Website:  Jacqueline Woodson  First created in 2002

·         Copyright date: 2002-2011

·         All links are functional and the website is current. 

Author:  Jacqueline Woodson.  This is the award winning author’s website that is up-to-date with first-person musings for the children and young adults that already love her books, or who may be discovering her for the first time.  

Website Design: Ms. Woodson’s interactive webpage is bordered by images/links to her books (that her audience is most assuredly already familiar); she uses language that is hip and in-tune with her audience and throughout the site Woodson includes graphics/photos that are personal, friendly, fun, and inviting.  In the bio section she tells the story of how she became a writer…

”I wrote on everything and everywhere. I remember my uncle catching me writing my name in graffiti on the side of a building. (It was not pretty for me when my mother found out.)”  

• Woodson wants to inspire those who may be hesitant about putting their own stories to the page by answering questions about her process and providing autobiographical examples of what has motivated her to write.  Included are short videos too.

• The sidebar navigation is descriptive and user friendly for her youthful audience.  Main page titles are:  Books I’ve Written; All About Me; Frequently Asked Questions; Some Awards I’ve Won, How to Contact Me, and Where I’ll Be.

• Each brightly colored page contains three bullets with links for readers, teachers, and caregivers to whom she offers this advice:

·         To her readers Woodson says, “Keep reading and writing.”

·         To the teachers she says, “Encourage young people to ask lots of   questions.”

·         To the caregivers: “Teach them the value of reading early on.”

• Children and young adult readers will love this website for its interactive, colorful, informative, and personal qualities.  Teachers will find guides for suggestions in the classroom, and caregivers will be inspired by the fact Woodson understands that not every child is being raised in a home with a mother and father. Woodson gets her readers and those with whom they live and are taught.  Follow on Twitter @JackieWoodson.  I wish I was attending the NCTE Conference in Chicago this year so I could meet her. 

Reading Comprehension Strategies

Focused strategies for teaching vocabulary and reading comprehension benefit our special populations and struggling readers, but strategies that are research-based and proven winners also raise the levels of our “regular” students too. 

 Cubing is a strategy designed to prepare students in reading and writing (Cowan & Cowan, 1980).  In reading, cubing can be used to strengthen students' comprehension of a topic or concept and help expand students' understanding of a topic, concept, character, and/or text from various perspectives.

Here are three sites for more information about cubing and how to use them: 
How to make a comprehension cube 
Primary Source Designs: Cubing
Differentiated Strategy 101: Cubing Strategy (a ppt download)

PROOFREADING (SPELLING GRAMMAR) TAYLOR MALI

Word Knowledge - Building Vocabulary

Visit these sites for variations for this strategy:

• Frayer Model
• Four-Square Vocabulary
• Four Square Method for Vocabulary

Franz Kafka quote

"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us."

More about portfolios

Portfolio assessments are not some new idea to education in the 21st century, they have been around for a little while now.  Students as young as first grade are collecting their best work and reviewing their assorted artifacts from a variety of subjects with their teacher through a focused discussion of  their growth over time.

Portfolios can be digital with multimedia pieces that showcase progress, or they can be a collection of pages in a folder or box. Reflection is a key element of the portfolio review process, allowing students the opportunity think about their thinking (metacognition) and learning. 

“Kids forget what they didn’t know when they learn something new.”

Self evaluation helps students think about what they do to become good learners and what evidences there are of their learning present in the collection of artifacts. Through this process, students become stronger and more motivated learners. They are able to point to concrete evidence of that learning, or conversely , they can point to their weaknesses and areas where remediation is necessary.  

For parents: tests do not provide global information of their child's knowledge, only a snapshot of how their child is measured against a standard. Portfolios provide a broad view of their child's knowledge and growth (or trouble areas/weakness).

The entire process takes time to collect, reflect, and discuss.  Guidance must be provided by the teacher in which artifacts are appropriate for the collection, how to reflect, and points to bring to a discussion/review.

* * * * * * *

In the mid 90s, I was at a high school in El Paso, TX chosen to participate in a field study for developing  a new teacher evaluation tool.  Portfolios were a large part of that new Professional Development Appraisal System (PDAS). WE were encouraged to photograph, videotape, and collect lessons that were student-centered and successful.  "Student-Centered and Learner-Centered" was part of a paradigm shift in the educational atmosphere where teachers were moving from the "sage on the stage" to the "guide on the side," so we wanted to showcase just how were were achieving this goal.  

We went through the painstaking process of learning what to collect, how to reflect, and the review. Some teachers went crazy with their portfolios that looked like mulitmedia  scrapbook masterpieces, while others put their Xerox copies of lesson plans in a folder. There was not a standard at the time for how the teacher portfolio should appear, so there was a range of what those early portfolios looked like. 

I must say that the process was tremendously beneficial for me as an educator. My own paradigm did shift. Had I not gone through that experience, I would not understand the full impact and benefits of portfolios as an assessment tool.

As it turned out, portfolios did not become a part of the Texas appraisal system for teachers, but it is a part of the National Board Certification that many states require for their educators or offer for monetary incentives.

Basic Steps for National Board Certification:

National Board Certification consists of two parts:

1. Teaching Portfolio
   Teachers typically videotape their teaching, gather student learning products, and analyze their teaching practices.
2. Assessment.
   Teachers answer questions that relate to content specific to their fields. The assessments focus on breadth of content knowledge.

Teachers must earn 275 points as determined by the National Board. National Board Certification is issued for a period of 10 years and can then be renewed.

READ!

Cracking the Alphabet Code

Children  love to work with interactive websites  because they are more than point and click; they are fun!

These sites contain multimedia with top quality content. They are the sort that teachers will recommend to each other again and again, and new readers will enjoy learning how to break the alphabet code.

Can't go wrong with Professor Garfield -.
for phoneme awareness try Orson's Farm

Fruit Phonics - orange you glad I found this for you?

Practice with Spelling

Portfolio Assessment: A view of "self" within a system of educational expectations

In 1996,  Bonnie S. Sunstein, Associate Professor of Education at the University of Iowa, wrote 

"Assessing Portfolio As s e s sment :  Three Encounters of a Close Kind " offering an explanation of this form of assessment . I especially respect her explanation of portfolios being a way for one to view themselves against a standard of an"other". The questions she gathered from professionals to use with students are helpful to jump-start the highly complex  processes of reflection and reflextive thinking.

From: Voices from the Middle  Volume 3 Number 4  November 1996 

'via Blog this'

"...we  don't  allow  ourselves  or our  students  to look  hard  enough  at  what they've learned. When we  can't look, we  don't see..."

The  difference between portfolios  and other   forms  of  school  "assessments" is the voices of the portfolio-keepers looking internally at their  own  growth as it happens (reflection), and then looking externally toward what the school expects (reflexive). They create materials, examine  their  progress,  and design the opportunities to assess their own collections, self-evaluating  and  reflecting  about their work while  documenting  how it  stands  up against  a school's  expectations. Curriculum should not  be a mystery to students. When students assess their  own work by  reviewing it-describing,  listing,  and  analyzing  what they've done-they  begin to articulate their own learning within a teacher's curriculum.

Three Types of Portfolio Analysis

I. A Reflective Encounter: Self to Self 

• Taking the time to re-see one's self in light of the  other  is  a  highly sophisticated  "higher order critical skill."
• Reflection is what we  call analysis in literature, documentation in science, or exegesis in liturgy. It is hard to explain and even harder to arrange.

2. A Reflexive Encounter: Self to Other 

• The  reflection bridge  is  a  two-way  street.  
• A  student  comes to  learn  as  she reflects on her work, "but if you tell me what your standard is, I'll tell you how the stuff in my portfolio shows that I can meet your standard."
• This process is a reflexive  one.
•  A portfolio-keeping process must be at once reflective and reflexive
• Establishing opportunities for reflexivity is a matter of  allowing students to represent processes in a portfolio as well as in products. 
• Representing processes requires responsibility, ownership, a sense of agency

3. A Dialectical Encounter: Teacher as Mediator 

•  Portfolios  are valuable because they offer the opportunity for a "self' to set itself next  to  an "other" in  order  to  understand itself better. 
• They are valuable because they allow  an  individual to  assess-internally- her own  developing sense of standards, and then to  assess-externally-how  she meets those of her school and the communities to which  she  wants  to  belong.  
• And  teachers must be at the center of this process with students.
• A curriculum should never be  a mystery to  a student  who keeps a portfolio; it should provide a framework and a set of goals that the student  ought to  be able  to  meet  in  her  own way

The Reflective Encounter 

Questions that Identify, Clarify, and Look for Change 

(from experienced teachers)

Alan Purves, SUNY Albany 

• What do you know that you didn't know before? 
• What can you d o  that you couldn't do before? 
• What do you d o  that you couldn't do before? 

Jane Hansen, University of New Hampshire 

• What is different in your portfolio now than six months ago? 

J   Sommers, Miami  University, Ohio 

• How  are your writing and your composing processes different now than they were when you began compiling this portfolio? 
• Which class  activities  (journal  writing,  peer  response groups, revision, etc.) have affected your writing and your composing process this semester, and what effects have they had? 

Sally Hampton, New Standards Managtng 

Director;  1992-95  Portfolio Project, 

English/Language Arts 

• If  you were to choose one piece of work  that represents your best effort, what would you choose? 
• Why is it a significant effort? 
• When  you  revise  your  work, what  lenses do you  use  to determine what to change? 

Lora Wol f f ,  Keokuk High School, Iowa 

• After looking over all your artifacts, what is missing? 
• What connections exist among the artifacts in your portfolio? 
• Explain the connections. 

Brian Huot,  University of Louisville 

• Why have you chosen these specific pieces for your portfolio? 
• What makes these pieces interesting to you? 
• What surprises you about your work? 
• What would you do differently? 

Eunice Greer; Harvard PACE;  University of Illinois 

• What do you want people  to learn about you from reading your portfolio? 
• Show me where or how they would learn those things from looking at your work. 
• What's  something  that  you've  been  working to  improve? 
• Trace your growth in that area through the collection of your work.  (I want them to follow a thread of  an idea through a series of works that have been built over time and read their portfolio as a single body of work, not as a random set of unrelated works.) 

Nancie Atwell,  Center for  Teaching & Learning, Edgecomb, Maine 

• How  many  pieces  of  writing  did  you  finish this semester? 
• What genres are represented among these pieces? 
• What's the most important or useful information about conventions of written English you've learned this semester? 
• What will you try to do in your writing in the future? 

Judy Fueyo, Penn State University 

• If  you  think  of  your  work  according to  "level of  difficulty," what would you  choose as hardest and why? 
• Please describe what you were trying to do, even if you did not achieve it.

The Reflexive Encounter 

Questions that Encourage Representing the Self to an Other 

Chris Sullivan, Plainville High School,  Connecticut 

• Within the context of the overall picture of yourself that you are trying to create, what does this artifact show? 
• Think in terms of skills, knowledge, and personal impact as you  answer. What does this piece tell you about your goal for this period of time? 
• Does it say you are getting there? Have to work on a certain skill? Need more evidence for evaluation? 

Miles Myers, Executive Director; NCTE,  Urbana, Illinois 

• If you are reflecting for personal reasons about your work, do you have a life or a school career pattern into which these reflections fit?
• If you are trying to show someone else something about your reflections, how will you make these reflections visible and meaningful for the other person? 

Linda Carstens, San Diego  Unzjied School District, California 

• What should I know as a reader about this piece that will help me understand your thinking and work? 
• What would you do next to this piece to have it "tell your story" even more clearly? 

Sara Jordan, SUNY Albany, New  York 

• What do you want your work to say about you? What does your work say about you? 

Tom Romano, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 

• What things can you show me about your learning that I would otherwise not know about you.

Running Records

Teachers use running records as a quick assessment tool to evaluate students' reading and comprehension.  They are used to help find students' reading levels, check their fluency, and find weaknesses in comprehension.

Running records are conducted one-to-one by the teacher with the student. The materials needed are:

• Various Leveled Books
• Running Record Forms - to keep track of miscues and errors
• Timer
• Pencil
• Calculator

As the child reads the text, the teacher follows along with a copy of the text or on a running record form (example above).  Teachers note any errors, insertions etc.

The teacher will recognize if the text is TOO EASY or TOO DIFFICULT, in which case the session stops immediately. The student will need to be retested on a different level book.

If the student finishes reading the text, he can do a retell of the story or answer comprehension questions to help the teacher assess their comprehension. 

Miscue Analysis : the teacher is assessing the errors made by the student

Types of Miscues	What they tell you
Correction: During the oral reading, the child realizes he/she has made an error and re-reads the section/word without prompting.	Correction: This is good! We want readers to self-correct. However is the reader reading too fast? Is the reader mis-correcting accurate reading? If so, the reader often doesn't see himself as a 'good' reader.
Insertion: As the child is reading, he/she will insert a word or two that isn't on the page	Insertion Does the inserted word detract from meaning? If not, it may just mean the reader is making sense but also inserts. The reader may also be reading too fast. If the insertion is something like using finished for finish, this should be addressed.
Omission: During the oral reading, the child leaves out a word(s.)	Omission: When words are omitted, it may mean weaker visual tracking. Determine if the meaning of the passage is affected or not. If not, omissions can also be the result of not focusing or reading too fast. It may also mean the sight vocabulary is weaker.
Repetition: A child repeats a word or portion of the text.	Repetition Lots of repetition may mean that the text level is too difficult. Sometimes readers repeat when they're uncertain and will repeat the word(s) to make sense of the passage.
Reversal: A child will reverse the order of the print or the word.	Reversal: Watch for altered meaning. Many reversals happen with young readers with high frequency words - of for for etc.
Substitution: Instead of reading a specific word, the child inserts a different word. info about miscues from Sue Watson	Substitutions: Sometimes a child will use a substitution because they don't understand the word being read. Does the substitution make sense in the passage, is it a logical substitution?

The Reading and Writing Processes: A Comparison

When students understand the similarities between the reading and writing processes, they begin to see the natural flow that exists as they read what others write, and re-read to revise their own writing. Sounds simple enough, right? But when I explained these comparisons to high school kids, I witnessed their AH HA moments and positive changes in their reading and writing habits.

 

chart info from Literacy in the 21st Century, 5th ed. by Gail Tompkins.

8 principles for effective teaching of Reading

Effective teachers

View more PowerPoint from vblori

information from Gail Tompkins, Literacy for the 21st Century:  A Balanced Approach, 5th ed. 2010.

Bonding vs. Loving with Support

Bonding	Loving
Ensure success for every child	Affirm their strengths
Model respect	Through my behaviors I show compassion and courtesy toward every student through encouraging words and creation of a safe haven; building trust from day one.
Encourage shared decision making	Empower students by collaborating with them, not dictating to them
Bring in stories	Share successes, disappointments, and failures with my students: by opening myself to my students, I show them I trust them with my life stories.  I cannot expect them to share themselves, if I do not model the behavior
Get to know students as readers	Interview my students individually to learn about their reading attitudes and aptitudes
Enjoy the students in your class	Laugh with them, cry with them, share with them, be joyous with them, show them you are delighted to be their teacher.
Celebrate life	Love life, relish learning, be passionate about reading and other aspirations

Ways to support bonding in the classroom:

• Converse with students about what is important to them; even what they fear
• Ask them for their advice and opinions
• Create a loving, trusting, respectful and tolerant environment
• Champion your students.
• Don’t lecture to them; share with them
• Write together
• Read together
• Laugh together
• Model the behaviors you desire your students to exhibit

Summer Learning is Important to Student Success

Summer Learning is Important to Student Success :

 "... Most students lose about two months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation skills over the summer months. Low-income students also lose more than two months in reading achievement. And the alarming thing is: that loss is cumulative. More than half of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income youth can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities. As a result, low-income youth are less likely to graduate from high school or enter college. By middle school, many kids will be hopelessly behind, putting the chance of entering college or even graduating from high school at risk."

'via Blog this'

Most Read Books

There have been many comments about this graphic: some question the notion of "read" vs. "printed" while some say that books in a series should not be lumped together (i.e., Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings). What are your thoughts?

Methods for Language Teaching

Approaches and Methods for Language Teaching

View more presentations from vblori.

Free Technology for Teachers: What About Me? - Create an Infographic About Yourself

Free Technology for Teachers: What About Me? - Create an Infographic About Yourself:
Applications for Education
What About Me? could be a good tool for getting students to look at their social media footprints. This could be particularly important for high school students applying to college as well as for students looking for jobs. Have students create an infographic to analyze what they're sharing on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

'via Blog this'

March is Women's History Month

Put the power of primary sources to work in the classroom. Browse ready-to-use lesson plans, student activities, collection guides and research aids.


Visit this website from The Library of Congress for Women's History Month

Learning Strategies

Whatever the strategies emphasized, learned, and used, it is generally agreed that they should be taught through explicit instruction, careful modeling, and scaffolding.

• Mentally active learners are better learners
• Learning strategies can be taught
• Learning strategies transfer to new tasks
• Academic language learning is more effective with learning strategies

from The SIOP Model by Jana Echevarria, MaryEllen Vogt, and Deborah J. Short

Word of the Day: Suggestopedia

 http://www.jwelford.demon.co.uk/brainwaremap/suggest.html

Key Elements of Suggestopedia

Some of the key elements of Suggestopedia include a rich sensory learning environment (pictures, colour, music, etc.), a positive expectation of success and the use of a varied range of methods: dramatised texts, music, active participation in songs and games, etc.
Suggestopedia adopts a carefully structured approach, using four main stages as follows:

• Presentation
  A preparatory stage in which students are helped to relax and move into a positive frame of mind, with the feeling that the learning is going to be easy and fun.
• First Concert - "Active Concert"
  This involves the active presentation of the material to be learnt. For example, in a foreign language course there might be the dramatic reading of a piece of text, accompanied by classical music.
• Second Concert - "Passive Review"
  The students are now invited to relax and listen to some Baroque music, with the text being read very quietly in the background. The music is specially selected to bring the students into the optimum mental state for the effortless acquisition of the material.
• Practice
  The use of a range of games, puzzles, etc. to review and consolidate the learning. 

Enable students to take control of their learning

While the teacher provides the necessary instruction, modeling, and support, the students work to develop the metacognitive skills necessary for independent problem solving.

from: Mastering ESL and Bilingual Methods by Socorro G. Herrera and Kevin G. Murry

ASCD Inservice: Every Child, Every Day

ASCD Inservice: Every Child, Every Day:
"Examine the literacy activities that struggling readers in your school experience every day. Do all of them spend at least two-thirds of their reading and writing lessons actually reading and writing? Or do they spend larger amounts of time on specific skill-work activities, and little time reading and writing?


When struggling readers interact with texts all day long, in science and social studies lessons, for instance, do they read with 98% accuracy or higher -- or do they struggle with reading accuracy, then fluency, and finally comprehension? What are students learning about language and literacy in settings where they have an uninterrupted diet of challenging texts?


Ask yourself:

• Are the adults in our school making decisions that create struggling readers?
• Are instructional systems and uses of time designed to ensure the activities recommended above? If not, what is in their place?
• What am I going to do to ensure that every child spends most of every day in high-quality, literate, learning environments?"

'via Blog this'

The Old Man & The Sea Animated | Open Culture

The Old Man & The Sea Animated | Open Culture:

'via Blog this'

Suggestions for the Creation of a Language-Rich Environment for Language Acquisition

from Mastering ESL and Bilingual Methods by Socorro G. Herrera and Kevin G. Murry

When a child creates

When a child creates with blocks, when he communicates with paint, when he uses his body freely as a means of expression, he is being taught to read.

J Hymes, 1965

Building Bridges

Building Bridges with Multicultural Literature: African Refugees

View more presentations from Lori Berghe.