Opinion Clines

Scaffolding Language Scaffolding Learning: Teaching English Language Learners in the Mainstream Classroom by Pauline Gibbons is the Chets Creek book study that I have been attending led by our Reading Coach, Melanie Holtsman.  There are about fifteen teachers who meet each week after school from first through fifth grade, including a couple of Math teachers. We only meet for forty five minutes so Melanie has quite a challenge to get us thinking. The third strategy from Chapter 3 that I have tried  is called "opinion clines." (I admit that when Melanie explained the strategy I doubted it could be used with first graders!)

The idea is to arrange items in a line representing a continuum.  Student need knowledge to be able to make decisions so I decided to use the characters from our Kevin Henkes Author Study.  The students know these characters well and relate to these characters.  I put a continuum on the board with "worried" at one end to "never worries" on the other end. The challenge was for the students to use their knowledge of  Kevin Henkes' characters and to place each of the characters on the continuum using reasons to support their opinions from the books. Putting Wemberly at the worried end was a no brainer. He is the main character in Wemberly Worried, but making a decision of where Sheila Rae, the brave and spunky Lilly fit was a little more challenging. Soon the discussion and disagreement started.  The students argued back and forth using examples from the book, and accountable talk, to try to change opinions.  When we couldn't come to a consensus, the students voted and the above is the continuum the students finally agreed upon.  Not bad! 

Kinder Math Standard-based Bulletin Board

Our kindergarten standard-based Math bulletin board went up this week.  It is based on a Math Investigations lesson called, Six Tiles in All, in which the children had to take six one inch paper tiles and make a  design to share with the class on one inch grid paper so that each tile was touching another tile in some way.

This is the standard.

K.CC.B.4 – Count to tell the number of objects

4. Understand the relationship between numbers and quantities; connect counting to cardinality.

b.  Understand that the last number name said tells the number of objects counted.  The number of objects is the same regardless of their arrangements or the order in which they are counted.

This was the task.

Six Tiles in All asks students to use six one inch tiles to make different arrangements.  Each arrangement has to follow a special rule – each tile has to touch another tile in some way.  The teacher showed several arrangements and also had the students identify non-examples.  Then several students demonstrated their idea of how the six tiles could be arranged.  The students were then challenged to find different arrangements of their own six tiles and to choose one way to record and then share with the class, using paper tiles and one inch grid paper. 

 

On the following day these same paper tile arrangements were used as quick images.  Children were encouraged to explain how they remembered the image to reproduce it.

This task begins to meet the standard by having the students practice different arrangements of a single number, 6.  To meet this element of the standard the students needs to demonstrate their understanding of this same concept with other numbers.  They would also need to count the items in each arrangement, understanding that the last number said is the number of objects.

 

This is the background information.

Six tiles are used for this investigation because six is the number that most kindergartners can count with accuracy.  Because it takes two hands to represent six, students naturally work with two numbers to make combinations of six.  In addition, six is one of the largest amounts that can be mentally visualized and manipulated and instantly recalled.  This is also a number kinders are intimately familiar with because most of them will turn six during the year!

This investigation gets to Piaget’s work with conservation which is a foundational skill in number sense.   Conservation of number is the understanding that the quantity of a given number of objects remains the same regardless of how it is spatially arranged.   Six is six is six. The child that sees six tiles horizontally as six but then has to recount those same tiles when they take another arrangement would be unable to conserve numbers.  But a child that identifies the horizontal as six, and then the same six tiles rearranged to make a rectangle as six, would be able to conserve numbers.  The child that has conservation does not need to recount the same tiles as they take different shapes because he knows that the number stays the same.

 

This investigation also gets at subitizing which is the ability to immediately recognize an arrangement as a single unit.  The ability to see the particular arrangements of indentions on a die and know it is 5 without counting would be an example of subitizing.  This investigation, like dot cards, ten-frames and rekenreks, provide students with the opportunity to practice subitizing.  Quick images help a child practice subitizing and visualizing what the number looks like with different patterns of that same number.  

 

The board contains the work of six different students.  Below is the work and commentary of one.

Eren was especially proud of his arrangement which he said looked like a chess board.  He liked that the “ends” were touching and that it was a design that no one at his table had imagined.

 

Nia thought it looked like a zigzag and Alex recognized the checked pattern when he said it looked like a checker board.  Tommy said it looked like racing and when Sawyer said he couldn’t see racing, Tommy explained that it looked like the racing start line, the checkered flag!  Love the fact that these very young children are beginning to challenge each other in their number talks!

Kevin Henkes Characters and Charts

 We have read all of Kevin Henkes' "mouse"  books.  We used the books to study his characters.  First, with Wemberly, we worked with a partner to think of a single word that described worried Wemberly.  Then for Wendell and Sheila Rae and Louise we worked with partners and came up with a word to describe each character and then wrote our evidence - where in the text the character had demonstrated that quality.

 

 After several days of describing characters, we decided to see if we could come up with the word that Kevin Henkes used to describe each character.  The Kevin Henkes word is in red on the right.  The words that we came up with are in green.

 

Finally we decided which character was our favorite.  On one side of an index card we drew a picture of our favorite character and on the other side we wrote the reason that the character was our favorite.  As you can see Owen was our favorite, but Lilly came in a close second!

 

We also learned about Kevin Henkes' life so we could figure out how his life had affected his writing.  Students shared the most interesting thing they had learned about Henkes from their homework.

 All of this background helped us talk across the books - our favorite book, favorite character, which book we thought was Kevin Henkes' most important to first graders...  To have a book talk, we had to learn about Accountable Talk - how to wait for the silence to speak, how to make sure that everyone got a turn, how to disagree politely, how to listen and build on what others said.  We made the chart below of phrases to help us continue the conversation.

The Curious Garden: Book-of-the-Month May 2011

April's Chets Creek Book-of-the-month was The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. The strategy that we worked through was asking deeper questions with medium and high cognitive complexity. We met in small groups and then came together with our grade level to write questions for each page of the book. Today Mrs. Ruark read the book to the students, asking them the more complex questions that we had discussed as a group. The idea is that children have to comprehend text by talking about the ideas before they are able to do the work independently on a comprehension assessment. This is a really great book that tells the story of a garden that grows from a railway that is no longer used. The text and illustrations challenge the children to draw inferences and think deeply about the message in the book.

After reading the delightful story and asking questions throughout the text, Tracy showed the children an article that she had read in National Geographic that is based on the real story of an abandoned rail line called the High Line in Manhattan. The city turned this abandoned rail into a walking park with chairs to sit and read, an amphitheatre, and a leisurely strolling path filled with greenery right in the middle of the city. This additional piece gave the children an opportunity to draw conclusions between the two pieces of literature and worked well with the idea that we are working with in writing - that children can use real experiences to base their fictional writing. While we could have pulled one of our laptops to the document camera to share the on-line magazine article, instead Tracy used her personal ipad to quickly pull the story up for the children to see. The site even included a video in elapsed time of someone walking the path! Using the ipad was quick and convenient. We first tried just holding the ipad and showing it like we would a book but quickly realized that the pictures and video showed very well through the document camera! How exciting it would be to have an ipad at our disposal. It was so quick - so convenient! I can see how we would use the Internet so much more often in our lessons and with such great ease! Anyone know where we can find the money for ipads?!

Comparing and Contrasting Mem Fox Books

Comparing and contrasting books is a good way for children to begin to understand books across a single author. Today I demonstrated the way that Koala Lou and Possum Magic, both books by Mem Fox, are alike and the ways that they are different by using a Venn diagram. For the active involvement of the mini-lesson the students were divided into partners and allowed to select two other Mem Fox books to compare and contrast using their own Venn diagrams. We helped the partners either chose two of her pattern books or two of her story books so the books would have more in common. As children use the graphic organizer to help them understand the Mem Fox books, it helps them organize their thoughts and begin to talk with a partner - the first steps in accountable talk.

Stellaluna: Book of the Month October 2009

Today was Boss' Day, so, as is our tradition at the Creek, the faculty celebrated with a breakfast and gift to our Principal. That is how we opened the October Book-of-the-month this morning.

Our Principal, Susan Phillips, chose an oldie, but goodie, to read to the faculty as we settled down with our delicious breakfast snacks. To activate our schema she asked us to recall our first day at Chets Creek. Teachers told funny and poignant stories of their first days. She then dedicated this book-of-the-month to our new students to Chets Creek this year.

Stellaluna by Janell Cannon is a beautiful book for this time of year about a little bat who is separated from her mother before she is old enough to fly. While Stellaluna adapts to her new bird family, she is pretty excited to be reunited with her bat family. When she realizes that she really is a bat, she also finds out that she doesn't have to eat any more bugs, that hanging by her feet is really okay, and that she really can see at night. The bigger lesson, of course, is that different is not always bad. It's just different.

Each classroom got a copy of this traditional book. Paired with this delightful text was a revisit to a strategy that we learned early in our America's Choice training - accountable talk. It's a strategy used in many classrooms on a daily basis but probably new to some of the teachers who have joined us in the last few years at the Creek. It will be interesting to see if seasoned teachers revisit this standard and use this book experience to find ways to deepen their discussion of books. It is an opportunity for kinder teachers to revisit how they introduce book discussions to our youngest learners. As the Principal talked about the book she drew us back to those stories of first days that the faculty had shared at the beginning of her presentation, took us through those same "new" experiences that Stellaluna felt and then asked us to think about the new students in our classrooms. Enjoy the Principal's presentation.

At the end of the day our Principal spent some time talking to a kindergartner about her book-of-the-month choice. They decided to try hanging upside down just like Stellaluna - just to see how it feels! Wonder what they decided?!!