Pulling on the threads

The end of the school year is getting closer and we (teachers and students alike) are all a little weary. At this time of year, I notice that the inquiries in many classrooms start to peter out and practice sometimes reverts to worksheets and themes. This change is problematic for several reasons:

• There is still so much going on in children’s play, regardless of the season. When we stop paying attention, we miss lots of valuable learning.
• The summer regression (sometimes called the summer learning loss) is a real thing, particularly for students who don’t have a lot of literacy support at home. We need to make the most of the time that we have with students; we can’t afford to lose any precious minutes to classroom activities that aren’t moving learning forward (like watching movies or completing word searches).
• For some students, holidays aren’t a happy, carefree time. When we shift our instructional focus towards themes related to summer holidays, we put a lot of stress on those students who may not be looking forward to 8 weeks spent at home. We impose our own anticipation of summer onto them and create needless anxiety.

When I’m teaching ballet, I’ll sometimes stand on a chair or sit on the floor to, quite literally, see my class from a different angle. I’ve taught some of my students for a decade or more and I need to find ways to see them with new eyes so that I can continue to challenge them and help them progress.

The same thing can happen in our classroom practice and, while standing on a chair may not be the best suggestion (or so my health and safety manual tells me), we do need to find ways of seeing our students with fresh eyes, especially as we near the end of our time together.

In the last couple of days, I’ve thought about two ways we might shift our perspective.

Earlier this week, I accompanied a group of students on a community walk through their small town. We noticed lots of interesting changes in the environment: daffodils blooming, trees budding, and bugs… so many bugs! The kids were simultaneously fascinated and terrified by an old house that they were convinced was haunted.

Among the things they collected on our walk were pine cones from the large, mature red pine trees that lined the streets. When we got back to the classroom and looked more closely at them, the kids noticed that the shape of the pinecone resembled the shape of the shells we had observed and drawn on one of my previous visits. This gave us an opportunity to revisit the drawings we had done before and to remember the strategies we had used to capture the shape of the shells. Revisiting work you’ve done during the year and looking at it with fresh eyes can leapfrog into something new and interesting. You may want to enlist colleagues to work through a documentation protocol with you to help you see your experiences from a new perspective.

How can we draw these shapes? It’s triangles and spirals together… like the shell!

Another strategy that can spark fresh engagement and activity is sharing the work of one child whose work has caught your attention.

A couple of weeks ago, I was visiting a class and noticed one boy walking the same trajectory over and over again.

He was talking to himself as he walked and clearly had a purpose to his pathway.

When I asked him what he was doing, he replied that he was walking on his secret path and he showed me where his path went.

I wondered how he might be able to share his path with his classmates and he decided that he needed to draw a map.

At first the map was just a series of dots in a curved line but as we talked, he realized that he needed to represent the starting and ending points of his pathway: “I start at the water bottles and I end at the library.”

 

 

 

 

The water bottles are represented by circles. The books are represented by rectangles.

This map drawing attracted other students who then began drawing their own maps which led us on a journey through the school following their maps up and down stairs and, eventually, to the library.

When we returned, we shared the original map with the whole class which has since led to more map making. What began as a single child walking through the class, became a much larger project that may see this class through to the end of the year. If we hadn’t pulled on that thread we wouldn’t have been able to weave that pattern together. Where are the threads in your classroom? How can you weave them together to create the tapestry that will wrap up your year?

Sharing his map with the class.

5 ways to make your read alouds work!

Reading aloud to kids is an experience that almost everyone who has spent time with children has in common. Whether you’re a veteran teacher or a teenage babysitter, you’ve probably touched the magic that we create when we take the time to read with kids.

I’ve had some amazing experiences as a parent and a caregiver of reading aloud: the moment when a child recognizes the letters in their name, or a common word, or a rhyming pattern in the text or a repeated phrase or sound that they love to yell out at the top of their lungs.

“Clang Clang Rattle Bing Bang, Gonna make my noise all day!”

~ Robert Munsch, Mortimer ~

Equally amazing are the books that make me cry, the books during which my kids know they can expect mom to get choked up “Mommy, why are you crying… again?!? You know how it ends.”

Bagels from Benny makes me cry 100% of the time.

But whether I’m reading to one kid in a bunk bed or a whole gymnasium full, there are some tricks that I use to keep their interest and make the most of the time and I hope you will find them helpful in your practice as you harvest those magic moments with your students.

1. Why this book, for this child, at this time? 

Too often when I visit classes, I see read-alouds chosen at the last second or selected because the characters (often familiar from television) are favourites for the kids. Alternately, the book may be a favourite for the teacher, a classic from their childhood or something their own children love. The books we choose to read in our classes should directly relate to the instructional goals we have for our students.

I worry that as you read that last sentence, you’ll be thinking that read-alouds should be dry and boring with curriculum standards attached at two-page intervals. Not at all! Instructional goals might include working on phonological awareness (rhymes, initial sounds, phoneme segmentation) or on prediction, inference, or making connections to personal experience. They might also relate to the children’s social development or their curiosities/inquiries. Whatever your instructional goals are, your read-alouds should support them in a pleasurable way that will increase overall engagement and, even better, give everyone a laugh (or, in my case, a cry).

2. Lights, Camera, Action!

One of my favourite things about the new Fountas & Pinnell Literacy Continuum is that they’ve titled texts read aloud by the teacher as “Shared and Performance Reading.” Describing a read aloud as a performance couldn’t be more accurate. Teaching is highly performative to begin with and reading aloud to students is often the most “on-stage” part of the day.  Take advantage of it!

Vary the volume, tone, speed and character of your voice. Change your posture. Move around. Use props and gesture. Be silly! Kids love watching their teacher become the ogre under the bridge, stomping his feet while he drools at the prospect of devouring a tasty goat and then quickly transitioning into the goat with skinny knees knocking together nervously as she tiptoes across the rickety bridge on her delicate hooves. What could be better?!?

3. Don’t do all the work.

Do you know who loves to do funny voices and make sound effects?

Kids!

When read-alouds don’t work, one of the most common reasons is that teachers are doing too much. Kids love to get involved and they can, at any age. They can make the sounds of the cars or the bird or the farts. They can guess the next rhyming word or chant the repeated text in a book. They can also get up and act out parts of the story as they explore the meaning of verbs. If you’re measuring the success of your read-aloud by how quiet and still your students are as you read, I’d suggest that you’re using the wrong measuring stick altogether. Students will be more engaged in the reading when they know they have a role to play in telling the story.  The drama glossary in the Ontario Arts Curriculum offers some great ideas for how to actively engage kids in a story. So does the CODE website.

4. It’s too long.

We all have finite attention spans, perhaps even more so in the last few years. Children’s attention spans in Kindergarten are estimated to range from 10-25 minutes. If you’re teaching young children, I would suggest keeping your read-alouds under 15 minutes, maximum. If the book you want to read will take longer than that, there’s nothing wrong with reading it in chunks. Come back to it tomorrow! The kids will get more out of the experience when they’re fresh and pausing will build suspense. It’s a great opportunity to work on prediction: “What do you think will happen next?”

5. Context

Write what you know, the experts tell us. If you don’t have a personal connection to what you’re writing about, it’s not likely to be successful. The same is true for reading, particularly for our youngest children. They need to be able to connect to the story somehow. It can be set somewhere far away and involve people whose lives are very different but if your students don’t have a context within which they can engage with the narrative, they’re likely to tune out, sometimes politely and sometimes not-so-much.

For instance, the book Mama Panya’s Pancakes is set in an Kenyan village and involves experiences many children in urban settings wouldn’t have (fishing, going to a market, bargaining for the price of food) but it centres around sharing food and the experience of hosting friends for a meal. All children are likely to be able to connect to those ideas, even if their only experience of sharing food is at school. Think carefully about what the context is for the books you’re choosing. What’s the entry point for your students? Without a context for the learning, you’re not likely to accomplish your instructional goals, no matter how well intentioned they may be.