The posters above were created through lessons from: Notice and Note: Strategies for Close Reading.

At the start of the year, our class reads the book, Wonder, to start the year.  Every day, we move our tables, grab some over-sized pillows, and plop down to enjoy the story together.  I purchased the Kindle version of the book, and use Kindle for Mac (free web app) to project the story through my laptop.  Although I read the story out loud, my students are required to follow along to increase their reading fluency and improve their spelling & pronunciation of unfamiliar words.

Before each lesson begins, I start with a mini-lesson of some sort.  This past week, we have been learning about the six signposts from Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading.  I taught my students the importance of noticing these "signposts" whenever we read, and how they can really help us understand the text better when we think about or discuss them.  If you look at the picture above, the red bulletin board that is empty in the picture now contains small versions of the posters cycling through at the top of this post (see slideshow below). My students have been taught to identify these signposts, share them with the class while we read, and stick a Post-It Note to the correct signpost describing the event in the story that connects.  This has led to some excellent discussions!

Although I haven't done it yet this year, there are some excellent parts of the book that I like to Xerox in order to have my students highlight their evidence when answering a specific question.  This is great practice for upcoming assignments and upcoming assessments.  I can model this by highlighting the text on the screen in Kindle for Mac and then adding a note to the highlighting explaining how it is evidence of the question I posed.

I feel that reading Wonder to start the year is a great way to introduce common core skills like close reading to my students, improve our reading comprehension strategies, learn tolerance and kindness, and build our classroom community.  Although it takes us a while to get through the 300+ pages, there is so much that we gain from it!  I highly encourage you to try out this model with your favorite book, or if you'd like, start with Wonder, by R.J. Palacio!  Good luck!  Please let us know below how it goes for you!

So, it's been about a week since our class transported back in time to Colonial Boston (1768).  In addition to finding apprenticeships, a place to live, and exploring the new landscape, my students have also done a little bit of learning regarding our new home.  We read some content from our books, had a discussion as a whole class, and started to make sense of the events that led up to America declaring their independence.

In order to demonstrate our fledgling knowledge of occupations in colonial America, we began to create a shared Google Presentation.  Students were asked to explain what the occupation was (based on their research) and connect with it in some personal way.  Here are the directions for that activity.  Here is what it looks like so far - much more to do, however:

I'm always nervous on Back to School Nights, and this year was no exception.  My classroom was packed, and according to my students the next day, every child had at least one parent attend!  Not reading the group all that successfully, I wasn't sure if I was getting my point across or how well-received it was.  As time ended, the crowd started to leave, many chatted with friends, some waited to talk with me.

To my delight, most parents expressed pleasure with my message and looked forward to the year we would be sharing together!  Possibly more importantly, though, many shared the following message with me in one form or another:

I was so happy to hear that!  I promised them I would do my best, and I thanked them for their support!  Hearing that they understand the importance of struggle and failure tells me that they want their child to develop several important 21st Century Skills, skills such as grit, determination, perseverance, persisting despite setbacks, and being responsible for their own learning!  These parents get it!

Now, for anyone who doesn't know me, I am also all about praising my students and allowing them to "earn" privileges and responsibilities.  Despite our challenging atmosphere, my students are happy and excited in school.  We learn using PBL and simulations, and my students generally run the classroom!  Very few lessons are lecture-based, and I rarely use worksheets.  My students often go home with a little headache, but they're happy to have "earned" that headache from hard thinking instead of mindless busy-work.

While reading this article on the effects of overparenting this evening, I couldn't help but smile, because I could start the year knowing that I had my parents' support and knowing that my teaching philosophy meshed with their parenting philosophies!  As a matter of fact, as I was wrapping up this blog post, I had a parent email me with this quote in it:

My parents get it!  Do yours?  How do we encourage more of this type of thinking?