Engaging kids through technology

This video from TeacherTube should get us all thinking about how we need to keep up with the technology for the benefit of our kids. I've seen plenty of bored to tears teenagers in high school and it pains me to see a few of those in upper grades as well. Technology isn't the only answer, but it can definitely be part of the equation.

Literature Circles

Here's a video on literature circles that would be great for our upper grade teachers to take a look at.

Engagement and Feedback Make a Difference

Two critically important factors for effective instruction - student engagement and teacher feedback - were sorely lacking in this study of 2,500 elementary school classrooms. It behooves all of us to reflect on our own practice to see if this is also true of our teaching. Do we value orderly, quiet environments over dynamic learning communities that can sometimes be a little messy?

Teens are Reading. Cheer Up!

Here's a great article that demonstrates that teens are buying and reading books in record numbers. I'm confident that the work we do with our pre-teens at Halecrest is the key to creating either a band of voracious readers or a horde of lethargic couch potatoes.

Drumroll Please...

And the winner is...

Decoding, Word Recognition, and comprehension scores in 1st grade are a better predictor of reading breadth in 11th grade than intelligence. How do you like them apples? Do you realize what GOOD NEWS this is!!! Let me clarify. Of the two choices, how much control do we have over our students' innate intelligence? Well, unless we are the mother or father, not a whole lot. Therefore, the area where we have nearly exclusive control - instructing the building blocks of literacy - turns out makes all the difference. The importance of those Kindergarten and 1st grade teachers to a lifetime of literacy success is incalculable. So, teach them well, O might primary teachers. Your work has a resounding impact for years and years to come.

Pop Quiz

Ann Cunningham and Keith Stanovich have unearthed some astounding findings in their research with plenty of implications for primary reading instruction. After establishing many benefits of extensive and wide reading, they went about to determine the antecedents of students who read widely. They performed a longitudinal analysis of 11th graders whom they had studied as first graders, which leads us to our pop quiz question. Which of the following 1st grade measures is the greatest predictor of 11th grade reading habits?

1) Intelligence

2) Decoding, word recognition, and comprehension


Stay tuned tomorrow for the cliffhanger answer... or just read the article and show your stuff ... or guess and hope for the best.

You call that wide reading?

I previously mentioned Anne Cunningham and Keith Stanovich's article What Reading Does for the Mind and will be making several posts from this research. They cited a study done by Anderson, Wilson, and Fielding (1988) which analyzed the out-of-school time use by fifth graders. Here are some highlights. The average student was reading about 5 minutes a day which equates to 282,000 words a year. If you improve that reading to 21.1 minutes a day you will read over 1.8 million words a year. Only 10% of the students in that study were reading at that rate. Imagine if we could get every student to read a paltry 30 minutes a day - which I believe most teachers "assign" regularly!! What would be the impact on vocabulary development, knowledge, and ability.

Emily Reads

Quotes on math

My foray into assisting with 6th grade math has got me thinking about the subject more than usual. Here are some great quotes about the validity of math instruction from a math teacher/blogger.

Reading early makes you smarter!

As the reading challenge kicks off today I found an article by Anne Cunningham that describes her study of the long term effects of reading on academic success and general knowledge. Check out this gem.

This is a stunning finding because it means that students who get off to a fast start in reading are more likely to read more over the years, and, furthermore, this very act of reading can help children compensate for modest levels of cognitive ability by building their vocabulary and general knowledge. In other words, ability is not the only variable that counts in the development of intellectual functioning. Those who read a lot will enhance their verbal intelligence; that is, reading will make them smarter.

More evidence to support a big push for simply getting kids noses into books. If you don't want to read the whole article (because you'd rather watch 24 reruns) Martha Brockenbrough has a brief summary at MSN Encarta.

It's clicking....

The University of Oregon, the birthplace of DIBELS, from all I can see has a companion website on reading. It is a great place to go to get some understanding of the elements of reading that DIBELS assesses and the rationale for their approach to diagnosis and intervention. I'm finally getting my head around the term "phonological awareness". Hey, it only took 2 1/2 years!

Is there any argument reading is of primary importance?

The Education Commission of the States site is a wealth of research summaries to inform policy makers. Check out this quote regarding the long range implications of our failure to teach kids how to read - early.

Academic success, as defined by high school graduation, can be predicted with reasonable accuracy by knowing someone’s reading skill at the end of 3rd grade. A person who is not at least a modestly skilled reader by that time is unlikely to graduate from high school. (National Research Council, 1998)

Our work needs to move forward with a sense of urgency. We must teach all kids to read early or doom them to an academic life of futility, frustration, and ultimately failure. You can see more quotes like the one above right here.

No prescriptions

Here's what teachers say about scripting lessons.

IB interested

Here's an article about an elementary school that has been certified for IB.

Take a look

Whining Rubric

Here's a rubric to inspire great performance!!!

Teaching Reading

Teachers, you all need to read this article. This is definitely worthy of our attention. Yes, we will have a very big philosophical debate (which is always kind of fun!) but the cost of doing nothing is paid for by students.

Would you rather be smart or be a hard worker?

The debate over innate intelligence versus environment in the development of a peson's abilities has been argued for many years. This article provides some new data for the discussion. The bottom line is that intelligence is overrated and disciplined study gets a lot of the credit. This adds credibility to our Halecrest motto: "Work Hard, Play Hard ... Leave 'em in the dust".

More on Fluency

An article from Educational Leadership by Timothy Rasinski gives some food for thought on the fluency question. It provides a balanced approach between reading for speed and comprehension.

If we emphasize speed at the expense of prosodic and meaningful reading, we will end up with fast readers who understand little of what they have read. Fluency instruction leads to impressive gains when it provides regular opportunities for expressive reading through assisted and repeated readings coupled with coaching; it doesn't require explicit reference to reading for speed. Students' reading rates will improve as they become naturally more efficient and confident in their ability to decode words.

Based on his research he has found assisted reading and repeated reading to be the most beneficial modes of instruction to promote fluency that leads to improved comprehension.

After reading a passage aloud to students, I ask them to follow along with me, first silently and then aloud, as a group. Sometimes I ask students to orally read a passage with a partner who is at the same reading level. At other times, I ask more fluent readers to read with students who are having difficulty with reading (Eldredge & Quinn, 1988; Topping, 1987a, 1987b, 1995) or I have students silently read while listening to a fluent rendering of the passage on tape (Carbo, 1978; Pluck, 1995). Such practices constitute a powerful strategy for improving fluency and comprehension.

Developing fluency in reading requires practice; this is where the method of repeated readings comes in (Samuels, 1979). Research indicates that repeated readings lead not only to improvement in reading the passage but also to improvement in decoding, reading rate, prosodic reading, and comprehension of passages that the reader has not previously seen (Dowhower, 1994; Koskinen & Blum, 1986; Kuhn & Stahl, 2000; National Reading Panel, 2000).

These are things worth considering as we seek to help students read for understanding.

Did I say that I love cats?

I promise you won't be reading any articles like this one about me anytime in the near future. I think I'll go give a hug to the neighborhood cat.

Talking about formative assessment

Here's a post that is a great perspective on formative assessment from a teacher's perspective.

The type of information that is valuable in making instructional decisions is what we are after with our formative assessments.