Reading With Purpose

My favorite book to teach is probably A Prayer for Owen Meany, but given that I no longer have access to AP Lit students on a regular basis, my next favorite book to teach is Lois Lowry's The Giver. I've taught this book for about 15 years, and my students do extensive Utopia Projects, which I've written about in many blogs like this one for Middleweb, this one for ShareMyLesson, and in my book The Flexible ELA Classroom.

However, this year I'm shifting my focus a little bit to frontloading the student experience.

I'm now asking them to apply a lens of their choosing to reading The Giver. This slideshow offers them four lenses to read the novel with a specific purpose in mind: this essay test. I've noticed how much they struggle to provide evidence of their arguments when writing about a novel, so this approach is meant to help them trace their thoughts about a particular theme the novel addresses or to do a deconstruction approach for option #4.

They've settled into reading and taking notes, and though I doubt this lens business makes much sense now, I'm excited to see how it helps them formulate an argument at the end of December. I'll keep you posted.

Strategic Groupings for Academic and SEL

This has been an awesome month of school. It is really flying by, and as we do final edits of our Credo essays, I'm already making some adjustments to the seating to get ready for our next unit on short stories. I want students in smaller groups, so I'm adding another area. Instead of having four distinct parts of the room, I've just rearranged things so that I can have a fifth as well. I spent awhile today breaking each class into groups. This time it is by hunch, as I try to balance academic ability, leadership skills, and collaboration style. I'm looking forward to the change, but I'm sure a few students will be hesitant to be assigned seating after these few weeks of freedom, but I'm confident I can help them build community and trust in their small groups.

Students have been assigned a group letter (A-E). Each group will start in one Quad on Monday and rotate each day through all five sections. Yes, I'm aware a quad is only four, but we've used that language, so we are going with a 5th Quad. We'll all suffer the irony together. This way, no one group gets the "choice" section, though there really isn't a strict preference. It will also help students see how they learn best. Today was a bit odd because I had to teach the most traditional of all lessons--how to use commas to combine sentences and prevent run-on's. The kiddos not at tables had clipboards, they were still attentive, and I feel good about their participation as well. It just seemed odd to teach something so 1950's in my progressive style room. As I explained to the kiddos though, it is crucial to always present your best self, and grammatically correct sentences aren't optional. And, BTdubbs, neither is capitalizing the letter i. They've been warned!

Jigsaw Activities to Support SEL Skills

Room 255 has been trying out jigsaw activities over the last few weeks. First, we used "The Landlady" jigsaw to do a close read, section by section, with each group doing about 100 lines. This helped us to be able to do a really good close read without getting overwhelmed. After the initial reading, the next class students were placed in new groups with students who had read the other parts. There, they discussed each section.

This past week we listened to the John Lithgow reading of "The Monkey's Paw" that is awesome. As we listened, students annotated, and then I gave each of the five different groups a question to discuss. Next week, we'll be dividing up into groups again, and this time they will be comprised of students who studied the other four questions. By the time they jigsaw the questions, at about 7 minutes per question, they will have the entire story annotated to discuss characterization, setting, mood, theme, and irony.

This has been an awesome way to help students stretch their communication skills from an ELA perspective, but I'm also interested in the social and emotional aspects of this assignment. There are a few students who don't want to share their findings with the new group, but I'm offering anyone who needs it the opportunity to come down to my room to rehearse ahead of time and get the hang of the conversation piece.

One of the best things that happened this week is watching my co-teacher, Laura Klein, connect with students who were dealing with the hardest question--the one about irony. The seating was a great benefit in this situation. Doesn't it just remind you of a bookclub!