Sheltered Instruction Presentation

Today I presented to a local group of middle school and high school teachers about sheltered instruction. My presentation is below. Of course seeing a Power Point for a presentation is never the same since the slides are more of an outline. However, if you are interested in knowing more, just leave a comment. The resources and links are all from the Oregon Department of Education, with the exception of a link to show the TCI social studies text that I use.

On a side note, this is my first time embedding with Google Docs rather than via Scribd. It seems like it will work really well, and if it really works as smoothly as it seems, I don't see any reason why I would ever need to use Scribd again when Google Docs is so easy.

Reading Workshop Reflections

Today was one of those magical days in reading workshop. Lately during the day it has felt more like spring than winter, and today we were able to crack the door open a little and have a breeze of fresh air while the students were spread out around the room with their independent reading books. As I scanned the room ready to start conferring I noticed one of my students that I have had since last year in the corner quietly reading the words aloud to his book. He was in the zone, absorbed in his book, taking steps each day to building a life-long love of reading. Around the rest of the room I saw many other reasons to celebrate. I always love conferencing with my students and seeing the wide variety of books that they are reading at any given time.

Lately, I have been thinking back a lot to Steven L. Layne's "Alliteracy Poem" and about the goal of fostering that sense of life-long reading, rather than having the majority of the focus on meeting on a standardized assessment. Seeing Reading Countess' post also made me think about the same concepts.

Reading Countess Comments on Atwell

From The Reading Zone, I saw a link to Reading Countess' recent post about standardized testing and the amount of time it takes away from regular instruction. She was lucky enough to spend a week in Maine with Nancie Atwell - what an amazing experience! I can only imagine how beneficial that would be.

What's Missing in my Writer's Workshop?

As I am starting the third quarter tomorrow, I have been mapping out this next phase of the year. I will be busy preparing students for their state writing assessment and/or work sample that they will complete in February. At the beginning of the year I decided to take the suggestion of others to teach prompt writing/writing assessment writing as a genre. I am also doing a lot of groundwork to begin student blogs with my 7th graders in the near future.

While there is much to celebrate with different components that I have incorporated and put into place this year, there are also areas where I have definitely been lacking. Although in many respects I have more fully integrated writing workshop this year than last, one area that I actually did better last year was peer revisions. Back in August and September I was trying to start all components of the writing workshop at once and realized that I needed to take a step back and firmly establish each piece of the process. One area that I stepped back from was peer revisions; however, now I am at the third quarter, and I never implemented it back in! This quarter creating more opportunities for my students to share and confer about their writing with their peers will be a major area that I will focus on improving.

I am looking forward to next year because I feel like I have been figuring out so much this year that next year I will have a smoother start from the beginning of the school year. It is always nice to feel a sense of making progress and figuring out different components.

On-Line Student Book Clubs via Blogging

During my first year of having a classroom blog, I constantly have a working to-do list of what I would like to incorporate. Recently I was able to try out one of them by having my first ever on-line student book club, and I am very excited with the results. Rather than reading a section on their own and then meeting to discuss in class, students got their first taste of an on-line discussion while reading Bella at Midnight by Diane Stanley. I decided to only try it out with one group so that I would be able to work out any necessary gliches before trying to implement it with multiple groups at a time. However, another first was being able to have students from both 6th and 7th grade participate.

Overall the group went really smoothly, and my students enjoyed the process. In addition, parents enjoyed being able to follow the discussion as some read the book along with their children. I jotted down some notes of what I would need to do in order to make them even more successful in the future.

*During the discussion I realized how to set up the nested comments which facilitated easier discussion for our last conversation as opposed to the first two weeks. This will always be the standard from now on.

*I need to remind students from the beginning of the expectation to maintain an academic voice. At times their writing was a little too casual (using slang) or not double checking to make sure they followed certain conventions such as capitals.

*This time students were required to do their original post plus respond to three other people. Next time I will probably still have that requirement, but I will also add that they are expected to read every comment and respond to anyone who directly asks them a question, even if they have already met their required amount of posts.

*I will also start to scaffold and encourage them to reference the book, including a page reference so that they will start to get used to scholarly references and explanations of an idea. I modeled this a little bit with this discussion but I did not explicitly point this out to students and talk about why it is beneficial to do this. This will also probably vary book to book, depending on the difficulty level of the text.

*I have also considered the possibilities of joining up with other classrooms to have book discussions. Just as having an on-line book discussion allowed me to have students from both of the grade levels I teach, it will also open up the possibilities for discussing with other students. This would be a great experience for my students to see different perspectives. I hope to try this out sometime later this year.

*Along the same lines, it has also entered my mind that this format would allow for more parent involvement and potentially another means for university students to interact with reading buddies, a classroom project that they have.

*Later this year I will be starting student blogs (I am still deciding with exactly how many students). One of the options will be for students to start their own book discussions. They will be able to use the ones that I lead with them as a springboard for how they might choose to format theirs.

The possibilities are endless, and I am excited to see the blogging discoveries this year will bring!

Mrs. V is taking a Writing Class

This semester I will be taking a writing class through a nearby university, and I can hardly wait. I just received a couple of my required texts from Amazon and the other will be arriving shortly. The official class title is Writing Processes, Instruction, and Assessment, K-8. From the syllabus it sounds like we will be doing a lot of writing and various genre studies. I can already tell that the class will be a great learning experience.

Here are the required texts for the class:
Best Practices in Writing Instruction


Traits of Writing: The Complete Guide for Middle School
(Students can choose whichever of the traits books best fits their teaching area, and I was feel so lucky that the middle school text was just released!)


Teaching Writing: Balancing Process and Product


We will also be choosing one book as part of a book club. One of the options was Stephen King's On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, so I also ordered that through Amazon; although, I won't know if I am able to use it for my book club book or not until I find out if there are others who also want to read it. Regardless, I have heard about it a lot and know that it will be a great read whether it is for the class or on my own.

Scenarios Series

One of my students came back from break excited about a couple of books from the Scenarios series that her dad gave her for Christmas. After reading her comments about the second book, All That Glitters, in her reading response letter, I talked to her about the books in class. She had written to me that the main character had to make an important decision and she wanted her to make the right decision. I asked her if she had read far enough to see what she had decided, and imagine my surprise when she said something like "She made the right decision because that is what I chose for her." That is when I realized that it is an interactive series, instantly taking me instantly back to the days of Choose Your Own Adventure. As I was looking into the series a little more for this post, I realized that the books do not have quite as many decision as Choose Your Own Adventure, but rather the books set the stage for one moral dilemma per book and the reader is able to make a decision to see the consequences based on choice. I always love to see my students excited about receiving books as gifts!

Personal Narrative Revision Conferences

This week I have been conferencing with my students about their personal narratives as they are revising. I still feel like such a conferring novice, but here are some of the points that I am learning as I go along.

*While I am still developing my conferring skills in general, it was perfect to have the notes that I took from when I was reading drafts over the break right in my conferring document. I wrote areas of improvement/suggestions/comments I would want to make in the next step column. It was great to have that as a guide for my conferences. As I conferred I gauged how much my students seemed ready to absorb and at times I adjusted my original plan to mention less of my comments and to add others to long term goals of areas to improve. It was nice to go into the conference with a plan. However, I realize that sometimes it is challenging to have a good turn around of reading all of my students' drafts outside of class. Next time I am going to try reading partial drafts in class and giving suggestions along the way in a more consistent, systematic way, rather than collecting all as a complete draft. Not only do I think this will save time outside of class, but I think I will be more efficient. Now that I have my system for electronic anecdotal notes set up, I think this will work much better. Then I will still read their final published drafts and take notes as I did with this set of drafts to continue to guide future instruction and areas to build on.

*While conferencing, it is so fulfilling to hear students say, "I remembered you said before..." Watching student growth unfold before my eyes is such an amazing experience.

*One advantage to reading the drafts outside of class was that I was able to create a list of general trends that I was noticing in student writing. Before conferencing individually, I posted and discussed a list of ideas to consider while revising with my students. Then by the time that I got to many students they had already revised their drafts with the ideas in mind. It was an excellent way to see what my students were able to do on their own. It did not take me long to realize that I should start each of my conferences with, "What have you revised so far?" Often students stated that they made a revision based on a teaching point. When they showed examples, they demonstrated that they had made meaningful steps along the way and opened up a perfect opportunity to give authentic scaffolding specific to their writing piece or to further develop a good start they had on the concepts. If they had not tried out the suggested ideas yet, then I talked to them about example revisions using their draft. Next time when I try reading drafts/partial drafts in class I will still keep a running list of common trends and address them at the start of writing workshops as needed, and I will always start .

Quick Electronic Anecdotal Notes Update

After setting my anecdotal notes up over the break that I mentioned here and here, I have been trying them out with both reading and writing conferences this week. Even though I am only two days in, I already feel like I have been able to be much more productive than I was with any of the other systems that I tried out this year. I also feel much more organized. It is such a great feeling to feel like I am getting something as substantial as finding my system in place.

Last Day

The two weeks of the break flew by (as always) and tomorrow I will be back to school. I look forward to seeing how everyone's break went. We only have two weeks (one in each language) left in the second quarter that will fly by. In social studies students will be reviewing the main concepts from Medieval Europe before taking the unit tests. In writing they will be finishing revisions and publishing their personal narratives. They will also be taking their first round of state testing in reading.

Before I know it, it will be third quarter where we will be moving on to Renaissance and Reconstruction in social studies, preparing for the state writing test (I decided to teach prompt writing as a genre before testing as others have suggested), and discussing questioning in reading, along with starting new book clubs. Once the 7th graders complete their state writing assessment, I am very excited to begin student blogs. I can hardly wait!

Third quarter always seems to go fast, and fourth quarter is the quickest of the year. It is hard to believe that I am already approaching the half-way point of another school year.

Professional Reading in 2009

2009 was a great year for reading for personal professional development. I read 22 books that have helped me to continue to shape who I am as an educator and to fine tune my practice. I can't wait to see what 2010 has to hold as I continue to read through the many great books waiting to be read on my book shelf as well as new books that will be published this year!