Parental Help At Home

“How can I help support my child at home with his reading development?” is one of the most common questions I receive to begin the school year. Without going too deeply into details, I offer a list of approaches that will help at home. 

1.       Be vigilant when it comes to required and independent. It’s too easy to assume your daughter has read something because she was in her room “reading” quietly for a period of time. Regarding this lapse, I am a bit of an expert, as more than once over the years I’ve fallen into the trap of letting what I saw be the measure of what one of my boys read.  Only by asking direct questions can you gain some sense of proof that the reading was done. 

2.       Read what your child reads. Your child has been given several chapters of a Gary Paulsen book to read for the following week. Take a few minutes to read those chapters too. This is -hands down- the best way in which to gauge how well your child understood the chapters because now you know them well. And, who knows? You might find yourself enjoying the book too. 

3.       Purchase a second copy of an assigned book. I have tremendous difficulty with reading any book I don’t own. The reason for this is that I am constantly writing marginal notes and underlining passages that catch my attention. When you have a book your child can mark up, then there’s nothing to asking your child to underline significant events in the text, or circle the confusing passages.

4.       Pick a moment to demand a written account of the reading. This is always painful for all parties involved. I know my boys do not like to write –it’s not like they’re in any kind of special club either. Almost no one likes to write. However, writing is where the rubber always meets the road. If your child cannot express his understanding in writing, then he doesn’t have a good enough hold on the reading. This is a particularly effective activity to use following non-fiction reading. E.g. after reading about a scientific process (photosynthesis), or the events leading up to country conflict (causes of the Civil War), or the steps in a solving a math problem. 

Any one of these approaches will help improve your child’s reading and understanding at home. The key is to use them often enough that an occasional lapse doesn’t become a lingering problem. Once your struggling reader realizes you’re no longer holding him accountable for the reading, well… you know how that goes.

Dogs of War Has a Home in Middle School Classrooms

Dogs of War Makes for Terrific Reading

A colleague, well aware of my affinity for graphic novels, made sure to hand off to me a copy of Dogs of War by Shiela Keenan and Nathan Fox, as well as, a copy of Romeo & Juliet by Gareth Hinds. As of this moment, I doth not have anything to scribe about the latter, not having read it… just yet. For the former, I doth have plenty to scribe about.

Dogs of War is comprised of three short stories, each depicting the role one canine has played in one of three wars –WW I, WW II, and Vietnam. Although the stories are named after each of the dogs (Boots, Loki, and Sheba), and this leads you to believe you’ll be following closely their stories, the canines generally share the spotlight with their various human protagonists. Some might be upset to going into the work to find out the dogs aren’t the main thrust of the book. For me, that hardly mattered. I found the storytelling for all three tales to be brisk, informative, and interesting throughout.

In “Boots”, the first story set in WWII, readers are thrown into the harrowing experiences of trench warfare as viewed through the eyes of a 16-year-old soldier and his loyal dog. Floods, mud, cold, poor nutrition, and bullets –Oh, there are bullets!- fill the story panels as a 16-year-old Donnie and his mates work to hold to a bloodied length of land and survive their terrible battle against the Germans.

If this were all the story had to offer, I’d be hard pressed to find the motivation to write about it here. Where the story develops into something worth sharing with you and (hopefully) with students is in the author’s attention to historical details.

When our human protagonist, Donnie, and his canine, Boots, first find their newest trench allies, the soldiers are, almost pleasantly, trading hot bullets with the Germans over walls of sandbags. Young Donnie is surprised by this but told it’s merely “the morning hate”, whereby each side essentially recognizes that what transpires between them is a common morning occurrence –as if to say, Oh this shooting at each other is nothing to worry about. This seemingly misplaced attitude amid battle is actually –to borrow from our British friends- spot on. Many a soldier who returned from WWI reported as much. I read that some soldiers referred to the morning volley of bullets as “trading tea”, a cute moniker for a dangerous practice. But, the pithy remark underscores something about the sensibilities of the time. Soldiers, on both sides, still held to a sense of nobility in fighting a war, a sense of gentlemanliness. Even if they were trying to knock one another off.

Not wanting to give away too much, I’ll add that "Boots" presents an account of WWI that any middle school student would find highly interesting. Heck, I’m middle-aged and loved seeing the brief scene in which a soldier is cooking up some juicy lice he’s plucked from his uniform.  It’s a story sure to spur discussion about what war, life, and attitudes were like in the early 1900’s; and that can only be a good thing for those of us trying to feed youthful mind.

The other two stories in the collection are equally accurate in their depiction of how men and animals behaved in their respective wars. I was particularly appreciative of the author’s decision to not simply turn these stories into Disney-esque accounts of dogs at war. In fact, although the dogs are presented as the heroes to the stories, they’re really closer to secondary characters, the human protagonists being far better fleshed out for readers. Again, the cause seemed to be to show war as it actually was without making it inaccessible to middle school students. It was also to show how dogs have served our soldiers for a century and more.

Keenan’s and Fox’s story is worthy of classroom use. A halfway decent teacher (and I think I juuuust make that cut) can use the interest it garners to spin students off into further reading exploration about war, dogs, the 1900’s, the 70’s, and much more. I’m already thinking this book will be a fine companion piece to Cynthia Kadohata’s novel Cracker! The Best Dog in Vietnam, a historical fiction book about a dog and his handler helping men survive during the Vietnam War.

Self-Reported Grade, i.e. the Mirror Moment

Self-Reported Grades, i.e. the Mirror Moment by Ralph Lagana

I don’t know too many people who aren't consumers of television shows and movies.

Good or bad, we seem able to find time in our lives to watch a story presented for

us on a screen. And, because of our common appetite for watching stories on screens,

I feel supremely confident you’ll know what I mean when I write about the Mirror

Moment.

The Mirror Moment is what I call the point in a dramatic TV show or movie when a

character must finally take stock of himself. Almost always, this happens before a 

mirror. A rogue cop, a dishonest friend, even a self-deluded killer will at some point

look into a reflecting glass and be forced to “see” himself for who he really is. It’s a

decisive moment in many cases because we learn which path the character has chosen.

That’s the Mirror Moment.

We've seen the Mirror Moment portrayed on screen so many times that it borders on pathetic. What holds it

back from that precipice is that it rarely rings falsely to us. Without becoming too dramatic myself, I’ll merely

note that we've all experienced the Mirror Moment, taken stock of our day, or behaviors, or acts. The Mirror

Moment is a powerful experience as it can quite literally change how you act or think. I sometimes think it’s

what keeps one from running amok.

Knowing that taking a true measure of oneself can be so effective, it would seem to make great sense to

bring that into the classroom in some way. For myself, this means seriously considering if I've done enough by

the end of each week or day. It can even be boiled down to individual periods. Was my lesson this period

effective? This is something most teachers do. Anyone who observes a teacher doing a lesson several times a

day will see it transform rather distinctly from start to finish. I digress…

If holding a mirror to oneself is good for the teacher, could it not also be good for the student? In other

words: Would students benefit from holding the metaphorical mirror to themselves at the end of a class period?

It certainly seems like it should. And, more importantly, there is research to support this.

John Hattie’s book, Visible Learning for Teachers, aims to make plain which visible efforts by schools and

teachers have the greatest impact on students. Hattie has studied research on whether or not homework

has a high, positive, effect on students. Does student choice have a large effect? Peer relations? Home life?

Simulations and Gaming? Disruptive behaviors? And so forth. It’s a long list. One you can review here:

visible-learning. 

Actually, it’s one I highly recommend you examine.

BUT

But, before you do, would you care to guess which visible behavior ranks the highest as having a positive effect

on students and teachers in the classroom? Yeppers, that’d be the Mirror Moment, or as professionals like Hattie

call it: “self-reported grades”.

Of course, educational research is not flawless. It can be and

often is subjective. But, the data Hattie has compiled is compelling,

enough that I’m going to give it a whirl this school year. Below

is an image of a self-reporting grade card, I plan to present to

students. Once a week, if my addled brain can remember to

follow through on this, I will ask my students to stop for 3-4

minutes and reflect on their efforts in my classroom. I’ll ask

them to look into the mirror and decide for themselves if they

were attentive, managed to maintain good effort, and honestly

attempted to complete classwork to the best of their abilities.

Kids are usually pretty honest about these things -sometimes

too honest, scoring themselves lower than I might. We shall see.

We shall also see if Hattie’s data and my years of watching Mirror Moments hold up in the real world.

An Important Element to Long-Term Learning

Flies...

When you or I think of flies, I'm fairly sure it's not exactly a great feeling that washes over you. Next to mosquitoes, they're pretty much incessant-bug number one on a long list of pests we'd rather not know. Flies have that scavenger's air about them -what with their being attracted to foul smells, garbage, and rotting meat. Worse, for those of you who are even more in the know about flies, you may also be knowledgeable about the eating habits of flies. That is: eating by spitting a chemical mass onto the food they hope to consume, then sucking up the gooey sludge their vomited concoction has turned it into.

Okay, I believe I done enough to gross you out to this point; and, while fun, it wasn't my aim. I mean, I believe it's fairly clear to all of us that flies have no redeeming qualities, and that they're best found at the end of a working swatter. And yet...

Before learning the and yet, it would be much appreciated if you took 4 minutes to watch this video about training flies. 

Did you catch the "and yet"? 

If you were paying attention to the video, you now know that something interesting is to be learned from flies. Flies are not too much unlike us. Flies can smell, flies prefer some odors to others, and flies can learn. Maybe not table manners or how to stop their obnoxious, pestering ways, but they can learn.

Flies can learn. I repeat this information because it's about the last thing I'd assume or think of when someone mentions flies. More remarkable is that flies learn best over a period of time, time with breaks set in between. 

Does any of this sound familiar? 

Kids, you, even I, learn best not by cramming the night before a test, but by trying to understand, memorize, and apply things over days and weeks with those all important breaks in between. 

Teachers have know this for a long time. It's why we ask students to fill in multiple study times in their agenda planners. It's why we say at the end of every period the weeks leading up to an exam, "Make sure you study tonight."

The key is to follow through on those marked points of time, the ones that have a break in between them.


Oh, and one side note. Our bees are dying. Hardly news as Sudden Colony Collapse Disorder has been in the news for a few years now. Same with bats. It's a terrible thing as we know many of the foods we buy rely on bees and their ability to pollinate plants to survive. So, here's a thought. Since we know that flies can learn and we know they're attracted to certain smells (regrettable foul smells), can't we create a simple chemical to spray over fields that would attract flies to it? The flies would act as surrogate bees in this way. No? Maybe you just think my idea stinks. Then again, that'd "bee" the whole idea!

An Important Element to Long-Term Learning by Ralph Lagana

Speed Reading is...

… a farce.

There seem to be a slew of applications (you know them as apps) that purport to increase one’s reading speed. Worse, there are even more blogs and articles out there eating the concept up. Wish I could be as enamored but my years of experience as a reading teacher struggle mightily to be as excited about these products as others seem to be. I’m actually dubious that any of those writing about these apps have actually used them for more than an hour or two or taken the time to reflect on their efficacy.

I’m of the opinion that speed reading apps, especially the older you are, are akin to buying snake oil and hair tonic –loads of promises with nothing more like to occur than a placebo result and a sense of being swindled.

I downloaded and tested two apps, Fastr and ReadQuick, several months ago. (I picked these two simply because they were free the day I discovered them.) Both programs are fundamentally the same in their execution: you see words flashed quickly on the screen, you “read” them, and then hope to keep up. Where they diverge is in what materials you can use to practice your reading speed. 

ReadQuick will let you read articles from sites like The Morning News, The Feature, and Longreads, though you’re not really limited because you can import from any site. You can set the rate of words displayed from 100 to 800 words per minute (WPM). ReadQuick displays one word at a time once you turned it on. The program also provides stats for you such as the number of articles and words you’ve read in a week, month, or year.

Fastr works more with existing books, ones without DRM. Unlike ReadQuick, you have the options of seeing one word at a time on the screen, or several. Fastr also predetermines, based on book length and the rate of reading you choose using an adjustable meter, how long it will take you to speed read the book you’ve selected.

For this blog, I’m going to stick with my experience using Fastr as my example.

I downloaded Treasure Island as my practice book. I was shown that, set to 100-words per minute, I would complete “reading” chapter one of Treasure Island in 24 minutes and 46 seconds. This time remains the same whether choosing to have one word at a time presented to me or several. Sounds okay to me, but then again so does a miracle hair tonic.

I started with method one, trying to read one word at a time. The weakness to seeing one word at a time becomes fabulously apparent when seeing the first sentence of the book. It follows:

Chapter 1 The Old Sea-dog at the Admiral, Benbow, Squire Trelawney, Dr. Livesey, and the rest of the gentlemen having asked me to write down the whole particulars about Treasure Island, from the beginning to the end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island, and that only because there is still treasure not yet lifted, I take up my pen in the year of grace 17-, and go back to the time when my father kept the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first tool up his lodging under our roof.

In case you missed it, that’s a chapter numeration, a chapter title, and the first sentence of the book. Even with it presented before me in its entirety, it’s a daunting series of information to retain and understand. And yet… Fastr would have you believe that in seeing one word at a time, and with continual practice, you will eventually be speeding through such densely written text. Pi-shaw, I say. Pi-shaw in my language means: Yeah, you may read more quickly, but you’re grasp of what you’ve read will be its inverse.

More amazing, or is that ridiculous, to me is that you can ramp up the program to a reading speed of 1,600 WPM. That’s not a typo. One thousand and six hundred words per minute. The program informs you that at this speed you will have finished chapter one of Treasure Island in a tight 1 minute and 32 seconds! Even better, you’ll have more hair on your head than you did when you were eighteen! (Special note: I may have made that last part up.)

At 1,600 WPM you cannot see but a few words between the blur of everything else claiming to be words. I tried reading this way using the multiple words aspect and met with the same issue. Namely, what level of Dante’s Hell does this activity take place? To be somewhat fair, only somewhat, you’re supposed to work your way up to this level. No go 100 to 1,600 in one sitting. I’m on the verge of writing pi-shaw again. 

Now, before I get assailed by the individuals behind these apps, let me note a few things. Yes, you can increase your rate of reading. I work with a handful of students every year specifically in this regard. These are students reading around a rate of 60-70 WPM when I first start with them. 60-70 WPM is generally regarded as too slow for their age (11-12) and academic setting. With a lot of repeated and timed reading of short passages, nearly all improve their reading rate. Most will find themselves reading closer to 100-125 WPM after half a year of guidance. There are of course the usual outliers.

What differentiates what I’m doing, when compared to the hollow promises of speed reading apps, is how I approach the task. I work with the entire text before the student, not one word at a time, or even a few words at a time. Students need to see words in chunks and sentences. Many troubled readers already tend focus on one word at a time, which both slows them down and impacts their comprehension. (By the way, I haven’t even touched this critical component yet.)

Students hear me read the passage in question aloud. This is done to build their understanding of how to read different types of writing, to develop their ear for reading. There is such a thing as having an ear for reading. We teach, for example, the very young to elevate their voices when learning to grasp how to read a question mark. The same work goes into helping slower reading students understand how to read a light-hearted poem versus a straightforward passage in science. You simply don’t read them the say way or at the same rate. Faster is not going to help a student one darn bit in an unfamiliar reading situation or when a text becomes too complex. (Refer to the excerpt of Treasure Island.)

Reading is not about speed, it’s about understanding. I’ve worked with dozens and dozens of accurate, fast-reading, student over the years who’ve not a clue as to what it all meant. Teachers commonly refer to these types of readers as word callers. Programs like Fastr and ReadQuick amount to the same thing. Call out words faster and you’ll be a better reader. Nuts. 

Most reading WPM charts suggest that students top out at 199 WPM by grade 8. And, those students who are reading aloud that quickly are in the 90^th percentile as oral readers. The 50^th percentile, which is where some 80% of us fall, is 150 WPM. Silently we can and do read more quickly, but not by much. Again in grade 8, the average rate of silent reading per minute falls somewhere around 185-205 WPM. At the college level, 250-270 WPM is regarded as an adequate average. Keep in mind that all of these averages include a measure of understanding on the student’s end.

The key, for this teacher of reading, is always final understanding; and I don’t see how speed reading apps -with their extremely narrow approaches- help in that regard. Even in my work with helping improve a student’s rate of reading, I’m working constantly on their flow of reading and comprehension.

In my experience, readers who finish first in class and maintain great understanding are not the norm. I’ve also learned, again through years of observation, that those handful of students just happen to have spent a lot of their idle time reading, from books, not speed-reading apps. That’s why they’re generally quicker. Lot’s of actual reading having occurred.

Think of it this way. You want to become a wine aficionado, which means spending a lot of time learning about grapes, soil content and rainfall patterns, to name a few things. It also means sampling a lot of wine. Does gulping sample after sample of wine, out of context and as quickly as you can, make you more experienced and knowledgeable about them? I sincerely doubt it. And yet, programs like Fastr and ReadQuick would have you believe this.

Reading is the same way. You need to savor at points what you’ve read, to roll the information and language around in your mouth for a while before you pass judgments or draw conclusions about it. 

Speaking of wine…

These are the sources I used as supporting data for this post.

http://www.readnaturally.com/pdf/oralreadingfluency.pdf

http://www.readinghorizons.com/blog/post/2010/07/19/Optimal-Silent-and-Oral-Reading-Rates.aspx

http://www.gio.co.za/Documents/FluencyInSilentReading.pdf

Common Core Standards: Close Reading

Man oh man do I wish I could be as excited as so many of my colleagues seem to be about close reading, the practice of examining short, complex texts until your brain hemorrhages. (No, wait. That's beyond the standard. I think...)

Unfortunately, I'm having a hard time feeling the passion for close reading because I can't figure out how it's anything new. Most strange too because people are certainly acting like it's new. (Not that my inability to figure out something that everyone else seems to innately get is anything new either.)

Yet, last I checked, taking a written passage then pulling at it like your making taffy has been every teacher's modus operandi since the Greeks sat in a circle to chew the literary fat.. Hmmm.. maybe that's what all the hullabaloo is about -teachers grasping that they have free license to do what they like doing best (not so much the fat chewing.).

Anyway, I'm doing what I always do begining from a point of non-sense in the hope that it leads to some form of clarity for anyone reading. Here's the skinny. I was asked to present my understanding of close reading as is connects to the Common Core State Standards. I did what we all do. Went pale, tried to get out of it, accepted my fate, told myself it's nothing we're not doing already (not true in too many ways to list), and scoured the top 10 listed links to all of my Google searches. (I may have gone to page two, links 11-20 a few times even. Shows resolve.) Then, lacking any creating, which you already concluded from my Internet only research, I slapped together a PowerPoint.  Hey! If I have to suffer making this, then we will all suffer together watching it.

Below are the slides for that presentation. You'll be missing out on all my blank stares, errs and umms because there is no audio for it. Be very thankful for that.

Common Core Standards: Close Reading from RLagana

Common Core State Standards -Writing

select below for argument
http://bleckblog.org/comp/node/266

This blog title is a bit misleading. When I'd originally been asked to put something together on the Common Core writing standards, I presumed I'd be focused on three areas: narrative, informational, and argumentative.

However, as you'll see, the embedded slide show  focuses mainly on one of the three Common Core writing approaches -argumentative writing; and it is no accident that it happened that way.

The Common Core asks for three areas of writing to be nurtured and developed with students: narrative, informational, and argument writing. The narrative form, which comes under a large umbrella of styles from poetry to narrative non-fiction, is highly familiar to teachers and students alike, precisely why little attention is given to it. The same thinking applies to informational writing, because high-stakes testing has dominated the educational landscape for many years, everyone knows expository writing well.

So, if you haven't guessed by now, that leaves one approach to writing on the outside looking in -argumentative writing. The Common Core wants students and teachers alike to revert to the earlier practice of reading passages with a keen eye, one that spots and collects text evidence then uses logic to draw conclusions or form hard-to-refute claims.

Writing for argument is not about screaming louder than the other guy, as many political debates seem to do, nor is it about writing in the persuasive style, where loaded words and a complete disregard for the other side of the issue is the normal method of expression.

Writing as argument is more gentlemanly -and, if possible, almost entirely sterile. Below is one of the purest forms of written argument and logic.

All humans are mortal.
Aristotle is human.
Therefore, Aristotle is mortal.

Good luck arguing against that conclusion!

Of course, not many arguments are so easy to lay out. Evidence can be interpreted incorrectly and reasonable claims made on each side of an argument, but the model serves to remind educators and students alike as to the type of thinking required when writing to argue. If a pure, logical argument cannot be made, then one steps over a bit and adopts as much reason as possible.

At least, this is my ham-fisted understanding of what to emphasize for the Common Core writing standards.

Common Core State Standards -Writing from RLagana