Jump Start Thinking in Your Classroom

I've been reading two books simultaneously!   The first is Teaching Students to Read Like Detectives, by Fisher, Frey and Lapp and the second is Making Thinking Visible: How to Promote Engagement, Understanding and Dependence for All Learners by Ritchhart, Church and Morrison.  They are my new favorites because they embody the essence of Common Core Standards and what our students can achieve. 

I love the idea of giving kids and teachers the tools/structures to meet the expectations of the CCSS.  I have attached a free foldable I adapted from a Thinking Visible routine called, Compass Points.  It's a popular routine that helps students explore various facets of a proposition or idea.  Ask students these questions and record their responses in the directions of a compass to provide a visual anchor.  More information can be found at www.pz.harvard.edu.

Compass Points (Free Foldable)

I envision strategically choosing a few of these thinking routines at a time to model in classrooms and share with teachers before the end of the year.  

Getting to the Core: Argument Writing

Argument writing is a key area of focus in the CCSS.  The CCSS routinely expects students to draw evidence from texts to produce clear and coherent writing that informs, explains, or makes an argument in various written forms (notes, summaries, short responses or formal essays).  I have created a foldable on TPT that is a great tool for instruction in the writing of a CEI paragraph: Claim, Evidence, Interpretation.  It's also a great follow-up tool for student's to practice the skill of argumentation.  When you make copies of the foldable, copy the foldable pattern on the front and lined paper on the back.  I have the students cut one “door” at a time.  After students complete their response under each door, they just need to open all the doors to see a completed Claim, Evidence, Interpretation paragraph.  

The 7Cs of Argumentation

ELA Frameworks K-8

It has been crazy lately trying to get everything done.  I'm sure you feel the same way.  I was busy preparing materials to facilitate a day long institute day on the CCSS and the implementation of the Understanding by Design process and my hard drive crashed for the second time since July.  I love Dell laptops but their service stinks.  I lost all of the English Language Arts templates that I typed up in January.

I originally saw the attached English Language Arts Frameworks from the Georgia Department of Education.  I used their format to design a template for the district where I work.  Imagine how thrilled I was when I realized that these templates were actually based on the PARCC (Partnership for Achieving Readiness for College and Career) Model Content Frameworks!  At this time, the PARCC Frameworks are available on their website for grades 3-12.  Based on the PARCC Frameworks, I have re-typed the ELA templates for grades K-8.  You can download them here. Below is a photo of the grade 4 template for ELA.

The PARCC Frameworks are oriented horizontally on the page but I prefer the vertical orientation which also mimics the orientation of the Common Core Standards as you look vertically down the column for your grade level.  I also like these documents because it clearly depicts the requirements for each module or nine week period during the school year.  These documents also demonstrate how the six shifts for ELA instruction are threaded throughout each nine week period.  Thankfully, no one should be stopping instruction to prepare for THE TEST.  Instead, everyone just needs to do their best teaching everyday and keep the six shifts for ELA in mind every week as you write your lesson plans or as you work on curriculum committees to prepare units of instruction. 

I am schedule to present at the Superintendent's Conference in Tinley Park, IL on March 21-22, 2013.  My presentation is based on a bulletin board that I created titled, Daily Dose of CCSS, which focuses on the six shifts in instruction for ELA.  On page 7 in the introduction to the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, there is a description of a literate individual. So I decided to create a diploma depicting a literate individual to hand out at the end of my presentation with all of the links that are included in my presentation.    I'm going to roll up the diploma and tie it with red ribbon.  See the picture above and click on the bold print ELA for a hyperlinked copy.  

I'd love to hear your comments.  

Daily Dose of CCSS!

The CCSS for ELA have brought fundamental shifts in our instruction.  I have just created and posted a bulletin board on TPT to highlight those fundamental shifts.  I debated between two different titles for the bulletin board:

DAILY DOSE of CCSS  (or)  CCSS Give Me Five!

I started with CCSS Give me Five! but I thought of Daily Dose of CCSS when I was taking some medication for a recent bout with the flu!  If displayed prominently in your classroom, this bulletin board is a great reference for you and your students to the critical elements of the CCSS for English Language Arts.  Those elements include: analyze content, cite evidence, report findings, participate in discussions and study and apply academic vocabulary.  Our goal should be to include these critical elements of the CCSS in every lesson that we teach.   Hopefully it will empower you as a teacher and your students to work on more rigorous tasks through the infusion of these critical elements of the CCSS.    The best part of this bulletin board is that you can configure the hexagons many different ways.  The photo below just illustrates one of those configurations.

CCSS Layered Flipbooks K-8

* * * SPECIAL SALE * * * 

Take a look at my TPT for my Common Core layered flipbooks for both ELA and Mathematics for all grades K-8.  See the preview of the CCSS flipbooks below. For grades K-6, CCSS for ELA are on the front and CCSS for Math are on the back for easy reference. I have packaged grades 6-8 together for each of the content areas. I have priced the CCSS flipbooks economically at $5.  All you need is access to a printer, colored cardstock, and a binder. I made over 200 copies of these flipbooks for the teachers that I work with in grades K-8!   Feel free to contact me if you want me to customize a CCSS flipbook for you. I have customized versions for both special education and speech resource teachers. This is a great tool for writing lesson plans, unit plans and curriculum guides because it's all at your fingertips in one tool. 

 

 

QAR Strategy and CCSS Literacy

As I became familiar with the Common Core Standards for English Language Arts, I immediately saw the correlation with the QAR (Question Answer Relationship) Strategy.  The versatility of the QAR strategy is that it can be incorporated with any type of textual passage and it works across all content areas.  QAR identifies categories of details from the text which are "right there on the page", inferred from passages in different locations within the text, and inferred from the text as a whole.  The best part is it requires students to examine the text as a whole, determining what types of information are explicitly found in the text, what information is learned from multiple locations within a text, versus that information is dependent on their own knowledge base and skills of making inferences.

I have been working with some junior high teachers in Social Studies and I have created edited versions of some of the exemplar texts (Common Core Text Exemplars can be found in Appendix B) to teach students the types of information used in the QAR strategy by requiring groups of students to develop questions from each type.  Hit my TPT button on the right and download my free QAR Lesson Plan and Anchor Chart packet which includes a 5E lesson plan and the patterns for a QAR anchor chart.  When asking groups of students to create questions from each QAR category, you can use index cards or the easy QAR Sticky Note page that you can download here . 

 

 

Directions:

1. Print 2 copies of the QAR Sticky Note page to start.
2. Copy 1 - Place a sticky note within the outline of each of the four boxes on the page. Place the page in the printer.  Make sure the page is oriented in the printer so the sticky part goes in first.
3. Copy 2 - Place this copy of the QAR Sticky Note on the glass of the printer.
4. If you like how it prints, repeat steps 1-3.  Make as many copies of the QAR Sticky Note page as you have students or make one sheet of sticky notes for each group

 

 

As an assessment piece, I created a 4-door foldable for QAR with the question stems.  You can download it here.