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Teaching Thursday: Book in a Bag

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Typically, our teaching-related posts fall on Tuesdays, but today I feel inspired, so it’s Teaching Thursday! I can’t say enough good things about my son’s kindergarten teacher. She’s so good at her job that she inspires me regularly. Whenever I volunteer in the class, I am fascinated with the ways in which literacy instruction is similar and different for kindergarten.

One of the things she does is called “book in a bag.” All of the kindergarten team uses this method/idea and maybe this is an idea that is common for this age level, but it makes my son very happy, so I thought I’d blog about it from a parent’s perspective! The children each have a bag that is labeled with their name. They bring home a book to read in the bag. Their job is to reread it as many times as they need until they can master the book. The teacher stressed that this should be fun. If the children get frustrated or aren’t having fun, then the program is not serving its purpose.

This is what I love about my son’s kindergarten teacher. She has them doing data analysis on mittens and gloves and she makes learning fun for my son. He looks forward to going to school every day. For me, this is what I want for him—I want him to love school as much as I do. Also, this is differentiation!

So my son excitedly brings home his book and slowly reveals it from his backpack for the whole family to see his next book before dinner. He taps at the door when I am feeding his baby brother and whispers, “Can I read my book in the bag to my baby brother? He’s the only one who hasn’t heard me read it yet.” And he holds up the book to us as he reads it, so we all can see the pictures. The repetition is helping him, and this is rereading at its best. So before we hop into bed to read, he pulls out his book one last time for the day to practice the words and to proudly show off his reading skills. As a parent, I love how happy this makes my kid, and the ownership feels with his book makes him enjoy reading even more. <3

Call for Middle and High School Teachers of YAL

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Do you teach a young adult literature course, or do you integrate YAL in your classroom?

I am currently working on a book project that explores the different ways in which middle and high school teachers structure their YAL courses (elective or required). I am also looking at how teachers infuse YAL into their regular education courses. I’ve seen great classroom designs and course projects, and I am looking for others. I’d love to capture them and acknowledge the great work happening in classrooms. If you might be interested in being included in the book, please send me an email at ricki[DOT]ginsberg[AT]colostate.edu or message me on Facebook! Participation would involve the sharing of a course project, classroom activity/activities, and/or course syllabus.

If you know someone who might be interested, please share this post with them. Thank you! 

 

Call for Middle and High School Teachers of YAL

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Do you teach a young adult literature course, or do you integrate YAL in your classroom?

I am currently working on a book project that explores the different ways in which middle and high school teachers structure their YAL courses (elective or required). I am also looking at how teachers infuse YAL into their regular education courses. I’ve seen great classroom designs and course projects, and I am looking for others. I’d love to capture them and acknowledge the great work happening in classrooms. If you might be interested in being included in the book, please send me an email at ricki[DOT]ginsberg[AT]colostate.edu or message me on Facebook! Participation would involve the sharing of a course project, classroom activity/activities, and/or course syllabus.

If you know someone who might be interested, please share this post with them. Thank you! 

 

Teaching Tuesday: #metoo Literature Circle Books

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I am in the struggle zone, and I’d love your help. Next semester, I am teaching a co-taught college course with a history professor. Students will be examining several social movements and forms of collective action. The history professor is in charge of the historical background and currency of each social movement, and I am in charge of the stories within the movement. Students will then go on to explore a different social movement of their choosing and read a YA text that relates to the movement. I am VERY excited. 

For three weeks, we will be considering the #metoo movement. For whatever reason, I seem to read more books related to issues of race, immigration, sexuality, etc. than books about sexual assault. I’ve created a list of the books I am considering, and admittedly, I’ve only read half of them. Now that I know it is a weak spot, I am going to fix it. However, I’d love your help in narrowing this list to the books that you recommend that I read first. 

These are the books that I’ve read and plan to include because they offer a lot of opportunities for discussion:

  1. McCullough, J. (2018). Blood water paint. New York, NY: Dutton.
  2. Reed, A. (2017). The nowhere girls. New York, NY: Simon Pulse.

(Also, excerpts from Kelly Jensen’s Here We Are.)

I need to decide on three more titles. Listed below are the books that I want to read in the next three weeks to see if they will work well within a discussion of the social movement. I am looking for books that are very well-written and that will give much fodder for discussion:

  1. Anderson, L. H. (2019). Shout. New York, NY: Penguin.
  2. Blake, A. H. (2018). Girl made of stars. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  3. Hartzler, A. (2015). What we saw. New York, NY: HarperTeen
  4. Kiely, B. (2018). Tradition. New York, NY: Margaret K. McElderry.
  5. Mathieu, J. (2017). Moxie. New York, NY: Roaring Brook.
  6. Russo, M. (2016). If I was your girl. New York, NY: Flatiron.

I have all of these books on my nightstand, so access isn’t an issue. I plan to read them all within the next couple of months, but I’d love your advice of which I should read first! If I am missing a great book, please let me know. I’d like it to be a book published within the last 3-4 years because students tend to have read books older than that range.

Feel free to message me if commenting isn’t your jam. 😉 Thank you in advance!

Literacy Teachers Vlog: Kellee on Helping Struggling Readers Succeed

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The Literacy Teachers Vlog is hosted by Leigh Hall, Professor at the University of Wyoming, and I was so honored that she asked me to join her to discuss helping struggling readers succeed.

Don’t miss out on Ricki’s discussion about Lexiles either!

Thank you again Leigh for having me part of your amazing channel promoting literacy to educators!

Call for Middle and High School Teachers of YAL

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Do you teach a young adult literature course, or do you integrate YAL in your classroom?

I am currently working on a book project that explores the different ways in which middle and high school teachers structure their YAL courses (elective or required). I am also looking at how teachers infuse YAL into their regular education courses. I’ve seen great classroom designs and course projects, and I am looking for others. I’d love to capture them and acknowledge the great work happening in classrooms. If you might be interested in being included in the book, please send me an email at ricki[DOT]ginsberg[AT]colostate.edu or message me on Facebook! Participation would involve the sharing of a course project, classroom activity/activities, and/or course syllabus.

If you know someone who might be interested, please share this post with them. Thank you! 

 

Teaching Tuesday: Teacher Action Research

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I’ve always loved teacher action research. When I was teaching high school, I applied for a grant to get a laptop in my classroom to integrate technology into my YAL class. I had so much fun exploring the ways this laptop changed my instruction and the learning environment, and I was lucky to have an article published in The ALAN Review. I became more interested in research and engaged with my former college advisor to conduct another study a couple of years later. This kind of research is wildly exciting for me. (I am a dork! I admit it!)

This semester, I am teaching a graduate class called Investigating Classroom Literacies. The students in the class range from preservice teachers to inservice teachers. They are a phenomenal group of students, and I have loved working with them. We are reading two books. One is a textbook that introduces traditional qualitative research, and another is a teacher action research book.

It’s been fun to introduce traditional qualitative research designs to the students, and we’ve had fun playing with their research topics and how they fit into different research designs. That said, we are aiming to be more practical. The idea is that they will see research as more accessible, so we’ve looked carefully at teacher action research and how it differs in its ease of implementation.

Each student has picked a different topic to explore in their classrooms. Generally (so I don’t give away their specific ideas), they are looking at: using tools to help students with anxiety, examining differences in gender perceptions of leadership, mindfulness practices in ELA, flexible vs. teacher-selected grouping, college student responses to identity-based activities, and teacher preparation for health-related issues. Their topics are much more specific than these, but I am genuinely excited by the range in their interests within English Education.

The students have workshopped their research questions with the entire group, and they are currently writing their literature reviews. I am very much looking forward to talking about data collection and analysis next. Yahoo! I have the best job in the universe!

Do you do teacher action research formally or informally in your classroom? What is your favorite part about it?