Class Antics – Inside Elementary Education

This is Part 1 of a series about Fun with Literacy: Taylor Swift lyrics

I teach my students dozens of reading vocabulary terms, and I’m always looking for examples of the concepts in our everyday lives. You should have seen the looks on my students’ faces when they saw “Figurative Language with Taylor Swift” on our daily schedule! I felt bad when I realized that they thought T-Swizzle would really stop by later in the day. Still, the class rallied from their disappointment and found many examples of figurative language and literary techniques in this song.

I first got into Taylor Swift songs after judging talent show auditions a few years back. I heard each of her songs many times over. I was impressed with the lyrics. The girl knows how to tell a story, using clever rhymes, similes and alliteration to enhance the effect. There’s a reason she’s a star.

Here is my literary analysis of the song “You Belong With Me” by Taylor Swift from her album Fearless. It’s very good for teaching students how to recognize literary techniques in popular entertainment.

–For Taylor’s story-behind-the-song, click here

Research shows that kids who do not read during the summer months fall victim to the Summer Slide, in which they lose skills during summer vacation. This is an acute problem for elementary students, because they lose so much, so quickly. We spend the first quarter trying to get students back to the level they were at the end of the previous year.

The bigger problem with the Summer Slide is that it affects the most vulnerable students, those who have the least support at home. Scholastic, PBS Kids and iVillage joined to promote Summer Reading Central for kids and parents. The goal is to get kids to read at least 4 books over the summer to prevent the Summer Slide.

Scholastic’s Summer Challenge lets kids log their reading time in pursuit of a World Record. In Summer 2010, students around the world logged 52,710,368 reading minutes. Scholastic will feature the 20 schools with the most minutes this summer in the 2012 Scholastic Book of World Records.

There’s a 12 page Family Participation Guide online with reading logs, certificates, forms for recommending books to others, and WordGirl definition and vocabulary activities. Suggested Book Lists are posted online for the 2011 Summer Reading Challenge, organized into dozens of categories of interests, also identified by reading level or age.

As for me, I’ll be reading and writing all summer. I love it!

When I was a child, Fred Rogers was my best friend.  He opened his show with a simple song, so simple that I could sing along before I started going to school. I knew that he talked directly to me and I talked to him, too.

May 22 celebrates the anniversary of the premiere of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1967.  The last original Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired on PBS in 2001, making it the longest-running PBS program at the time.  (PBS began its broadcasts of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1968.)

Fred Rogers did a lot more:
>> He was the composer and lyricist of over 200 songs.
>> He wrote numerous books for children and for adults.
>> He won 4 Emmy Awards and the Lifetime Achievement Award.
>> He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
>> He advocated before the U.S. Senate for more government funding for children’s television rather than the Vietnam War.
>> He testified before the U.S. Supreme Court in favor of allowing home recording of his television show during the Sony V. Betamax litigation.

His last book, published in 2002 was The Mister Rogers Parenting Book.  One of his famous sweaters is on display in the Smithsonian.  Mr. Rogers was one of my most important role models, even at the age when I called him “Mr. Rog” because I couldn’t say his whole name. 

I salute you, Mr. Rog.

Part of the fun of blogging is that you get to meet other bloggers—and their students.  Mr. Reifman’s class in Santa Monica asked me if the boy on the cover of Best Multiplication Songs EVER! is supposed to look like an “x” for multiplication.  I was impressed with their question and told them more than they ever wanted to know about symbolism in my books and marketing messages.  (I went to business school to learn how to be a civilian—I grew up as an Air Force brat with no idea how the other half lived.)

So here it is…Fun with Symbolism.

Dear Mr. Reifman’s class,

You are very clever! There are indeed hidden symbols and layers of meaning on the cover for Best Multiplication Songs EVER!

The jumping boy on the cover is indeed intended to make you think of the “X” for multiplication. The jumping-for-joy-look indicates that the album has a lot of energy. Also notice that the red letters and a boy flying against the blue sky evoke Superman images, suggesting that you can become a multiplication superhero if you listen to the album.

Managing Stan (aka Zapped!) has hidden symbols, too. You’ll notice that fire or the color red appear when the kids are up to no good and are being untrue to themselves. That’s when things tend to get zapped, too. I used trees (and leaves) to symbolize honesty and being true to yourself. For example, Kyle wears a gilded leaf necklace that belonged to his mother. Brian, his best friend, is the one who keys in on its importance. The scenes at the Secret Tree show the kids becoming friends, not just classmates. Even the plaque on the bench under the tree has a tree theme: In Memory of Eldon Bower. “Bower” is a tree-related word meaning a leafy shelter.

In my newest book, Brainstorm, I wrote some cool metaphors. See, Brian is very clever, and his ideas come to him out of the blue, like brainstorms. (Some brainstorms are good; others lead to  funny problems.) Whenever Brian has a brainstorm, I create a metaphor and compare it to a real storm. For example, “Snowflakes swirled in Brian’s mind as a wintry brainstorm grew into a blizzard.” In some cases, the type of storm has something to do with the idea, like when Brian’s brainstorm starts raining cats and dogs as he thinks of an idea related to Barkley, weirdest dog ever.

Until my last year of high school, I could find symbols in stories, but honestly thought that the authors didn’t really intend them. I thought my teachers just made me search for them as some sort of scavenger hunt activity combined with an assignment to write a two page essay about the importance of the color red on page 184. Education is about helping each generation build on the learning of others; I can save you some time and say that yes, authors absolutely really do put symbols in their books.

Try putting symbols in your own stories! Just think of the symbol you want to use and what it will mean, and slip it in here and there. Not too much, or it will get tacky. For example, Brainstorm is 180 pages long, and I only used 9 brainstorms.

Sincerely,
Corey Green

Rick Riordan won the Author of the Year Award for The Lost Hero (The Heroes of Olympus, Book 1)

The Children’s Choice Book Awards lets young readers voice their opinions by voting for the books they like.  Of course, the hope behind this program is that kids will make their own reading lists and develop a love of reading.  Kids cast more than 500,000 votes online this year.

My students love Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series.  The students who can read at that level are very proud of their accomplishments, and their success motivates others. 

My class formed a Percy Jackson fan club that celebrated all things about Greek mythology.  They were especially democratic by not demanding that club members had to have read the Percy Jackson books to join the club.  The result was a lot of fun and sharing on their own time—things that make a teacher’s heart soar.

Thank you, Rick Riordan, for your contributions to KidLit!

This year’s theme for National Library Week is “Create your own story @ your library.” 

What activities are you planning for your class? You might like to use my Story Writing Tips for Kids that have been online for a long time.  The webpage is one of the most frequently visited of all my sites.  I also have a Story Planning Worksheet to download, print and use in your classroom.

Here are some famous librarians.  I hope this information sparks fascinating interactions with students in classroom discussions:

* Ben Franklin and his philosophy group Junto organized the “Articles of Agreement,” which set up the nation’s first library.  The librarywas first meant to benefit only the members so that they could share books on the issues they discussed during meetings.  It went on to become the Library of Congress.

* J. Edgar Hoover went to night school at George Washington University and supported himself by working at the Library of Congress. There, he was a messenger, cataloguer and clerk.

* Lewis Carroll: The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass became a sub-librarian at Christ Church in Oxford, England.  Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and he first told the story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the three daughters of the Dean of Christ Church, in 1862.

* Jacob Grimm, one of the famous Brothers Grimm, worked as a librarian in Kasel, Germany after graduating with a law degree.

* Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time served as the librarian and writer-in-residence at Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City.

* Beverly Cleary attended the School of Librarianship at the University of Washington, Seattle, and became a children’s librarian.

* Former First Lady Laura Bush holds a Master’s degree in Library Science.  While First Lady, Mrs. Bush supported librarian recruitment initiatives and toured many libraries around the world.

The Library of Congress website has wonderful sections for Kids and Families and for Teachers.

My post about National Library Week 2010 might have some ideas for you, too.

I am posting this a bit early so my teacher-readers can create lesson plans.

April Fools Day celebrates pranks, hoaxes and silliness.  Many people believe it originated from a line in “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”  This was the story of Chanticleer and the Fox in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (1392).  Readers misunderstood a line to mean “32nd of March.”  Chaucer’s poem was made into a book titled Chanticleer and the Fox, written and illustrated by Barbara Cooney.  Her book won the 1959 Caldecott Medal.

Some fun April Fools pranks from The Top 100 April Fool’s Day Hoaxes of All Time:

 * In 1915, during World War I, a French aviator flew over a German camp and dropped what appeared to be a huge bomb. German soldiers immediately scattered, but no explosion followed. Finally, the soldiers gingerly approached the bomb, only to discover it was just a large football with a note tied to it: “April Fool!”

 * The BBC announced that Swiss farmers were enjoying a bumper spaghetti crop in 1957; the show included  footage of Swiss peasants pulling strands of spaghetti down from trees.  BBC’s instructions for growing a spaghetti tree:  “place a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best.”

 * In 1975, an Australian news program reported that the country would soon be converting to “metric time.” Under the new system there would be 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, and 20-hour days.

 * A newspaper story ran in London in 1981 about a Japanese long-distance runner who had entered the London Marathon but, on account of a translation error, thought that he had to run for 26 days, not 26 miles. The runner was reported somewhere out on the roads of England, still running, determined to finish the race; even though various people had spotted him, they were unable to flag him down.

 * The April 1998 issue of the New Mexicans for Science and Reason newsletter contained an article claiming that the Alabama state legislature had voted to change the value of the mathematical constant pi from 3.14159 to the ‘Biblical value’ of 3.0.  This became an Internet sensation: the Alabama legislature soon began receiving hundreds of calls from people protesting the legislation.

April Fools Day is a perfect occasion to tell you more about my book,  Zapped! 

Inventing Stan was easy…
making Stan behave is impossible!

Kyle, the new kid at Buckley Elementary School, invents an imaginary scapegoat to deflect the blame for a prank that goes wrong in class. How perfect — the kids can play pranks and never get into trouble!  When Stan takes on a life of his own, the kids get into more trouble than they ever imagined. The kids discover making Stan behave is impossible.
Children’s middle-grade fiction.
Audience: Ages 9-12.

 Now for something real: On April 1, 2007, the first Diary of a Wimpy Kid book came out.

Once upon a time, schoolchildren celebrated holidays on the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln (February 12) and George Washington (February 22.)  Now, the two holidays are combined into one: Presidents’ Day.*

Presidents’ Day is a time for many traditional elementary school activities: learning about the presidents and completing worksheets, hearing stories about Washington and the cherry tree, and creating a silhouette of students using the overhead projector for tracing.  Fun activities, all.  Here is a not-so-traditional idea for a grammar lesson:

Presidents’ Day is not the official name for the holiday, and there is some disagreement on the spelling.  “Presidents’ Day” is favored by the Chicago Manual of Style, the American Heritage Dictionary, and Webster’s Dictionary.  “President’s Day” is incorrect because two presidents “own” the holiday, not one.  Use the day to try once again to teach students about where to place the apostrophe: before the s if ownership is singular, after the s if there are multiple owners.  eHow.com has a nice lesson plan for teaching apostrophe use and links to several practice worksheets.

ABCTeach has a collection of nice Presidents’ Day worksheets.

*The third Monday in February is the federal holiday that honors George Washington. Today, the date usually is observed as “Presidents Day” in recognition of other American presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln (who was born February 12). The legal name of the federal holiday, however, remains “Washington’s Birthday”. The federal holiday used to be observed on February 22nd until the Uniform Monday Holiday Act was passed by Congress.

Ticket to Read is an awesome online program that functions as a super fun reading tutor for all levels.  You can use it for remediation or as a challenge.  It’s appropriate for grades K-6.

In essence, your child earns tickets for reading passages and answering the questions.  These tickets can be redeemed to play games and to decorate your own personal virtual tree house.

Ticket to Read provides comprehensive reading tutoring.  It really covers everything.  Your child reads the story out loud (fluency) and answers questions that address comprehension and vocabulary.  If your child makes mistakes, the program offers personalized tutoring.  If your child has trouble sounding out words, the program will read to her, and then let her click on words she doesn’t know so she can hear them pronounced.  After all the tutoring, your child tries the passage again.  Many of the passages are nonfiction, which is the most difficult genre for children on standardized tests.  For younger students, Ticket to Read has a phonics component.

The tickets are good reinforcement because your child earns them quickly and constantly.  Every correct question earns tickets.  Reading a story out loud and recording it earns tickets.

It is super fun to decorate the tree house.  Your child can spend tickets on virtual toys such as a drum set or keyboard, buy a virtual teddy bear, and even purchase access to secret passages or a virtual pool.

Individuals can subscribe to Ticket to Read for $29.95.  Classes can subscribe for $249.95.  Schools can subscribe, too—see Ticket to Read for details.  You can get a FREE 14 day trial.

This is a great deal!  You will be so glad you subscribed!  Your child’s reading level will soar!

I have found a magical teaching tool: Spectrum Publishing’s Little Critter Reading.  It’s a workbook with the perfect format: an engaging story based on the Little Critter books by Mercer Mayer, followed by a worksheet covering comprehension, phonics, and study skills.  Students beg to use it and groan when we put it away.

In my experience, Little Critter Reading improves a reader’s skills by a whole grade level.

You can buy Little Critter Reading at two levels: grade 1 and grade 2.  Grade 2 is appropriate for students in second and third grade.  Grade 1 helps students make the remarkable transformation from reading three sentences on a page to reading several paragraphs—in the space of one workbook.  Grade 1 is great for English Language Learners.

I recommend Little Critter Reading books for the classroom and for the home.  At home, a parent or older sibling can tutor a struggling reader with Little Critter Reading books.

How to use Little Critter Reading:

1.  Read the story to your students.  Very important—think how much better they can read if they already know what it sounds like!
2.  Let the student(s) read aloud with you.  This way, you’re pulling the student along and helping her experience fluency.  For the whole class, choral read the passage.
3.  If time and patience allow, the student can read the story aloud without your help.
4.  Do the worksheet that goes with the story.  You might have to teach a mini lesson on topics such as root words, ABC order, verb tense, etc.  Kids quickly catch on and complete the lesson easily.
5.  Review the lesson.

One caveat: you are not supposed to photocopy Little Critter Reading workbooks.  I applied for a grant and bought a class set of the workbook.  I use it with my third graders at the beginning of the year.  We put a page protector over the worksheet page and write on the page protector with an Expo marker.  We erase with old socks.

Students who behave well get to draw on the page protector for two minutes!

Seriously, I can’t recommend Little Critter Reading highly enough.

Before IQ tests, memory was a common measure of intelligence.  Students memorized poems, speeches, and sometimes whole texts.  Michelangelo, for example, memorized all of Dante.

Memorization has fallen out of favor in today’s teaching climate.  The current thinking is that we should teach kids to apply information, and that knowing isn’t so important.  I think kids should be able to do both.  How can you apply anything if you don’t know anything?

Memorizing builds attention span, task commitment, pride, and (I believe) intelligence.

Challenge your students to memorize things worth knowing.  Weave memorization into your classroom, but make it fun.  DON’T grade students on memorization if it’s not in your state standards.  (Give rewards instead.)  Make memorization a Fast Finisher activity.  Students who finish work early can focus on your class’s latest memorization goal.

Here are some ideas for things to memorize:

> Preambles to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence
> Important ideas in the Bill of Rights
> The Gettysburg Address–all or part
> The National Anthem (not all students know it)
> Patriotic songs
> Excerpts of famous speeches
> Famous poems
> States and capitals (not stressed anymore, but good to know)
> Continents and oceans
> Several countries for each continent (Australia and Antarctica are special cases)
> Famous cities in each state, country, continent
> Science concepts: the parts of a cell, Newton’s laws, whatever suits your curriculum

No-cost celebrations can become cherished memories for your students.  

Remember the fun you used to have building forts at home?  Draping a sheet or tablecloth over some furniture and spending hours in the tent? It’s even more fun at school! 

First: Lay down a challenge for your class:
+ Read a given number of chapter books
+ Reach your AR goal for the month or grading period
+ Memorize math facts  (when every student in your class masters multiplication facts, that is a feat most worthy of celebration!)

The reward: Fort Day.  Bring in clean sheets and tablecloths for draping over classroom furniture (tell students not to bring fitted sheets).  Desks make a good foundation, and textbooks hold the sheets in place.  Students enjoy their forts — they can read, play board games, or just hang out for an hour.

If you want to really have fun, let kids make one giant fort out of the whole classroom.  My class created different rooms and hallways, and had a blast crawling through the fort!

My experience: Fort Day should last no longer than two hours (including set-up and clean-up), usually the last hours of a Friday.  Fort Day is best as a one-time good deal.  The second Fort Day in one year just doesn’t have the same magic.

Teaching Tips:
Lay down a Fort Day reading challenge that ends right before your state achievement tests.  If students can qualify for Fort Day by reading chapter books and nonfiction, THEY WILL READ A LOT OF BOOKS.  Everyone benefits!

Build vocabulary with “Fort” words: fortitude, forte, and fortuitous all have to do with strength, just like a real fort.  Have your class look for more fort words in the dictionary.  They will find fortunate, unfortunate, fortunately—and forty.  No matter what I say, my students just won’t accept that “forty” isn’t a fort word in this lesson plan.  I back down and tell the kids they have a point—it does have “fort” in it, doesn’t it?

IMPORTANT!  Set Fort Day rules.  The most important rule: don’t fart in the fort.  You will be very sorry if you don’t make this a rule.  The girls in my class insisted on it.  The boys followed it.  Kids get very excited on Fort Day, and excited kids can be naughty kids.   I just had the offenders sit out for a few minutes, then rejoin the group.  I didn’t have repeat offenders.

I recommend blankets for the base of the fort and sheets or tablecloths for the tents.  Blankets don’t make good tents because they don’t “breathe” and the forts get stuffy.  eHow offers tips on making forts at home here, here and here.

Teachers, include serious and sad poems in your National Poetry Month celebration.  Elementary students like feeling they are big enough to read grown-up poetry.  Students know that life isn’t all sunshine and daisies, and they appreciate poems that address serious aspects of life.

Here are some poems I liked in elementary school and have found that my students enjoy:

If by Rudyard Kipling: The ultimate character education poem.  I share this with every class! 

In Flanders Field by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD

Grass by Carl Sandburg

Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes

Annabel Lee by Edgar Allen Poe

There is no frigate like a book by Emily Dickinson

Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds/Admit impediments…)

The Highwayman by Alfred Noyes.  This is a classic ballad with a strong storyline.  Explain the story to your class, then read the poem with them.  I used this poem when I taught fifth grade, but I don’t think I’d share it with third graders.

For a grand finish, play “The Highwayman” set to music and sung by Lorena McKennitt—it is haunting and beautiful and perfect for the text.  I recommend that students be able to see a copy of the poem while they are listening.  A YouTube version of the song is available (it’s a ten-minute long clip).  You also can download the song at iTunes or buy the album, The Book of Secrets, through Amazon.com.

Next post: Poetry Workbooks.

Celebrate National Poetry Month in your classroom!  Children love the rhyme, rhythm and repetition of funny poetry.  Teachers will love the opportunity to teach literary devices and figurative language.  Here are some of my favorite fun poets:

Shel Silverstein: I divide poems from Where the Sidewalk Ends into categories of easy, medium and hard, which I name Tall, Grande and Venti after Starbucks.  Students practice and perform poems at their level.  Let your class visit Shel’s website and hear him read his poems.  Warning: many sound downright bizarre!

Jack Prelutsky: another classic!  Children love his books.  You will love that his website features easy-to-print .pdfs of some of his favorite poems for the classroom.  Check out his new book of poetry, Something Big Has Been Here.

Linda Knaus: I discovered her poems while searching for fluency material.  Perfect!  Print a few poems from her “Funny Poems” category and you’re ready to go!

I’ll have another post about serious poems later this month.

“School libraries are the foundation of our culture, not luxuries.”
Laurie Halse Anderson
Official Spokesperson for School Library Month

Now more than ever, it is important to recognize School Library Month.  School libraries and school librarians are vulnerable when states and districts face budget cuts.  Show your school’s students, teachers, staff, parents and friends how important the school library is to education.

Activities for School Library Month:
 – Make posters advertising the school library.  (Learn about techniques of persuasion while you’re at it!)
 – Create video or audio announcements about school libraries to show on the school announcements.
 – Imagine a school without the library.  Have your students write about what this would be like, and the opportunities they would lose.
– Make a class book about reading and the library.  Have each student write and illustrate an essay, poem or letter.  Have your class vote on a theme.  Examples: “Reading Takes us Places,” “Choose Your Freedom, Learn to Read,” or “Readers are Leaders!”

About Laurie Halse Anderson: She is a bestselling author of such novels as Speak, Fever 1793, Wintergirls, Catalyst, and Chains.  Many of Laurie’s books are YA (Young Adult) and are not written for the elementary classroom.

I have used Fever 1793 for fifth graders.  Students enjoy this story of the Yellow Fever epidemic in Phildelphia.  It connects especially well to lessons on American History and the American Revolution.   Laurie says she gets the most fan mail about her Vet Volunteers series, written for fourth to sixth grade students.