Content Area Reading and Writing: Insect Book List

Hello Teachers/Friends,

Some of us are embarking on a science, reading, and writing study soon in our classrooms.  We are ordering bugs, caterpillars, worms, and more in preparation for our students to observe animal life cycles.  You may also be shopping for some books so kids can read about these insects during reading workshop.  I just did some browsing myself and thought I would share the lists I made. 

Happy Reading!

Books for Content Area Study of Insects:

Ladybug Books

 Books found at Amazon.com and Other Online Booksellers:

Ladybugs: Red, Fiery, and Bright by Mia Posada

A Ladybug’s Life by J. Himmelman

Ladybugs by Claire Llewellyn

Ladybugs and Other Insects (Scholastic First Discovery) by Gallimard Jeunesse

A Ladybug Larva Grows Up (Scholastic News Non-fiction) by Katie Marsico

The Life Cycle of a Ladybug (Learning About Life Cycles) by Ruth Thompson

Ladybug (Life Cycles) by David M Schwartz

Books found at Book Source:

Are You A Ladybug by Judy Allen

Hungry Ladybugs by Judith Jango-Cohen

Crawl, Ladybug, Crawl! By Dana Meach Rau

Ladybug, Ladybug, What Are You Doing (Board Book) by Rourke, Eds.

Ladybugs by Margaret Hall

Ladybugs by Chery Coughlan

Mealworm to Beetle Books

Books found at Amazon.com and Other Online Booksellers:

From Mealworm to Beetle: Following the Life Cycle (Amazing Science) by Laura Purdie Salas

Mealworms (Watch it Grow) by Martha E. H. Rustad

Beetles (Welcome Books) by Edana Eckart

A Mealworm’s Life by John Himmelman

Young Naturalist’s Pop-Up Handbook:  Beetles – Book #1 (Young Naturalist’s Handbook) by Robert Sabuda

Butterfly Books

Books found at Amazon.com and Other Online Booksellers:

Time for Kids: Butterflies! By Editors of Time for Kids

The Life Cycle of a Butterfly by Bobbie Kalman

Are You A Butterfly? By Judy Allen

The Life Cycles of Butterflies: From Egg to Maturity, A Visual Guide to 23 Common Garden Butterflies by Judy Burris

From Caterpillar to Butterfly by Deborah Heiligman

Monarch Butterfly by Gail Gibbons

Monarch Butterfly (Life Cycles) by David M. Schwartz

A Monarch Butterfly’s Life by John Himmelman

Ant Books

Books found at Amazon.com and Other Online Booksellers:

National Geographic Readers: Ants by Melissa Stewart

Are You An Ant? (Backyard Books) by Judy Allen

Inside an Ant Colony (Rookie Read-About Science) by Allan Fowler

The Life and Times of the Ant by Charles Micucci

Time for Kids: Ants! by Editors of Time for Kids

The Life Cycle of an Ant by Hadley Dyer (a Bobbie Kalman book)

Ant Cities (Let’s-Read-And-Find-Out Science 2) by Arthur Dorros

 

Celebrate National Poetry Month

Hello Teachers/Writers,

Spring is in the air and I am busy gathering a new collection.  "Of what?" you might ask.  Well, I'll tell you. 
Poems. 

I am gathering them from lots of different places and getting inspiration from several other bloggers, teachers and kids.  One of my favorite sites right now is the Poetry Everywhere site from PBS.  Lucille Clifton is one of my favorite poets of all time and I thought this clip would welcome us all into the celebration that is National Poetry month.  You can see more of these great videos at the Poetry Everywhere site.  Thank you PBS!

Filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival

"won't you celebrate with me..."

 

Another favorite of teachers is this poem by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Filmed at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival

"Music lives inside my legs..."

I also found a lovely blog, with several great suggestions for anthologies and ways to use poetry in the classroom.  Go to http://missrumphiuseffect.blogspot.com/

I'll be back with some of my favorite poems and suggestions for ways we can help kids read and write poetry later this month.  Happy collecting! 

Support for Students with Autism

This week I was profoundly changed by a workshop here at Teachers College.  Kelly Chandler-Alcott and Paula Kluth presented a workshop to support teachers who work with students diagnosed on the PDD spectrum.  One of the many things we learned was to be open to various ways students communicate with us and to seek out news ways for them to have their voices heard.  One of my favorite parts of the day was a short clip where we were able to hear the ideas and perspectives from a 7th grade student.  I'll share it with you in the link below.

To view this at the Storycorps site, click here.

Or, go there by typing http://storycorps.org/animation

Q & A

12-year-old Joshua Littman, who has Asperger's syndrome, interviews his mother.

Paula and Kelly also shared some concrete ways to adapt things like read aloud for students with autism.  You can find some of these suggestions at Paula's website.

Text Sets To Use in Teaching

Are you thinking about teaching kids to think and talk across books about bigger themes?  The Common Core Standards invite students to do this work in first and second grade.  Many of us are including this in our teaching in Read Aloud as well as independent reading.

The challenge:  getting sets of books that belong together in the hand of kids!  Some teachers and I have been thinking about this and we have conquered the challenge.  At first we rushed to order new sets of books for our classroom libraries.  "What are the book lists?" the teachers asked me.  I suggested that we go with interests of the students and invite the kids to make sets of books from the baskets that are already in the classroom libraries.  Really... it works!  We found these examples of text sets on my shelf. Enjoy!  I hope you and your students have fun learning about interesting topics!

Some Text Sets from My Shelf That You Can Use to…

• Teach kids how to study and learn about a topic.
• Teach kids to talk across books during read aloud or partner time.
• Teach kids to notice themes across books.
• Teach kids to use content specific vocabulary in their accountable partner talk.

Sports:

Koala Lou by Mem Fox

Mr. Putter and Tabby Run the Race by Cynthia Ryalnt

Sam Plays Paddle Ball by Annette Smith (published by Rigby)

Max Rides His Bike by Jenny Giles (published by Rigby)

Sam’s Race by Annette Smith (published by Rigby)

Good Sports:  Rhymes about Running, Jumping, Throwing, and More  by Jack Prelutsky

My Basketball Book by Gail Gibbons

My Soccer Book by Gail Gibbons

Dogs:

Mr. Putter and Tabby Walk the Dog by Cynthia Rylant

Henry and Mudge and the Big Test by Cynthia Rylant

“The Trouble with Dogs…” Said Dad by Bob Graham

Once I Ate a Pie by Patricia MacLachlan and Emily MacLachlan Charest

Stella Unleashed:  Notes from the Doghouse by Linda Ashman

Trucks:

Earthmovers by Lee Sullivan Hill

Toby and B.J. by Annette Smith (published by Rigby)

Toby and the Accident by Annette Smith (published by Rigby)

Toby at Stony Bay by Annette Smith (published by Rigby)

Toby and the Big Red Van by Annette Smith (published by Rigby)

Toby and the Big Tree by Annette Smith (published by Rigby)

Construction Zone by Cheryl Willis Hudosn, Photos by Richard Solbol

All About Book Demo Writing

Hello Writers/Teachers!

Are you getting ready to write your own All About Book to teach your young writers a new form of writing?  Are you using the Units of Study Book written by Lucy Calkins and Laurie Pessah, Non-Fiction Writing: Procedures and Reports?  If so, you'll want to create some demo writing to use with your students.

This year my All About Book has been inspired by a long time love affair as well as recent events.  Are you wondering what topic I chose?  It is....  All About the Green Bay Packers!  I thought I better get at least a few pages of my demo text up before the big game this Sunday.  Below you will see my cover and planning page as well as one of the sections in my book (ironically, it is the section kids are most interested in when I visit classrooms).

First, the planning page.

My colleague Marjorie (a follower of our blog) taught me this strategy for young writers and I am happy to share it with you.  Yes, you can plan by organizing a table of contents.  You can also plan by using a web as Laurie suggests in the book.  Many kids know and like these ways of organizing their information.  But last spring I tried this "draw what you know about your topic" strategy.  Then point to each picture and teach something (orally rehearse that out loud).  Then, grab a piece or two of paper and make that section/chapter.  

For example, in my book I can touch the player in the bicycle and rehearse or teach about the preseason ritual of kids lending their bicycles to hefty players as they commute from the stadium to the practice facility.  I might say out loud, "It is a long tradition for players and kids from Green Bay to interact during training camp.  Each July and August weekday, kids wake up early, ride their bikes to the stadium, and wait near the door where players exit to walk to the training camp facility.  Players choose a kid with a wave or a handshake and then, the burly player climbs onto a small-ish bike and hands his helmet to the kid.  The player rides the bike, often with a few wobbles while the kid runs along side carrying the helmet.  It is a beautiful sight to see NFL players having such close interactions with their youngest fans.  Some players choose a regular,  the same biker each day, while other players opt to choose a different kid each day."  After I rehearse this out loud, I would get the pages from the writing center, thinking carefully about the paper choice I would want to use to convey this information.  Then, I would show I would plan to put all of these words on the paper.

The second graders in Rachel and Dan's CTT class were on fire as were the kids in Liz's kindergarten class when we gave them the option of drawing everything they knew, then touching the pictures to rehearse/teach, then write.  We gave the second grades the choice of planning tools since they had used tables of contents and webs in the past.  The kids chose the planning strategies that worked best for them as individual writers.  The kindergarten writers seemed to be able to organize their books with ease by looking back on the "cover" that had all of their pictures and then turning to a new page to write/teach.

***  Important note:  The kids planned and began drafting sections of their books all in one day.  You don't want to limit kids and make them wait for the next step.  Get them started making the sections fast!

You can see one of my drafted sections of my book below.  It is the Parking section of my All About The Green Bay Packers book.  I mentioned earlier that this is the section kids seem most interested in when I show my demo writing.  I think they may have spent some time looking for parking in their young lives : )

You might also notice that I have used this draft to teach some craft techniques like using parentheses, and writing an introduction at the beginning of the teaching to orient the audience.  I also used this particular version in a revision minilesson to teach writers to reread with the audience in mind, making sure that specific information was taught (i.e.  Writers, think, "would my readers really understand?").

Choose your own passionate topic and get started.  Happy Writing!

Teaching Struggling, or Perhaps Striving, Writers: Compassion First

This is the time of year where we reach a half-way point in our teaching and often assess progress.  We know that students grow on a developmental continuum but we also have benchmarks for progress.  We search our class lists and the progress each student makes as well as the distance between a student's current level of performance and the expected benchmarks.  We begin to talk about them as our struggling or striving writers and we search for ways to support them.

You may have recently come to this point in your teaching this year and need a shoulder to lean on in your teaching and planning.  First, let me tell you this.  You are not alone in your concern for these students.  And, allow me to share in this post a few things that have helped me in BIG ways.

 First, I think we all need to take a deep breath and give ourselves and these students some compassion.  

Yes, I know readers, that may sound a little fluffy to those of you who read my posts and hear "rigor, rigor, rigor" in my voice.  But, when I say that it is important to feel compassion for ourselves as teachers and for our students, I am NOT saying that we should lower expectations or give kids a way to opt out of challenges.  In fact, I am saying the opposite.  We can be compassionate by digging in deeper to our work, recognizing what works and what does not, and improving our work and the student's work at the same time.

We can show this compassion when we recognize all we have done thus far, both ourselves and our students, to work toward achieving the benchmarks.  And, we can use all we have done thus far to help us plot a further course.

You can reflect on a few things in your search for this compassion.

• How can I continue to be compassionate in the words I use to the whole class and to my striving writers?
• How can I continue to be compassionate in the physical environment I create in the classroom?
• How can I continue to be compassionate in the in the social and work bonds I support in the classroom? (i.e. partnerships and clubs both formal and informal)

Here are just a few of the things in each area that we can try as we search and reflect together:

Compassion in our words:

• Write down the times of the day when the student feels successful.  Remind the student what it feels like to be successful.  Point out that they are smiling during these times.  
• Write down exactly what the writer is "striving" to do next and tell them what you see without judgement.  I like to say this rather than what the writer is struggling to do.  Semantics, I know, but to me it shifts something in my mind.  It changes the way I approach a writer.  When I talk to young kids I often say, "I notice you are working hard to ___" or "You've been working on this part now for about __ minutes."
• Make a list of the times in the day we meet with the student.  Perhaps one time of the day works better than another.  
• Make a list of the kinds of conferences and small groups we have taught.  Perhaps we need to continue some of the things we have already tried.  Often one conference doesn't do the trick.  You may need to repeat the same teaching point.  Whenever a fellow teacher is feeling down and out and says, "I already tried that.  Didn't work," after I offer a suggestion, I sometimes reply, "Keep doing it.  It may take time and repetition."
• Make a list of the things the writer can do now that was not evident in his/her writing or habits 6 months ago.  Share these with families at conferences along side of the reality of the benchmarks the writer is striving to meet.  It is important to see growth as well as the next steps.

Compassion in the physical environment:

• Make the paper choice the writer needs available in the writing center and have honest conversations about the paper choice you believe the writer is ready for at the moment.  Make sure you are not holding the writer back, always providing one or two lines more per page than what the writer can currently do. 
• Invite the writer to co-create a work space that will inspire writing.  If it means the writer chooses a private space, talk with the child about the positives of a private space and make sure the child notices the positive results (more writing volume, for example) that comes out of the private space.

Compassion in the social bonds we create:

• Make a list of the other students the writer sees as mentors in the classroom.  Perhaps you can seat the writer near those students or give some partner time to the students so the striving writer has time in the middle of the workshop to show his/her writing to the partner for feedback.  For more support on setting up partnerships and supporting students in them, see some sample minilessons in the Units of Study Series.  I like the partner time minilesson in Session XII in the Revision Unit as well as the partner time minilesson in Session III of the Small Moments Unit.

If you are searching for more to help your struggling writers, you will want to get Colleen Cruz's beautiful book, Reaching Struggling Writers.




In her book, Colleen gives tip after tip to help writers who need support with topic choice, the physical demands of writing, and the process of revision.  It is a quick read and one that will leave you filled up with things to try right away in your classroom.


Second, the folks from Responsive Classroom have supported a shift in my classroom management with their book, The Power of Our Words.  This book is thought-provoking, teacher and child changing, and one of the most important books I think we all should know and read.  It has chanced the way I work with striving writers, kids with IEPs, and frankly, all students.  The practical examples can shift a classroom climate and leave you feeling better about yourself and your teaching at the end of each day.

Partner Time in the Persuasive Letter Writing Unit

Are your first or second grade writers passionately composing letters?  Do you notice things that could use improvement but aren't sure what to do?  I have a few tips for your partner time that can help you and your young writers compose powerful letters!

First, let's talk a little about partner time in writing workshop.  You may want to partner kids in this unit who are writing on similar topics or perhaps kids who get caught up in similar causes and write several letters to different people on a topic.  Or, you may want to partner each writer with another writer with whom they share a strong social connection.  Kids are writing about topics near and dear to their hearts.  Who better than to help you develop a strong reason or an anecdote than someone who knows you best?  Give the kids time with the people who can help them most.  I suggest 5 minutes in the middle of writing workshop as partner time to give kids a boost.  This partner time will no doubt increase volume too.

Here are a few things to teach partners in this unit:


One partner pretends she is the audience for her partner.  The writer rereads his letter and asks his partner, “Does my letter make sense?  Do you understand what I am trying to change?” 


One partner can read her letter and tell her partner the problem she is trying to solve with her persuasive letter.  She can ask her partner for help developing reasons why the problem is important to change.  The partner can listen to the problem and suggest some reasons. 


One partner can read his letter and tell his partner the problem he is trying to solve with his persuasive letter.  He can ask his partner for help developing some ways he could be part of the solution or change process.


Happy writing everyone!