Even though libraries are citadels of silence, guarding humanity's best thoughts, it doesn't mean that humor is forbidden there. To prove that a giggle can easily accompany a pleasant read, Bored Panda has collected a list of some of the funniest examples of librarian humor.
I was a PSRV (known as pedestrian struck & run over by vehicle) this past March and at first the doctors thought that I had minor injuries. I was sore, headache, the usual but no broken bones so I…
Are you looking for ways to make reading standards easier for your students to grasp? Fables are a great way to introduce and integrate these learning targets. Here are 5 reasons why fables make teaching key reading standards much easier for students to understand.
This study guide and infographic for William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale offer summary and analysis on themes, symbols, and other literary devices found in the text. Explore Course Hero's library of literature materials, including documents and Q&A pairs.
Elements pounds Mixtures Worksheet Answers from atoms and molecules worksheet , image source: briefencounters.ca
This study guide and infographic for Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams offer summary and analysis on themes, symbols, and other literary devices found in the text. Explore Course Hero's library of literature materials, including documents and Q&A pairs.
Hi all! The big day is Tuesday! That's my first day back with my little sweeties. I'm getting excited and nervous. Yeah, can you believe aft...
Independent reading is a great way to help students build a love of reading! These 5 strategies help hold students accountable!
This study guide and infographic for Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus offer summary and analysis on themes, symbols, and other literary devices found in the text. Explore Course Hero's library of literature materials, including documents and Q&A pairs.
Once again, let me tell you how much I LOVE summertime. I have been busy busy busy creating brand new products, including a new Fiction and Non-Fiction Anchor Chart, that I’m super excited about! So, last April, I created a set of Assessment task cards for Non-Fiction Text Features. I... Read more
Finally! The Taxonomy of my Music is complete! While I’m working on my Digital Art assignments I enjoy watching my favorite TV shows. I bring this up to help you get a sense for how long it t…
Find out what Kristy and Jesse have been up to this week - and get a look at their house plans!
Lots of free coloring pages and original craft projects, crochet and knitting patterns, printable boxes, cards, and recipes.
I recently had an unsatisfyingly brief conversation with a woman who's purchasing new textbooks and online resources to implement the Common Core Curriculum in our school district. I'm rather neutral in the whole Common Core debate. Having taught freshman composition at five different colleges and universities, each with a different philosophical approach to the subject, I developed a pretty flexible understanding of the "right" way to teach. Basically, there are lots of right ways to teach, and lots of wrong ways. The Common Core, at least in its general approach as I understand it, doesn't seem exactly wrong to me. Whether it turns out to be right, only time will tell. But as a result of that brief conversation, I started wondering how Great Literature will fare in the Common Core. From my cursory research on the matter, the answer is far from clear, if only because states and individual school districts have enormous freedom to customize the Common Core. No one really knows what will end up being taught from Great Literature and what will end up being deleted from reading lists...and thus, potentially, eventually, from our culture. In some ways, my using the phrase Great Literature with initial capitalization is a betrayal of my moderate stand in the politics of literary criticism. Oh, yes. Literary criticism is highly political, as is most of academia. In literary criticism, we have the conservatives who claim that there is truly such a thing as Great Literature and it needs to be vigorously protected from contamination by the plebian affection for commercial trash. The conservative critic Harold Bloom, for instance, classifies Hamlet as Great Literature and Harry Potter as trash. Of course, he hadn't actually read Harry Potter when he offered up his condemnation of it, but he won't let a little thing like total ignorance stop him from expressing his expert opinion. He has, however, written some lovely, intelligent, and insightful essays on Hamlet that I have happily quoted in academic papers. Bloom comes across as an insufferable literary snob, but he's not stupid. On the other end of the political spectrum we find the anything-goes liberal critics. For them, all the classics are generally referred to as literature with a lower-case "l." In truth, however, the liberals are suspicious of even lower-case literature and instead prefer the term text to refer to whatever writing they analyze. The adorable marketing blurb on the back of a bottle of Newman's Own salad dressing, for example, is a text, as is the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. These two examples of writing are equal in value and interchangeable as legitimate subjects for literary study. Obviously, liberal textual egalitarianism gives conservatives apoplectic fits. I confess to a certain delight in the red-faced sputterings of the snobs, but I also recognize that Beowulf probably deserves a bit more attention than marketing blurbs on bottles of Newman's Own...unless you're studying marketing, in which case Beowulf is pretty much useless. Hmmm...I suppose you could shoot a commercial in which Grendel leaves a bloody mess for the queen's laundry women to clean with Oxi-Clean. If anyone makes that commercial, I want royalties. Anyway. Back to Great Literature. I'm a moderate in the literature war. Great Literature is distinctively awesome, but when it comes to school reading lists, I honestly don't mind students reading popular fluff on occasion. Nick had to read The Hunger Games in 8th grade. I've not read it and am uniquely unqualified to pass judgment on its quality (ahem, Mr. Bloom, take note), but it's new and popular and only time will tell if it survives long enough to become Great Literature. Nevertheless, it sparked in Nick a desire to read that has hitherto been smothered by his love of screens and things that go bang through the Xbox. I don't care what gateway books schools use to get kids hooked on reading, as long as they also teach those undeniably influential great books that have shaped our culture for good. Get the reading monkey on their backs, and the great stuff is easier to push. And thus we come back to my concern: how much Great Literature will survive the Common Core? According to my source in our district, English teachers are going to have to start teaching at least some informational texts, which seems utterly wrong to me. Social studies and science teachers can and should cover how to read informational texts (this is a vitally important skill virtually ignored in my own classics-based education), but English classes are where we read literature, where the cultural creativity of our past meets young minds of the present and lays the groundwork for the cultural creativity of the future. The language of literature isn't literal or merely informative. Its density of meaning vastly exceeds the sum of its words. Literature layers meaning, explores ambiguity and depth, reveals the complexity of life and death and what it means to love and live and breathe and change. Reading literature right can only happen when one reads literature broadly and deeply...because as soon as a poet writes a poem or a novelist writes a story, s/he joins an ongoing conversation with all the poems and stories that have come before, just as we join the ongoing conversation of humanity when we are born. English classes are where our cultural conversation reaches back to the Bible and Sophocles and Chaucer and Dante and Cervantes and Shakespeare and Donne and Austen and Dickens and Joyce and Eliot and Hemingway and Angelou. English classes are where we start participating in that cultural conversation in active, meaningful ways. It means something that the story of Superman repeats the story of Moses. It means something that Oedipus was destroyed by pride and unintended consequences...and so are modern politicians. It means something that JK Rowling modeled her "Tale of the Three Brothers" on Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. It means something that so many people saw in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings an allegory of World War I...an allegory Tolkien himself vigorously denied. It means something that James Joyce modeled arguably the greatest novel ever written on Homer's ancient epic The Odyssey. All of literature engages in a conversation. And that's literature with a lower-case "l." The good, the bad...it's all connected. Those blurbs on the backs of Newman's Own dressing bottles? They cleverly riff on classic stories and history. The more you read of both Great Literature and lower-case literature, the more you understand the conversation. The more you read, the easier the conversation is to follow. I recently sparked a bit of a kerfuffle on my stamping blog when I quoted the first line of TS Eliot's The Waste Land. I encouraged people to think of a loved one going through a tough time and to send them a card this month. I closed the post by saying that, after all, "April is the cruelest month." Several people took offense, and one went so far as to accuse me of promoting negativity. Seriously? That's why we need to keep reading Great Literature. If we strip all texts down to their literal meaning (April sucks, for instance), we get information devoid of context. Nuance, creativity, individuality, and spirit are lost in the literal. The conversation gets derailed when we're not speaking the same cultural language, a language rich in history and imagery and words with more than one meaning and expressed in contexts that matter. The more deeply we understand the connectedness of words and images and thoughts, the more deeply we understand our world and each other. Reading our cultural masterworks teaches that connectedness in profound and vital ways, ways that informational texts (for all their undeniable value in some areas of thought) simply can't teach. At least, that's what I think. And now it's your turn. What do you think? Should school reading lists for English classes include Great Literature, or is Great Literature ceasing to be relevant in our fast-paced, high-tech world? Are English classes the proper place to teach students how to read informational texts? Should we replace To Kill a Mockingbird with Time Magazine or cnn.com? Has Great Literature had an effect on how you think, what you think, what you feel about life? Note: You can find links to all the photos in this post (and many more!) on my Books Pinterest Board.
I think there are so many ways this could be used in therapy and I am excited to try it out! The basic principle is the kids can shake the bottle around to find the different words hidden in the rice. Once they find a word, they can:
Long O can be a tricky sound to teach because there are a few different ways to spell it. But I'm breaking down how you can easily teach this sound and all its spelling patterns.
One of my goals for the first month of school has always been to get to know my students as readers. I want to know what types of books interest them, and which books bore them, and then I use this in
We all know and love Kahoot, right? If you do not know about Kahoot then we have a few blog posts with tips and ideas to get you up to sp...
...is a sane librarian. Right? Right. So I'm going to post my favorite, hilarious book memes today. Because, yeah, Summer Reading is right around the corner and, yeah, some patrons do need to take a chill pill. But let's not focus on that, shall we? By far my favorite meme. So! Without further ado, a break from your workday: Haha...I'm such a nerd... But I do hope you enjoyed the break! Until next week! See Volume 2 here
Have you ever thought about using wordless videos in your speech therapy lessons? It increases engagement! Start with these videos...
Okay, I have a new favorite reading lesson-- my asking questions lesson! When I got a chance to work with Scholastic last spring, they gave us a bag of swag that any teacher would love, and it included the book This Is Not My Hat by Jon Klassen, which is perfect for teaching a reading lesson about asking questions! (I’ve linked it to Amazon here, but I also highly recommend finding it through Scholastic Reading Club :) On my CRAFT board, we list "Ask questions before, during, and after reading" as a reading comprehension skill (although some of my kids think it belongs under Response to Text, so we concluded that it could go as either!). This is a really important skill for some of my struggling readers, because some of them never question what they read. They are just reading to get it over with! (oops- took this picture before we added it!) Asking questions before reading gives them a purpose for reading and gets them engaged. When they are looking for the answer, students read more intently. Asking questions during reading makes sure they are thinking about what they read. Asking questions after reading causes them to be reflective about the author's choices and sometimes helps them draw a personal opinion about the text. Asking questions is a great place to start students’ thinking while reading! I love teaching questioning towards the beginning of the year, because this is a gateway skill to deeper comprehension. Asking questions about the text isn't too hard to do (especially with a well-chosen text!), so it helps to build the habit of thinking as they read. It's also a great way to get students started in their reading response journals because it's a pretty clear-cut type of response that most of my students feel confident trying. I used this book with my 2nd grade group and all the way up to my 5th grade group. It's great for teaching this skill because the title and cover instantly intrigue them. Kids wonder, "Whose hat is it?" and "Why is a fish wearing a hat?" I tell them we are going to look for the answers to our questions as we read, and we start the read-aloud. As we read, I stop every few pages and ask the students to whisper to their partner something they are wondering about the story. Then, I choose a few students to tell their questions out loud. (I get 100% participation this way, and more confident kids who are willing to share!) We keep track of our questions on a chart like this- both adding new questions, and putting check marks next to our questions that get answered. (My markers are dying—ugh!) Of course, the chart I made for my partner turned out even better. (Isn't that always how it works?) She actually laminated it so she can use it again sometime (which is such a great idea, especially for us as reading specialists who might teach a version of this lesson to each grade level!). This book also makes a great review for "the three ways to read a book," or using the pictures as readers to help us understand. (Actually, you could use this book to teach that lesson, too, but I just used it as a review.) The book is being told from the little fish's point of view, and so the text only tells us so much. If students don't read the pictures, they won't know the entire plot- and they won't enjoy the book nearly as much! (Here, the text tells us that little fish doesn't think the crab will tell anyone where he went... but the illustration tells us that the crab does tell!) The younger kids, especially, love "catching" the discrepancies between the text and the pictures. At the end of the book, the text stops and we just see illustrations. Some kids are always shocked by this! And, immediately, they all have opinions about what happened to the little fish. Some think he was eaten, some think he just gave the hat back, and some think he ran away. The ending of the book is left open and never actually tells us what happens, and so my students are always left with questions about the book after we finish it! (See why I think This Is Not My Hat is such a perfect picture book to teach questioning?) With the older students, we went a little deeper and discussed the author's choice to leave the story open-ended, and debated whether or not we liked it as readers. (Reviews were very polar in my group-- most kids either loved it or hated it!) The next day during another mini-lesson, I read aloud a different book (usually tailored more towards the group's grade level) and let students practice asking their own questions along the way in their reader's response journals. Eve Bunting's books tend to work really well for Asking Questions lessons (like The Wednesday Surprise), but I also love The Lotus Seed and Chicken Sunday for teaching asking questions. And don't forget to throw in a non-fiction book-- sometimes these are the most important ones in which students need to use the comprehension strategy of "ask questions!" Once we've practiced as a whole group and shared with our reading partners, I'm able to look through their notebooks and make sure they seem like they're getting it. (Glancing through their reading notebooks- even if you don't take a grade yet- is so important, because this is the perfect time to lead a strategy group for those students who need some extra support). From here, I like to let students use Post-It notes to practice this strategy in whatever they're reading independently. I also try to fit in a little time at the computer lab (or at a computer center) using the amazing site Into The Book. If you haven't used this free site, you are missing out! For each reading comprehension skill, there are videos, a song, and an in practice activity. Usually, there are at least two, so you can do one together (especially if you have a SmartBoard or something similar) and have students complete the other independently. Their questioning lesson is a great way to guide student practice of using this strategy to actually help them comprehend. A good list of mentor text suggestions: http://www.mauryk12.org/literacy/reading%20mentor%20texts.htm A great list of resources, including some sample lesson plans for teachers: http://www.busyteacherscafe.com/literacy/comprehension_strategies.html#questioning Share your tips in the comments below or on my Facebook page here! I would love to know your favorite books for teaching kids to ask questions and what other strategies you use.
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In first grade reading comprehension is something new, challenging, and difficult to teach because even though they’re all 6 or 7 they’re developmentally so different. Head over to my blog to get this comprehension page. Depending on what grade you teach it’d be great for: homework individual assessment small groups partners intervention challenging gifted students ... Read More about Reading Comprehension
This reading response worksheet is ideal for practicing story elements, reading strategies, comprehension, text connection, author study, vocabulary work and so much more!
Title: Blood and Honey Author: Shelly Mahurin Series : Serpent and Dove #2 Genre: Romance,Fantasy fiction,Young Adult ...
Do you hate to teach poetry? Do you want your students to learn and enjoy poetry? Try these simple ways to learn how to teach poetry...
This is a printable about the types of the books used in my class for 4th graders. I used the ones I taught in the class. Please feel free to modify it according to your class and their needs. You might also find another worksheet which has pictures of some book covers. - ESL worksheets
