Making connections: Reading Wonder during Ramadan

Wonder, by RJ Palacio, is a book about a boy named August (Auggie) with a facial deformity.  He begins attending school at the beginning of fifth grade, hoping to be accepted for who he is, rather than ostracized for his face.  The book switches between Auggie's point of view and the point of view of his classmates and others.  The main theme of this heart-wrenching and brutally beautiful story is the importance of empathy, compassion and acceptance.

So, why Wonder and Ramadan?  It happened very naturally for me, as I was using Wonder in a book study during Ramadan.  I wanted to find a way to help students really connect with the text.  Several of the students I was working with were Muslim and the connection happened very organically.  As we continued to explore Wonder through the theme of Ramadan, I watched my Muslim students, especially the girls, gain a new sense of their worth in the classroom as ambassadors of their culture. The other students, I hope, learned about empathy, compassion, and acceptance not only through the medium of the text, but also as their classmates shared pieces of themselves and their culture during our discussions.

Some background on Ramadan:
Each day of Ramadan, every person over the age of 12 is expected to fast from dawn until sunset. The translation of the Arabic word "to fast" is "refrain." This means not only refraining from eating and drinking, but also refraining from idle gossip or unnecessary speech and unkind words and thoughts. The goal of Ramadan is spiritual purification. Many Muslims pray more often during this time. They ask for forgiveness of past sins, focus on positive acts for the benefit of others, and ask God for guidance for future living. The fasting is supposed to induce feelings of empathy for those who are less fortunate, as well as a sense of inner peace.  For more information, try this website, or go to an even better source: your students and their families.

Ramadan is also a time of fellowship, and people will often invite friends and family to share in the sunset fast-breaking meal, the Iftar.  I've been blessed to have been invited to share in many Iftars, and if you get the chance, I highly recommend accepting this invitation.  Not only will you eat some amazing food, but the bonds of friendship and community you'll make are life-long bonds.

As you begin the book study with a focus on Ramadan, modeling making connections will help students frame their own connections.  While non-Muslim students may be tempted to make connections between the book and their own culture, I recommend gently encouraging them to stick to keeping connections linked to Ramadan--especially if the other students are of the mainstream culture.  Muslim culture gets such little airtime in U.S. classrooms, so if you've made the decision to give your Muslim students the opportunity to really use their voices and be heard during this book study, be sure to keep that space open to them.

Some possible connections to make while modeling are:

Page 46: Precepts: rules about really important things

Page 47: What kind of person am I?

Page 48: When given the choice between being right or being kind, choose kind.

Page 65: Your deeds are your monuments; we are remembered for the things we do

Page 77: Other students talking about August

Happy reading,
Jacquie

Checking back in after a loooooong year!

I just want to preface this post by saying I love my job.  I truly do.  There is NOTHING else I can imagine doing with my life other than teaching English to my immigrant and refugee students.  Best. Job. Ever.

That being said, this has been an especially hard year, for many reasons.  The insane amount of testing we implemented this year in the great state of Ohio was the cause of some of the stress of the year, but I'll write about that and the implications of constant testing on ELL's in another post.  We enrolled more emergent ELL's this year at our school than any year past, and the ESL team was the target of some classroom teacher anxiety and hostility because of that.  However, we (ESL teachers) love, love, love emergent students, so any negativity thrown at us we eventually deflected with our joy at getting to know our new students and helping them acclimate to their new home.  As far as health goes, my daughter and I were sick almost all year.  No exaggeration.  If a virus was around, it paid us a visit this year.  Not fun.  As a single parent, she and I are together all the time, so we tend to share everything, including germs.  In addition to all of that, this year an ongoing personnel (not personal!) issue came to a head, but even that wasn't the lowest point of the year.

What was the lowest point of my year?  The day I lost a student.  She wasn't a current student.  She attended our school two years before, and she was a student that no one forgets.  Nebiat was a sweet and beautiful girl and so, so much more.  This girl worked harder than any other student I've had in my years of teaching.  She was self-motivated.  I didn't have to convince her that learning was important.  She knew that, and she demonstrated that knowledge by attacking every lesson in every subject with all of her energy and excitement.  Our sweet Nebiat was the student we compared others to, and most students, quite honestly, looked unfavorable compared to her.  Nebiat's thirst for learning, and willingness to work hard, are sadly uncommon characteristics in many students these days.  In one of her first days in ESL, she shared her shame at being unable to read.  After several weeks of working with Nebiat, it was obvious that her difficulty with reading did not lie with her, but rather with poor previous schooling.  She grew as a reader, and her confidence grew along with her reading ability.  Nothing could stop her.  Nebiat could have been ANYTHING she wanted to be, and she wanted to help others.  Her bright light was dimmed far too soon, and I'm sad and angry about it.

Nebiat wasn't part of my biological family.  She only attended our school for a little over a year.  So, why am I so devastated?  I almost feel unworthy of my grief.  She wasn't my daughter.  She wasn't even a current student, although I consider all of my students to be my students for life--regardless of age.  So many other people were close to her and deserve to grieve for her.  It makes sense for them to feel a grief so deep that it's hard to pull out of it.  Why am I feeling this way?

It's because of who Nebiat was as a person.  This girl was amazing.  After she moved on to middle school, I would still see Nebiat at her apartment complex where I frequently visit to spend time with students and their families.  Even if she was in a group of her middle school friends, she always broke away to come over and talk to me.  She asked about my daughter and the other ESL teacher she worked with at our school.  She excitedly shared what she was learning in school, what her teachers were like, and how her grades were.  She told me about her friends and the silliness they got into. That sweet girl would hang out with me and talk for as long as I wanted, never looking over to her friends as if she needed an escape from this crazy teacher who won't stop talking to her!  I can't explain how much that meant to me coming from a middle school girl!

Nebiat deserved a long, amazing life. Her short, amazing life touched mine in ways that I probably still haven't realized.  I thought her funeral would bring me "closure," but I don't know that there ever is closure when a child dies.  I just know that I will never forget her.  As cheesy as it sounds, she really will always be in my heart and on my mind as I go throughout my life.  I feel a strong need to make sure no one forgets that she was here and that she was amazing.  and that I loved her.

I wish I had a book to recommend for teachers dealing with grief over the death of a student. Throughout the past few weeks, I have looked for such a book or article.  I needed to know that what I was feeling was normal.  I found many resources on how to help students deal with grief, but nothing that was written for teachers.  So many of us love our students as if they are our own.  When we lose a student, it is a profound loss for us.  At least, it is for me and for Nebiat's other teachers.  If you know of a book or article that is dedicated to helping teachers deal with the death of a student, please leave a comment below.

Take care of yourselves and your students,
Jacquie

Choosing Texts for Early Readers

As an ELL teacher, choosing texts to use with my students is perhaps one of the most challenging parts of my job.  Each week, I struggle with how to focus my text selection: vocabulary topics?  grammar function?  fluency?  literary devices?  And then, from where should I pull the texts: guided reading room?  library?  from the same publisher each time, or mix and match?  In her book Becoming Literate, Marie Clay asserts that "it is the individual child's achievements and where he next needs to go that [should govern] the selection" (p. 182).  So, with the multitude of information our lower-level ELL's need to know, how do we choose a text that will meet their needs, but still foster a love of reading?

Some tips from Marie Clay:

• Use texts you have previously read to students.  Known texts are "still new and challenging because the child is bringing that prior knowledge to the text...using a different kind of support from the interactive sharing of the task with the teacher" (p. 184).  Be sure to couple the re-reading of the text with a new focus.  If the original sharing of the book focused on vocabulary, have the re-reading experience tackle a literary device used by the author.
• Be wary of using contrived texts: "If [students] have only read controlled vocabulary texts [they] will have difficulty with texts that do not control the vocabulary" (p. 187).  Relying on contrived texts can also have a detrimental effect on oral language development if students learning English are presented with one way of "speaking" English in texts and then are expected to understand and respond to the language those around them produce naturally. 

• Story books should be an integral part of a student's reading journey, but should not be the only method used to teach students to read. "To learn to anticipate the language and situations found in stories children have to build up a vast experience with children's story books...Some children do not get those experiences before they come to school and teachers who use a story book reading programme must provide them with make-up experiences" (189).  ELL's often come to school with very little knowledge of story structure or the purpose of reading.  It's therefore imperative that we provide as many opportunities for our students to interact with quality literature as possible.  However, story books are not often written for beginning readers to read on their own.  Portions could be read by students in a big-book or projectable format.  Language Experience Approach texts could be created by students based on the story books to give students a pathway into the text.

• While LEA's do give children who are learning English a textual experience with which they can connect, "it is not enough to read only natural language or language experience texts.  Children need book experience to read books.  Book language has different forms and different frequencies of occurrence from spoken dialects.  Natural language texts can be regarded as transitional texts, used when the child is just beginning to relate what he knows about oral language and print to the written texts he is trying to read"  (p.191).

For slower readers and those who are learning to read while at the same time learning English, natural experience texts and repeated contact with familiar literary texts initially presented by teacher are a natural starting point for literacy development.  Consistently working only with simple, controlled material can "develop habitual responding for that type of material.  This learning will not transfer readily to more complex texts" (195).  Staying away from such contrived texts is especially critical for ELL's.  Students must be exposed to rich language use and have the opportunity to swim around in it and be immersed.  This is the only way their oral language, and then later their written language, will develop to the depth of meaning that native English speakers enjoy.

Happy reading,
Jacquie

Directionality and Storybook Reading

In Chapter 6 of Becoming Literate, Marie Clay writes that children face three main challenges after their initial experiences with print.  One of those challenges is the directionality of print.  In English text, of course, this means learning that print goes left to right.  Period.

I hadn't considered this skill to be anything unusual for children to learn until Clay opened my eyes: "The child's everyday experience has actually trained him in different habits from those he needs in reading.  An orange, a dog or a favourite toy must be recognized from any viewing angle.  Meaning is constant when the object is small or large, is upside-down, back-to-front, or sideways to the viewer...On entry to school he has to learn that in one particular situation, when he is faced with printed language, flexibility is inappropriate."  (Clay, 1991).  DUH!  I had never thought of directionality in reading as something entirely foreign in its adherence to one serial direction in the world of a child for whom every other experience has been multi-directional.

After that "ah-ha" moment, I decided to check out whether or not my kindergarten students truly understood the directionality of print.  Using the Sulzby Storybook Reading Assessment, I had my students read a Goldilocks book to me.  The students were already familiar with the text from a read aloud the previous week.  The book has multiple lines of print on each page, so I was able to gauge whether or not students had learned the following:

• directionality
• return sweep
• high frequency words
• using pictures to gain meaning
• the language "style" of story telling

In addition, I was also able to take notes on what aspects of oral English the students have acquired.  For example, whether or not they correctly form and use plural nouns or regular past tense verbs. 

The Sulzby assessment taught me a lot about my students!  I was surprised to learn that one of my students has not yet mastered directionality.  Not surprisingly, he was also the only one who didn't use the pictures to tell a story, but rather just labeled what he saw in each picture.  He jumped back and forth between right and left pages of the book and only attended to the pictures.  He paid no attention to the print.  My other two kindergarteners demonstrated knowledge of each of the skills I was assessing.  One of the students even made a serious attempt to read each word on the page, and he did a great job of it!

Now, I know which of my students are ready to move on, and which needs more work with simple, one lined texts and retelling stories after read alouds.  I highly recommend reading the Sulzby article (link above) and trying this assessment with emergent readers.

Happy reading!
Jacquie

Islands of Certainty

The title of this blog post is one of my favorite Marie Clay-isms: "islands of certainty."  She writes that "in the familiar story the child locates a word he knows and builds a response around it.  Then the child's reading of text comes to be controlled by particular words even though he can only recognize one or two words" (Clay, 1991).  These familiar words are the "islands of certainty" in a sea of unknown text.  Often, for emerging readers, these islands are sight words.

If you visit pinterest, you'll find a plethora of sight word games and activities geared to helping children memorize these most common words in English text.  However, the majority of the activities involve memorizing the words out of context.  For ELL's, sight words are often meaningless, so it's imperative that literacy teachers of ELL's focus on meaning and usage when teaching sight words and present the words in connected text.

Introducing new sight words doesn't need to be overly complicated, even when working with emergent language learners.  For example, when working with my first grade emergent students, I introduce new sight words with the following 5-day procedure:

1. Oral language practice: I write five new sight words on index cards.  We practice reading them out loud.  I use each word in a sentence or two as examples.  Then, the students all use each word in a sentence.  My students love making up sentences so well that they usually have multiple sentences for each word!  This is not only a great way for the students to get oral language practice, but it's also an opportunity for me to ensure that the students truly understand what each word means and how to use it.  I can gently correct any misunderstandings before they become fossilized.
2. Words in context: I write sentences with each sight word on sentence strips that I post on the board.  The sentences are taken from those that the students invented the day before.  We read the sentences together out loud.  Then, the students choose one of the sentences to re-read with expression.  This is also a big hit!
   
3. Guess the covered word: I cover or remove the targeted sight word from each sentence, and the students have to choose the correct word to go in the sentence.  We then do the same procedure with new sentences using the targeted sight words.
   
4. Writing sentences: Students write sentences of their own using each of the targeted sight words.  Then, they share their favorite with their classmates.
5. Fast ten: This is a quick check of the new sight words and a few known sight words.  Students write the words on white boards as quickly as they can.  They only win "points" if they not only write the word quickly, but also correctly.

Throughout the week, we find and circle the targeted sight words in our focus story and in our shared writing.  This gives students many more examples of the use of sight words in connected text.

I keep a list of the sight words that I've taught to the group.  When I read with each student individually each week, I double and triple-check that these "islands of certainty" remain not only in the students' reading repertoire, but that they are also using those sight words correctly in their oral language.  The one-on-one time I eke out to read with each student gives me the perfect venue for checking progress on a number of skills.  Carving out that time isn't easy, but it's well worth the effort!

For more activity ideas that use connected text to teach new words to ELL students, check out Phonics They Use by Patricia Cunningham.

Happy reading,
Jacquie

Language Experience Approach and Dr. Seuss

In honor of Dr. Seuss's birthday, for the past two weeks my reading instruction has centered around texts my students created after repeated readings of The Sneetches, And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, and Green Eggs and Ham.  I used the Language Experience Approach with students to create texts on their level that we could read and work with all week.  In their article, The Power of Language Experience for Cross-Cultural Reading and Writing, authors David Landis, Joanne Umolu and Sunday Mancha assert that LEA is "a means of providing interesting and relevant texts for diverse students' reading and writing."  I often use LEA when I want to introduce my students to rich literature that is too vocabulary dense to be an appropriate text for them to work with independently.

My kindergarten students listened to and (even during the first reading!) helped me read Green Eggs and Ham.  We used the book to study transportation and food vocabulary, most of which were new to my students.  Then, we wrote a very simple text together about foods we don't like to eat.  Every few lines, we threw in their favorite refrain, "I will not eat it here or there.  I will not eat it anywhere."  They gleefully shouted those lines when we came to them.  Using our Language Experience Approach-created text, students took turns tracking the words and performing the return sweep while reading.  We also used their text to practice counting words in a sentence and to identify words they knew using word swatters.  This was a quick way to take notes on which of my kindergarteners are still working on many of these Concepts About Print, and which have already mastered them.

In first grade, we read The Sneetches.  We're in the middle of a unit on friendship, so this book fit in nicely!  In addition to focusing on the theme of the book (not judging others by what's on the outside), we also wrote a summary of the book that we used as one of our texts this week.  Two of my first graders are still working on one to one matching and recognizing kindergarten sight words, so that was their focus with our word work this week.  My other students are working on r-controlled vowels and transition words like "First", "Next", "Then", so they worked with those skills.  Language Experience texts give teachers the opportunity to use one text to work with students at a variety of levels, which is very helpful in an ESL pull-out class setting.  We often have limited time (30-40 minutes) and multiple levels of language proficiency in our small groups, so being able to use one text to teach many skills makes better use of our precious time!

My second grade students also created a Language Experience text, but theirs was a different format.  Before I read And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street, I explained to students that the story was about a boy who, when walking home from school, imagines all the wonderful things he could see.  We then made a list of all of the things they see on their bus ride home from school.  Once we made our list, I read them the book.  We discussed the differences between what the boy imagines he could see and what we really see on our way home each day.  The following day, I re-read the book.  We then made a list of the imagined sights along Mulberry Street.  The students then made lines to compare similar items in the lists.  We talked about why it's important to make connections while we read.  The students completed our book study by writing their own version of the book: And to Think That I Saw It on Walnut Street (our school's street name).  We published the stories and hung them in the hallway for our friends to read.

LEA gave my students the opportunity to work with great literature at their level.  By taking their ideas and thoughts about what we read together, I was able to correct grammar in a natural, conversational setting, encourage the use of new vocabulary, and demonstrate to students that their words and thoughts are worthy of study.  All in all, a fun and successful week using the Language Experience Approach to make Dr. Seuss's lovely literature accessible to my students learning English. 

Happy reading,
Jacquie

Assessing and Grouping ELL's for Guided Reading Instruction

Guided Reading, focused small group reading instruction, has become a staple of effective reading programs in schools all around the world.  In each of those schools, though, Guided Reading may be implemented in many different ways.  When I first learned to use Guided Reading, the component that was most stressed was that students should be reading the same book, out loud at the same time.  We were trained to tune our ears in to one student each day as he/she was reading aloud with the group and provide support as needed.  I taught for many years believing that Guided Reading was nothing more than a group of 3-5 students reading at the same time, at different paces, and sometimes at very different skill levels.  According to Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, experts on early literacy, this difference in reading proficiency among students is one of the main causes of concern for teachers trying to implement Guided Reading instruction.

Because of this, initial and ongoing assessment of students is essential.  Dr. Jan Richardson, in her book The Next Step in Guided Reading, gives several examples of assessments that can be done with readers at many different levels.  For students in grades kindergarten through second grade, Richardson recommends assessing letter identification, sight word reading, sentence dictation, and taking running records.  Running records are an integral component of Marie Clay's Reading Recovery Program.

When analyzing a running record, Richardson identifies six steps to include in the analysis (p. 41-47).  I found these to be extremely helpful:

• Step One: Determine the accuracy level
• Step Two: Analyze errors (structure vs. visual errors)
• Step Three: Analyze strategies
• Self-monitoring
• Cross-checking
• Self-correcting
• Step Four: Assess fluency (Words per minute, expression, attention to punctuation)
• Step Five: Assess comprehension
• Does the student substitute words that make sense?
• Does the student reread to confirm or repair meaning?
• Does the student read with expression?
• Can the student retell the main ideas and some details of the text?
• Step Six: Select a focus for instruction:
• Risk-taking (stop correcting the child; provide encouragement instead)
• Self-monitoring
• A caveat when working with ELL's: asking "What would sound right?" or "What would make sense?" (p. 43) may not be appropriate for students at intermediate or below English proficiency levels.  Students still learning English will not always be able to identify what sounds right or makes sense in what is still an unknown language.
• Decoding
• Fluency
• Oral retell
• Comprehension

So, what if your students are Transitional, Intermediate, or Fluent readers?  Richardson has assessment suggestions for those readers, as well (p. 49-53).  For Transitional readers, she includes a Word Study Inventory (p. 48) that I just started using with one of my second grade groups, and I love it!  In the inventory, the teacher dictates words with common phonics skills to the student and then plans word study based on the areas that need improvement.  For Transitional, Intermediate and Fluent readers, Richardson recommends the following assessments:

• Oral reading (running record)
• Retelling
• Comprehension questions
• Determining instructional reading level (student reads with 90% accuracy and 75-85% comprehension)
• Cpmprehension Interview

The above mentioned resources, and many others, can be found in the textbook or on Jan Richardson's website.  I highly recommend both!

For ELL's, Guided Reading can be very beneficial in not only improving reading and writing, but also for strengthening  listening and speaking skills.  When a teacher modifies Guided Reading instruction to include targeted vocabulary instruction (including any front-loading of background knowledge), attention to the structure of English, cultural relevance, academic language, as well as development of oral language, ELL's can make dramatic gains in reading comprehension.  In the article Modified Guided Reading: Gateway to English as a Second Language and Literacy Learning, the authors add an important element to the assessment and grouping piece of Guided Reading: the inclusion of English language proficiency level in forming small groups for reading instruction.

Preparing for Guided Reading by assessing and thoughtfully grouping students based not only on reading and writing skill assessments, but also language proficiency, is an important first step to successfully implementing Guided Reading instruction in the classroom.

Happy reading!
Jacquie