Making Sure They Are Learning | Edutopia

Authentic assessment of reading comprehension- but even more than that understanding of 'a plan' for students to continue to grow as a reader

Making Sure They Are Learning | Edutopia

Listening to Children

We talk about listening to children. Maybe (no, I'm sure) we should also take on the uninhibited characteristics of risk taking.

http://www.ted.com/talks/adora_svitak.html

Writer's NotebookSSSS

As Ralph Fletcher says, "Keeping a writer's notebook is one of the best ways I know of living a writing kind of life" (p.3 A Writer's Notebook). For me, it's not A notebook, it means several notebooks. I find that I have notebooks for different purposes- some notebooks have a collection of professional and personal experiences, one is small so I can easily transport it, and some I started and for some reason stopped using. I'm glad I found this video of Jack Gantos telling about his writer's notebooks! Jack Gantos on Writer's Notebook

Learning from a Student

Graphic novels are a popular genre I am learning more about. I've browsed the shelves at the local bookstore and read an article or two about these multimodal texts. But, it was a student in my 4/5 class that taught me and brought my browsing and reading about to life!

An avid reader of this genre, he explained character sketches, traits, as well as how the text "works". He read several pages with great expression and included background knowledge from other texts to help me understand. What I didn't know was that he was considered a "struggling reader" prior to this school year!

These texts build on students' interests in art (I often see students drawing anime), video games, and other popular media. Scholastic now has their own site of graphic novels to read.

How could students create their own graphic novels? ReadWriteThink has a comic creator students could use, but has limitations in design and limitations inherent in a web 1.0 tool. Another site (at a minimal cost) allows the student be the producer and creator of their own graphic novels. Negotiating these limitations can lead teachers and students to become creators as well as consumers of this engaging genre.

Multimodal Poetry Response

A few weeks ago, Voicethreads, an interactive sharing site was mentioned in our class. A third grade class' thread is an example of how students use art, voice, and interpretation to share their work and others can comment and participate in the work. Comments can be made by voice recording, video, keyboarding, and even using a cell phone! Check out their thread!

Shelly Blake-Plock is a high school teacher and authors the blog Teach Paperless. He said, "Before I went paperless and used blogs to get information from them, I would only see students' work if they wrote an essay or turned in a quiz or test. Now I'm seeing what they're working on all the time..."

As I read e339 blogs this week, I learned more about each of you and your "process" in selecting and researching the topic for the multigenre research paper. It was another form of "inside sentences" that Hale talked about in Crafting Writers. I experienced another advantage of blogging for students AND teachers!

Help!

The Indiana Partnership for Young Writers is a wonderful resource for pre-service and practicing teachers of writing. Ms. Mary Wordsmith is an interactive blog that you might want to visit.

http://marywordsmith.blogspot.com/