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The Book Fort

Instructional Ideas for Immediate Implementation

The Book FortInstructional Ideas for Immediate Implementation

Welcome to The Book Fort! Vol. 1 Issue 18

Missed previous issues? Find them below:

Issue 1 Issue 2 Issue 3 Issue 4 Issue 5 Issue 6 Issue 7 Issue 8 Issue 9 Issue 10 Issue 11

Issue 12 Issue 13 Issue14 Issue 15 Issue 16 Issue 17

Week Seventeen: The Book Whisperer


Putting the right books into the hands of students is one of the things I love most about being an educator. It doesn’t matter if the student is six years old or fifty, the same light shines in his eyes when the book changes him forever. I know that book love intimately; the right books at the right time helped me escape some dark times in my life and continue to take me away to places that I may never go in “real” life.


I returned to The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child this week because I am getting swept up in this Icelandic idea of Jolabokaflod, or the Yule Book Flood. Kate Barrows, colleague at Liberty High School and fellow Library Media Specialist/ELA Teacher, introduced me to this idea of giving just right books to friends and family at the holiday.


Texas teacher Donalyn Miller encourages teachers to do the same in The Book Whisperer; she caught me immediately in the introduction when she cited the (ridiculous) fact that the National Reading Panel (2000) left Independent reading off of the recommendations for strategies that improve students’ reading skills and backs up her disgust with Stephen Krashen’s work on its effectiveness. We also agree on this point: students need to read more and have choice in order to get better at reading.


The strategies that follow come from her book. Thinking ahead to the new year, which signals a new grading period or term for most of us, consider trying independent reading if you don’t currently. If you haven’t read or purchased the book, YOU MUST. Add it to your Christmas list, or better yet, give it to a colleague or friend.


Miller, Donalyn. (2009). The book whisperer: awakening the inner child in every reader. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Books.

Practical Applications

Reading Strategy: Creating the Conditions for Reading

We all know it, but let’s be honest, it is easy to move into survival mode this close to Holiday Break. Things like the classroom environment and intentional routines that truly encourage learning can go right down to tubes with holiday parties, school plays, choir performances, and the looming due date for posting grades. Miller’s suggestions for creating positive conditions for learning are listed below (34-36). Consider resetting yours when the break ends.
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Immersion

Surround students with books of all kinds and give them the opportunity to read them EVERY DAY. Even if this is just a short ten minutes, that is fifty minutes of dedicated reading time at the end of every week they wouldn’t have had otherwise. You can’t expect to make progress if you don’t provide the regular, dedicated time for reading.
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Demonstrations & Expectations

Model for students the behaviors, strategies, and outcomes proficient readers achieve and use. Use student models and ask them to work with you to create rubrics. I say this a lot, but students cannot hit a target they cannot see and they don’t care much about achieving when they have no ownership.
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Responsibility

Give students choice in what they read. This doesn’t mean that they can’t be nudged in the right direction, but it does mean that they should feel they have the responsibility to choose. With that, however, comes commitment; set clear goals with them for pages read or growth.
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Employment

Provide time for students to practice applying strategies and techniques with various types of texts. The brain is a muscle, too; it needs repeated exercise to hone skills.
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Approximations & Response

Recognize and congratulate students for what they do well, very specifically, and often. Students need to feel successful, but they can smell a fake a mile away. Realistic, individualized goal setting will help with this. Also, confer with students regularly and give specific, non-threatening feedback. If you don’t take the time to confer, you might as well skip independent reading altogether. This is how you will know where students are. #JustDoIt
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Engagement

Reading must have personal value to students, be anxiety-free, modeled by someone they respect and value, and students must see themselves as capable (so finding the right book is essential).

Writing Strategy: The Reader's Notebook

As a high school ELA teacher, I was always looking for new ways to authentically assess independent reading and more importantly for students to respond in writing. Integrating reading and writing (and potentially grammar/vocab) is the best way to get the most bang for your buck (my favorite cliche). This strategy is one of those. Check it out below. The journal sample comes from a teacher model (Kate Barrows, Louisville, KY).


Tips for Successfully Using the Reader’s Notebook

Adapted from D. Miller (95-102)

  • Must be a living notebook that is constantly changing, yet organized in such a way that the student finds it usable & the teacher can access the student learnings. Each may look different than the next and teachers have to get comfortable with this (even those OCD teachers).

  • Students should have a very personal experience with reading and convey that in varied ways. Some suggestions are: a letter to the teacher about their status with a book, a double-entry journal with quote analysis, a running glossary of tier 2 vocabulary words from a book with their sentences and synonyms, 17-word summary (K. Gallagher), a found poem that captures a thematic idea, a connection to another text, analysis of character through tracking of the conflicts.

  • Use this notebook as the basis for student conferences; don’t pack them home on Fridays in a crate. While students are reading each day, grab three or four to scan, add some written comments, make a note on your tracking sheet, and confer based on this.

  • Summatively assess overall reading growth through a thesis-driven essay at the end of each term; ask students to determine their strengths and weaknesses as a reader, the state of their reading identities, and provide evidence of this using the notebook. Reading, writing, reflection, #BOOM. Check out the Self-Reflection Activity prompts from Miller (111) below.

Speaking & Listening Strategy: Shared Reading

Miller outlines some great things to keep in mind when it comes to fluency practice in Chapter 6, “Cutting the Teacher Strings.” Students need to practice reading aloud, but they also don’t need to be embarrassed or ridiculed if they struggle. As much as we all try to create a safe, inviting space for learning in our classrooms, kids will be kids. So, a couple of suggestions for oral reading practice are below.
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Book Talks

These are an easy way for students to share about their books without giving a formal presentation. For fluency practice, require a short passage from the book as part of the talk. This way, students choose and they can practice ahead of time to gain confidence. The purpose of these is to sell the book to peers, also, so it’s a perfect time to discuss intonation, emphasis, and pacing in oral reading.
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Peer Reading

Pair students (or give them choice if this works with the group) and provide time for read-aloud of a shared text. This might be a class novel, literature circle selections, or short text intentionally chosen by you for a particular class focus, like poetry, nonfiction, or a short story.
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Podcasts of Audio Books

For shared class texts, check out podcasts and audio book versions to play for students while they follow along for a short time. This will provide the fluent model reader, but the pressure is taken off you and the students for a bit. Serial Podcasts are great for this, especially to evaluate tone, purpose, bias, and rhetoric.

Classroom Tool of the Week

Mentimeter

Looking for a cool, quick way to formatively assess before the students leave the room each day? Need a different way to collect feedback from a teacher training? Mentimeter is for you. You can create several for free in various formats, including a word cloud like the one shown below. Participants simply use a six digit code to access the question via phone, tablet, or computer and the results populate in real time while everyone watches! Bonus: there are profanity filters in multiple languages.

Check it out here and on Twitter @Mentimeter

OER Commons

OER Commons is a wealth of community-curated and created, sorted, leveled, and curriculum-aligned (including AASL Standards for the 21st Century Learner!) resources. Save, tag, evaluate, align, and view conditions of use for existing resources, or create materials, lessons, and modules independently or in user groups. Accessibility controls include adjusting font size and style, line spacing, and contrast. Use OER Commons to find amazing resources throughout K-12, or have learners in grades 9-12 and beyond create and publish materials to share with the larger community.

Check it out here and on Twitter @OERCommons

#NCTE17 Recommended Reads

Since visiting the exhibit hall at #NCTE17, I continue to go through all of the books I bought and received from generous publisher giveaways. Over the next couple of weeks, I will be promoting amazing books that students might like and I will be giving away some in exchange for student reviews. Stay tuned!
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Penny from Heaven by Jennifer L. Holm

School’s out for summer, and Penny and her cousin Frankie have big plans to eat lots of butter pecan ice cream, swim at the local pool, and cheer on their favorite baseball team—the Brooklyn Dodgers! But sometimes things don’t go according to plan. Penny’s mom doesn’t want her to swim because she’s afraid Penny will get polio. Frankie is constantly getting into trouble, and Penny feels caught between the two sides of her family. But even if the summer doesn’t exactly start as planned . . . things can work out in the most unexpected ways! Check out Penny from Heaven and Jennifer L. Holm. She also writes the Baby Mouse series, which kids LOVE!
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The Luster of Lost Things by Sophie Chen Keller

Walter Lavender Jr. is a master of finding. A wearer of high-tops. A maker of croissants. A son keeping vigil, twelve years counting. But he wouldn’t be able to tell you. Silenced by his motor speech disorder, Walter’s life gets lonely. Fortunately, he has The Lavenders—his mother’s enchanted dessert shop, where marzipan dragons breathe actual fire. He also has a knack for tracking down any missing thing—except for his lost father. Readers who love Wonder will not be able to put this one down. Check out The Luster of Lost Things and Sophie Chen Keller @imsophieckeller.
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As You Wish by Chelsea Sedoti

In the sandy Mojave Desert, Madison is a small town on the road between nothing and nowhere. But Eldon wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, because in Madison, everyone gets one wish—and that wish always comes true.Some people wish for money, some people wish for love, but Eldon has seen how wishes have broken the people around him. Check out As You Wish and Chelsea Sedoti @chelseasedoti. It releases in hardcover 1/2/2018 and would make the perfect gift for a young adult!

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Kristie Hofelich Ennis, NBCT

In an effort to systematically study relevant research and stay connected to the teachers I greatly respect and with whom I have worked for years to successfully implement independent reading, this newsletter came about. It will offer research and practical ideas for quick implementation and may prompt further discussion or study with your colleagues. I hope you'll find it useful and thought-provoking; I also hope you will stay in touch if you implement any of the ideas with your students. They are, after all, why I do what I do!

Email: kennis@murraystate.edu
Location: Dublin, OH, United States
Facebook: facebook.com/kristie.hofelich
Twitter: @KristieHEnnis