What Blogging in 2020 Taught Me

2020: The record high teaching anxiety of the year somehow transmuted into blog posts with record high views. No joke. In 8-1/2 years of blogging, 4 of my top 10 are now from 2020, including the #1: “7 Things I Learned Starting a School Year Online.” That was the most remarkable bit of data that emerged from my traditional review of the year’s blogging. (Here are the links for reviews of 2019, 2018, and 2017.) As I continued to reflect, I found that while my reasons for blogging have stayed the same, everything has taken on new dimensions in this strangest of years. 

Over those last 8-1/2 years, I’ve become almost addicted to weekly blogging. Sitting down on a Saturday afternoon to really hash through with myself something that’s gone on during the week has become core to what I do as a teacher. 

• For myself: It’s an opportunity to articulate what did or didn’t go well and why, or simply to hold myself accountable to having done something during each week worth reflecting on. 
• For my students: It has solidified my own identity as a writer, so that when I teach writing, I’m speaking from experience. 
• For community: I need a place to share my teaching attempts, successes, struggles, growth, a place I can offer and receive help and encouragement.

However, 2020 scooted me way out of my comfort zone, challenging me to grow not only in a new mode of teaching (online), but also in new grade levels (middle school) and new field (adding ESL to English language arts). March and April were anxious months (the blog evidence: I only wrote 2 posts each month), but looking back over the top 6 posts of 2020, I can see how I’ve grown. Here they are: 

1. “7 Things I Learned Starting a School Year Online” (July 24; 2,338 views) Having moved to Japan to start a new school year in April, and starting it online, I’d already been through what American teachers were dreading. I was delighted that what I was able to share apparently filled a need!
2. “Hexagons Spur Creative and Collaborative Thinking!” (October 3; 570 views) “Hexagonal thinking” has been featured on 2 blogs I follow and used widely in the Creative High School English Facebook group. That encouraged me to try this excellent way of showing and promoting the thinking skill of making connections. And I could fold my blog back into the discussion. If you haven’t tried this in a class, I highly recommend it.
3. “Resources for Teaching News/Media Literacy and Current Events”  (August 14; 455 views) This has been a growing interest of mine over the last 5 years, and the pandemic-election conjunction brought the need into sharp focus. I curated a list of resources over the summer, and saw many opportunities to share the post. What I really got a kick out of, though, was seeing someone I didn’t even know sharing it in answer to a question in the Creative High School English Facebook group. When somebody has found something I made helpful enough to pass on… 
4. “One Easy Exercise for Paying Attention to Language” (November 14; 423 views) Though I’ve always had ESL students in my English classes, targeting English language learners in a school setting has been a new experience. I want to really help them thrive—not just survive. Larry Ferlazzo’s book The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox has been an amazing resource. I’ve committed to trying one new strategy from it per week. When I blog on it, I share it in ESL teachers K-12 Facebook group. It’s been great to be able to glean ideas from this community and to finally have something to also give back! 
5. “Creating Classroom Community Remotely: My Best Practice” (May 9; 375 views) Another post relative to online learning. NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) asked permission to share it on their blog. I’m thankful for the little successes in the steep learning curve on online teaching, and for the ability to plough back into the connected educators’ community a little of the value I’ve gotten from it. 
6. “Prompting Fluency in Writing for ESL Students” (October 30; 274 views) Another idea from Larry Ferlazzo’s book. The really fun thing here was that a teacher I’ve never met from the ESL teachers K-12 Facebook group asked to use a blog post I’d written in a Youtube video she was doing. I find that kind of educator synergy so energizing!

The long and the short of it? 2020 has grown my online community, and grown my teaching repertoire. Thanks especially to all the members of the Facebook groups ESL teachers K-12 and Creative High School English. Those communities helped immensely. And it’s okay with me if I don’t have to grow quite as much in 2021, but it’s good to know it was possible.

Fueling the Brain with Independent Reading

Reading is essential because it fuels the brain. —middle school student on exam

One experiment I've run this year is giving 6th and 7th graders 10 minutes per class for independent reading. (Except while reading the whole class novel Wonder, when reading time was devoted to that book.) As a part of the exam before Christmas, I asked students to reflect on the reading they’d done (questions taken from Larry Ferlazzo’s book The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox—Strategy 1 Independent Reading, Figure 1.1 End-of-Quarter Reading Reflection). Through that reflection, I was reminded what a good practice it is, I learned some things about my students, they set some goals for themselves.

First, what we did: Students brought a book of their choice and read for the first 10 minutes of the period. Most of the time I read with them. This has been shown to correlate highly with the success of independent reading—whether the teacher demonstrates her own value for the activity. Sometimes I gave a quick book ad for one I’d finished, and sometimes I gave a quick reminder of the value of reading and why we were spending this time "just reading": growth in vocabulary, knowledge of the world, writing skill, empathy, focus, enjoyment… 

Once a week I circulated and recorded the book and page number for each student. We could have a conversation if a student isn’t making much progress (or are on an earlier page than last week!). Sometimes I suggested a change of book if it was too difficult or not interesting. I have a classroom library, and I always had a couple of recommendations on hand when I saw a student was nearing the end of a book. 

Sometimes we made connections between independent reading books and what we were studying in class. We finished the term with students each giving a book ad for one of the books they had read.

Frindle by Andrew Clements was very popular with the boys. Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo with the girls. Auggie and Me with everyone when we had finished Wonder by Patricia Palaccio. One boy will read anything by Alan Gratz. A couple discovered Percy Jackson and are racing through the series. One loves A Place to Belong by Cynthia Kadohata, one Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, and another Genius: The Game by Leopoldo Gout. 

I learned that students have read an average of 5 books each this fall trimester. That's a pace that would mean 15 books in a year! I think they surprised themselves. I was also surprised to learn that one student reads voraciously in another language. 

Here are a few more of the questions and student answers:

How do you feel about your progress in reading? 

• I feel like I’m getting faster at reading, able to zip through sentences in a matter of seconds. 
• I think I’m improving in focusing on the book. 
• When I used to read, I would read the same line twice, but now I don’t do it as often. 

What strategies are you using to help you understand your book?

• Summarizing chapters into a long sentence. 
• Looking up words I don’t know. 
• First I read the front and back. 
• I would visualize what’s going on and re-read the sentence until I understand. 
• Ask questions to people who have read the book.

What changes will you make as a reader next term? 

• I will read longer, more challenging books. 
• I think I will try to make time to read every day. 
• I want to read more books than I read this term.  
• After finishing The Famous Five series, I’d like to read books that are thicker.

What do you need to become an even better reader? 

• I need a place where it’s quiet and I can focus on my book more. 
• Ask for more book recommendations.
• Partner to talk about my book with.

Finally, here are some of the ways students filled in the sentence "Reading is ___ because ___":

• Reading is essential because it helps improve your vocabulary and focus.
• Reading is hard because there are words I don’t understand.
• Reading is soothing because it reduces my daily stress.
• Reading is important because by reading a book you can get knowledge and can be a better writer. Unlike the internet it is more likely for the information you got from a book to remain in your brain. And obviously it is fun.

Love that last one. Especially the way all that information about reading had to be crammed into a 1-1/2 inch blank! 

Making Learning Meaningful with Article Choice Sets

• I realized that I always buy stuff that I don’t need. In this article, it said “Ask yourself if you really want something before you buy it.” When I saw this sentence, I thought that I should take that advice. (from student response to “How to save money as a kid”)
• What interested me the most was Michael was diagnosed with epilepsy and he needed to stop gymnastics, climbing trees and diving—all of the things that he loved. If I were Michael I would be really sad. I think that’s why he thought more strongly to help the other people. (from student response to “This 10-year-old opened a bakery; for every cupcake he sells, he gives one to the homeless”)
• I was surprised because he actually created a bank for children. Usually we end up only thinking about it and don’t take any action, but he actually created a bank. I noticed that it’s a very good thing to take action rather than just thinking about it. (from student response to "Teen entrepreneur in Peru runs a bank for kids, helps environment")

I love it when students really engage with the class material, not just because it is assigned, but because something in it piques their curiosity or grabs their attention. That happened recently in an 8th grade EFL class, and I want to replicate this activity in future units. The magic fairy dust, I think, was student choice, practical application or real-life models, and an ethical dimension—all while practicing reading, writing, thinking, speaking, and listening in English.

I took the “article of the week” idea and married it to student choice based on the unit topic, which was money, to go with the grammar focus of quantifiers. NewsELA is a great source of articles for students learning English because the articles are available at 5 different lexiles. A quick search of the topic “money” turned up 3 articles that had variety, relevance, an ethical dimension, and a global component:

• How to save money as a kid (lexile choices: max, 850, 720, 560, 430)
• Teen entrepreneur in Peru runs a bank for kids, helps environment (lexile choices: max, 1190, 1030, 840, 560) 
• This 10-year-old opened a bakery; for every cupcake he sells, he gives one to the homeless (lexile choices: max, 810, 660, 550, 410)

I made copies to pass around and gave students one minute to scan and then pass, deciding at the end which of the three articles they were interested in reading. I was delighted when I had some takers for every article.

The assignment I adapted from a free article of the week template on Teachers Pay Teachers. There are several pages of thorough explanation, expectations, sample articles and reflection questions, and a grading sheet—grab the packet if you’re interested. Here’s briefly what students did with their chosen article:

1. Close read and annotation: Highlight or underline at least 3 words/phrases you find important, interesting, confusing, and write a note in the margin for each about why you selected that bit. This is your brain on paper, showing me your thinking about what you’re reading as you read (see above). 
2. Summary statement: Title, summary verb, and approximately 50 words
3. Vocabulary journal form (4 entries): These are 1/2-page forms including places for the word, part of speech, definition, context sentence, visual representation, synonyms, and antonyms (see below).
4. Reflection: I used a list of sentence stems, out of which students were to pick 3 and complete each with 2-3 sentences. (I noticed…, I wonder why…, I can relate to this because…, etc.) 

Vocabulary journal form

We took it slowly because this was the first time through for an 8th grade EFL class: one day each for reading, vocabulary, summary, response. After each step except reading, students shared with the class in some way: teaching one of their vocabulary words to classmates, reading aloud their summary, and presenting the combined summary and response for a question/answer time. I'd love to do this with my 6th/7th grade ELA class as well as my high school EFL class. In a future use, I'd also wrap up with a discussion of the ethical aspects of money. This time I tried introducing the articles that way, and it was a little slower going. So much potential here! 

The Monsters Are Due at Christmas?

It seemed singularly out of step with the run-up to Christmas. A Twilight Zone episode featuring aliens toying with human machines just enough to trigger their fear which turns them against each other. But it was a piece that kept coming up as good middle school material, my curriculum was missing drama, I found a good unit on Teachers Pay Teachers, and the timeframe fit. I ignored the un-Yuletide-y vibes and plunged ahead.

As the unit drew to a close, I began to see that I had been wrong. “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” is, in fact, very appropriate to Advent. We long again for angels to appear and say what they always say: “Don’t be afraid.” 

It’s become cliche to refer to 2020 being a year of uncertainty and fear with the Covid-19 pandemic, economic fallout, a worldwide reckoning on racism, a polarizing US election, and much more. The year 1960, when this most popular Twilight Zone episode first aired, was raked with its own uncertainty and fear—the Communist Control Act of 1952 was successfully used for the 2nd and last time, the US entered the Vietnam War, and the USSR shot down the US U2 spy plane. The show was remade as “The Monsters Are on Maple Street” in the wake of 9-11 and the fear of global terrorism. 

Rod Serling shows us a vision of the human tendency to respond to fear with suspicion and scapegoating, which will ultimately destroy exactly what they are trying to preserve. How can we opt out of that herd mentality? Especially when the reasons for fear seem really concrete and probable? Recently, a friend posted this quotation from Henri Nouwen that resonated with me: “Optimism and hope are radically different attitudes. Optimism is the expectation that things—the weather, human relationships, the economy, the political situation, and so on—will get better. Hope is the trust that God will fulfill God's promises to us in a way that leads us to true freedom. The optimist speaks about concrete changes in the future. The person of hope lives in the moment with the knowledge and trust that all of life is in good hands...Let's live with hope.”

Trying to figure out how to share my growing understanding of how Christian hope fights fear with 6th and 7th graders, I realized I had a day on the calendar blocked for reading a Christmas story while I was commenting on rough drafts of the theme essay. I got out one of my favorites, “Guests,” by Katherine Paterson, from her collection Angels and Other Strangers. It’s set in Japan—the setting of our school—during World War 2—also a time of great uncertainty and fear. When I came to the last line, I knew I had my connection: “For the first time in many years, Pastor Nagai obeyed the angel’s word” (36).

What faith gives me is the assurance that even when the physical threat is real, it is a bigger threat to not show the compassion God has shown us--a threat to our eternal souls and the souls of others who won’t see God in us. Not only that, but God empowers us to choose his compassion. And, in the compassionate hand of God, we know our eternal destiny is safe.

May we, too, in these waning days of 2020, obey the angel’s word.

Another Easy Exercise for Paying Attention to Language

Running and laughter abounded—as well as dictation for grammar, spelling, and vocabulary! I call it sentence relay. (Sounds so much more fun than the "d" word--"dictation"--and it is!)

Two weeks ago I wrote about one easy exercise for paying attention to language. Here’s another. This one adds collaboration and movement—one 8th grader was actually breathing hard! Larry Ferlazzo, to whom I'm indebted for the idea, calls it running dictation or messenger-and-scribe. 

I posted 4 different sentences in different places around the room (small type, lying down in the chalk tray, or with a flap folded over to prevent thwart prying eyes from across the classroom). Students paired up, and for the first sentence, one had the job of going to a sentence, reading it, returning to the partner, and dictating it from memory. The partner staying in place took the dictation. The runner could make as many trips as necessary to check wording, spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but she had to return to her partner to deliver the findings—she couldn’t shout across the room while looking at the sentence—and she couldn’t carry the paper over to the posted sentence for comparison. When a partnership thought they had the first sentence done perfectly, they swapped roles for the second sentence—then back and forth again for sentences three and four. 

Two teams finished nearly at the same time, and when I checked the sentences over, both had 6 errors. I told them how many in each sentence, and they were disappointed, but eager to find out what the errors were, groaning when they discovered them—spelling, plurals, missed punctuation, subject-verb agreement.

The sentences I chose were ones from our reading that contained vocabulary words that would be on the quiz the next day, so the activity was a two-for—both vocabulary review and dictation. Actually, it was a four-for—vocabulary review, dictation, a wake-me-up-and-get-the-blood-flowing, and conversation practice, and the questions and directions (How do you spell this word? You have to put a comma after…) all had to be in English.

Actually, I chose 5 sentences, and the shortest one I used to model the task with me as the runner and an advanced student as the scribe. I modeled the back-and-forth, and I modeled how to graciously give corrections.

Energizing, motivating, and effective: Whether I want to review a previous day's reading, a particular grammatical structure, or vocabulary words, this exercise is a great way to do it. 

I’m always on the hunt for games and activities, and The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox has been a fantastic resource. I also had great success with free games I’d gotten over the summer from the website Teach This. I found them so helpful that last week I sprang for the paid level access, and I’m loving it. Highly recommended—and so much more than games is available!

Growing Writers with Low-Floor, High-Ceiling Journal Prompts

I’ve been re-converted to student journal writing this week. Here are some of the types of responses from 6th and 7th grade language arts students that sparked this reconversion:

• Journal entries articulating very specific, personal fears, complete with illustrative or originating narratives. 
• Journal entries making connections between “The Monsters Due on Maple Street” and various students’ independent reading books, such as Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, Genius: The Game by Leopoldo Gout, and Grenade by Alan Gratz.
• A script of over 3 handwritten pages giving an alternate, peaceful outcome to the climax of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” masterfully imitating Rod Sterling’s style and working out the resolution right down to the aliens’ conversation and narrator’s conclusion.

For one reason and another, I haven’t been using student journal writing regularly this year, but then this week I gave 3 prompts. Some students wrote powerfully and at length to the first prompt: What is something you fear? (Or something that others fear—can be from a book or movie, news, history, or someone you know.) A couple of responses were minimal. Some said they weren’t afraid of anything, and yet no one chose the parenthetical options. The students who had really engaged with the prompt I’m sure spent more time than the required 10-15 minutes. Some of them were students who seem to struggle to get words on the page in other writing situations. I was both thrilled and disappointed in myself that I’d missed this important avenue so far this year, and I wondered how I could help all the students engage to that level. 

I realized I had not clearly articulated and taught the goals of this journal prompt—I’d just thrown it out there. The next day, I made a course correction. I told the students there were 2 goals for this journal prompt: 

1. To practice writing fluency—just putting words on the page for 10-15 minutes.
2. To make connections with the text we are reading as a class—connections to ourselves, to other texts, or to life (history, current events, things studied in other classes, the experiences of people we know). 

Because of #1, if you run out of things to say on your first idea, feel free to try a new idea. For #2, I hadn’t explicitly taught the concept of text-to-self, text-to-text, and text-to-life connections, and I hadn’t explicitly taught, modeled, and given practice on how to make those connections. Now I’m making a start.

Then I assigned journal prompt #2—since everyone had chosen to write journal #1 on the text-to-self connection, this time they could choose to write on a text-to-text connection or a text-to-life connection. Guess what—better results! No one-sentence responses. A student who ran out of things to say on one topic started on another. And, as a bonus, several students made connections all on their own between their independent reading book and the text we were reading as a whole class!

Finally, journal prompt #3: Write an alternate ending to “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” one that is positive rather than negative. The goals for this journal prompt? 

1. To practice writing fluency. 
2. To identify important points where people could have made different decisions to affect the outcome. 
3. To provide an opportunity to be creative. 

This is place where one student wrote a fantastic script over 3 handwritten pages. Another student did a similar thing with 2 pages. That’s the high ceiling for those with the interest and ability. But even those who protested they weren’t creative listed several different points at which people could have made different decisions and how that might have worked out. Some of the scenarios were more realistic than others—but every student, at some level, was working on the goals I’d articulated for at least 10 minutes. That’s the low floor.  

So overall, what have I learned about student journals?

• Time—sometimes I’ve required length, like 1/2-page, but writing size can vary so much, and middle schoolers can be so literal. An at-home assignment of 10-15 minutes of writing 3 times a week is working well for 6th and 7th graders right now. I’d give the in-class time, but I’m already giving 10 minutes to independent reading, which I don’t want to monitor in any other way than by observation for the time being. And accounting for time, as a teacher, keeps me from just piling on more assignments. It makes it clear that saying yes to some things means saying no to others. It clarifies priorities.  
• Monitor—teacher response, share with a neighbor—this week, to get us started right, I’m responding to every one, though the second 2 I responded to at the same time. Later I may move to every couple of weeks, and ask students to choose and mark with a post-it the one they want a response to.
• Goals—set, communicate, teach what’s needed, monitor, and give feedback.
• Prompts— I prefer using prompts that are connected to class but go beyond, that are as open-ended as possible, and that offer variety over time (creativity, application, evaluation).

And the biggest thing I’ve learned about student journals? They're a great tool. I regret my irregularity using them so far this year. It’s a low-pressure opportunity for increasing the volume of student writing, it gives me important formative feedback on what needs to happen in class, it builds relationships as students make personal connections, and it’s a great low-floor, high-ceiling learning activity for differentiation.

What effective low-floor, high-ceiling reading and writing activities do you do?

One Easy Exercise for Paying Attention to Language

Paying attention—really paying attention—is harder than it seems. I spent a good portion of my childhood with either my dad or a coach telling me to keep my eye on the ball. How does one actually DO it? Once as a volleyball coach, I took some old balls, colored each panel in alternating colors, and told players to watch closely and tell me which color panel contacted their arms. 

As an English teacher, I’m always on the lookout for strategies that help students pay that kind of attention to language. Over the years I’ve found a few. Sequencing—of paragraphs or sentences—is one I love. This week I found another in my personal challenge of trying 1 new strategy a week from Larry Ferlazzo’s The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox. It worked so well with my English language learners that I took it to my English language arts class where it worked just as well. 

Hang with me because it doesn’t sound that exciting, but the students were engaged, focused, and energized. They were paying attention to meaning, to vocabulary words; and to sentence structures, grammar, punctuation, and spelling. They practiced listening, note taking, collaboration, speaking, and writing. And it was great review at the beginning of the period of some of yesterday’s content. Ferlazzo calls it “dictogloss.”

Here’s how it goes: I picked a short paragraph that we’d read the previous day. I gave students a half-sheet of scrap paper, and asked them to divide it into thirds. I told them I would read a paragraph they were familiar with several times, and then they would try to recreate.

1. I read the paragraph at normal speed, and students only listened—no writing.
2. I read the paragraph a little more slowly, and students took notes in the top third of the paper.
3. Students paired up and share notes, adding in the middle third of the paper things from their partner or things that occurred to them in the discussion. 
4. I read the paragraph a third time, no notes—only listening.
5. Then students tried to recreate the paragraph I’d read in the bottom third of the paper.
6. When they were done, they could get out the original, compare it, and use a different colored pen to make 3 changes or additions. 

For a middle school language arts class, I used a paragraph of stage directions from the script for “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” that came shortly before class ended the previous day, so on top of all the good language stuff, it also functioned as review of content:

Steve and Charlie can be seen beyond them. They stop once again and turn toward the boy. There’s a murmur in the crowd, a murmur of irritation and concern as if the boy were bringing up fears that shouldn’t be brought up; words which carried with them a strange kind of validity that came without logic but nonetheless registered and had meaning and effect. Again the murmur of reaction from the crowd. Tommy is partly frightened and partly defiant as well.

For a middle school English as a foreign language (EFL) class, I used a paragraph from the textbook (Focus on Grammar 5 [4th edition], Jay Maurer, Pearson. Unit 8):

How did money originate, and where? The Babylonians were the first to develop actual “money” when they started to use gold and silver about 2500 B.C.E. In the succeeding centuries, many other items came to be used as currency, e.g., jewelry, land, and even cattle.

I won’t grade it—at least this time. I got the results I wanted: most students were engaged, and looking over the papers gave me great formative data for who needs help in note taking as well as in a whole variety of other English-y skills. I’ll definitely do this again—not every day, but certainly every week or two.

How do you help students really pay attention to language? 

9 Amazing Middle Grades Novels: Windows and Mirrors

Sometimes I finish a middle grades book and think, “I can see why a kid might like that, but because I’m not the target audience, it just didn’t grab me.” Then I find one that makes me laugh, cry, and never once check how many pages are left. I've run into a whole raft of these recently. These books’ characters have been just as real and compelling, their issues just as significant, their style as intriguing as any adult literature, all done with a lightness of touch, a belief in growth, and an ultimate hopefulness. This gives me an optimism that books can still be windows and mirrors for my students: windows through which my students can see the experiences of others unlike them as well as mirrors where they can examine their own experiences, growing in understanding of and empathy for all image bearers of God, appreciating our similarities and our differences, motivated and knowledgeable about loving those neighbors. 

Here are some of the books I’ve been reading recently:

1. Amal Unbound by Aisha Saeed. Amal is a Pakistani village girl, determined to become a teacher, who falls afoul of the local landlord. An excellent introduction to the reality of indentured servitude and issues of girls’ education.
2. Harbor Me by Jacqueline Woodson. “I want each of you to say to the others, ‘I will harbor you.’” A teacher in New York City tells her 6 sixth graders this, and over the course of the school year, they do exactly that as they gradually share their stories—Black, white, biracial, Latinx; an incarcerated father, a deported father, a dead mother.
3. Front Desk by Kelly Yang. How can a book can be laugh-out-loud funny while dealing with issues of immigration, unfair employment practices, and discrimination? Mia Tang’s family are Chinese immigrants who live in and manage one of those cheap hotels 10 minutes from Disneyland that I passed many times when I was in high school.
4. A Place to Belong by Cynthia Kadohata. At the end of World War 2, Hanako and her family leave the U.S. internment camp and return to the Japan her father left long ago to live with the grandparents she has never met who are poor tenant farmers in the mountains outside Hiroshima. A nuanced and unusual perspective so appropriate for my Japanese international school students!
5. Ghost Boys by Jewel Parker Rhodes. A 2-line blurb cannot begin to communicate how beautifully this story weaves together perspectives and past and present to come up with an ultimately hopefully message for the living to make a difference. The ghost of a young victim of police violence meets the ghost of Emmett Till, who helps him process what has happened, so he in turn can help the daughter of the police officer. 
6. Out of My Mind by Sharon M. Draper. Melody Brooks is trapped in a body she has little control over due to cerebral palsy, but she is determined to find a way to communicate all the things going on inside her brilliant mind. A story of resilience, growth, and empathy. 
7. All Rise for the Honorable Perry T. Cook by Leslie Connor. Perry was born and raised inside a prison in tiny Surprise, Nebraska. He has an unconventional community there, until the new district attorney makes him move into a foster home. But that isn’t the end of the story. Full of humor, wisdom, and a commitment to integrity.
8. Adventures with Waffles by Maria Parr. Another laugh-out-loud funny book. Translated from Norwegian, it relates the antics and adventures of Trille and Lena in their little community on an isolated fjord. Then the adventures all begin shaping toward a plot, and it took my breath away—how the story enfolded friendship and loss and fear and family and growing through it all. 
9. Ungifted by Gordon Korman. A hilarious story about Donovan Curtis, troublemaker extraordinaire though otherwise entirely ordinary, who gets accidentally sent to the gifted program instead of punished one day. I laughed, and I loved how everyone ends up growing without any of it being contrived or moralistic.  

What middle grades books have you loved lately and why?

P.S. For others I've been reading in the last 6 months, see the following blog posts:

• "Falling in Love with Middle School Books All Over Again" 
• "Reading Books to See and Love Our Neighbors"

Prompting Fluency in Writing for ESL Students

I found a way to help my ESL students generate a variety of ideas for writing. 

At the beginning of the year, I tried picture prompts. I thought it would be a fun way to get the words flowing. They could describe the picture. They could write a story about the picture. They could write from the point of view of a variety of people, animals, or objects in the picture. They could put themselves in the picture. The possibilities were endless! All I got, however, were lists of what was in the picture. Eventually I gave up.

Enter my lifeline, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox by Larry Ferlazzo. My goal is to try just one new strategy from it each week. I was marching through the book, still early days, and posted a blog about vocabulary. There was a flurry of activity around it when I posted it to a Facebook group of ESL teachers, sending me back to the book—is it only for middle schoolers? No. Does it have strategies for beginners? Yes. Does it deal with writing or only with vocabulary? 

I scanned the table of contents down to writing. I noted for the inquirer that there were plenty of strategies for writing, and then realized that since writing was the place I was struggling with my class, I should skip ahead and dip into some writing strategies. I saw Strategy 17: Using Photos or Other Images in Reading and Writing. It sent me back to my earlier failure and I wanted to see what Larry had to suggest. 

I used the New York Times picture prompt “On the Street.” Check out all the New York Times picture prompts—a great resource for photos, but while the prompts may be sufficient to get a native speaker ELA class’s ideas flowing, the next step was the magic for my ELLs.

Larry Ferlazzo’s assignment “Examining an Image (for Intermediates)” (Figure 17.3) was the magic fairy dust. At list of questions prompting the students to think about the image in a variety of ways:

1. Describe the objects in the image.
2. Describe the people and/or animals in the image.
3. Describe the different activities you see happening in the image.
4. Describe the mood of the image. Is it happy, sad, or something else? What evidence do you see that supports your answer?
5. Write a title for the image and explain why you chose that title.
6. What might the people in the image be thinking or feeling? Why?
7. If you could see outside the frame of the image, what things or people would be there? What do you think would be happening? Why?
8. What year do you think the image was taken or made? What evidence do you see that supports your answer?
9. What questions do you have about the image?

One student focused on the detail that one person has an umbrella up and the rest don’t. Maybe it’s starting to rain and people are worried. Other students focused on the robots—either as real robots that were mixing with a nervous population in the future, or as people in costume excited to go to a party. One student specified the location as New York, noting the buildings in the background.

I wonder what will happen if I use this prompt with an image once a week from now until Christmas. I hope it will increase fluency in writing so we’ll need less and less time to do the exercise. (This time took quite a while—15 minutes in class, 15 minutes at home, and 10 more minutes in class to finish.) I also hope it will increase flexibility in thinking, so that after Christmas I could give a shorter prompt and students could come up with a variety of ways to approach it on their own. Finally, I can track errors and teach one mini-lesson per exercise on common mistakes.  This week’s was subject-verb agreement in this phrase: “There is a lot of people.” I think the next image I’ll use will be a Norman Rockwell painting. 

And that is just one exercise of many given for each of the 45 strategies offered for ELL students in this book. If you teach English language learners at any grade level, any ability level, and you’re feeling the need for an infusion of new ideas, I highly recommend this book.

What do you turn to when your teaching is needing a shot in the arm?

P.S. More recommendations:

• Larry Ferlazzo's blog
• All the "Best of" lists Ferlazzo has curated (He claims to have 2,000, and I don't doubt it. The first is "The Best Art Websites For Learning English" and the last is "THE BEST WEB 2.0 APPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION IN 2020 – PART ONE"
• Other books in the series give strategies help English-proficient students as well as ELLs in subject areas. I haven't read them, but if they're anything like The ELL Teacher's Toolbox, they're worth their weight in gold:
• The Social Studies Teacher's Toolbox
• The Math Teacher's Toolbox
• The Science Teacher's Toolbox