Engaging Students with Gross but Informational Texts

I spent the last two days in Edwardsville, Illinois with Janet Allen sharing in how to engage students and teach vocabulary. Yes, I said engage students! At IRA, I ran into a colleague and friend who said, “If I hear the word ‘engage’ one more time, I’m walking out!” Obviously, she doesn’t get it. If we cannot get a kid’s head or heart into what we are trying to teach, we cannot teach. The lessons that hit home the hardest and last the longest are those attached to belly-laughter or tears.

Part of our talk in the last two days has been about effective teaching and that requires that we not only get kids’ fully “into” what is happening in the classroom, but also providing them a variety of vehicles that can drive their learning home. Janet promotes using a variety of texts for both purposes. Here is a list of some middle and high school “must reads” for read alouds and shared reading Janet shared:

The Copper Elephant  by Adam Rapp

The Joey Pigza books by Jack Gantos:

What Would Joey Do by Jack Gantos

The Joy Masoff Collection

Oh Yikes! and Oh Yuck!

The Kathleen Krull series: Lives of Artists, Lives of Muscians, Lives of Atheletes, etc.

Lives of the Artists: Masterpieces, Messes (and What the Neighbors Thought)

 Food Rules! The Stuff You Munch, Its Crunch, Its Punch and Why you Sometimes Lose your Lunch! By Bill Haduch

 Suggested Independent Reading for Girls:

Lurlene McDaniel—stories that engage adolescent girls and have have heavy science vocabulary

Sometimes Love Isn’t Enough

The End of Forever

Last Dance

The books of Paul Janeczko

Bring It On!! Using Technology to Motivate Reluctant Readers

I’ve have been absolutely swamped with work this last month! That is a good thing! More and more educators are inquiring about tools they can use to motivate learners and enhance achievement.  Among other topics, this workshop in Atkinson, Illinois explored ways that teachers can build students’ literacy skills by incorporating graphics into instruction; isn’t that part of the allure that HDTV has over our viewing?

Rather than complain about how visual kids seem to have become, I say, “Embrace it!!” Use visuals to teach thinking skills and then….transfer those very thinking skills to written texts. Think about incorporating a “You Tube” into instruction, perhaps one that reviewed a book or area of study that your curriculum was designed to teach. Couldn’t we teach the skills of prediction, connection, questioning, and inference from a video and then transfer those skills to content text?

On Friday, I have a workshop in Joliet entitled “Boys and Books.” There, I will lead the group in a discussion about the differences between girls’ and boys’ attitudes and achievement levels as shown in standardized testing as well as through  qualitative studies built on interviews among those very populations. When we talk about independent reading, questions concerning assessment arise. How do we asses their reading? How do we know they have read? How do we come to see what they understand?

In the past, this has been done through book reports–a genre that I drudgingly pulled myself through about three times and then threw my hands up in despair. I hated reading book reports; no wonder kids hated writing them. From there, I went to book talks, and though they were more entertaining for all involved and more accurately appraised real comprehension because kids had to answer live questions, they were time consuming and a bit biased. Those who like the stage were more confident and therefore, able to perform at higher levels than the more shy of my students. Of course, I offered options, but book talk was generally preferred by all except the shiest who still chose to write the forumulaic book report.

Okay, where does the technology come in? The Podtalk!

I am sure someone is saying, “Well that’s nothing new! I’ve been doing that for, for, for months!” Try using G-cast, a free web-based service that allows your students to use their telephones and an 800 number to set up their podcast. Once recorded through the phone, the gcast is available online. From there, it can be posted for the world to hear, just like this one…..