the PaperWings

This I believe: If we are to have a hand in a future peace, we must not teach to only transform children’s way of being right now when they are under our care, but we must always teach towards Forever- when they have long since passed for the last time through our classroom doors and into the world. Plan for Forever? Affect what children do, not only on the weekends, but how they handle themselves at a corporate meeting? That’s a tall bill. We’re used to planning for next week, next month. Some of us plan on a yearly scale. But how do we plan for Forever, so that what we teach isn’t just a teeny blip on a child’s life radar? Here are some key words I test against my teaching points and lessons: · Transparency- do children easily see why we are doing this? · Relevance- how will this help children outside the walls of this classroom? · Applicability- is how I’m teaching this idea going to apply to later life in a meaningful, useful way? Teaching children to talk well...

“And so.” “And so what?” said Abilene. “What happened then?” No matter the personality of my class on a given year, the bittersweet story of The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane always weaves itself tightly into the fabric of our literate community. The book has this absolutely magical ability to transform a group of children who begin with an “every child for himself” stance to one who is ever so slightly more thoughtful about the position of another. It's the one book all year that I never want to end (and neither do the kids!). We read and reread. One year, I lost count of how many times we reread Chapter 4. When the music of the words surrounds us, all arguments and off-task behaviors are suspended. (Can you blame me, then, for wanting it to never end?) Wisely, even 2nd graders can see past the simple journey motif that works as a container for the deeper story, or inside story, as we refer to it. They realize that with each change Edward undergoes...

After 3 years of teaching reading and writing workshop in my classroom and after finally starting to get a handle on what I was doing, I started to feel a pull between reading and writing. I didn't like that even though there were so many similarities and so many connections to be made, the units were sometimes so far apart that those connections were not immediately visible to the students. So, on my fourth year, I drafted my own units of study by teaching all the same skills as before but reordering them a bit (and sometimes just rephrasing them) so that reading and writing could be one. In this way, I was able to make the innate connections between reading and writing immediately visible to my students and I believe they flourished. Mainly, they gained a strong sense of genre and purpose. They could think much more flexibly about reading from the point of view of the writer and writing from the point of view of the reader. Because the connections between reading and writing wer...

Teachers who are new to workshop often finding themselves teaching a minilesson and then floating around the room re-teaching that same teaching point during conferences. Don't fall into that trap! Minilessons are for teaching one skill that almost everyone needs; conferences are for teaching individuals new skills that they need to become more proficient. This is like a teacher's Prime Time. So keep 'em short (about 4 minutes per conference if you can), take notes (more on that later), and present new skills as clearly as you can.   There are three basic types of conferences: Research-decide-teach: An RDT conference is probably comprises most of our conferences (and is most difficult, in my opinion.) We research the child either from afar or by listening in as they read or talk, and we sift through all the possible teaching points. And then we do the hardest thing of all: We decide which teaching point will have the biggest impact with this child, at this tim...

Regardless of your political or religious affiliation, cultural background, gender, or moral views, you cannot dispute that we live in volatile times. Across the globe, humans struggle with hunger, war, and disease on a daily basis. Some of it will touch us in America and some of it is only a quiet, unread newspaper headline. While all of this happens, each new generation of children is educated, graduates, and takes their place among the leaders of our country, while their teachers either capitalize upon or neglect opportunities to affect the future of this earth. Although teachers cannot teach their students everything there is to know about the economic reasons for food shortage, the underlying tensions that begin modern day wars, and the insidious disparities that leave some countries ravaged by disease, they can do something exponentially more important. They can teach children how to care, to listen, and to act. More powerful than teaching an impossibly infinite list of...

Imagine that in your second life, you decide to learn how to walk a tightrope. Your mentor coaches you by saying, "balance." If that was the extent of their teaching, I'd advise you to run for the hills! Balancing is a skill. But there are plenty of strategies that go into learning how to balance. Balance by holding your arms straight out. Balance by keeping your chin up. Balance by tightening your core.   Teaching reading and writing are the same. Every teaching point in a minilesson needs to have both a skill and a strategy. A skill is something that you teach children because they need it to become proficient readers, and a strategy is a way to achieve it. One skill might have many different strategies, but we only teach one at a time.   Even though we may call determining importance a strategy when we are talking to children, it's really a big umbrella skill. There are many different ways that a reader can determine importance. They can determine impor...

What follows is Lucy Calkin's TCRWP (Teacher's College Reading and Writing Project) version of the workshop minilesson-   and the version to which I subscribe. For this posting, I'll be talking in reading terms, but it is the same structure for writing. Every minilesson has four parts: connection, teach (within that is the teaching point), active engagement, and link.   In the connection, we refer back to something we've read or learned as a class or to a problem you've been noticing. Or, we can begin with a little story from our own reading lives. The point is to help children access the schema they will need to proceed. In the teach, we clearly state what it is that we will teach them through a one sentence teaching point. Even if you are doing a minilesson on the fly and have not planned the entire thing out, the one-sentence teaching point needs to be thought out in advance so that you can state it the same, non-cluttered, clear...

What do we mean by Balanced Literacy? Before you declare that you teach in this way, check out the Lucy Calkin's Teacher College version of BL. As with any educational buzz words, not everyone is in total agreement on the components of Balanced Literacy, but everyone seems to agree on the below three balancing acts: 1. Balance between part and whole (The part is the code of reading, comprehension, & fluency, and the whole is the whole text and integrating the parts.) 2. Balance between reading to, with, and by students 3. Balance in group size (There is a bit of whole group, but most of a Balanced Literacy's teacher instruction takes place in small group or one-on-one/one-on-two.) Whole;  reading by;  one-on-one  (when he gets his turn conferring with teacher) The name of the game is to keep those balancing acts in check. Guard against too much whole group, too much focus on the mechanical part of reading (or not enough), a lack of indepen...