Like Balancing Round Stones....

I decided to take my chances and look into some of the "suggested reading" for this course. I was pleasantly surprised by Gerald Duffy's Teaching and the Balancing of Round Stones. It was one of the most refreshing and exciting articles I have read in this program. I love how developed such an artful metaphore for teaching, and after reading his article I too am convinced that teaching is much like people trying to balance round stones. Too many of our articles are telling us what to think and exactly how to teach this or that. Duffy's insight that teachers become teachers becuase of the very fact that they are different is so refreshing.

Throughout this program I have been looked at like the black sheep, the "wild child" that is going to disrupt our schooling system. Duffy gives me hope -- hope that my "uniqueness" and my ability to think for myself is in fact a useful trait in teaching. I love how Duffy describes the many "balancing acts" that we as teachers are expected to accomplish. Society wants us to produce independant thinking democratic citizens. Yet, they want us to have perfectly orderly classrooms. Contradiction? Yes, but a great teacher is able to create the perfect balance in his or her classroom. Districts want us to teach every student to their individual needs, yet we are supposed to expect the world of them. Again, a teacher must produce the perfect balance.

I also love the question Duffy poses:

• What particular thing do you want to accomplish as a teacher?


• What indispensible message do you want to communicate to your students?


• What do you want your students to eventually become?

These questions really made me ponder why I am here and what i want to accomplish. It would take me days to come to even the slightest conclusion to these questions, but reading them has given me an entire new light on the next few months. I am excited to enter my student teaching with these in mind. What is one thing that really want to accomplish? What do I want my students to accomplish? What do I want my students to become? What a wonderful question! I want my students to be free thinkers. I want them to challenge everything and desire to learn as much as they possibly can. I want them to believe in themselves above all and to believe in eachother no matter what they wish to accomplish throughout their lives. They may not want to become lawyers and doctors and I want them to know that that is okay. I want them to be given the tools to explore the world and discover something that they are passonate about. I want them to love life and love learning!

Students, please take out your text books...

Shared reading and guided reading are two wonderful, yet very different teaching styles. I think that as a teacher the goal is to blend these two styles into your daily classroom routine as much as possible.

Shared reading is a great way to introduce students to a new genre. Last week in my main placement, my MT was introducing our students to Non-Fiction books. She used the document-camera to display the book on the screen for the class to see and read along. We have many ELL students in our class, so it was important for her to pick a text that was not too dificult. The lesson was focusing on the "features of non-fiction", not so much the information within the text. Under the docu-cam she displayed the full spread of the text, pointing out how the pictures are photographs, not drawings. She used "cognitive-apprenticeship" to "think out loud" while she read through the text and discovered that the photographs had "words under them that talk about the picture." She told the students that "readers call these words 'captions'."

Guided reading is equally as important, although much harder to execute in a classroom. My MT will sometimes have me work with a small reading group of similar level readers, but I find that there is little 'extra' time during the day to incorportate specialized reading groups. This is very unfortunate becuase students (especially the highest performers and lowest performers) gain SO much small group teaching. I think that it is mostly a classroom management issue, and like Routman explains, you have to let the class fend for itself unless it is an absolute emergency (which she has yet to see!). Yet, as a new teacher the idea of letting the students play "Lord of the Flies" for 20 minutes seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I have seen guided reading successfully executed in my Dyad placement. My teacher would set out the literacy centers once a week on Mondays. The centers rotated every 2 months and begin in October, so the excitement and level of engagement remains high among the kindergarteners. Students are assigned centers in pairs and the teacher is able to hold a meaningful conference with 4 to 5 students without interruption. She also requests parent volunteers to come in during this time, resulting in 2 Monday volunteers who are familar with the routine and extremely helpful.

My Class vs Our Class

This blog is slightly out of order... this is in regards to last weeks reading:

Routman discusses just about everything in her books Reading Essentials and Writing Essentials, yet in the first few chapters of the first mentioned book one idea stood out in my mind-- how to set up your classroom.

As a new-teacher-to-be I am full of excitement about MY new classroom. It's not my master teacher's classroom that I am using as a stage to practice my teaching skills. No, this is MY classroom. It represents who I am as a teacher and I want parents to walk in on the first day and think to themselves, "This is going to be a fantastic year!"

And then I read Routman's ideas in chapter 2. Oh my gosh! Talk about taking what I thought I knew and turning it completely upside down, and well... me being okay with it. In fact, more than okay. In love with her ideas is more appropriate. Its not MY classroom. It is our classroom, where the teacher and students come every day to learn from eachother. After reading her ideas about allowing the students to help set up the classroom during the first few days of the school year, I realized how important it was for my students to feel at home in our classroom just as I would like to feel. Looking back at my preschool classroom, there were plenty of Routman's ideas that I had done. I always tried to cover as many blank spaces with student art. I took to heart my boss's theory of "If I walk into your classroom any day of the week, I should instantly know what you are learning in the classroom." I love this idea and I made sure that students' work was hung as soon as it was dry. If we studied dinosours for two weeks, by Tuesday of week one I would have two bulletin boards full of dino-art. The giant volcanoe overflowing with lava? Group art project! The boarders? Dino-footprint stamp project! I thought that meant it was their classroom. I thought I had it down to a tee.

And then Routman through my world in a tizzy! The kids deciding where the recyceling bin goes? Where homework sheets should be turned in? Where the art table should stand and how often we switch jobs... or which jobs we have for that matter? No... they couldn't be in charge of that! That would be chaos. Or would it? Routman makes very solid arguements for why students should be an active participant in the layout and dynamics of the classroom. The more stake they have in the building of their enviornment, the more respect they will have for their classroom day in and day out.

I am happy to say that Routman has influenced my ideas about classroom set-up. I went from having a very materialistic view of "sharing" the classroom with my students to having a wonderfully democradic outlook on the design and day to day runnings of our classroom.

Phonemic Awareness is /f/u/n/

We had a wonderful introducation to phonemic awareness in Tony's class last quarter and it is to me one of the most fascinating aspects of elementry education. My previous experience as a toddler teacher introduced me to just how early students begin to pick up on phonemic awareness. It really is amazing to think that as young as two years old, we are making the phonological awareness connections. Young children love rhymes and can easily pick them up. By the later toddler age, you can witness kids exploring phonological awareness by immitating rhymes with "made up" words, such as the "Tina-Tina-Tina, Fe-Fi-Fo Bina!" rhymes. Other rhyming songs are thick with phonological awareness teachings, such as the "Apples and Bananas/ Epples and Beneners" song. It wasn't until this course and its sister course last quarter that I was able to make the connection between classic rhyming songs and reading. I find it absolutely fascinating!

After reading "Put Reading First" I have a much greater understanding of how to approach the teaching of reading. In my toddler classroom, I was often using a non-systematic approach to teaching the letter sounds without even realizing it. I would often go through the alphabet and model the letter sounds, "A... ahh ahh, B... bah bah, etc". I had no idea that this was in fact, not entirely useful to my students. Using a systematic and explicit approach, including letter blends in association to words (verses the written letter) makes much more sense, especially at the youngest years of education when written language resembles doodles more than words.

I understand that phonetic education is useful and necessary for students to be able to read and write. Yet, I believe that in these early years (toddler - kindergarten) that phonemic awareness is a much stronger approach. For students who do not have an understanding of written language, phonological and phonemic awareness is better achieved in a systematic and explicit teaching method. With a good base education, students can jump into phonics with a greater understanding of why a sound represents a particular letter/ letter combination (verses a sound representing a particular part of a spoken word).

Invntiv Speling II: The Happy Medium

Inventive spelling is a topic that runs through my head again and again as I continue my journey in the world of education. I am constantly pondering, "How much 'inventive-ness' is too much?" In previous blogs I have already admitted my love for inventive spelling and how I wish I could convince the world that it's okay to miss spell words as long as meaning and comprehension is not lost. Yet, as an educator I am torn between allowing my kids to be creative and run freely with their writing, and the daunting fear of letting them continue yet another year with incorrect information on the proper spelling of words.

Finally-- some answers! Regie Routman's Writing Essentials touches on this topic in a refreshing way. In the last section of chapter 7, Routman state, "While inventive spelling is great for freeing kids to use words they might not typically write, sometimes we accept inventive spelling for words kids are capable of writing conventionally" (Routman 163). He states that it is reasonable to expect students to be able to spell a bank of words. For kindergarteners, the bank includes "I", "my" and "can." Since students at this stage are using words such as "I", "my" and "can" quite often in their writing, Routman believes that they might as well practice them correctly. Inventive spelling is still okay for words that students would not normally be expected to know (or be able to sound out phonetically), but if they are common words in their writing the expectations for conventional writing should be raised.

This is a refreshing outlook because it is the happy medium I have been searching for. Inventive spelling is okay, BUT it is also okay to ask a student to check his spelling on "was" written as "wz". And just as I was thinking, "Great, but how do I do this effectively?", the next few pages are full of practical applications for any classroom.

Routman suggests constructing Word Walls (Routman 165) with commonly used words that you should expect your students to spell correctly. Other Word Walls can specialized to include content from the unit in study, seasonal words, family words, students names, etc. Additionally, using Word Walls to highlight smaller words within long words will help students foster their ability to spell complex words by breaking them down.

I think Routman is very thoughtful in his approach to inventive spelling, finding a balance that makes me feel confident in given students freedom without sending them off to the 1st grade with "wrong" spelling skills.

Wordle: using cool gadgets for education

Bush's Speech on Afghanistan
Obama's Afghanistan Speech

I got this idea from another blog, Moving at the Speed of Creativity. The idea was to take Obama's latest speech on Afganistan and imput into the fancy Wordle program to visual annalyize the speech. Wordle takes text and transforms it into a word graphic, with the text size increasing with the amount of times each word is shown (Jane showed us this tool last year).

I never really put too much thought into how to use the tool, aside from making a fun logo for my myspace account or whatnot. But after reading that blog, I realized that it can be a wonderful annalyitical tool for large amounts of text. I took it a step further and entered in Bush's speech about Afganistan from 2001. Comparing the two speeches using the Worldle designs makes a large visual impact.

In Bush's 2001 speech, 'military' is the big stand alone. In Obama's 2009 speech, 'Afganistan' dwarfs the other words. 'America' is far more present in Bush's speech than Obama's. Obama's visual speech has 'people' in large print, whereas Bush's visual depiction shows many synonyms for 'terrorist' and 'outlaw' verses 'friends' and 'children'. Does this mean Bush is a more creative speech writer? Does it mean Obama sees all people more equally? You cannot tell from the visual graphics a lone. But, using these tools in conjuncture to reading the full text will allow students to gather a better understanding and perhaps an insight into 'reading between the lines'.

And just out of pure curiosity, here is a Wordle of my blog :)

Picking the "just right" book

At this point we have had many chances to pick out books to read to our children. We know what to look for-- repetative/perdictible text (rhyming is always fun too!), big, beautiful illustrations and characters that your children can connect to. It has to be a story that delves into enough depth, but short enough to keep their interest. And if this wonderful, perfect picture book happens to incorporate a theme that the class is learning about, then you might just have found a book that is acceptable for the day.

But now, oh boy. Now we have to pick a book for the STUDENTS to read! Yikes! This, to me, seems so much more difficult. It's not like a read aloud that you can adapt on the spot to meet the needs of your students. You can't replace big vocabulary words with simple kindergarten words, you can't shorten big chunks of text when students begin to loose interest. When you pick a book for THEM to read it has to be just right. If it's too hard, the student will get fustrated and may begin to shut down. If it's too easy, the assessment is useful and the student will likely become bored with the text. It's a lot of pressure.

I hope that this pressure eases with time and experience. I am sure it's just like any other aspect of teaching. With practice it becomes natural. I just hope that I don't miss judge too many students' capabilities along the way.

Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird is almost like a collection of quotable lines and interesting conversation starters. She has a way of portraying so much of her personality (voice) in her writing in an utmost honest way. Just as her story starts off, good writing begins with telling the truth. Lamott illustrates this within her own writing page after page. She also has a wonderful knack for creating colorful ways of describing her concepts of good writing.

This is particularly true on page 110-111, where Lamott recalls an old Mel Brooks routine where a psychiatrist tells his patients, "Listen to your broccoli, and your broccoli will tell you how to eat it." She continues to explain how she would retell this to her students to help them reclaim the innosence and freedom of the childhood mind. She asks them to listen real closely to hear the faint voice of their character and listen to what they want to do next, what they want their next adventure to be.



I think this is a very important concept for young writers to be aware of. As students attempt to write a fictional story they often ask you as a teacher, "What should come next?" It is important to encourage them to push their minds further-- to continuely think of more detail and creativity. The idea of "listening to your broccoli" is a cute way for students to visualize this concept. By taking the time to stop and really just think about what the character would want to do or how they would do it, our writing takes on a life of its own. It is at this point that writing turns from well writen to wonderfully illustrated prose.


Lamott's ability to take extremely vague concepts and approach them with very concrete images is the ultimate key to being a good teacher. In this way she is able to effectively show her students how good writing is achieved.

Is Writer's Workshop Appropriate for All-Ages?

I am one of the biggest fanatics when it comes to writing. I believe that students should be allowed to write about whatever they are excited to write about. Does it matter if their story is about last week's awesome soccer game or that one time that they got a high score on their favorite video game? In my opinion, if the writing is well done then the student should have the freedom to choose a topic that interests them. So many young boys dread writing-- or should I say, they dread writing 3 pages about Thanksgiving Dinner, using descriptive writing about smells and textures to put the reader right at the dinning room table. But allow them to write about that amazing hiking trip they went on with their dad over the summer and watch the descriptive text form naturally as their excitement leads them to describe just how awesome the hike was.

Writer's Workshop facilitates this freedom. And for that reason, I am a fan of the general concepts involved in Writer's Workshop. However, I feel that maybe too much freedom is being delt out in the wrong places. The program requests an hour of writing, generally speaking 'free-writing' every day. Then each day, the student is introduce to one new concept to incorporate into their story. One day it is "how to make a list" another day it is a new prewrite style. And this is all good... almost.

My biggest problem with Writer's Workshop is it's massive attempt to unify how writing is taught across the board-- across schools, districts and grades. And here inlies my issue. How should a fifth grader and a kindergartener be learning the same thing? Some writing skills are transferable, like pre-writing styles. Others are simply not. Teaching a kindergarten how to edit their story when they cannot even form complete words just is not helpful. I understand the idea is that they will be intoduced to these concepts early on in their education and become more comfortable using them as their skill progesses, but it seems overdone at times. Kindergarteners who have a very pre-emergent writing level (as in "I went to the park" reads "Wt to t pk") usually cannot recall what their story says a week later (as opposed to when you ask them about it when they are in the middle of writing it). Having them return to a piece they wrote a month ago and asking them to edit it, is really in a sense having them make a carbon copy of a carbon copy. They basically retell a story with less memory and detail as the original, and we as teachers are supposed to tell them that that makes them a better writer?

I like Writer's Workshop, I just wish that it was used as a guideline (like in some schools) rather than a god-sent cirriculum like the schools I have been in. It has very good concepts that can be (and should be) easily adapted the proper age group. All in all, I wish districts would trust their teachers enough to offer them the tools and allow them to use them to their discretion.

Ideas in Kindergarten

Reading in kindergarten was always a bit of a mystery to me. Some kids come in able to breeze through story books, while others are struggling to learn a handful of letters. I feel like the reading achievement gap is most extreme among all students during this first year of school. You have the handful of kids that spent a year or 2 in a highly academic preschool, others who have spent their whole lives in daycares. Some have a stay at home mom or dad who reads with them daily, others spent their early years running through sprinklers rather than reading books. There is not really any way to tell where a student will be at academically either. It's their first year in school-- no records, tips and samples sent up from last year's teacher, and no way to prepare for the new year's class.

When I first walked into my kindergarten classroom in Ballard, I didn't quite realize this spectrum of learning. I assumed everyone read, all at slightly different levels but all able to get by. When one little boy asked me what color he was supposed to color in the number pattern, I instinctly told him to read the directions. He looked at me like I was dumber than a doornail and stated so incredibly matter of a factly, "I can't read!" I had never worked with someone who was in elementary school and incable of reading (either English or their native tongue). So I decided I must focus in on some of my teachers literacy teaching techniques.

I noticed that she often color codes things and draws little sketches next to very simply written instructions. For other things that students don't necessarily need to be able to read, like the daily announcements, she will write them out and read them aloud with her finger tracing over the words. This way, students with some letter and word recognization skills will be able to become familiar with more words. At the same time, students with little or no reading skills are not left in the dark and recieve the same message in addition to word recognization practice (depsite the lack of comprehension).

When she reads stories, she chooses a mix of simple story books and longer, more detailed stories-- some with beautiful illustrations, others with minimal doodles. When she reads simple books, she traces the words with her finger. More difficult books she will often model "good reading" pausing to show the pictures after she reads the page. I think that it is important for her to keep a variety so that kids do not get bored, either for lack of understanding or becuase the material is too easy.

These are simple strategies that are easy to incorporate into any classroom, but I feel like it is necessary to intentially spot them out to ensure that students at all levels of the literacy spectrum are provided with an education fit for them.

What to do with the next Dr. Seuss in your classroom?

There are two ways to teach writing: teach the skills and allow it to lead to good writing, or teach how to be a good writer and add in the specific skills along the way. In my opinion, the second option is much more valuable. It is easy to teach a student how to create a proper sentance and correctly place a coma. It is much more of a challenge to analyize how a good writer writes and how a student can grow into such a writer.

The 12 Writing Essentials allow teachers to embrace this idea, and allow students to develope their style and skill simualtaneously. The 12 Essentials are important becuase they can be used across the grades. The ideals and practices are transfered from year to year, only the skills taught are more advanced as the students move from grade to grade.

Some of the Essentials are basic and easily teachable. Writing for a specific reader and meaningful purpose (1) is basic enough to teach at the primary ages and quite necessary for any piece of writing. Determining an appropriate topic (2) is impossible to avoid when starting a piece, but it is important to specifically walk students through this essential part. Presenting ideas in a clear and logical way (3) is the meat and guts of teaching writing. It is so, so important for a teacher to give students a variety of tools to help them organize their writing. Other Essentials are just as vital and more or less easily taught, like elaborating on ideas (4), embracing language (5), engaging leads (7), satisfying endings (8), and correct conventions and form (10).

Other Essentials are less simple to teach. Crafting an authentic voice (6) is probably the most important aspect of good writing-- and the hardest to teach. How do you even begin to teach such a huge topic of individuality and style? You cannot teach someone to be creative and true to themselves. You can give them the tools to find their own creativity and provide an enviornment that is safe for them to explore their voice and stye, but it is still a very abstract idea to teach. On top of that, it is even more difficult to teach voice to a student who is just emerging as a writer. Where do you draw the line between voice and inproper grammer and/or poor writing. Is Hunter S. Thompson a good writer with an excellently authentic voice, or is he a poor writer who throws all regards to grammer out the window? How about Dr. Suess and his dictionary of made up words? In these cases, I think it is in the eye of the beholder. Do you stop the next Hunter or Seuss by emphasizing proper sentance structure and correct spelling, or do you let style and voice develope and blossom?

Enventv Speling: a good idea?

I am quite possibly the biggest fan of inventive spelling. Growing up, I was always a terrible speller (and to be honest, I haven't improved much). I always felt so defeated each and every time I was marked down for incorrect spelling. I knew what I was trying to say, and obviously if the teacher knew enough to show me the right way to spell the word with her evil red pen, then she knew what I was trying to say as well.

As I enter the classroom from the other viewpoint, I love to see children exploring with their language. Watching a child "streeeeeetch out" a word they don't know how to spell or sound out "kaa ahh teh" is seriously so amazing. You can see their brains working, like the wheels are literally turning inside their heads. You can see the letter sound recognition going through their minds. Sometimes they don't have the original pronunciation of the word correct from the get-go and it muddles up their phonemic spelling just a bit. But, at the end of their story, you can understand what they are trying to communicate to you. And if you can't decode it? Just ask! "Hey Jimmy, you're story looks amazing. Do you want to read it to me?" I have yet to meet a kid that was not stoked to tell a story. Listening to their re-telling let's you as a teacher deciefer just how close all those "scribbles" were to the "real" words that they represent.

As much as I champion inventive spelling for students (and adults, as far as I am concerned), I do find it entirely too difficult to tell a student that they spelt something "right" when it is phonetically correct but illiterate to the English language. When my second graders spell out went as "wnt", they GOT all the right letter sounds. How are they supposed to know that went has an 'e' in it when all you hear is the "weh weh + nnnnn + teh teh"? It sounds like a W+N+T to me and if I was socially and professionally allowed to spell it that way I would. Yet the teacher in me feels like I am doing students an injustice by nodding in agreement to a word sounded out so perfectly, yet spelt so incorrectly. I still think that inventice spelling belongs in the elementary schools, but I would just like a little more detail on how and when to start introducing the "correct" spelling of words in the eyes of society. I mean, you just cannot get very far with a resume that says "2 yeers xperiants". 

Literacy in Kindergarten

Emergent literacy in kindergarten is an very unique experience. This is the only year in elementary where students are not expected to already know how to read. Imagine that-- in just nine months a kindergarten teacher is expected to take a non-reader and transform them into an emergent reader. Pressure? You bet!

I was terrified to even touch the subject of literacy. It is such a vital component to all other aspects of education. Although it's only been two days so far, sitting in the classroom has converted my fear in two big ways. Each lesson is very, very simple and focuses very clearly on one small thing. Yet, my teacher said specifically that it is that very concept that makes teaching literacy so difficult. She explained to me how trying to peice every little skill together can only work if you are constantly thinking about 100 at a time when teaching any literacy.

The Emergent Literacy (Mason) chapter on kindergarten literacy sheds light on how multi-faceted the subject truely is. Although I do approach different books with different ways of reading and interpreting the story, I don't think I would have ever noticed it had it not been pointed out to me. I hadn't thought that my teaching style would and should change according to what type of book I was reading. I very much do enjoy being forced to look at different genres of books, and the 'cheat sheet' charts are incredibley useful.