Blog/ Literacy

Cliffhanger

9/13/2017

Good books have incredible power.

In observation of 9/11, we've been reading The Man Who Walked Between the Towers by Mordicai Gerstein. It tells the true story of Philippe Petit, who in 1974 tied cable between the World Trade Center towers in New York City and danced on the tightrope, a quarter of a mile high in the sky. We have had to divide the book into 2-3 different readings, due to time constraints.

Groan! That is the students' reaction when I tell them, "We will stop here for today and pick up next time."

"Please, can you read just one more page?"

The students love a good story. Our most enthusiastic listener, I'm discovering, is an older student who needs quite a bit of remediation work in reading. This tells me that there is a lot of promise for this child to succeed academically, even if there are challenges right now. The curiosity and engagement are very much present; our goal is to equip the student with the skills to access that exciting story in written format.

It has been interesting to see how much the children know about the September 11 attacks that took place 16 years ago. Most were unaware. Gerstein's well-written book offers a gentle way to introduce a grim topic to children.

Another book we're reading is Wilma Unlimited by Kathleen Krull. It tells of Wilma Rudolph's triumph over polio to become the first U.S. woman to win three gold medals at a single Olympics. The book is raising dialogue about prejudice. For our students, it may be a little hard to understand why blacks and whites were segregated when Wilma Rudolph was growing up. I've noticed when our students look at the pictures in the book, their attention is not on skin color but on events. Thank God.

Again, the students are disappointed when we don't finish Wilma Unlimited in one class session. When they come back the next day, they ask if we will continue the book. Inwardly, I am grinning to see their enthusiasm.

Good books such as these captivate students' attention. As adults, we have to do all we can to maintain that interest and curiosity, the desire to learn and grow.

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Music and Literacy

8/2/2017

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One of the things we'd like to add more of into our programs is the arts. More music, more dance, more poetry, more drawing and painting, more theater. The arts inherently attract children, and the limited amount we have been able to incorporate has been effective in developing targeted literacy skills such as fluency, writing, and even cultural literacy. We see the link between literacy and music quite clearly in our weekly classes.

Our Reading & Math Buddy sessions often start with a fluency exercise, the reading of a rhyme or song book. The goal with the fluency exercise is to help the children read quickly and accurately with expression - a demonstration of their reading automaticity. In reading rhymes and songs, there's a lot of repetition, phonological awareness, and rhythm involved, as well as singing, which even our older boys enjoy! The singing and reading along is low-stress for the children. If they are unable to decode a word, they have a framework in place to help them decide how to pronounce a word.

Our students' current favorites are the nursery rhymes and folk songs from Cantata Learning. Each rhyme/ song is a book in itself, with illustrations for every few verses. The school/public library bought a set of these books this year, and they quickly became a staple in our lessons because students across the board responded so well to them. The student reads through it first independently, then the volunteer makes corrections or points out vocabulary, and then they read or sing it again. Even though the collection contains well-known rhymes and songs, they are usually new to our students. The rhymes and songs are fun to sing together, especially in small groups. Often, students will request to read another after the fluency exercise.

A few of the other picture song books we love, outside of the Cantata Learning set:

Miss Mary Mack by Mary Ann Hoberman
I know an Old Lady by Nadine Bernard Westcott
Old Black Fly by Jim Aylesworth
The Wheels on the Bus by Jane Cabrera

In our weekly private music lessons (keyboard) for children ages 5-12, the link between literacy and playing music is significant. Most songs are short and have accompanying lyrics. We encourage the students to use the lyrics to help them play the music, whether they are playing by ear or reading music notation.

For example, one of the first songs we teach beginners is Hot Cross Buns:
Hot cross buns,
Hot cross buns.
One a penny,
two a penny
Hot cross buns.

Sometimes children forget to play "Hot cross buns" twice at the beginning. Or they play three notes instead of four for "One a penny." We stop and count the syllables. Four syllables. Play the note four times. Being aware of the lyrics helps the children to play the correct rhythm. When we add in actual notation with quarter/ half/ eighth notes, the students see the correlation even more clearly.

We also play games in music class that reinforce alphabet and spelling skills - albeit with a limited set of letters, A-G, corresponding to keyboard key names. Thanks to Susan Paradis' Piano Teaching Resources website, we play spelling games and race up and down the keyboard alphabet.

A large corpus of research is available on the connection of music and literacy. For us, we incorporate both simply because we see that it is effective in helping our students develop their literacy and music skills - and the students love it!

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Ownership

7/15/2017

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Undoubtedly, one of the strongest factors in how much our students progress is the amount of ownership the student (and parents) take of the learning experience. Our youngest students, ages 4-6, require a lot of parental involvement - parents to read to them, to help them write in their journals, to talk with them. Thankfully, these parents do take a deep interest in their children's learning. That's how we end up with delightful children's journal entries such as these:

The same applies for the older children and adults we work with. The more they are willing to invest of their own time and effort into the learning experience, the more they will get out of it. As a curriculum writer and teacher, I have to remember to create opportunities for the students to produce and do on their own, even if it seems easier to just give them a fill-in-the-blank exercise to demonstrate mastery. It's in the authentic contexts that we see whether or not students have mastered the skills.

Sometimes, a student only needs a tool or resource, and he/ she will be able to get the work done independently. One of our students and I started reading The Wizard of Oz at the start of the summer. I wondered how long it would take us to finish the book, as we could read aloud only a chapter, at most, in each session. I also wanted to review vocabulary and mispronounced words, so the book took a big chunk out of class time. (The student is a good reader, but the vocabulary is fairly advanced.) At the end of class one day, I asked if she would like to take the book home and read it on her own. "Yes!" the third-grader eagerly nodded. I asked her to take good care of the library book, checked out under my name. A few days later, she happily reported that she had already made it to chapter 6. The next week, she announced, "I finished the book!"

This small incident led me to re-evaluate how much I am entrusting to the students. How are my expectations reflected in the lesson plans and in the activities they do? How open-ended are their tasks, that they have room to create? Are we providing tools and resources for students so they can learn independently?

The student and I since have had a conversation about getting a library card, so she can get books on her own. She brought her card to class today, and stayed at the library after our session so she could look for more books to take home and read.

Reminder to self: give students and parents abundant opportunities to take ownership. Then, the learning becomes their own. That's what good teaching is about.

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Summer Writing Experiments

7/8/2017

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One of the best decisions we made this summer was to add a stronger writing component to our classes. The Reading & Math Buddy students are keeping a writing journal, and the students in the Literacy Movement Workshop are re-telling Peter and the Wolf through various graphic organizers.

Initially started to help incoming fourth-graders be better prepared for the state test, the writing journal has turned out to be great for students of all ages. The setup was fairly simple and low-cost: spiral notebooks personalized with large wall stickers from the dollar store. The instructions in a nutshell:

Write something every day at home.
Don't worry about spelling....just write
Date your writing and skip lines.
Bring the journal to class each week.
Use the writing prompts provided, or write about whatever you'd like to.

The point was just to have the students express as much as possible and develop their narrative skills.

What we're seeing so far:

Our youngest students, ages 5 and 6, love their journals and are the most consistent in writing, with the help of their mothers.
Many students need prompting and coaching on how to add details to their narrative.
Students who read well generally spell well, but still benefit from explicit instruction.
Through the writings, we see clearly the gaps in students' letter-sound correspondence and grammatical usage.
Some students ask if they can write in Spanish, their dominant language. We say yes, as the focus is on self expression, not necessarily their English skills.

In the Literacy Movement Workshop, the students write using different tools. The first week, they read the first few pages of Peter and the Wolf, then charted out what they knew already (K), what they wanted to learn (W), and what they learned (L) in a KWL chart. In subsequent weeks, after they read the entire story, they made a BME (Beginning, Middle, End) chart and retold the story through a comic strip. These graphic organizers have been useful for reinforcing the elements of the story and plot, as well as new vocabulary.

One surprising finding has been how receptive the students are to writing during the class time. Journal writing is usually timed in class, about 6-8 minutes. In Literacy Movement, students often take up to 20 minutes to complete their charts. We've seen that with the longer writing times, students have more time to think through and organize their ideas into coherent sentences. They enjoy the writing process.

It is yet too early to tell the effect of our writing experiments this summer. However, the parent feedback and parent-child interactions we've observed have been overwhelmingly positive. The writing component is one element we intend to continue and develop in future classes.

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Four steps to a better vocabulary

6/28/2017

One of the youngest students in our program, a six-year-old, has perhaps the most sophisticated vocabulary among all our students. She once solemnly told me, "I go to my room and sob when I get into trouble." On another occasion, she thought something was wonderful, then remembered an equally fitting descriptor: "Or I could say it's exquisite. That's a fancy word for wonderful." Regarding an upcoming visit to relatives, she shared that "they have a new corral" on the ranch. This particular student loves the Fancy Nancy series by Jane O'Connor, so it's no surprise that she uses big words. Her large vocabulary, however, is unusual among our students, all of whom speak English as a second language. How has she been able to develop and actively use a large lexicon? How can we encourage other students to do the same?

Vocabulary is one of the essential components of literacy, and a child's vocabulary size is a strong predictor of future academic success. Four elements clearly help pave the way toward a large vocabulary: everyday conversation, rich experiences, reading, and explicit instruction.

Home conversations impact children from a very early age. Many research studies, including a 2013 Stanford University study by psychologists Anne Fernald and Adriana Weisleder, have demonstrated a strong correlation between the size of a young child's vocabulary and how much their parents talk to them. In essence, the more direct talk, the greater the vocabulary size. One important takeaway from Fernald and Weisleder's study: socioeconomic status does not have to determine the size of child's vocabulary. Parents of all income levels and backgrounds can help increase their children's vocabulary simply by speaking with them frequently throughout the day.

Experiences also open the door to vocabulary development. Visiting the zoo and learning new animal names is a prime example. How about enjoying new foods, such as tabouli from the Middle East? When we bring out the Snap Circuits kits, the students learn to identify positive and negative terminals on the batteries, the resistor, integrated circuits, etc. The children in our Literacy Movement Workshop this summer are learning a lot of new vocabulary through Peter and the Wolf: instruments such as bassoon and oboe and dance terminology such as choreography and Chassé. When we have a new sensory experience, it's human nature to want to know, "What am I seeing? Hearing? Eating? What do you call this movement?"

Books are a rich resource for sophisticated vocabulary. Research indicates that picture books contain many more rare words than everyday conversation and employ more formal language than daily conversation. In a study by Jessica Montag and colleagues at Indiana University, there were 1.72 times more unique words in a sample of one hundred picture books than in child-directed speech. According to the Huffington Post, another study by Dominic Massaro at the University of California, Santa Cruz found that picture books are "two to three times" more likely than home conversations to contain words beyond the 5000 most common English words.

Lastly, explicit instruction is an important method of vocabulary acquisition, albeit the most formal. Who could forget the word lists, the weekly quizzes from former school days? In our Reading & Math Buddy sessions nowadays, we take more time to focus on the meaning of words we encounter in our readings, to be sure the students don't just "decode" but understand the word in context. This means a more intentional study for our middle elementary students, as we discuss not only meaning, but also synonyms, antonyms, and parts of speech.

The six-year-old in our program has picked up rich vocabulary through her conversations at home, books, experiences, and attentive listening in formal learning contexts. As I consider her vocabulary development, these are a few applications to systematically implement into our programs:

1. Encourage volunteers to include informal vocabulary instruction as they talk through picture books with younger readers.
2. Include formal word lists for older readers in instruction time.
3. Design programs that introduce families to a variety of experiences and contexts. More arts programming, more recreational opportunities, more science, more game days for conversational opportunities.
4. Encourage parents to continuously dialogue with their children and provide diversity of experience.

As our students gain greater proficiency in decoding, we must ensure that they have the vocabulary to connect with the sounds, so that their reading has meaning.