Author Study

Sorry for the long break in posts, guys! I started (well, resumed, after a long time) an after-school job in January, which leaves me with very little time in the evenings. Also, now that the days are longer and the weather is warmer, I'm spending more time doing things and being outside, and less time in front of my computer.

All excuses aside, I have a cool teachery thing for you! 

Last year in my second-grade class, I had a leveled reading group, compiled of students from across the grade. My crew were some of the high-fliers from the grade, so I was free to do some unit planning and curriculum creating. One of my favorite units was an Author Study of Patricia Polacco. 

The unit I did last year took us over a month of 30 minute lessons four days a week. This year, I am supporting a 2nd grade class in the afternoons and the teacher kindly offered to let me do something fun with a small group of students, so I'm recreating that Patricia Polacco unit, and I wanted to share it with you. 

I started off by giving the students (6 children, 4 girls and 2 boys) some background information on Patricia Polacco. You can go to her website for her full biography, but I just gave some basic facts--she is a prolific author and illustrator, she writes her own stories, retells folktales, and shares things from her own life in her writings and illustrations. 

The first book we read was Mrs. Katz and Tush. It's a great story, and a wonderful introduction to Ms. Polacco's writing and illustrating style. I asked the children to notice colors and patterns in the illustrations, and we talked about the types of characters in the book--namely, a child interacting with an older person. We also discussed the variety of religious backgrounds and skin colors in the book (Mrs. Katz is an older Jewish lady who befriends a young black boy). 

Next, we read Thank You, Mr. Falker, which is a story near and dear to pretty much every teacher ever. We had similar discussions as above, but including a discussion on learning disabilities and how we should approach differences in learning in ourselves and others. This is really valuable for students around 2nd grade, I believe, because they are becoming so acutely aware of who is different. Reassuring and imposing the belief that differences are ok is so important. At this point I also had the students make a T-chart about Patricia Polacco--one side was things they had learned about Ms. Polacco from her stories, and the other side was any connections, observations, or pattens they had noted while reading the first two books. 

This is where I got all teachery. The next two books in my mini-unit were Chicken Sunday and My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother. I divided my group into two sets of three students, and gave each group a pile of sticky notes and one of the books. I told them to picture-walk through their books, and jot down any questions they had or observations they made. I did ask them to keep their observations focused to the books at hand--any colors or patterns they recognized from other books, use of photographs in the illustrations, etc. This really served to pique their interest in what they were reading, as well as giving them purpose for the actual read-through since they wanted to answer their own questions. 

I asked the groups to write a 1-2 sentence summary--what they thought their book would be about based on their picture walk. Then, finally! Each group read their stories and I checked in (frequently--the groups sat at either end of a long table and I sat in the middle literally leaning back and forth between groups) to answer questions or help with sounding out tricky words. 

Next, rather than doing a traditional jigsaw, I asked the groups to essentially play the game Two Truths and A Lie. The groups wrote down two true facts or events from their book, and one false statement. They swapped papers and books, and predicted which of the other group's statements were false. Finally, they read each other's books! They loved this--it made the second book like a treasure hunt, and the group that guessed correctly was so proud. I was also pleased because they were reading closely and staying focused. 

From here, we went back and added to our T-charts. The last part of this mini-unit was a journal entry. I asked three questions: 

1) Which of the books we read was your favorite? 

2) Give two reasons why it was your favorite. 

3) Write two things you learned about Patricia Polacco from that book. 

It was super fun, and the kids did really well. I'd highly recommend any of Ms. Polacco's books, for teachers or parents or students. She writes so brilliantly and so feelingly. One of my personal favorites is The Junkyard Wonders, but beware, it's a tearjerker. 

What children's books or authors do you love? 

No Excuses, Just the Truth

I've been a little absent lately...no real excuses. I'm just tired, feeling burned-out, and lacking any inspiration whatsoever. I'd rather postpone writing than write worthless words.



Anyway, I'm down to something like 32 days of school and 4 more weeks of Sunday School. I'm almost cleared to teach summer school, but those days will be really laidback and end at 12:30, so...hardly counts in my book. No papers to grade, no math lessons to mull over, no research (except some extra awesome crafts), it'll be a comparative breeze.



In the meantime, I do want to share a project that I completed at school recently! Our district utilizes RTII (Response to Instruction and Intervention) which is a great program that essentially looks like good, old-fashioned reading groups. The pedagogical idea is that when students are grouped for a portion of the day based on ability, we as teachers are able to target strengths and weaknesses, build necessary skills through carefully differentiated instruction, and maximize growth and learning.



Exciting stuff.



(Really, actually. This stuff lights my fire.)



Anyway, out of the whole second grade I teach the highest level readers for 30 minutes each morning (thanks to our great district, very few of our students are actually below grade benchmarks, but I work on some higher-level thinking skills). As such, I have a lot of flexibility and I've had a lot of fun designing my own curriculum for this group.



You know, because I don't have enough to do as a first-year teacher.



My most recent project has been an author study of one of my favorites--Patricia Polacco. She's an awesome and incredibly talented author and illustrator, and we've had a blast reading her books. We've discussed themes, genres, and made lots of connections between her texts. One of my favorite things about Ms. Polacco is that she injects so much of herself into her books, and so many of her stories have at least autobiographical elements, if not being totally based on her life.

Patricia Polacco's Official Website

As such, our culminating project was to skim through the books we'd read (complete list below) and glean information about her life completely from her books. We'd done other research on her life, but we put together this awesome timeline just based on her stories.

The kids really enjoyed this project. They loved digging through the books for factual information, and we got to practice our sequencing, comprehension, making connections, and main idea all in the bargain.



Now...just 32 days to go!

Half-Day Happenings

Today was a teacher inservice day, and since I'm enjoying the only pure benefit of being a student teacher (I don't have to attend all the inservices!) I had a half day. This morning I went with two other kindergarten teachers from my school to visit Lower Gwynedd Elementary School. It was really neat, Wissahickon is a great (very affluent) district, and the elementary school definitely reflected that. We saw some awesome writing conferences and literacy stations, and of course, observed some fun fillers and energizers. As anyone who has ever been in charge of children knows, it's always good to have some tricks up your sleeve for killing those last five minutes, or refocusing the children in a positive way. My favorite activity of the morning was a sight word activity. You know all those little words that aren't quite phonetic (sound like they're spelled) and come up ALL the time in reading? Words like the, she, it, am, and, etc. The students made cards for themselves with all their sight words, and then laid them out on the floor. They threw bean bags onto the cards and then spelled and said aloud the word the bag landed on. So cool, and such good practice.

I ran a couple errands after my visit, and then came home, because I had work to do. Cat lent me her mother's mini steam cleaner, and I had a date with my area rug. Lily is probably 99% housebroken, but those little accidents are ridiculously hard to get out of the rug. Plus we are the third owners of this rug, so there's no saying how long the dirt has been there.

First I moved the (freakin heavy) marble coffee table off of the carpet. It's a ginormous hunk of pure marble, thankfully in two pieces, but it disguises the fact that our rug is really too small for our living room.

As I said, Cat lent me her mother's steam cleaner. It took me a while to figure out how to use it, and I didn't have the appropriate soap, but warm water with a little baking soda did the trick.

It took ages, and a break in the middle to take the dog out, but finally I was left with:

and (brace yourselves, oh weak of stomach):

The rug is only 5x7, so it wasn't a ton of space to clean, but geez oh man that's a lot of dirt.

Finally, it was time for some Lily snuggles.

What a cutie. I don't think she really enjoyed the process, nor does she appreciate the end result. Oh well.