National Day of Writing ~ Celebrating Writing

The U.S. Senate recently passed a resolution declaring October 20, 2009, the first National Day on Writing. The resolution encourages all schools to join in the celebration by submitting writing to the National Gallery of Writing.

The National Gallery of Writing is a virtual online gallery that is collecting writing from all kinds of people all over the world. The gallery will accept stories, poems, recipes, emails, blogs, even audio, video, and artwork for submission.

The Senate resolution confirms the important role that writing has in our school Literacy Plan for the 21st Century as well as in our lives. Writing well is a 21st Century skill that can not be neglected.

The National Council of Teachers of English recognizes that literacy practice in the 21st Century is in the midst of profound change and has issued the following recommendations:

• Our schools and our nation need to recognize and validate the many ways we all are writing.
• We need to develop new models of writing, design a new curriculum supporting those models, and create models for teaching that curriculum.
• We need to make sure that all students have the opportunity to write and learn in intellectually stimulating classrooms.
• We need to recognize that out-of-school literacy practices are as critical to students’ development as what occurs in the classroom and take advantage of this to better connect classroom work to real-world situations that students will encounter across a lifetime.

It's not too late for you to participate in this global celebration of writing. The National Gallery of Writing is accepting submissions until June 2010.

Read more about how to submit your writing or view a video demonstration.

Need some good ideas to get started? Read about ways teachers from the National Writing Project celebrated with their students or visit the National Gallery of Writing and read some of the submissions on display. NCTE also has some good Tips for Writers.

Please join this global celebration and experience the power of writing!

Contact me if you would like help creating your own classroom gallery in the National Gallery of Writing.

READING MAKES YOU SMARTER

Everyone knows that reading
makes you smarter....
want to know how much smarter?






Imagine this....if you read for 20 minutes every day, in a week you will have read for 100 minutes!

Wow!

Now multiply that times 4 weeks...and in one month you will have read for 400 minutes.

Think how much you will learn from all that reading!

Do that for a whole school year, and you will have read for 4,000 minutes!




Unbelievable!


That is equal to the amount of reading you could do in 10 whole days of school.

That makes you 10 days smarter than the average kid!

Now, if you keep reading for 20 minutes every day, by the end of the 6th grade you will have read for the equivalent of 60 whole school days. That's going to make you a very smart kid!





So find yourself a really good book...and read for at least 20 minutes every day!












Source: U.S. Department of Education, America Reads Challenge
images: creativecommons.org

Back to School ~ Creating Community with Book Recommendations

As our students come back to school we can't wait to hear about the adventures they have had and the great books they have read. One of the best ways to create a community of readers in the classroom is by giving students the opportunity to recommend books to each other.

Some teachers find it helpful to give students guidelines for sharing.

For fiction: tell us the title of your book, the author, the genre, who the main characters are, and the problem they had to solve. But be careful you don't give away the ending!

For non-fiction: tell us the title of your book, the author, the main topic, something that surprised you, something that you learned, and a question you still have.

In addition to giving students time to talk about great books they've read, consider some of these ways for them to share book recommendations:

• create a bulletin board display
  
• write a book recommendation
  
• create a podcast
• write a blog post
  
• create a book trailer (pdf)
  

Giving students lots of opportunities to recommend books to each other is one of the best ways to effectively create a community of engaged and excited readers in your classroom.

Welcome back!

Summer~ a time to reflect, renew and focus

LAKE TAHOE

With the end of the school year comes time for teachers to reflect, renew and focus on their own learning. Summer offers stretches of uninterrupted time to read and learn with other professionals, in person and online. Time to read and discuss all those journal articles, professional books and lesson plans you put aside because you didn't have time during the busy school year. Summer is also a great time to take a graduate course or attend a workshop.

This summer I traveled to Tahoe, California, to attend the Technology Liaison Network's Resource Development Retreat with the director of the Plymouth Writing Project, Meg Petersen. As the newest Tech Liaison for the PWP, I was excited to meet and collaborate with techies from National Writing Project sites around the country and spend a week focused on the newest technologies being used in classrooms. Our task was to develop resources for our own writing project site that could be shared with other sites.

I learned how to make a podcast, how to create a NING, and how to take a short video clip with my digital camera and upload it to a website. While all this technology is very cool, our focus remains on integrating the technology with the teaching of writing.

At the end of a very intensive week, I left the retreat with new friends, new ideas and new technology skills to share. Whatever your plans are this summer, I hope you, too, find time for yourself and your own learning.

Have a great summer!

Looking for a Good Summer Read?

Check out these authors!

Video Interviews

See interviews with renowned children's book authors and illustrators

Authors & Illustrators on the Web

Find authors' personal websites and websites maintained by fans, scholars, and readers.

HAPPY READING!

Higher Order Thinking Skills and Blogging

Blogging is an easy way to begin preparing elementary students for the new literacies of the Internet. (2009, Zawilinski)

In a recent article titled HOT Blogging: A Framework for Blogging to Promote Higher Order Thinking in the Reading Teacher, Lisa Zawilinski identifies four common types of blogs currently found in elementary classrooms: classroom news blogs, mirror blogs, showcase blogs and literature response blogs.

The internet is this generation's defining technology for literacy (Coiro & Dobler, 2007; Leu, Kinzer, Coiro, & Cammack, 2004; Leu et. al., 2007). It is home to a continuously emerging set of new technologies for literacy such as search engines, e-mail, blogs, wikis, instant messenger, social networking tools, and many others yet to emerge. Each requires new skills and strategies. Schools need to prepare students for these new literacies by integrating them into the curriculum, and blogs are an easy way to begin. (Zawilinski, 2009)

I recently started a literature response blog with one of my reading groups called We Blog Books. We use the blog to focus our discussions on the Higher Order Thinking strategies we've learned this year: monitoring for meaning, using 'fix-up strategies', visualizing, determining importance and questioning.

Students log on daily to respond to a prompt or discussion question and read what their classmates have written. Engagement is high and, like an anchor chart, the blog makes our thinking visible so that we can refer to it throughout our book discussions.

As a result of this experience, I've discovered that to be successful, teaching students how to write blog comments requires the same modeling and guided practice that other reading responses require. I've also learned that effective blog prompts need specific criteria to scaffold student responses. Finally, I've learned that giving students permission to share their own thinking, questions and observations is a powerful motivator and an effective way to 'gradually release responsibility' for thinking to students.

CELEBRATE POETRY

April is Poetry Month and I've discovered some wonderful places to visit online to celebrate reading and writing poetry.

Poem in Your Pocket

The second national Poem In Your Pocket Day is Thursday, April 30, 2009!

Choose a poem you love during National Poetry Month, copy it down, and carry it in your pocket to share with family and friends on April 30, 2009. Teachers, visit Read Write Think lesson plans.

30 Poets/ 30 Days
Gottabook Blog is publishing thirty new poems from thirty poets during the month of April. Check back each day during the month of April to read a new poem. Some of my favorite poets will be participating: Douglas Florian, Jack Prelutsky, Pat Mora , Janet Wong and Jane Yolen.



Or celebrate poetry by writing some of your own. Visit the Kids' Kits Online Magnetic Poetry site and write your own poems on the virtual refrigerator! Play with words online!