Cultivate a Culture of Reading: Reflect and Share

• Reading is fun because you can see from another person's perspective.
• Reading is educational because I can connect to people around the world.
• Reading is fun because there are many questions, thoughts, and feelings as I read.
• Reading is good for learning and for your brain because you get to learn new vocabulary and also know that there are many kinds of people in the world. 
• Reading is fun because I get to go to another place.

I love reading 6th and 7th graders’ responses to the last prompt on their end-of-term independent reading reflection that asks them to fill in the blanks in the following sentence: Reading is _____ because _____. The above sentences were a sampling of the ones from last week.

It was an odd end of the academic year here in Japan as we flip-flopped between online and face-to-face learning for the first time since May of 2020. One of the casualties was the book presentation we usually do at the end of each term so each student can share with their classmates a good book they’ve read independently and we can all build our to-read list. I was worrying about how to get the students to present online, and suddenly I realized that if those truly were the objectives of the activity, then there was an easier way to do it. I simply put up a question in Google Classroom:

What book that you read this term would you recommend to your classmates? Give the author and title and where it can be found. Give at least 3 specific reasons why you liked it. Respond to at least 2 other classmates' recommendations--support the recommendation ("yeah, I read this; it was great"), ask a question, or express interest ("oh! this looks good!").

Though the assignment wasn't my first choice, the actual conversations around the books were fantastic. While two students didn’t do it at all, and a handful of students stopped at the required 2 responses, most really engaged with each other. The top contributors logged 13 and 15 responses! That’s definitely going into my toolbox for cultivating a classroom culture of reading.

  
Interestingly, while last term Ground Zero by Alan Gratz was the most read, this term no individual book got more than one vote. What were the books my 6th and 7th graders recommended? There was... 

• Nonfiction like Just Mercy (YA version) by Bryan Stevenson and I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai.
• Historical fiction like The Last Cherry Blossom by Kathleen Burkinshaw and The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. 
• Contemporary realistic fiction like Towers Falling by Jewell Parker Rhodes.
• International fiction like The Bridge Home by Padma Venkatraman.
• Adventure like Genius: The Game by Leopold Gout.
• Humor like The 39-Story Treehouse by Terry Denton and Andy Griffiths.
• Fantasy (all from series!) like The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart, Erak’s Ransom (Ranger’s Apprentice) by John Flanagan, Into the Wild (Warriors) by Erin Hunter, Brisingr (Inheritance Cycle) by Christopher Paolini, and The Tower of Nero (Trials of Apollo) by Rick Riordan.

Even at the end of this strange year, I am more deeply convinced that the investment of 10 minutes of class per day for independent reading is well worth it. Yes, reading grows vocabulary and and writing skill. But even more than that, my answer to the fill-in-the-blank question would be, reading is vital because, in a classroom culture that values reading...

1. We steward God’s gift of language by noting what is beautiful, powerful, and good. 
2. We honor God’s image bearers as we appreciate their acts of creation, communication, and meaning-making. 
3. We seek reconciliation as we see the world from another perspective, developing empathy for our brothers and sisters who are very different from us. 
4. We become motivated to seek justice as reading opens our eyes to the injustice that our neighbors suffer, reveals options and inspiration for justice, and gives us opportunities to practice choosing between right and wrong. 

Enjoy your spring break. And read something good! 

Spotting Grammar Patterns from Mentor Texts in Independent Reading

 

"Mrs. Essenburg!" The hiss broke the silence, following a hand urgently shooting into the air. It was the first 10 minutes of 6th period, when the 4th and 5th graders and I were all reading our independent choice books. I put my book down and made my way over to the excited student, and he whispered, "There's a pattern we did before!" pointing to a line in Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate: “…round and bare and waiting…” (21). 

The pattern that had been the focus of our study the previous week was adjectives following linking verbs, using as a mentor text these two sentences from Brianne Farley’s picture book Ike’s Incredible Ink: “Shadows, he thought, are like ink. They are shady and shifty and mysterious.”

But we’d also talked about how the sentence was different from the pattern for series that was usually taught: “shady, shifty, and mysterious.” We talked about why the writer might have chosen to use a different pattern from normal, what effect that might have. We decided it made the series last longer, making us think more about each word. Also, it makes it seem like the last word in the list might not be the end—there might be more adjectives, and these were just the first ones that came, one at a time, to mind. It's the beauty of using really good mentor texts: there's usually more than one thing going on in the writing. 

This student, the one hissing at me about the pattern in his independent reading book, is one of the best writers in the room, the one you don't feel you can really teach anything--you just try to get out of their way. I'm so delighted that I got to give him the key of consciously reading like a writer.

Here’s the whole context. Home of the Brave is a novel in verse. The narrator is Kek, a boy who is a refugee from South Sudan, adjusting to life in Minnesota—winter, English, no cows, and much more. He envies his cousin’s tribal scars, then continues:
I try hard not to look at 
another scar,
the place where Ganwar’s left hand
should be,
round and bare and waiting
like an ugly question
no one can answer.

It’s an amazing novel—I highly recommend it. While using the limited English of a child learning the language, it communicates what it is like to make that trip across miles and cultures and trauma and loss and imbues the reader with respect for those who make it. 

And, as I approach the end of this year of my experiment with teaching elementary and with using Patterns of Power to teach grammar at the intersection of reading and writing, I’m happy that this book is one of the places that intersection happened.

Games: Energy and "Stickiness" for Learning

It's the time of year we all, students and teachers, need a little extra energy. For reviewing things like vocabulary or grammar, a game was just the prescription my classes needed. Participating in a discussion of The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox (for the second time! yes, repetition is important for learning!) reminded me of some games I'd been meaning to try. (See this blog post for the last strategy from the book I tried: using music.) So, here are 2 games that recently energized my middle school EFL and ELA classes. They were simple to prepare, took only 5-10 minutes to play, but the frisson of excitement was tangible. And that excitement not only makes class more fun, it also makes learning "stickier."

Game 1: From Strategy #19 Error Correction Strategies, a game called “Correct a Sentence.” I used this to prepare middle school EFL students for the TOEFL Jr. test. I created several lists of 9 sentences with frequently-made mistakes. (I found them online or culled them from recent writing assignments.) I put the students in pairs, gave each pair a copy of the sentences, and gave them 3 minutes to correct the sentences. Then the groups exchanged sentences and we checked the corrections. We acknowledged the team with the most sentences right for the day. No prizes, no running tally. But the students were energized, the conversations were productive, grammar was reviewed, and students felt more confident about the test.

Game 2: From Strategy #23 Learning Games for Reading and Writing, a game called “Nine Box Grid.” I used this to prepare middle school ELA students for a vocabulary quiz. I put 9 of the 10 words in a 9-box grid on a Google Doc, numbered the boxes 2-10, projected the grid on the whiteboard, and gave each pair of students a mini-whiteboard and a dry-erase marker. I rolled a pair of dice down the middle aisle. The pairs had to write a sentence on their mini-whiteboard using the word in the box with the number rolled. What if I rolled an 11 or a 12? Then they have to use two of the words in the sentence—but they can pick which two. Again, great energy, great conversations, and great learning about how to use the words. You can review a couple of words a day in 5 minutes. Students came in the next day so excited to get to do it again.

Mostly I believe that learning should be meaningful. Communication is an inherent drive for image bearers of the God who eternally exists in trinitarian community, who spoke creation into existence, and whose first divinely delegated task was naming the animals. Reading, listening, thinking, writing, and speaking are potential powers planted within humans for developing the potentials of creation, exploring the world and relationships we’ve been given, and creating joy and justice in those relationships and that world. I resist “add-on” games and activities that seem to admit that learning is inherently dull and needs to be livened up. 

On the other hand, as we learned about how God created our brains, we’ve discovered that practice is important for neural pathways and that the chemical reward of fun—a dopamine shot to the brain—primes its memory circuits to be especially “sticky.” (For more on the neuroscience of learning, read Upgrade Your Teaching: Understanding by Design Meets Neuroscience and Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.) Games definitely have their place in that!

What games have you found useful for energizing learning and making it "sticky"?