Nearly every Halloween in the classroom has seen me running to the library during my conference period to beg the librarian for a book that would satisfy my student’s request that we do something “scary.” Coming up short on a day like Halloween is like looking into your kids eyes on Christmas morning as you explain that you just didn’t make room in your schedule for presents this year. So once again, I’ve armed myself with a holiday mini unit. This Halloween unit is flexible enough to blend easily with whatever I did in reading workshop on October 30, but festive enough to scratch that Halloween itch. Here’s a peek…
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7 Important Literary Devices in “The Girl Who Drank the Moon”
Some books present you with the best kind of difficulty: they are full to bursting with literary goodies, so rich that you can’t hope to teach the book for absolutely all it’s worth. Far from scouring the page to figure out something that will excite students and meet your instructional goals, these books require you to practice restraint–to pick out a few gems and leave the rest alone, so as not to belabor the reading. The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill is one of those books. I recently digitized my Girl Who Drank the Moon novel study, and was reminded of how well the author used multiple…
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How to Celebrate Fall Without Losing Instructional Momentum (Reading Workshop)
The weather changes, the leaves turn and you are faced with this dilemma: should I be the festive teacher, or the dutiful teacher? The one who closes the windows and trudges through the curriculum, or the one who cancels class to carve pumpkins? In college I imagined I would be the festive teacher. Once I was actually in the classroom I was dedicated to being the dutiful teacher. But inevitably the season would make itself felt and I just couldn’t resist a short break from my lesson plans for a holiday themed activity. More recently, I’ve tried to get the best of both worlds by creating holiday “mini units.” These…
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Blog Series on the Book, “Reader, Come Home”
In Reader, Come Home Maryanne Wolf reminds us how the reading brain works, how it can be altered by digital media, and how we can help our students (and ourselves) develop a reading life in a digital world. Here’s a round up of posts on topics found in the book: “The good readers of a society are both its canaries–which detect the presence of danger to its members–and its guardians of our common humanity.” –Maryanne Wolf
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Festina Lente: Hurry Slowly, Reading as Contemplation
This is the seventh in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here. “To read…we need a certain kind of silence that seems increasingly elusive in our over-networked society…and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape, knowledge can’t help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with it’s promise that speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react that to think deeply…Reading is an act of contemplation…an act…
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How to Facilitate Deep Reading & Foster Biliterate Brains
This is the sixth in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here. Before getting to Marynne Wolf’s final point in Reader, Come Home, I wanted to share some practical takeaways from the book. These are my own personal takeaways and I’ve divided them into two categories: Examining My Own Reading Life, and Imagining My Children’s Reading Lives Examining My Own Reading Life Since reading Reader, Come Home I’ve been ever more aware of my shallow reading tendencies. I experience continuous partial attention when I read on my phone, and that bleeds over to…
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The Biliterate Brain: The Reading Brain of the Future
This is the fifth in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here. So we know that deep reading is good and shallow reading is problematic, which begs the question…what do we do? Throw our phones in a lake? Raise our kids off the grid? Maryanne Wolf suggests a more balanced, more livable option. She’s the first to admit that we can’t go back in time, and wouldn’t want to. The goal, according to her, is to maximize the benefits of digital media and minimize the costs. She has suggestions for both the adult…
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What You Need to Know About Digital Media & Shallow Reading
This is the fourth in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post and find links to other posts in the series here. “Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of attention?” maryanne wolf, Reader, Come Home In Reader, Come Home, Maryanne Wolf points out that while we may be reading just as much as ever (we may very well be reading more than ever) the quality of our reading has become shallow. She connects this to our inundation with digital…
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What You Need to Know About Brain Plasticity
This is the second in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post along with links to other posts in the series here. “The crux of the matter is that the plasticity of our brain permits us to form both ever more sophisticated and expanded circuits and also ever less sophisticated circuits, depending on environmental factors.” Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home The above quote sums up brain plasticity. A more familiar way to say it is, “Use it or lose it.” A lot of what Maryanne Wolf has to say depends on the concept of brain plasticity. The circuitry of our brain…
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Help Students Read Every Day while Learning From Home: Distance Learning, At-Home Reading Workshop
When school closures rolled across the country last April, teachers quickly adapted to provide digital resources for their students. We were all in survival mode, and a lot of these activities amounted to digital busy work. It was the best we could do. But now we’re faced with the daunting reality of intermittent school closures, or models that combine face-to-face teaching with digital teaching. One of the greatest challenges, I think, to digital teaching is the loss of a daily, reading practice. At school you can monitor and assist student’s daily reading. You can develop reliable routines that help students build reading stamina. But when kids are learning from home,…
