"Notice and Note" Book Club

At school, some teachers decided to start a book club for the text Notice & Note: Strategies for Close Reading, by Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst (Heinemann, 2013).

I'm new to close reading, since it's a new requirement for Common Core State Standards and I'm new to CCSS!  I've started using close reading in my third grade class, using various resources I bought from Teachers Pay Teachers.  So far I've seen that my students are engaging in the reading and are able to access informational text that I wouldn't have thought possible.  It's rather time consuming, and I'm not fully confident in my ability to use this strategy, but I believe that increasing rigor and beginning to focus on reading closely at younger grades will help my students as they get older.  I realize that I was required to read closely, especially in college, but that no one ever taught me how to do it.  I have the strategies in my own mind for how to read, but I'm learning along with my students even now!

Anyway, it's winter break (almost over!!!) and we decided in our book club to read the first section, the questions the authors asked themselves, and come up with some talking points to meet with.  We want to read at home and spend the entire book club talking and discussing -- I'm all for that!!  I want to have rich discussions, with lots of disagreement, so we can all come to our own conclusions and walk away with our own interpretations that are flavored by each other's but aren't carbon copies.  Does that make sense?  I feel like lately the public discourse has turned into an attitude that if you don't agree with someone else 100%, you are insulting their intelligence, their beliefs, and their integrity.  This wasn't always so, was it?  And now people privately act like this on a wide range of issues, which I think is wholly inappropriate.  Lively discussions that can sometimes change someone's thinking to a 180 degree can absolutely happen, but more often we change slightly based on someone else's argument, and it makes our own thinking richer, it doesn't replace it.  I hope that our discussions are lively and fun, full of opinions and questions, and that we all walk away with deeper convictions and more energy to try new methods and strategies to reach all of our learners.

In my next post I will share my thoughts on each question in section 1 of the book.  Stay tuned!

Planning for the fall

School just got out and to top it off I was on maternity leave for the last five weeks, yet I'm already chomping at the bit to get started next year! Since I needed to rest (and my baby loves to sleep on my lap!) I have been spending a lot of time looking online for ideas. My two favorite places are Teachers Pay Teachers and Pinterest. Google searches for specific things I'm looking for are always great, of course.

The things I'm working on, in no particular order, are

    Spelling City lists

    Creating various decorative documents (instead of buying them!)

    A google site for my teaching team to hold onto documents

    Planning for my iPad - we get AppleTV in our rooms to hook up to the projector!

    Fixing my class blog

Here are some pictures of my home iPad with the apps I want to use (my school iPad is at IT for updates):

    For the projector 

   For kids - not all math

   Various planning and writing apps

So you can see I'm pretty busy! I think that trying these apps out now will make me more knowledgable, which will help me do my job better and in less time. My goal is to have a forty hour work week by Halloween, and if these apps and my proficiency in using them will help me achieve that I think this is time well spent. Besides, it's so rainy outside there's not much for me to do in my garden!!