Reflections

I can hardly believe that in just a few weeks I will already be at the end of the third quarter. This whole year I have been reflecting constantly about what is working and what I need to improve with language arts and social studies. Next year as our school grows I will only be teaching reading and writing because our third teacher that we will hire soon will be for social studies and science.

With that change my reflections have shifted a bit. I am still considering how I can improve in order to maximize student growth in social studies this year. For example, lately I have been scaffolding their abilities to write to learn. When I reflect I usually think about what is feasible for immediate implementation and what is a long term goal. Social studies still fills a lot of my short term thoughts, but my long term thoughts are language arts based with the exception of thinking how I will be able to at times do integrated units with the science/social studies teacher.

My main consideration for next year is deciding what my components will be knowing that the time configuration is going to be different. I am considering that I many need to alternate days having one day focus on reading, while the other focuses on writing even though I would want to have some aspects of both every day. That will give me plenty to mull over for quite a while, but I have a lot of ideas that I am excited about. I will be posting more details about certain aspects as I am able to integrate them (some later this spring and others next year).

A lot of my summer reflections/planning will be refining ideas that I tried this year. For example, I know that I want to improve with word study, my implementation of Anderson's ideas, my genre units, and my mini-lessons.

Bella at Midnight - Medieval Connections

I have been reading Bella at Midnight by Diane Stanley with a group of my 6th and 7th grade girls as part of a book club. With book clubs I have found that I love it most when I am reading the book for the first time along with my students, so that my comments are an authentic initial reaction, rather than rereading or trying to think back to a book that I read a while back. While I would not read aloud a book without first viewing it, I have come to see that it has been effective with book clubs. I had bought the book last year and did not have a chance to have a group read it yet.

It was a fun surprise as I started reading to notice that there were many connections to our social studies unit on Medieval Europe and even more exciting to see that the students brought up the link before I was even able to mention it. Many of the events and descriptions fit perfectly with our units on the structure of feudalism, daily life, chivalry, and the role of the church. The setting made the book even more engaging, as the students looked forward to picking up on these details while also discovering the direction the plot would go. The book would have been a fun read anyway, but I especially recommend it to other students who are studying Medieval Europe.

Wall Space

As Stacey previously mentioned, I have a lot of wall space to display student work. I was excited to display some of their work Friday evening. I had a long day at the school by staying late, but I left energized knowing that my students' work was finally up.

(Picture temporarily down - I realized that the photo I took shows one of the Heart Maps with the students name clearly showing in the picture, so I am going to take a different picture to add later.)
I put all of their heart maps above the counter/shelving. I wanted to have them in a location where they were very visible, yet not down low where someone might accidentally bump them. Students put a lot of thought into their heart maps, and I did not want them to get torn or scuffed up inadvertently.

 

Originally I was going to create our bulletin board for social studies, but then I thought about how it was a perfect opportunity for students to be involved with the creation. For each section, I post an essential question. Then students create visuals for areas that I direct them to represent key concepts from our chapters. The first one shows an introductory geography challenge to start out our unit. I created a lot of this, but a couple of students filled in the map.

The second section is a better representation of what it will usually look like. Students created a visual for four main areas that we studied in which the Roman Empire continues to influence modern life. They completed the visuals in small groups.

I look forward to utilizing other areas of wall space to display more student work. Friday I also set up an outline for our time line and students will be creating different dates to add to the time line as we move through our unit.

Monday Musings

Today I noticed Ruth's Monday Musings, and pretty soon after Shelly had her post up as well. Here goes my musings for the day:

*Today I was complemented on my lesson preparation. I am still trying to balance feeling prepared with spending too much time in my classroom on the weekends. I always keep on thinking if I just spend one more extra day in the classroom I will be set up for the year on another area. While this is true it seems like another new area of need pops up to press me to wanting to spend another "just one more day". It always feels so good to get one more level of organization in place or to feel just a little bit more prepared on a unit. Eventually additional time in my current position and classroom should lead me toward the pay off when I will have many pieces established that I am still working out now.

*I am so grateful to have a grade level teaching partner this year. This is the first chance that I have ever been able to really work closely with a teaching team. It has been so nice, and I could not have asked for a better fit. Best of all we are able to laugh together a lot, whether it is to share celebrations or to work through our challenges with humor.

*Today I realized that I don't have to keep moving through a news writing genre study that I had started with my 6th and 7th graders. Instead I am going to take a couple of steps back to better establish the workshop model and what it should look and sound like. I am using ideas from Ruth's post to create classroom blog posts and classroom charts on the process. We will still continue along with the genre study, just at an altered time-line. Even though it is always hard to decide whether to pause and take a step back or to keep moving along, in this case I think it will be well worth it. In addition, I have my reflective notes written down so that next year I will remember to add in this pieces in my yearly outline and have a smoother start to begin with. My students also started to work on their heart mapping today. I had wanted to do this for a long time but somehow forgot. Last week I ran across the idea and emailed myself a reminder to add it into my agenda. However, I will be using it to inspire any type of writing, rather than just poetry (as in Heard's book).

*Yesterday while at school I remembered to check out Nancie Atwell's video. What a special treat! She has always been so inspiring. Today I was reflecting on how much I try to fit into my day. Every piece is "essential", closely aligned with my philosophy of best practice, but I may need to incorporate some pieces on alternating days because there is not quite enough time in the day to incorporate it all.

*I loved my first TCI lesson in social studies. We started out with a geography challenge, which was a perfect follow-up to our start of the year geography intro on a world-wide scale. Now students are zeroing in on the specific geographic area that we will be studying. It was fun to see the level of interaction that the program incorporates. I can't wait to teach more of the lessons, but know that it will require more planning on Spanish weeks since not all of the materials are available in both languages. It will be one of my favorite parts of English weeks though.

*I am still trying to balance out the best way to have my environmental print fully reflect the language of the week, while also being time efficient. That is enough to be its full own post though.

Update

The year is flying by. This week we will already have our fall conferences. Granted they are earlier than usual, I am still shocked the time is here.

Today I went into my classroom, and it felt great to have a very productive afternoon. I was able to do some minor adjustments in my room that I have wanted to do for a while but have not gotten to with the end of the day rush during the regular week. For example, I turned my desk slightly so that it is at an angle rather than straight. I have been administering running records at my desk this year, and it has been working out really well. However, I wanted to have my desk at an angle so it would be a little bit more confidential.

Another mini make-over was cleaning out one of my new cupboards in the back corner and turning the cupboard and shelf above it into my word study station. I have all of my supplies in one place, and it will run much smoother and feel less chaotic. This year I am trying to manage more different groups than last year, and I have not had a regular 5 day English week yet since I implemented the different groups, so it is even more hectic trying to make the multiple groups work on less days. However, tomorrow will start the second week on the rotation, and I have high hopes that the reorganization as well as deciding to do a second group during writer's workshop when necessary will make all the difference.

Reading workshop is going the smoothest out of all the components in my classroom. Today I was reflecting that it should not surprise me since reading is the area where I feel the most comfortable, have the most background, and was able to set up most of the foundation for what I am doing now in previous years. It feels like this is going to be the celebration year when everything clicks together.

While not as smooth as reading workshop, writing workshop is also going well. There are many areas that I am adjusting and reflecting on, but I realized that this is the first year that I have really implemented a full on writer's workshop. Last year I attempted, but it was more of bits and pieces without having it be a consistent presence. Thus, there are some kinks along the way as I find myself making more notes about what I should have done to make the process run smoother. Nonetheless, the fact that I am able to get the workshop up and running and know that it will be a constant component in the classroom is reason enough to feel a sense of accomplishment. Each year it will just get better.

This week I received a curriculum kit from Teachers' Curriculum Institute (TCI) for social studies. I first heard about the program in Sarah Cooper's Making History Mine. Originally I was not going to have a commercially prepared program, but I met with my director to express my concerns of having a hard time finding sufficient resources to address the concepts on our 7th grade curriculum map (such as medieval Europe and the renaissance). I was thrilled to received the materials, and I am so excited to start using them tomorrow. I have heard feedback from a few different people saying that the curriculum changed them as teacher. I am most excited about all of the interactive activities and that they have an interactive notebook, so it will be perfect since this year is my first attempt at using INs. I will still continue to have students create pages in our class created INs, rather than switching to the program INs because I like the idea of still creating our own to specifically meet the needs of our classroom. However, I will use many of the ideas from TCI.

Today I was also able to program some more classroom blog posts. My projector has not arrived yet, and I will not really use the blog on a consistent basis until I am able to show it to students on the Smart Board, but it still feels good to start getting different posts up, beginning to establish a valuable resource for my students.

Whew! A month into the year I am still caught up in a whirlwind of activity. However, little by little I am getting more pieces in place, and with each piece an overall better sense of calmness. I still have not been able to cut out weekends, but I am hoping to do so shortly or to limit myself to a few hours.

First Days of School - Week 2

Although I intended to do more posts during the week to reflect on the start of the school year, once again I am finding myself at another Saturday. Last week was my first Spanish week of the year. My planning over the summer has definitely paid off, but there is still a lot to get organized and in place. Over the last couple of weeks I finalized the rubrics that I will use for various regular routines/features in my classroom: reading logs, writer's notebook, reader's notebook, social studies interactive notebook, reading workshop, and writing workshop. It took me a while to decide exactly how I wanted to organize my thoughts and to pin point exactly what the expectations were and the behaviors demonstrated that would match up to letter grades. While I have had systems set up to assess all of these areas before (except reader's and interactive notebooks which I am trying out new for the first time this year), each year I reevaluate them and they get better with time.

So far this year, as I mentioned last week, I have been really happy with the turn out of some of the new ideas that I have been trying out. Soon I will be posting some of my students' comments in response to some of Aimee Buckner's ideas for reader's notebooks.

Until then, here is a quick overview of the same areas that I addressed last week.

WORD STUDY
This week I did our first whole class word study. We looked at gu+i/gu+e and qu+i/qu+e. When I chose and created this sort, I had not had my students complete the Spanish spelling inventory yet. I just chose an area that I thought would be helpful for most of the students. We emphasized the sounds they hear and how to distinguish between differences such as gi as opposed to gui.

On Monday I administered the Spanish inventory with my whole class, and my practicum student was able to complete the form to analyze how each of my students were spelling (both the inventory and analysis form were from Words Their Way with English Learners: Word Study for Spelling, Phonics, and Vocabulary Instruction). The information from this will help inform my decisions on the sorts we will do for the rest of the year. It looks like Ortografía de la lengua española will be a helpful resource when creating my Spanish sorts, and I just noticed that they have a newer 2009 edition out.

READ ALOUD
The read aloud of Cornelia Funke's El Señor de los Ladrones (The Thief Lord) has been going well. We are still getting to know the cast of characters in the book as a class. I am picking up on some of the clues that I missed the first time reading it that point toward the thief lord's secret. Once we have read the whole book as a class I will be able to use the text as an example of discovering something new each time you read a text. For now I need to bite my tongue and act like it is my first time reading it without pointing out the subtleties that Funke includes.

READING WORKSHOP
This week reading workshop went well. I was able to complete Spanish running records with all of the students that I needed to. Because the resource we have for Spanish running records does not go up as high as the QRI that I use in English, a large percentage of my students have already demonstrated proficiency in the highest level. I also had a chance to have one on one conferences with a handful of my students. I always love getting to know each of my students as readers in two languages through a wide variety of sources. Next week I will complete as many QRIs as I can in English. Once those are complete, I will be ready to start small group instruction and be able to have more individual conferences.

WRITING WORKSHOP
After completing a Slice of Life Story in English last week, this week they completed one in Spanish. Our writing workshop still does not look like it will long term throughout the year, but it is only the second week. Students still need a lot of guidance on knowing what they should be doing, so next week I will continue to work on writing workshop procedures as we move into feature article writing. Before I wrote about how I had wanted to get a newsletter started last year, and then one of my students wanted to start a school newspaper, so we are going to build it in as part of our writing workshop. I am excited about starting this unit, because unlike my quick Slice of Life Stories genre study, I have a lot of personal mentor texts from when I was the features editor for my college newspaper. I feel more prepared for this unit of study, whereas with Slice of Life I still want to improve it a lot before I teach it again.

SOCIAL STUDIES
This week I continued my general geography review. I used some lesson ideas from World History For Us All. I did not use them exactly as they were since they are all in English, but it was a good foundation for my lesson. I especially liked their teaching unit 0.1 Lesson 2, maps of space. We did the outside version, and I adapted the lesson to fit into our interactive notebook format. It was fun to see the students thinking about perspective, and I will be able to refer back to this key social studies concept of the impact of perspective often. I also formed another lesson based on their unit 0.2 lesson 2 How many continents are there? We also did a world map activity where students labeled the continents and key features listed on our state standards. Students will keep these maps in the back of their Interactive Notebooks all year long as a reference that we will refer to often in order to discuss how geography impacts history.

WHAT'S NEXT
This weekend I am going to take advantage of the holiday weekend to spend time with my family today and tomorrow. Then Monday I will go in as if it were a regular work day and get a lot of planning and paperwork done. I have a lot of notebook and writing assessments to do, and I also need to map out a plan to make sure that I can manage assessing them in a more time efficient manner. My 51 students have been producing a lot of writing and reflections. I love the thought that has been going in to these activities, but I need to figure out how I can give them sufficient feedback, as well as utilizing them to inform future decisions.

First Days of School - Week 1

Yesterday marked the end of my first full week back with students, and last night I geared up to switch over to Spanish next week. My goal this year is to not be at the school so much on the weekends and to eventually go home a little bit earlier during the week in order to spend more time with my family. With experience I am learning how to plan my curriculum and use my time wiser in order to make sure that I am providing the best instruction possible for my students while also setting up structures and routines that allow me to better utilize my preparation time. Reading The Daily Five last spring inspired me to think of ways that this can be possible.

During the first weeks of school I have not been able to leave any earlier than usual, and while I have been in on the weekends, it has been minimal. It seems like once I am a few more weeks into the school year my goals will be possible. For now I am happy with my progress knowing that I am getting closer to where I want to be ideally.

The first week was filled with celebrations and reflections on how to improve. This post might end up being a little bit long, so I am going to put bold heading to go with each section in case you want to just skim about a certain piece of my week. However, some areas overlap, so information in one may mention an additional category.

WORD STUDY
I have mentioned before that this year I will be organizing my word study a little bit differently. Instead of having all students on the same rotation, I will have groups on different check in days with me. Originally in order to implement this I was trying to think of something independent that I could have the rest of the students doing while pulling back each individual group on different days to familiarize them with the process. I realized that with the 6th graders who are new to my class and Words Their Way it would make more sense to start out with one class sort, and then cycle into the small group sorts on the next English week.

I was so glad that I made that decision. I chose a sort with silent initial letters that I thought would be a good sort for most of the students but also presented it as a practice to get used to the procedures and steps in the process. Doing it this way with the whole class helped cut out a lot of confusion and get all the students on the same page. Stepping back one week from starting small group instruction seems to have saved me a lot of stress sparked by confusion. It was also a good reminder/review for my 7th graders.

Next week I will do my first Spanish word study sort. Last year I never implemented word study consistently with Spanish as it was harder for me to think of ideas of how to group and find words for self-created sorts. My goal this year is to do a whole class word sort every week. Then next year I will focus on being able to do small groups as I do in English. I figured that whole class sorts would be better than holding off until I have developed enough sorts to differentiate from the start.

READ ALOUD
Recently I had posted about using House on Mango Street as my start of the year read aloud. I had not read the full book since college, but I always remembered talking about the book and hearing positive feedback about integrating it into language arts. I read ahead to make sure that I did not go against the concept of reading aloud a book I had not already read. Since it had been so long, it was as if I had not read certain sections at all.

As I moved farther along in the week and continued to read ahead, I realized that the book was not quite like I remembered. While I remembered the majority of the book being about her younger childhood, it jumped to older and more mature issues faster than I had remembered. I had completely forgotten about some of the most pivotal points of the book in her older years, that were not necessarily ideal for a 6th/7th grade read aloud.

I was stuck trying to decide what to do. In the end, I could not justify reading aloud some of the sections as a whole class read aloud. Instead, the next day my 6th graders and I were at the carpet ready for read aloud and I asked them, "Have you ever read a great book that you loved and later read it again, realizing that it was not quite as you remembered?" Students hands shot up and they shared some examples. I used that as a segue way to share with them that although as I continued reading House on Mango Street it was still a great book, it was not exactly as I had remembered and I though it would be better for them to later reading on their own or for book clubs. Then I introduced the novel that we will be reading as a read aloud. The students were fine with the switch.

I planned on doing the same with my 7th graders, but one of my super observant 7th graders beat me to the punch. As we moved to the carpet she saw a different book in my hand and instantly raised her hand to ask, "So we aren't going to read House on Mango Street?" I just gave them the rationale without the question to them.

As I was reading the book in more detail it also helped me to better understand where Stacey was coming from. It was easier to see how the vignettes weren't necessarily Slice of Life writing. I switched my angle to telling my students that I wanted them to see an example of how shorter pieces of writing can be powerful when introducing Slice of Life Stories.

READING WORKSHOP
When reading The Daily Five last year I reflected that I thought my students would be able to read for a longer period of time without building stamina starting at three minutes. Our students are used to having silent sustained reading for most of their school career where the room is supposed to be silent and that they need to stay in one place. My initial thought was that building up stamina with independent reading would not be an issue, but rather the challenge would be having students maintain those same behaviors while other activities are happening in the room. As I started out building stamina, my inclinations ended up being right on.

After creating an I-Chart with the students, based on ideas from The Daily Five, in order to set up expectations, they met the expectations with ease. There were a couple instances when we had to debrief as a group and correct a hand full of students' non-reading early on. Once I reminded them that even if they are absolutely quiet, they are not following the expectations if they are looking around the room rather than reading their book, the students started to all read. Toward the end of the week I was able to start some one on one conferences and assessments. The students handled this well. The biggest challenge will still be when I integrate the small group component which will generate a little bit more of a distraction to students.

Overall I am really pleased with different components that I had tried out based on resources that I have read recently.

WRITING WORKSHOP
I started out the year with the oral storytelling concept. First I read Jalapeño Bagels and prompted students to tell stories about times when they have seen two cultures blending. The second day I read aloud Carlos and The Squash Plant and we shared examples of not listening to something we are supposed to do and then suffering the consequences. This yielded more conversation than the day before. On the third day I was ready to get them writing, so I read the first chapter of Samantha Hansen Has Rocks in Her Head, and then had them share with people sitting close to them stories about their siblings (or close cousin, best friend for only children).

As expected, the students were bubbling with stories, so I introduced their writer's notebooks. It was a great feeling to see the pens flying across their pages as they listed out their stories and then did two quick writes from their lists. The room was calm and energized.

The area where I reflected that I need to improve for next week is that once we moved from directed listing and quick writes into independent writing time later in the week, working on Slice of Life Stories, my 6th graders were not writing without talking as I had told them and reminded them over and over again. It did not take long for me to realize that it was because I forgot the key component of creating an I chart of expectations as I had for independent reading. This was not an issue with the 7th graders because they were familiar with the expectations from last year. Nonetheless, next week I will create the chart with both classes. Then I will be typing them up and laminating both to post in the room.

SOCIAL STUDIES
This week I did not do as much in social studies as I had originally planned. On Monday I was reminded of how each new routine can take a significantly longer amount of time to introduce and implement at first. The class time was easily filled with planned reading and writing activities. I decided to layer in components of the class. Toward the end of the week students were familiar with the different parts of the day and it was starting to look like a "normal" day.

Once I layered in social studies, I loved how all of the activities went. I started out with Sarah Cooper's idea of introducing a poem, "A Worker Reads History" in her book Making History Mine. I was able to adapt the steps that she does into an Interactive Notebook format, so it worked perfectly. While I was not sure how well my students would grasp the poem without scaffolding, they understood it more than I had expected. Upon finishing my first read aloud, one of my 6th graders said, "That is powerful." His comments later made it clear that he fully understood the essence of the poem from the start.

The other lesson I did last week was using World History For Us All's video World History in 7 Minutes. I created a lesson where I could also integrate in interactive notebooks focusing on state social studies standards that the video addresses, such as scale and long-lasting impact of early civilizations. We were able to bring in a projector on a cart and project it on one of my walls since it is a light cream color. I took advantage of having the cart in my room to also show the students Barack Obama's interview with student Damon Weaver.

BULLETIN BOARD
Students enjoyed the guess who bulletin board that I made with pictures I took of my 6th graders at the end of last year with one of their favorite books. Yesterday when I was taking the pictures down in order to get ready for our Spanish week, I wanted to use the pictures more. I got an idea to decorate the bookshelves in my classroom library with them. My practicum student found a way to make them fit, and it looks great.

GENERAL
I have still been checking in with and working closely with my partner teacher. My practicum student only has one week left with me. She has been a huge help, and I was lucky to have an extra set of hands to get my room organized and up and running. My assistant has been a great help too. Luckily, she will be with me all year for two days a week.

My Smart Board arrived, and I was so excited I could hardly stand it. I checked in with the tech to tell him it was in and said, "They finished up with the wiring last week, didn't they?" My excitement came to a screeching halt with his response of, "Is your projector in?" Right... In all my excitement, I forgot that while there is wiring, a Smart Board, and the ceiling mount supplies, the actual projector is not in. My oversight still makes me chuckle. My projector should be in anytime now.

Social Studies Focus and World History for Us All

Over the summer I have spent quite a bit of time reading, reflecting, and planning. When I realized that the school year was coming right up, I broke down my to-do list and decided to split up the content areas I teach into days. This week when I go into the school for a couple days I will be focusing on social studies. I got a head start last Friday by spending an afternoon at the university I attended in the curriculum library skimming middle school social studies textbooks.

I already know that I will be using a lot of ideas from Making History Mine, and that I want to use Kelly Gallagher's idea of Article of the Week (from Readicide and his DVD Article of the Week). I will be skimming through more of the examples of the ones he assigned to his 10th and 12th graders this year as I prepare. Even though he does this during language arts time, I will include it in my social studies curriculum. However, since I will teach both subjects, the two content areas will blend together in some aspects such as this.


I have been using my state's curriculum maps to match resources and ideas to our content standards. Since I do not have a textbook, I was excited to find World History for Us All, an on-line resource with lesson plans and supporting texts, which is a project of San Diego State University in cooperation with the National Center for History in the Schools at UCLA. I love the ideas behind the curriculum, as well as the three essential questions and seven key themes. It is perfect because our school is focusing on developing essential questions for each of our content areas. I am excited to use the video History of the World in Seven Minutes that is available on their home page. I still need to go through each individual lesson, but from what I have seen so far, I will use this resource a lot. The only drawback is that it is all in English, so I will not be able to use it as easily on Spanish weeks (although I can replicate the concepts in Spanish).

I am looking forward to a couple of productive days to map out my social studies curriculum more.

Making History Mine Wrap-Up

There is so much more that I could still say about Making History Mine, but I am going to wrap up my comments with a few more favorites. Lately, a lot of my resources have been for younger grades that I consider how to adapt or they are for a broad range such as k-12. I appreciated that this was for my specific grade range because then there were more ideas that I could use directly as they are. Cooper's understanding of middle schoolers is apparent throughout the book and reflected in the types of activities she suggests. I loved this quote, "Part of our job as middle school teachers is to know that our students are works in progress--to appreciate and challenge them for who they are right now, all the while keeping an eye out for who they might become tomorrow and next year and five years from now" (p. 93). This idea of both present, short term, and long term components was a clear goal. Cooper's curriculum is not only targeted to students being successful in their grade level curriculum but also as productive citizens. (This concept is also emphasized in Gallagher's Readicide with Article of the Week.)

I appreciated the framework explained in the text book, as well as all of the practical applications suggested for a wide range of social studies themes. I am planning on skimming back through the book later with my state's social studies curriculum maps and noting example activities as reference so that I will remember which pages to refer back to. Of course, it is set up as a resource to create similar activities with different content areas, but she not only explained the concepts, she also had examples of helpful resources that will help with the content in general that I do not want to forget about.

I expect Making History Mine to have a big impact on my social studies teaching. Now I will approach the year with the concept that my students are historians. I know I will refer back to the book often as I plan this summer and once the school year is underway.

Making History Mine Literacy Links

One component of Making History Mine that stood out close to the beginning of the book and came up over and over again was the integration of literacy into social studies content. This is pertinent in a time when teacher education programs such as the one I attended emphasize the importance that all secondary teachers are literacy teachers, not just the language arts teachers. When I chose my language arts power standards for next year I specifically grouped some standards that I would teach in social studies because they were a natural fit.

Cooper suggested integrating concepts I had already thought of (research and persuasion) but also seamlessly weaves in multiple other reading and writing activities starting at the beginning of the year when she introduces a poem that sends a valuable message that we can all make history (2). After explaining the way she presents and has students interact with the poem she gives her rationale, "This kind of activity--combining reading comprehension, literary awareness, historical context, and critical thinking--enables us to view the nuts-and-bolts details of history through a longer lens" (3). In much the same way, Cooper suggest opportunities to use reading and writing skills to help students be more competent historians.

The activities Cooper mentions will not only help students within the social studies context, but to be more well-rounded people with a lasting impact on their life. For example, the types of activities Cooper uses for students to gain a strong command of historical documents will transfer over into analyzing other reading genres. She blends primary documents with historical fiction to bring the content alive, realizing that both genres can have a great impact on students (9). She also talks about "unpacking language" in social studies documents (44). In additions, she has students do activities such as interring from a list of dates (70), yet another important literacy skill.

Later, Cooper mentions utilizing a text to help students recognize the way real historians "gather evidence to make an argument that often doesn't sound like an argument. They're almost fooling you" (33). This supports persuasive writing well, and I like the concept that she brings up time and time again the idea of "real" historians, making it a perfect fit for my literacy block where students will think about what real writers and readers do as well. Later in the book she has further ideas with opinion, persuasion, and reasoning and argument analysis as well (such as 40, 52-53). She also has a full chapter on research with sufficient scaffolding to help students successfully research and analyze a topic effectively (129-159).

Cooper's experience as a language arts teacher and strong understanding of literacy is apparent throughout the book. Her suggestions closely align with other mentors in the field that I value. For example, I often thought of the way her work complemented Nancie Atwell's by presenting one of Lincoln's speeches in a similar way to Atwell's poetry presentation (58-59) and Kelly Gallagher's resources including clearing up confusion (2). Making History Mine is a great addition to my teacher resource library. It easily fits with other resources, while bringing its own unique ideas.

Making History Mine Overview

I originally thought Making History Mine: Meaningful Connections for Grades 5-9 by Sarah Cooper focused on current events since I found out about it because of a conversation on the topic that also featured Kelly Gallagher's new Article of the Week video. When I received the book I was even more thrilled that it offered tips of integrating current events and so much more. Right now the full book is available to browse on-line on the Stenhouse website.

In my current position I will be teaching reading, writing, and social studies to middle schoolers. While I have a lot of experience and training with literacy and language learning, I have not had as much exposure to social studies education even though I always loved history. Earlier this year I started looking at my state's social studies curriculum maps for 6th-8th grade, and this summer I started more in depth planning to narrow down the standards to power standards and develop guiding questions and big ideas. Recent staff development helped me refine this process.

I still have a lot more work to do before school starts in the fall, so Cooper's book came at an opportune time and it is a perfect fit for the planning process that my school is already going through. Cooper explains, "The best answer I have found is to teach under the shelter of broad themes and global concepts, conveying ideas that connect content across topics and grade levels. With this approach, students are not focusing on the tiny details of history, although facts remain crucial to effective argumentation. Instead, adolescents see history through the eyes of individuals and then move outward to larger implications and patterns" (xi). By planning my 6-8 grade curriculum in such a manner I will have a scope and sequence that builds upon and supports the big ideas from one year to another. I will also be working with the 4/5th grade teachers to vertically align with them as well.

Making History Mine thoroughly explains seven components that Cooper thinks are conductive to creating students who think like historians and gain life-long lessons through the social studies content. I have too much excitement about this book to limit my reflections to just one post (it would get way too long), so watch back later in the week to see more thoughts on this great resource.