By Timothy Rasinski, Ph.D

Anyone who has followed my work in the past knows that I am a huge advocate for the use of poetry (and song) in the literacy classroom for all students, but especially for younger readers and older readers who struggle.  I’d like to share reasons why I think poetry should be an essential part of any literacy program.     

Poetry is Joyous

            Perhaps the most important reason for the use of poetry is that it is pure joy to read and perform.  So many of today’s children’s poets write with such great humor that children are certain to find great delight.   Poetry is fun reading!

Poetry is Profound     

Beyond its ability to tickle a funny bone or two, poetry can be deeply profound and help build students’ knowledge of the world they live in. Whether it is David L. Harrison’s Rhymes for the Times that tell the story of America through poetry, Catherine Clinton’s I, Too, Sing America: Three Centuries of African American Poetry,  Glen Alberto Salazar’s A Little Book of Persian Poetry, or Brod Bagert’s heart of science poetry, poetry can expand children’s world and stretch their imaginations.

Poetry Builds the Foundation for Reading

            Research tells us that many children struggle in reading because of they are not fully proficient in the foundational aspects of reading.  Poetry is immensely suited to improve many foundational reading competencies.

Phonemic Awareness

            Poetry is filled with texts that play with sounds.  Think of all the nursery rhymes children should learn before starting school.   Diddle Diddle Dumpling, Dickery Dickery Dare, Peter Piper, picked a peck, or Betty Botter Bought some Butter are sure to help children develop an awareness of the phonemes /d/, /p/, and /b/.  I can’t help but wonder if nursery rhymes were first created to help children develop their awareness of speech sounds that is crucial to their language and literacy development.

Phonics

            Most poems for children rhyme.  Rhyming words are words usually (not always) have similar rimes (e.g. the -ake in bake, cake, rake, take…).    Helping children detect and decode rimes are a great way to develop their phonics or word decoding ability (as well as their spelling or encoding).   Dr. Edward Fry, for example, found that knowledge of just 38 common rimes could help children decode over 600 words simply by adding beginning consonant, consonant blend, or digraph.  Little Bo Peep is a perfect text to explore the -eep rime, and Maya Angelou’s Life Doesn’t Frighten Me at All is certain to help children learn about the -all rime (and much more!).

Vocabulary

            Poetry is filled with rich words that poets use to weave their magic.     Back to the Maya Angelou poem we can find wonderful words and phrases such as frighten, frogs and snakes, dragons, counterpane, tough guys, and much much more.  Our job as teachers is simply to help children notice these great words that poets make such great use of.  

Fluency

            Fluency is developed largely through repeated readings of texts.      Another name for repeated reading is rehearsal.  Poetry is meant to be performed, so in order to get the point where students are able to perform, they will need to rehearse, hopefully under the guidance and support of a teacher.  Moreover, the aim of the repeated reading is to read with good expression (prosody), which is at the heart of fluency, instead of reading fast which is the goal of too many repeated reading lessons.

Sight Vocabulary

            The rhythm, rhyme (and melody) in poetry, and songs makes them easily memorized. How many of us can remember a poem that we first learned and last read in our school days?  Sight words are essentially words that are memorized by sight and sound.   Poetry is excellent text for helping students expand their corpus of memorized words – sight vocabulary, especially when after reading (and performing) an entire poem we work with students to analyze individual words and word patterns in the poem itself.  

Writing

            Because poetry often has a specific and transparent structure, it is an excellent mentor text for students’ writing.  It is not difficult for students to write their own versions (or parodies) of favorite poems or songs, whether it is their own versions of Yankee Doodle, Judith Viorst’s If I were in Charge of the World, or Langston Hughes’ Mother to Son the structure of the poetic text gives students a head start on creating their own poetry.  A favorite for many students in our university reading clinic:

Diddle Diddle Dumpling my son John,

Went to bed with his stockings on.

One shoe off, one shoe on.

Diddle Diddle Dumpling, my son John.

That rhyme is also a favorite for students writing their own.      Taylor, for example, wrote (rehearsed and performed) his own version of the rhyme:

Diddle Diddle Dumpling my son Fred,

Slept all day on his bed.

Woke up at midnight and screamed “there’s a monster under my bed.”

Diddle Diddle Dumpling, my son Fred.

Success – A Sense of Accomplishment

            Children who struggle in reading do not often experience success in their reading, especially when they compare themselves with their more proficient classmates.  Poems are relatively short, and the rhythm and rhyme embedded in poetry for children make them easy to learn to read and perform.  Imagine the feeling of accomplishment children can feel when they are able to fluently and expressively read a poem aloud, just as well as any more proficient reader, to classmates, teacher, family members, and others. That success is empowering.  In our reading clinic, our goal is for children to leave every single day with the ability to read something well and to read and perform it for their parents and other family members.  

Make Poetry Part of your Reading Curriculum

            In our educational world where stories and informational texts are the dominant forms of reading, we need to make a concerted effort to allow poetry a foothold.   Just 10-20 minutes of poetry reading a day can have a profound effect on children’s literacy development.  Poetry is particularly well suited for remote and virtual instruction. Poems can easily be sent electronically to students and printed at home.  Then, via zoom or other distance technology, teachers and children can easily practice, master, and perform a daily poem in that 10-20 time span.  Let’s make it a goal for poetry to be read, rehearsed, and performed every day of the school year! 

BrodBagert            https://www.brodbagertsheartofscience.com/

Margarita Engle         http://margaritaengle.com/

David L. Harrison       https://www.davidlharrison.com/

Sara Holbrook              https://www.saraholbrook.com/resources/poems/

Kenn Nesbitt                https://www.poetry4kids.com/

Robert Pottle               http://robertpottle.com/poetry-index.php

Jack Prelutsky           http://jackprelutsky.com/

You can find resources for teaching accurate and automatic word recognition (i.e. fluency) at Tim’s own website – www.timrasinski.com

Daily Word Ladders by Timothy Rasinski

Follow Tim on Twitter @TimRasinski1

 

By Tonya Gilchrist

“Run often and fast, toward or away from something. Trust yourself to know which. And trust yourself to know when by the chanting clocks that hang on walls of dreams. This is called wise and this is called brave.”

—Rebecca Kai Dotlich, The Knowing Book, 2016

We are living in times of great uncertainty. The truth is, we always are. And, sometimes, it can be hard to see the forest from the trees. 

Pause. Breathe. 

Look to your North Star: the kids.

Ask yourself: What is it I really want for kids? You will likely have various ideas that pop into your mind—yet they all circle back to one key truth: I want them to grow and learn with joy and curiosity. Always.

And while you can’t predict the future, you can “run often and fast” toward four cornerstones—four core values that can keep student progress and wellbeing at the center of all that you do.

1. It’s All about Relationships

This is THE cornerstone upon which everything else that we do stands. It is vital that we build genuine relationships with our students, centered on open dialogue (which includes active listening!), relational trust, and mutual respect. 

Always remember that kids are people, too. Showing students respect means you see them as the unique, incredible human beings that they are, and you treat them as such. Through showing genuine respect, trust is developed—and trust opens the door to building strong relationships. 

Of course, it is important not to misconstrue compliance with respect. According to Oxford English Dictionary, respect is “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.” Indeed, respect is earned.

In 1975, Judith Kleinfeld, a professor of Psychology, coined the term “warm demander.” In her work and research, she found that teachers need to be high in both “active demandingness” and “personal warmth.” It must not be either/or—we need both. We must earn the right to demand effort. Only once our students know that we legitimately care for them, can we then push them to high expectations—because they know the push is us looking out for them and truly wanting them to soar.

2. Amplify Inquiry

Inquiry can serve as the cornerstone to the stance and spirit that lives in our classrooms. When you start from a place of inquiry, you send a powerful message to your students: I am a learner, too. You are not a “sage on the stage,” rather you are there to explore questions with them. You are there to build and grow new ideas together. Through this inquiry stance, you model and honor questioning and learning more than knowing.

Rather than teaching students about argument writing, about multiplication, about laws of motion, or about the Cold War, how might you instead provide purposeful questions and inquiries for them to explore in order to develop the understandings for themselves? When we make our own meaning, lasting learning occurs. That’s the beautiful “stickiness factor” that comes with inquiry.

Of course, this does not mean that your teaching expertise is no longer needed. Quite the opposite, actually. Great teachers are essential. It is vital that you serve as a lead learner to support students as they grow. In addition, it is important that you are there to give explicit instruction as needed. Contrary to popular belief, explicit teaching definitely has a place within inquiry-based learning. The power lies in the how and why of this instruction. As the International Baccalaureate Organization says in PYP: From Principles into Practice (2018): “In an inquiry classroom, explicit teaching occurs ‘just in time’ (Hmelo-Silver, Duncan, Chinn 2007) not ‘just in case.’”

“Just in time, not just in case” can echo as a mantra in your teaching practice. Prioritize time for kids to live the work. Be careful not to over scaffold. Open up space for your students to intellectually grapple, think critically and creatively, and problem solve—while also being there to give “just in time” instruction and feedback to feedforward. 

3. Honor Agency

The International Baccalaureate Organization defines agency as choice, voice, and ownership. While we all have agency within us, whether or not we can utilize our agency often depends on whether our environments respect, value, and support it. 

Harnessing agency, then, is about empowerment. As you design learning experiences and cultivate a classroom culture, ask yourself: What am I doing to provide students with opportunities to be authors of their own learning?

In the world of education, we often refer to classroom management. However, rather than management, I encourage you to think of it as classroom empowerment. After all, teaching is not about being in control; it’s about providing an environment where students can cultivate their own autonomy, agency, and self-control. Too often, we adults lament that we want kids and teens to “take responsibility”—but are we opening up responsibility for the taking?

When you think of so-called classroom management, often what you are really after is engagement, attention, and motivation. This is all the more reason to lean into honoring agency.

In fact, both neuroscientists and psychologists have found that attention, motivation, and agency are inextricably linked. For example, cognitive neuroscientists Mike Esterman and Joe DeGutis spent years at the Boston Attention and Learning Lab developing a standard test to measure how well people can focus. They found that extra motivation had an astounding effect: it increased sustained attention by more than fifty percent. Knowing motivation is that powerful, how might we help our kids get more of it? Well, for decades, Edward Deci has been studying motivation, and he has found that one of the greatest factors is autonomy. 

As humans, we crave positive emotions. Feelings of boredom, stress, and/or helplessness grind learning to a halt. On the other hand, when we are entrusted to make our own choices and design our own goals and challenges, we are empowered. Motivation, focus, and learning soar.

We all want our students to develop skills for deep thinking and living a life filled with growth and learning. In order for this to happen, we have to give them opportunities to try new things, take risks, get a little messy, and learn from it all. That cannot happen in a tight vacuum of control, but it can flourish in an environment filled with trust and agency.

4. A Forever Stance

“Searching for meaning is the purpose of learning, so teaching for meaning is the purpose of teaching. If teachers do not have meaning making at the core of their pedagogy and practice, then let’s not call the activity teaching. Doing so demeans the word and the noble art and science it represents.”

—Jacqueline Grennon Brooks, “To See Beyond the Lesson,” Educational Leadership, 2004

It is crucial that we take a forever stance in our teaching and learning. We are not here to assign; we are here to teach.

Students must know, feel, and experience the truth that learning does not happen in isolation. As they learn and make their own meaning, they continually add knowledge, skills, and experiences to their repertoires. They think across, between, and beyond individual lessons, disciplines, days, months, and years.

Words matter. Whether teaching a whole group lesson, working with a small group, or conferring one on one, be intentional in communicating a forever stance. You can remind your students that anytime they are reading, painting, writing, listening, researching—or whatever the skill may be—they can choose to pull on this strategy that is now a part of their own, unique repertoires. 

As you live out your forever stance, your students will, too. They will recognize that learning is lifelong and lessons are transferable.

About Tonya

Tonya Gilchrist is an internationally experienced educator, instructional coach, and curriculum specialist. Tonya earned her Masters Degree in Educational Leadership from Hong Kong University. She also holds an IB Certificate in Leadership Practice and an IB Advanced Certificate in Leadership Research. Tonya currently serves as a senior strategist for Erin Kent Consulting where she specializes in helping schools around the world amplify inquiry and honor agency across all components of balanced literacy—including readers’ and writers’ workshops. She also works with schools to support them in enhancing disciplinary literacy and in effectively utilizing translanguaging practices. You can connect with Tonya on Twitter at @mrs_gilchrist and via her blog at tonyagilchrist.com.

By Lester Laminack

Enjoy, as Lester guides you from teacher-centered to student-centered teacher read alouds!

When you reach the end of an article, a story, or a book do you reach for your notebook to answer a set of questions written by someone else?  Do you feel that your understanding of what you have read, your worth as a reader, hinges on being able to give the answers to someone else’s questions?  Probably not.  Yet it seems that much of our reading instruction relies heavily on having our students answer a set of questions after they complete a reading assignment.  Following reading with a set of questions is a longstanding practice in literacy education.  In fact, many commercial reading programs follow this pattern.  One well-known program assigns a point value to each title, then has the children read and log on to a computer to read and answer a set of 10 multiple-choice questions. Other programs have students read then write answers to similar questions. And if we are teaching from a literature-based approach that doesn’t rely upon a commercially produced program we tend to have our own questions to hold our students accountable.

Questions Can Create Patterns

As teachers, most of us were introduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy as undergraduates in a teacher education program.  We likely practiced developing questions for each of the levels in the taxonomy and began our teacher careers believing that it was our charge to develop good questions that would hold our students accountable and yield proof that they read and understood the assigned text.

We sat with our notepads at hand and read the books, articles, poems, and various other texts our students would read across the year.  We paused at various points in the text to draft the questions we would give our students. We were attentive to character traits, shifts in the plot, nuances in word choice, the author’s use of simile and metaphor and figurative language.  We noted allusions to cultural references and other literature.  We were alert to the role of setting in the text, the way the author used dialog, bias, and narration.  We read closely and synthesized as we developed the questions we would present to the students.  Questions, whether presented by the program or developed by the teacher, may fall into a pattern or categories.  For example, questions about the main character, physical descriptions, main idea, vocabulary, opinion, evaluation, analysis, synthesis, inference, etc.

As students read and respond to the questions presented they begin to recognize the patterns as well.  Does this impact the way they read?  Does it shape what they tend to notice and pay attention to?  In other words, are they reading with the pattern of your questions in mind?  If the answer is, yes, then what are they failing to notice?  What is the cost to comprehension and attention and engagement?

Get In Touch With Ways You Read

Consider your own thought process as you read a text with the intention of writing questions for students to answer.  Are you beginning with a frame in mind? That is, do you begin with thoughts focused on Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How?  Or do you begin with the intention of finding three detail questions, two questions about the character’s motives, three questions that require the reader to interpret, two that require analysis, and one that calls for synthesis?  If the answer is, yes, then how does this frame influence YOUR approach as a reader? How does that process differ from the way you approach a professional text or a book you have selected to read for pleasure?  How does the approach effect your engagement with and your comprehension of the text?  Chances are that you read differently when you read for pleasure than when you read with the intention of developing a set of questions for your students.

Who’s Doing All The Thinking?

I have come to believe that the person who is asking the questions is the person who has done the thinking.  As you read to develop the questions for your students you were summarizing the text at critical points.  You were evaluating the merits of details and the use of Literacy devices.  You were synthesizing information and generating new thoughts.  You were noticing were the text called for an inference or expected you to have adequate background knowledge to connect to a metaphor or allusion.  In short, you were doing the deeper thinking, the more thorough analysis as a reader in service to the development of questions that would yield the proof of your students’ connections and comprehension.

Time To Flip the Read Aloud

I invite you to try something the next time you are reading aloud to your students.  As the story draws to a close and your voice delivers the last line simply close the book and exhale.  Pause for a few seconds and let silence settle over the group.  Then, look at them and speak quietly:  “Think for a few seconds.  Don’t speak yet, just think if you could speak with (author, illustrator, character, expert—beekeeper if the story is about bees, etc) what are the three best questions you could ask?  Think about that, please.  I’ll ask you to share your questions in just a moment.”

Have your notebook ready to jot down the questions as they share. At the end of the day when the students have boarded their buses to leave, revisit those questions and place them into four categories: Vocabulary, Background knowledge, Schema/conceptual frame, and other.  Take note of where the majority of the questions fall.  Think about what this reveals to you about their understanding of the text.  

I’ve come to believe that I find out more about where their understanding fails by examining their questions than I ever got from checking their answers.  

Lester’s books are on Amazon!

Learn more about Lester Laminack, check out his website!

Follow Lester on Twitter @lester_laminack

By Laura Robb

Most schools had twenty-four hours to close down. There wasn’t time to consider checking out books for students or ensuring each child had a computer or handheld device before leaving the building. During the sheltering-in period, no one could enter a school. Closed. For. Safety.  The first goal: provide breakfasts and lunches for the children. Within a week, school leaders figure out how to make meals available to students from preparing and bagging them to notifying parents of pick up times and places.

Second goal: Teachers and school leaders collaborate to figure out how to use technology in ways most never envisioned—to develop and deliver meaningful and engaging lessons to students at home. Daily, these educators tap into their creativity and innovative thinking to create engaging teaching and learning experiences for students.  School leaders offer support to their staff and repeatedly acknowledge the effort and dedication of teachers. Meeting change with courage, determination, grit, and thoughtful reflection is what educators do every day, but during this pandemic, they triple their efforts and work tirelessly to support children’s learning at home.

            Often, articles in newspapers express worries over students losing the gains made in reading if they’re not learning in schools.  There is one way to ensure that all students hold onto their gains in reading skill and achievement: twenty minutes of reading self-selected books every day. Yes! The research on daily independent reading indicates that if students continue independent reading at home, they can improve their reading skills.

 In April 2000 the National Reading Panel publishes a report stating that they couldn’t endorse independent reading because the studies they review don’t meet scientific research standards. What a blow to classroom teachers who year after year observe that students with rich independent reading lives at school and home also develop large vocabularies, more background knowledge, and outperform peers who don’t’ read independently.

The good news is that Dr. S. J. Samuels and Dr. Yi-chen Wu respond to the National Reading Panel by completing a scientific study on independent reading in 2004. Both conclude that the more time students spend reading, the higher their achievement compared to a control group.  Samuel’s and Wu’s scientific research corroborate the conclusions in Anderson’s, Wilson’s, and Fielding’s 1988 study (not considered scientific):  a strong correlation exists between the amount of daily reading students complete and their reading achievement. Reading volume matters!

Perhaps, the best advice teachers can offer students and parents during remote learning is this: read 20-minutes every day and choose books that provide pleasure and enjoyment. By increasing reading mileage, learners not only improve reading skills, but they also develop a lifelong habit that benefits them in the fifteen ways that follow. Share this list with parents, so they understand why setting aside time at home for their children to read gives each child a lifelong gift.

15 Benefits of Independent Reading

1. Refines students’ understanding of applying strategies, for during independent reading, students have multiple opportunities to practice what they learn during instructional reading.
2. Develops an understanding of how diverse genres work as readers figure out the likenesses and differences among realistic, historical, and science fiction, fantasy, mystery, thrillers, biography, memoir, informational texts, etc.
3. Enlarges background knowledge and deepens readers’ understanding of people as they get to know different characters.
4. Builds vocabulary as students meet and understand words in diverse contexts.  Independent reading, not vocabulary workbooks, is the best way to enlarge vocabulary because students meet words in the context of their reading.
5. Teaches students how to self-select “good fit” books they can and want to read.
6. Develops students’ agency and literary tastes. Choice builds agency and as students choose and dip into diverse genres and topics, they discover the types of books they enjoy.
7.  Strengthens reading stamina, their ability to focus on reading for 20-minutes to one hour.
8.  Improves silent reading. Through daily practice, students develop their in-the-head reading voice and learn to read in meaningful phrases.
9. Develops reading fluency because of the practice that voluminous reading offers.
10. Supports recall of information learners need as they read long texts that ask them to hold details presented in early chapters in their memory so they can access these later in the book.
11. Improves reading rate through the practice that volume provides.
12. Develops students’ imagination as they visualize settings, what characters and people look like, conflicts, decisions, problems, interactions, etc.
13. Fosters the enjoyment of visual literacy when students read picture books and graphic texts.
14.  Creates empathy for others as students learn to step into the skin of characters and experience their lives.
15.  Transfers a passion for reading to students’ outside-of-school lives and develops the volume in reading students need to become proficient and advanced readers.

 Make Access to the Finest Books Available During Remote Learning

At first, it can feel impossible to cultivate daily independent reading during remote learning, especially when families don’t have access to books from school’s media centers and classroom and community libraries. Some families have lots of books in their homes and enough money to purchase books online for their children. But there are large groups of children all over the country who don’t have access to books at home and whose parents don’t have extra dollars to purchase them. What follows are four suggestions for coping with this challenge, especially if remote learning continues when the 2020-2021 school year starts.

• Schools all over this country need funding for e-book libraries from federal state departments of education. It’s likely that students won’t return to school until there is a vaccine or medication that can cure COVID-19.  Now is the time for schools to consider purchasing at least two e-book platforms so students can self-select books.
• Broadband needs to be up to speed so that all children can use the Internet and participate in remote learning.
• Every child who attends public school needs a computer or hand-held device because every child deserves equity and access to materials and teaching.
• School media specialists and teachers can create lists of stories, myths, poems, folk and fairy tales, and books that are in the public domain and offer students and parents age-appropriate choices. 

Be a Change Maker

Now is the time for school leaders, teachers, and staff to collaborate to solve challenges for the upcoming school year.  My hope is that this will be a nation-wide effort with a goal of ensuring that every child in this country has access to books and opportunities to self-select books, so they can develop a rich, independent reading life! 

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