan and am now super excited to read one of his books. His session was so great - about how your kids who drive you bananas need you to be there for them, and you might even turn them into writers! Jordan spoke these beautiful words, "Your writing feedback needs to be anointing and appointing - writing is a person's soul on paper." So so true, we can't rip our kids to shreds when we look at their writing or go nuts with a red pen. Read for ideas first, hear your writers!

And Laurie Halse Anderson has amazing books, my favorites to date are Speak and Twisted, but I saw a new side of her this time with her historical Thriller Series, Chains, Forge, and Ashes. I had always wondered how she writes books so different - realistic fiction with Speak and Twisted in Young Adult about sexual violence and then historical thrillers centered around slavery, so it was great to hear her stories. What really stuck out to me was when she said something along the lines of "keep pushing to learn about white privilege" if you have been thinking about that lately. (I have.) The current state of our country goes way back, back even further than slavery, back to when people took land from Native Americans. We have a long road ahead to fix the difficulties we face here in 2016, but it can start with books and conversations.

Enchanted, yet again, by Ralph Fletcher
Ralph Fletcher has easily been one of the most impactful researcher-teachers on my career. I would not be who I am as far as a workshop stance without him. So to have him reaffirm what I already know as a writer - that children need to play with writing to develop not only a love for it but also to be effective at it was so wonderful to hear.

We have to make time in our writing workshops for students to have choice and voice, and when our writing workhops work, we are like a hot air balloon flying away with energy. Our students' writer's notebooks should be a playground and hot house for ideas!

So with all the mandates we have from outside our buildings and our state departments, let's remember to keep writing joyful for our students!

Kyleen Beers and Bob Probst
These two are quite comical and super smart, sharing about their books Notice and Note. These books focus on close reading strategies in both fiction and nonfiction. What I am walking away with her is relevance. We have to make the work we do with kids relevant, and one way to do that is through an awesome strategy called Possible Sentences and then using Notice and Wonder.

Next time you're going to read an article with your students, pick out 15 - 20 words and phrases from the article and list them. Have kids, in pairs, write possible sentences that could be in the text. Then, kids share their sentences and teacher scribes them on the board. Next, teacher asks kids to look at one sentence and wonder about it - what questions do you have? what do you wonder? Kids turn and talk and then share out.

These wonderings create relevance for our readers, big time. When we did this exercise, we all wanted to read the article afterward! This pre-reading strategy is so powerful for our readers, highly recommend.

More learning experiences
I heard a lot of other great sessions, too: about dyslexia, about content-area writing tips, CRAFTS, the hot new lit for Young Adult, and an awesome presentation from a great friend and colleague about blogging with kids. I can't wait to get my students going on blogs!

Hilarity
In addition to learning so much wonderful information that can be brought back to my classroom on Monday, it's just so fun to be around amazing friends from work. We laughed and had so much fun and geeked out taking selfies with our literacy celebrities. On the way home, we sang songs from Lion King and The Little Mermaid. Who does that? Which brings me to...

Gratitude
So many things to be thankful for:

• A district who gets that ongoing professional development is such a must for our teachers and kids; thank you for sending me to IRC and allowing me to continue my training so my students can continue theirs:

• Friendships built around selfie sticks and reading and writing workshop!

• Cute bags from the conference! (You guys: chevron!)

• "ELA Squad" t-shirts, that were the brainchild of a #D100chat one Tuesday evening. Thanks Cap!

• for teachers who teach with a firm, loving insistence so that our students become readers and writers who can powerfully interpret and interact in such world where news, advertisements, informatoin is usually skewed one way or another.

• for Twitter that allows us to stay connected and continue to learn from one another. Check out the #IRC2016 feed and my twitter feed for more! Let's grow our PLN!

Did you attend IRC? What did you take away?

Five for Friday

I had a great week! Here's a few of the cool things that happened!

I taught my first close reading lesson to first graders last week and they did so well! I based my lessons on work of some of my fellow colleagues (they blog over at Learning to the Core!) Anyways, we read The Hello, Goodbye Window and then focused our close reading on narrator and character traits. The kids were awesome and had fun, too. Here's some pics:

Looking back at the text!

Our anchor chart!

"I know this because in the story the girl said Nana took (gave) her a bath in the sink."

I'm super excited! I made a new Instagram account and have linked it up to my blog! You can see a few pics that I posted today, right over there to the right hand side of my blog. You can find me @bigtimeliteracy. Please follow! (I'd really like bloggers to follow me so I can find and follow you!)

 The Slice of Life Story Challenge is starting tomorrow! Do you follow Two Writing Teachers? Well, they are hosting a challenge for us to write every day in the month of March. I'm really excited, but also kinda nervous. I mean, some nights I come home and I'm just super tired...but I know I can do it. My month will start off with Farley's Currently tomorrow, and then we'll see where it goes.

Just want to share though: I may not always be writing about teaching-related topics! Perhaps my readers will get a dose of some of my daily (personal) life stuff, too!

I'm getting a blog makeover! Kassie, over at Designs by Kassie has officially put my on her wait list! I have so many ideas and I can't wait for it to get into the production stages...and how exciting will the reveal be? Eeeekkk! Can't wait! 

My blog hit 150 followers on Bloglovin! Now most people would have some kind of celebration and discount their TpT stuff, but I'm not amazing at Tpt, so I'm just happy to report that there's quite a few people checking out my blog! I'm super excited! One goal of mine this summer is to work on docs for TpT, but in the mean time, a big appreciation to all that stop by for some light reading each week!

That's all for me this week. Hope you have a great weekend!

A very late 5 for Friday!

I had such a great week last week and have been wanting to post but have been busy and relaxing. But, it's time now for Five for Friday! Linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching to share mine from this past week!

The reading team was in charge of our Wednesday Morning PD so we presented differentiated sessions on Close Reading. Christine, one of our Reading Specialists presented a beginning session of Close Reading, just covering everything that it entails. Teachers who already heard this session on during our Institute Day in January came with me. I presented "Revving up the Rigor with our Questions." In this presentation, we talked about moving close reading questions from the Key Ideas and Details standards to Craft and Structure and Integration of Knowledge and Ideas. I showed lots of examples, like this one:

Teachers then had time to look at one of their guided reading books or an article they were planning to use and figure out questions they might ask.

This session was great, too, because a first grade classroom asked me to come model this in their classroom. It's strange - because I've been reading lots about close reading, but haven't got to teach it yet...super excited for next week in a first grade cotaught classroom!

On days when I present to our staff, I always make it a point to get a little more dressed up, so on Wednesday I was wearing a dress and pink sweater, some bigger jewelry, and I did my hair and makeup more than I usually do. A few hours after our presentation, I was walking down the Kinder hallway and passed by one of our sweet little guys who said in the sweetest voice, "You look beautiful, Ms. B." It seriously made my day!

Our kinder teachers have been using Words Their Way now for about 14 weeks and are just beginning the digraphs and blends unit. What's great about Words Their Way is the routine and consistency it brings. AFter 13 weeks of the same procedures, students know exactly what to do, so they can really get to business with their learning. Watch this video to see students doing a Word Hunt in books. They are looking for initial S, H, and SH words in their books. Then, they record them in their notebooks:

I love it!! Kids can really see the importance of sound sorting as they read hunt through their books and they get so excited to find words and read them!

A few weeks ago I wrote about my favorite Valentine's tradition: Warm Fuzzies:

I've been doing these every year since my first year of teaching... always with middle school, until this year! This year I asked one of the kinder teachers if I could try them with her class. Aside from me not realizing the fine motor skills they need to tie little strings - they loved them!

They said the cutest appreciations to one another:

"Thank you for sitting by me at lunch."

"Thank you for being my friend."

"Thank you for helping me with my sound sorts."

Additionally, a parent had emailed the classroom teacher about another question, but mentioned how she loved that the kiddos did this activity together. Winning!

My Valentine's Day was pretty great, too! I had no idea what we were  doing - the bf planned it all! We went to dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant...my Pineapple Calamari was served in a halved-hollowed-out pineapple and the bf's mango and coconut beef was served in a coconut. I'm not sure why I didn't take a pic, but definite points for creativity! We had a lovely dinner and got each other little gifts....couldn't ask for a better night!

Hope you had a great week and are enjoying a much needed three day weekend!

Currently December

Wow, I can't believe it's December already! 2013 has flown by...but I'm so excited for what's ahead!

Like every other month, excited to link up with Farley for the Currently blog!

Alright, well let's get to it!

Listening to...A Charlie Brown Christmas
You know, I usually share a great song I've had on repeat for like the whole last month, but I happen to be writing this blog while watching this classic movie. I love it! I'm recording it, too. These kids are so mean to Charlie Brown though! And he is such a pessimist! The things you see differently as an adult...

Loving Arizona State Football and ASU Friends (and 1 Wildcat)
I got to go to Arizona for Friendsgiving, which happened to coincide with the ASU-U of A game. We killed them and it was awesome! Had a great tailgate with lots of friends and then a win at Sun Devil Stadium. Plus 70 degree weather and a break from work and school: Love!

Plus - not only are we going to the PAC 12 Championship, but we have home field advantage. U of A who? Stanford...we're coming for you! and we are ranked #11 in the BCS standings! Woooo! 

Thinking about my next visitor!
I'm so excited for one of my best friends to arrive in just two weeks from tomorrow! She'll be on her way to her family's house in Rhode Island, but she's stopping off in Chicago for two nights. We are going to go downtown to State Street and see the windows and the Christkindlmarket, have a few dinners, and then she's going to come to work with me for a day and see my school. She's awesome and I can't. Wait. for her TO GET HERE!

btw...it's Liz!

Wanting classes to end so holiday fun can begin
Ohh Christmas Tree...how I long to get out the boxes and put it up! And I want to make cookies and start shopping and wrap presents and all that fun stuff. But, I still have one comprehensive exam and one more short paper to write. I am thinking that by this weekend I should be good to go!

This is on the list:

Needing to read up on close reading
What books have you read about this? I'm currently going between Notice and Note (Beers and Probst) and Falling in Love with Close Reading (Lehman and Roberts). And I haven't even read anything by Fisher and Frey...Let's just say, I'm behind in my knowledge here. If you have anything to send me that's a great read, please do! As soon as grad school ends for this semester, I will have some time to get to that. Annnnddd...I'll be in West Palm Beach with my parents for break, so I need some beach reads!

The proportions may be a bit off...but you get the idea :-)

Favorite Tradition: Sending Christmas Cards
I moved to Chicago in 2009 and that was the first year I made a Christmas card to send out to all my family and friends. For the longest time I wanted to send them, but thought that you could only do that if you're married or have pictures of kids to put on the card. But then I realized that I do lots of awesome things and I wanted to get in on the fun of Christmas Cards, so this year will be my fifth card. I love sending them and getting them from all my family and friends. I just ordered mine yesterday, so I'm eagerly awaiting that orange envelope from Shutterfly in a week or so!

This year I need to make some kind of display and found this one:

But....I don't think I have that kind of time to invest in this, so I will have to figure out another option. Either way, all my cards will be displayed in the casa somewhere. Now....who will be the first to get one to me?!

Well that's all for this issue of Currently! Hope you have a great December with your kiddos and a lovely break! I'm hoping to blog more once I get a little break from grad school, so make sure to follow me!

Happy Monday!