A Good Day for Reading

Friday was a good day for reading.

• Before school, I had a conversation with a colleague about works to read in American lit and world lit classes.
• After staff prayer, a colleague introduced me to a student from her class who had asked her about borrowing a book from my classroom library. (Answer: Sure thing! Just write your name and the title of the book on the sheet posted above the shelf.)
• Between homeroom and first period, four sixth and seventh grade students were already in my room reading their independent reading books…and we don’t even take class time for independent reading when we’re doing a whole class novel!
• During first period, a student pointed to the back cover of the whole class novel and asked me if I had another book by the same author advertised there. (Answer: No, but the audio is in the online library our school has a membership in, and I was planning to listen to it to see if I wanted to get it for our classroom library. She was welcome to listen to it, and her query had just shifted that item to the top of my to-read (to-listen?) list.
• Between first and second periods, another student who is not in my class asked if she could read a book in my classroom library. (Before today no student from outside my class has asked me that…and then two in one day!)
• I noticed that another colleague had updated her “is reading” poster to a book that was also on my to-read list, and we had a brief conversation about that.
• I told my EFL class that because of the newspaper article we’d read and discussed on Tuesday and Wednesday, “Survey shows only 17% in South Korea and 20% in Japan like each other,” I’d had the idea to make a poster of books to read to learn about Korea. I posted it on the other side of my world map, opposite the poster “Learn about Afghanistan by Reading….” Next poster in the works: “Learn about Japan by reading….”

I’m encouraged to see a culture of reading taking root, and it doesn’t happen by accident. What helps a culture of reading flourish? Teachers who model reading, time made available for reading, and books made available to read. “Growing Your Expertise in Children’s Literature” has a helpful list of things teachers can do to help, including some of the things I do, like sharing personal reading posters; keeping current by following blogs on new books and award winners (like Nerdy Book Club and Read Aloud Revival); and establishing a Goodreads account for setting your own goals, tracking reading, and seeing what others are reading.

What do you do to encourage a culture of reading at your school? What results do you see?

Scavenger Hunt: Examining Writers' Choices

Fourth and fifth graders were avidly scanning texts from Judy Moody to Moby Dick. Some were searching writing workshop mentor texts. Suddenly one child gasped and flung a hand into the air, waving the text with the other: “Mrs. Essenburg! I found one! ‘I could feel the spice filling my mouth, so I immediately grabbed my water glass’” (“Spicy!” mentor text*).

Others students soon found their own sentences:

• "She tapped on the cherry pit to give it scars, so it would look old." (Judy Moody Gets Famous by Megan McDonald)
• "But there was no help for it, so up stairs I went to my little room in the third floor, undressed myself as slowly as possible so as to kill time, and with a bitter sigh got between the sheets." (Moby Dick, ch 4, by Herman Melville)
• "All of the panicking made me feel like I had to go back to the bathroom again, so I went back in." (“Lost!” mentor text*)
• "I didn’t want to deal with it, so I decided to spend the day in my room." (“Home Alone” mentor text*)

What were we doing? A scavenger hunt for sentences where the author uses the same pattern we’d been examining. This is the year I’m experimenting with spending 5 minutes per class to explore the place where reading and writing meet, the place where we examine something a professional writer does, what effect it has, compare it with other sentences by other writers, and try it out ourselves. 

We’d started with a sentence from Sherman Alexie’s picture book Thunder Boy Jr.: “I once dreamed the sun and moon were my mom and dad, so maybe my name should be Star Boy.”  We expressed the pattern like this: “I use a comma and so to join two sentences showing cause and effect.” 

I’m following Jeff Anderson’s lead in Patterns of Power, which I wrote about in “Why Learn Grammar and Conventions” back in March when I was gearing up to start. I wrote about a couple of my adventures with the process in that start-up in “Staying Curious about Language” and “The Grammar of Swooping Swallows.” 

I’m excited to have an expanding set of tools to help students develop the ability to read like writers and write like readers. I'm excited to see how far this adventure brings us by the end of the year.

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*Mentor texts are from Jamie Sears' Not So Wimpy Teacher 4th grade personal narrative writing unit.

The Power of Stories to Disarm Enemies

 

When a novel is on its third middle school reader within 9 days of being introduced to the class, I know it’s got something going for it. Today I want to share three fantastic  middle school books I’ve discovered recently that do a great job of increasing the reader’s knowledge of the world and empathy for global neighbors with very different experiences. In our current, interconnected world, we need to understand ourselves; we need to understand each other. My international students come mostly from Japan, with a sprinkling from such diverse places as South Korea and Thailand, Australia and New Zealand, Austria and Finland, and the US. We need to see—with the eyes of the heart—the neighbors we are to love. And novels are a powerful tool for helping us do just that.

Ground Zero by Alan Gratz. This is the novel that has been buzzing around my combined 6th/7th grade classroom. All of Alan Gratz’s historical fiction novels are popular with my kids, but this one is particularly timely in two ways: the point of view alternates between a boy who went with his dad to work in the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001, and an Afghan girl living with US/Taliban conflict in her village. 

Finding Junie Kim by Ellen Oh. When a Korean-American middle schooler experiences bullying on the bus and witnesses racism at school, talking with her grandparents about their experiences in the Korean War helps her find strength and agency for her own life. I love the connection of past and present, and as a grandparent myself…well…there were a few tears shed. 

Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri. I love this book so much that is hasn’t even made it to my classroom library yet (though I did successfully lobby for the purchase of the audio book for our online library). I read it, and now I’m reading it to a friend in the US in a series of weekend Skype sessions. We’re about halfway through. 

The book purports to be a series of presentations by an Iranian refugee  to his middle school classroom in Oklahoma. There are typical middle school escapades and sly humor woven in with cultural analyses of Oklahoma vs. Persian culture, and the narrator’s family history in layers from the mythical to the historical to his mother’s conversion to Christianity on a visit to England that led to half of the family fleeing persecution in Iran. And then there are the difficulties of refugee life. All this stitched together with references to Scheherazade and the significance of stories, sprinkled with some philosophizing about families and love. 

I was hooked from the title (an allusion to J.R.R. Tolkien) and the epigram at the beginning which includes this quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that I copied into a journal years ago: “I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”

This story, by the way, is the author’s. The narrator introduces himself like this: “All Persians are liars and lying is a sin. That’s what the kids in Mrs. Miller’s class think, but I’m the only Persian they’ve ever met, so I don’t know where they got that idea.

“My mom said it’s true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn’t. Persians aren’t liars. They’re poets, which is worse. 

“Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told.

“In one version, maybe I’m not the refugee kid in the back of Mrs. Miller’s class. I’m a prince in disguise.

“If you catch me, I will say what they say in the 1,001 Nights. ‘Let me go, and I will tell you a tale passing strange.’

“That’s how they all begin.

“With a promise. If you listen, I’ll tell you a story. We can know and be known to each other, and then we’re not enemies any more.

“I’m not making this up. This is a rule that even genies follow” (Nayeri 1).

Stories to make us know and be known to each other so we aren’t enemies any more. And that's what I get to teach students! Here are three great stories I've shared with them recently. 

How about you? What stories have you read recently that help us know and be known to each other so we aren’t enemies any more?

What Can a Wall Do for Learning?

 "Mrs. Essenburg," a shy 5th grader whispered to me, standing next to the poster of book recommendations I'd put up before summer break. When I bent over to see what she had to say, she pointed to Brindabella by Ursula Durbosarsky and grinned at me, "I read this one!" 

"Oh, that was a fun one for learning about kangaroos and about Australia!" I responded. She nodded vigorously.

The first week of fall term is under our belts--only 3 days, but that's the perfect amount of time to get reoriented to what goes on in English class and build back a bit of academic stamina, and then step back for a weekend before plunging in for a full 5-day week.

In the run-up to the start of school, teacher social media spaces have blossomed with photos of themed classrooms. Never having been much of a decorator myself, I focus on using the walls to support what goes on inside the room and gradually curate student learning. So here's some things that have gone up this first week:

1. Mrs. Essenburg's list of books read this summer from the online library our school has a membership in. Looking for recommendations, anyone? 

2. Student summer reading reflections from the first day back--we shared interesting characters we met, big ideas we thought about, and reading benefits we gained from titles we read. More resources for recommendations!

3. Review of the reading strategies we practiced spring term. (This particular format--drawings are my own--is taken from The ELL Teacher's Toolbox by Larry Ferlazzo.)

4. New learning we launched into this term (from Reading Nonfiction: Notice and Note Stances, Signposts, and Strategies--see my blog post on it here). 

5. And a world map so we can locate the places we read about! 

Coming next week: a word wall!

What role do your walls play in your class room?