Under Stress: Mine for Joy

As if teaching weren’t challenging enough under normal conditions, 2020 adds several more layers of stress for everyone. That just makes the habit of mining for joy that much more important than usual. When I am bombarded with stressors in my social media feed and news cycles well as daily life, I need to mine for joy by attentively digging into my own life and treasuring the nuggets I find. Here are a few I found at school this week:

2020 has transformed the mundane into reasons to celebrate. I get to go to school and teach students face-to-face in a physical classroom every day. I am thankful for that every day in a way I never was before because I’ve now had to do online teaching, because many of my colleagues in the US are still doing it, and because tomorrow is not a given—if the coronavirus visits our community we could be online again. Even though we’re all wearing masks, taking our temperature every morning, washing our hands like the wife of a certain Scottish thane, skipping school year markers like camp and the school festival, and adapting lots of instructional strategies to be more pandemic-safe—we are here, together, healthy, learning, one more day.

Geeky English teacher moments reading the novel Wonder with 6th and 7th graders. (See these posts for our journals, embedded grammar, and the back planning.) One student returned after leaving class at the end of the period and whispered to me gleefully, “Mrs. Essenburg, I was reading ahead on the bus on the way to school this morning, and the main character is reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe just like I did!” So fun to see them discovering the delight of getting literary connections. Another student volunteered in class, “The style the author uses for Miranda has a lot of colons!” This reading-like-writers stuff might actually be working!

The pre-assessment on irregular noun plurals (foot, feet; mouse, mice) where one student's answer to half was whole. I laughed so hard. I love seeing students’ minds at work—even when the answer reveals some level of misunderstanding. And that answer shows a lot more creative brainwork than just memorizing a list of words!

High schoolers started Cry, the Beloved Country—one of my favorite novels. Students brainstormed and discussed their ideal world—the measuring stick they use when they say something isn’t right or fair. It was a fascinating discussion.  

Friday fun with irregular verb past participles. Every Friday, one student walks in and says, “Are we going to play THE GAME?” And when I answer, “Yes,” the whole class is energized, even though they know we have 25 minutes of business to get through first. And they’re getting better at the verbs! We’ve been doing modals, so they have to say the whole phrase, “I might have ___,” for the verb they land on. A couple of students warranted a reminder yesterday that if they listened to the other players, they’d be more likely to get forms right when they land on the same square. But that’s all it took—one reminder—and they were all focused and attentive again.

I’m really excited about some learning activities I’m planning for next week: a hexagonal thinking activity to prepare for a one-pager in which 6th and 7th graders can demonstrate their understanding of the novel Wonder. Tune in next week for how it turned out. In the meantime, I'm actually looking forward to Monday! 

Here's wishing you nuggets of joy to mine and treasure among all the 2020 chaos.
 

Six Questions for Growing Readers

The silence in a room full of reading students is broken by a small gasp. That is one of my magical moments as a teacher—I know they’re fully engaged, and I know it’s on more than just an intellectual level—and it happened Friday. 

Toward the end of the 6th/7th grade English class discussion of the previous night’s assigned pages in the novel Wonder, I was having trouble restraining a couple of the students who’d read ahead from spilling the beans. “It’s the saddest chapter in the book!” one let escape. Others were shushing the spoilers. I didn’t help matters when I drew attention to the portentousness of the paragraph we’d ended on: “Finally, the door opened. It was Via. She didn’t even bother coming over to my bed, and she didn’t come in softly like I thought she would. She came in quickly” (219). Then I turned them loose for the last 10 minutes to get started on the next reading chunk. Silence descended for approximately 30 seconds. Then the gasp. 

That gasp told me my experiment had succeeded. It’s not just the one moment for that one student that I’m happy for—I’m happy that it is evidence that an approach to scaffolding reading that I’ve honed over years of working with 10th and 11th graders can also work for 6th and 7th graders. I want to give readers the tools to comprehend a text, make connections within and outside of it, and to read like writers. I don’t want to give them a list of questions that I think they should know the answers to—I want them to be able to pose and answer their own questions that they want the answers to. 

So the assignment each day is a box with 6 squares with at least 1 answer to each of the following prompts:

• What is one important plot development? 
• What is one important thing you learned about a character? 
• What is one quotation you found significant? 
• Why did you find it significant? 
• Notice something about the style: an unknown or interesting word, phrase, or sentence.
• Draw a picture representing something you envisioned while reading.

I know this works with older students, but the last time I taught 6th and 7th graders was over 20 years ago, and when we read novels, I had given them a list of specific questions on each chapter for them to find the answer to. Now I want to walk the fine line between enough scaffolding to engage readers with deeper reading than they’d do on their own without committing what Kelly Gallagher so memorably called readicide in his book by that title.

One thing that helped was my modeling. The first entry I did on the whiteboard as we read aloud together and they copied it into their notebooks. After that, I’ve done every entry in my own notebook (see above). Not only can I show students what I’ve done, but I can also know exactly what I’m asking students to do and I can comment on how doing the exercise builds my own understanding. It’s especially helpful to “show off” my drawings. They’re terrible. Stick figures. But they also communicate a specific moment or thought. Some have to do with plot, and some are more symbolic. It’s interesting to see who chooses what. I do a quick visual check at the beginning of the discussion to be sure each student has something. Sometimes a student has drawn exactly the same picture as me. Sometimes I have to ask a student about what she drew because it didn’t even register with me, but when she explains it, I can reinforce how important it is that we each notice different things. 

My goals are for students to understand how plot works to contribute to theme, how authors develop characters over time and through different point of view, to think deeply about specific quotations they find significant, to read like writers by paying attention to words and phrases, and to notice how they envision images as they read. These are strategies they can transfer to any reading. The 6 boxes let me do a quick visual survey at the beginning of class to be sure students have done the reading and held their thinking to bring to the discussion. I’m transparent with them about this: I tell them I’m asking them to fill in these 6 boxes so (1) they will be sure to think at least about these 6 things as they read, (2) they will remember the thoughts they had to contribute to the class discussion, and (3) I will be able to see the evidence of the thinking they did because I can’t see inside their heads. 

I’m so excited it’s working with 6th and 7th graders as well as I’ve seen it work with older students. 

What kind of transferable tools do you give students for growing as readers?








 

The Learning Power of a Game

It’s 2:30 on a Friday afternoon, and 8th grade English language learners are jumping out of their seats, squealing, laughing, and smiling (well, their eyes are smiling—I assume their mouths are, too, underneath their masks…Oh, Covid…). And it’s all about the past participles of irregular verbs. Yes, really. 

We are playing a game. You roll the dice, and you get to take the move if you can give the correct past participle form of the verb printed in the square you land on. We’re studying modals to express degrees of certainty, so you simply fill in the blank: “might have ___.” For take it’s taken, for go it’s gone, for sell it’s sold. You get the idea. 

I found the game board on iSLCollective when I was collecting games this summer. The name on the board says “Ludo,” a game I’d never heard of, but Googling the rules, I discovered it looks a lot like what I know as Sorry. I had discovered in my first trimester as an EFL (English as a foreign language) teacher, April to July, that even my advanced students still struggle with irregular verbs, and I determined to come back and hit that hard in the fall trimester. I had simultaneously discovered the energy that games bring to the language learning classroom, and determined to use some of my summer break to research games to use. (See this blog post for all the games I discovered.) So when I saw this Ludo game with irregular verbs, I knew it would be good. I just had no idea HOW good. 

How good is it?

• Friday afternoons no longer drag. We played this for the last 15-20 minutes of a 45-minute period for the first time last week Friday. This Friday students dragged into class, asked if we were going to play a game, and immediately perked up when I answered affirmatively—even though we were working on other things for the first 25 minutes.
• Students practice. Eagerly. With social support—friends (and opponents) sitting on the edge of their seats willing them to get (or miss) the correct verb form. Communal laughter when a missed verb is re-landed on and gotten this time…or missed…again. 
• Students strategize to practice. They don’t know they’re doing. They think they are sort of “cheating” when they realize that if they get all their pieces out and move in a block around the board, they are likely to hit the same verb in quick succession, making it “easy” to get it right. (Ha! They’ve just practiced 4 times in a row, and every time someone else lands on it, or they get sent home and have to re-cover the same ground again, they are interleaving practice!)
• We hit the sweet spot of what brain science tells us is effective learning, with the fun and rewards triggers releasing the chemicals oxytocin and dopamine that dial up the memory circuits of the brain.

What are they really learning?
I’ve given students a list of the 50 most frequently used irregular verbs. We highlighted the ones that are on this game board, so they can prepare ahead if they want. I’ve told them there will at some point be a test over all the verbs, so this isn’t all fun and games. It dampened their spirits for approximately 5 seconds. I probably should have given a pretest to really test the effectiveness…and maybe I still will! I’ll report back in a few weeks on what they really learned. When they’ve got this set, I’ll have to design my own game board to cover the rest of the irregular verbs. (By the way, I have noticed that there are a few regular verbs scattered among the irregular ones. I think that’s a great idea to keep the kids from assuming that the forms CANT be regular!)

What about Covid?
I am lucky enough to be face-to-face with my students. Still, I have a pair of dice for each student, I post or project the game board on the whiteboard, and I use colored magnets for the game pieces. They can roll individually, and then direct me how to move their pieces, so we aren’t all breathing all over each other and touching the same pieces. The dice I clean after each class.

I’m also lucky enough to have only the perfect number of 4 students in this class. What if I had more? I might do teams with a rotating speaker with a limited number of asks for help available. Or I have several games going. In that case, I’d have to have a 5th student in each group to be the judge, and, in Covid, he or she could also be the mover of game pieces.

If I were virtual, I don’t think it would be too hard to make a game board digitally. My first thought, since we’re using Google, is the JamBoard app. 

Can I finish a game in 15-20 minutes? 
No. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Last week I took a picture so we could pick up where we left off. But we ended up starting over because I decided to tweak some rules. It didn’t diminish the excitement one bit. I took another picture at the end of class this time. I use it to start the game next Friday.

What were the rule tweaks?
Here’s a link to some rules I found. I’ve decided to not require any particular number to get onto the board—we just want to get practicing! We didn’t use the blocking or sending home rules the first time. The second time I added them in. The sending home rule really upped the excitement. The blockading rule no one has used yet. The second time I also went from one to two dice—or we’ll never finish! I decided we always use the smallest number first, and if you fail to get that answer, you don’t get the second number. However, if using the smaller one first allows you to land on another player and send it home, you can use it first. 

Have you discovered any games that energize your language learning students and support their learning? I’d love to hear about them!

Grammar in the Wild

We had a wild time with sentences in 6th and 7th grade English Language Arts this week!

Grammar’s natural environment is print and speech. It runs around freely on pages, pen-tips, tongues, ears, and eyes, clothed in stories. So, equipped with ideas from this summer’s re-reading of Mechanically Inclined by Jeff Anderson, I set out with my students this week to study some grammar in the wild—in its context of reading and writing. Students were smiling and laughing, engaged beyond my wildest dreams. I’m so excited to see where this trip will take us, because new learning jumps out at me even as I guide my students.

We started a class study of the novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio with the start of school this week. (I wrote about the unit plan in last week’s blog post.) After introducing the unit and reading the first page the first day, on the second day, I followed Anderson’s script almost to the letter, substituting sentences from the first page of Wonder for his sample sentences from other novels.

I asked the students to write a sentence in their notebooks. Any sentence. On any topic. Just write a sentence. I took a couple samples from volunteers and wrote them on the whiteboard:

• I like to read books.
• White horses are rare and beautiful.
• I eat dirt.

(I’ll bet you can picture the student in your class who would have volunteered each of those sentences!) Next I asked if they were really sentences. I got hesitant nods. “How do you know?” “They have periods!” a brave soul offered. Well, yes, as the teacher/transcriber, I did put periods at the end. But then we open our books to the first page that we had read the day before. There’s a word with a period after it: “Inside.” I ask if that’s a sentence. Students are pretty sure it isn’t. I direct them back to the whiteboard and ask them what makes those groups of words sentences. 

“They tell you something.” 

“‘Inside’ tells me something. How is what they tell me different from that?” I thought this Socratic discussion might get corny, but it didn’t—those 6th and 7th graders were really trying to articulate how they knew those were sentences! After a few back and forths, someone triumphantly dug up the word “subject,” which we decided was the who or what the sentence was about. They didn’t know or remember “verb” or “predicate,” but they identified that the who/what was doing something. I added, “or being.” So we underlined the who/what subject and put a starburst around the doing/being verb in each sentence. There we have the sentence core: 2 words. 

We identified the core of a string of simple sentences on the first page: “I ride my bike. I play ball. I have an XBox. Stuff like that makes me ordinary.” I find a tricky one down the page: “I’m not that way.” Because of the preponderance of “I” subjects so far, everyone gets that, but then they think “not” is the verb. One quiet student catches the trick—he raises his hand and offers, “am.” 

We go back to “And I feel ordinary. Inside.” We see the sentence core is “I feel” and the one-word sentence after it really could be part of that sentence: “I feel ordinary inside.” That’s a very standard, understandable sentence. But what meaning gets added when the writer puts the pause of a period before the last word? It makes us stop, pay attention, and wonder—so what’s up with the outside? It creates a little mystery, and primes us for what comes next. So, I review, 2 words is the most basic sentence. As we continue to read, we’re going to hunt for and collect 2-word sentences. 

A student’s hand shoots up, and I call on her. “I guess,” she says. I stare at her blankly. She holds up her book and points to a place on the first page. “‘I guess.’ It’s a 2-word sentence.” Oh, yes! I knew that! I just had decided not to take that step in this lesson today because it was getting on in the period and we need to get on to reading some more. 

The next day I told them there was 1 kind of 2-word sentence we weren’t going to collect because there were too many of them: dialogue tags. We reviewed dialogue tags from last term, and found a few on the first page of today’s reading. A student noticed as I wrote them on the board that sometimes the subject and verb were reversed. I told them I was noticing another pattern, too.  Look for places where the sentence continues after the dialogue tag. They noticed the comma followed by an -ing verb and sometimes more:

• …he said, standing in front of the half-opened door. (24)
• ...answered Julian, closing the door. (24)
• ...Julian said, walking after me. (25)
• ...Charlotte said, sounding a little bit like Via. (25)
• ...said Julian, shrugging. (25)
• ...I said, trying to keep my voice steady. (25)
• ...explained Charlotte, ignoring Julian’s smirk. (25)

I said, "I’m going to say something and then do something, and I want you to write it down. Use this pattern: the words said, the dialogue tag, then a comma and -ing verb phrase." I acted out the following:

• “This is heavy,” said Mrs. Essenburg, dropping her bag on the floor.
• “It’s cold in here,” said Mrs. Essenburg, opening the window.

Woo-hoo! We know about 2-word sentence cores, we have a sophisticated pattern for combining sentences, and we are getting primed to read like writers!

Who knew grammar could be this much fun or this practical? Monday we’re going to have a 2-Word Slap-Down contest (you’ll have to see Mechanically Inclined if you want all the details), identifying the subject and verb in some of the longer sentences we read…I can hardly wait!