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"