Brains

http://www.apple.com/science/#gazzaley

http://mekentosj.com/papers/

For Lit2Go additions

Some works to be added to Lit2Go:

Poetry of Emily Dickinson

Poetry of Louisa May Alcott

Poetry of Julia Ward Howe

Poetry and children's stories of Helen Hunt Jackson (pen name H.H.H.)

Poetry of Phillis Wheatley

Poetry of Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Check for others in the public domain at http://famouspoestandpoems.com/country/America/women/American_poets.html

For the LA blog

Veterans of Past American Wars Project

http://etc.usf.edu/plans/lessons/lp/lp0104l.htm

In this NSA lesson plan, a Florida high school teacher has his students interview WWII veterans. In some cases, the kids interview their grandfathers, but the teacher also went to local veteran's organizations to find interview subjects for his students. This is a great example of a cross-curricular lesson. The students are developing language arts skills at the same time they are working within several social studies strands (i.e. Time, Continuity, and Change; Individuals, Groups, and Institutions; Civic Ideals and Practices; etc.). This lesson gives students an authentic context to practice reading, writing, listening, speaking, research, and interview skills. 

In addition to the information covered in this NSA lesson plan, the Library of Congress website offers helpful information for students on how to conduct oral history interviews.

http://international.loc.gov/learn/lessons/oralhist/ohguide.html

Notes from A's Class

Review from last week
Comprehension - making connections to schema
Stumbling blocks
Strategies to improve comprehension
Last week, played a game to show how questioning relates to thinking, and how to teach
questioning
Start with out of context actitivity to teach self-questioning (e.g. 20 questions); go to reading acitivity to teach questioning (e.g. Stump the Teacher); go to activities where they are reading and thinking of questions at the same time.

Questioning minds don't get bored. Questioning is thinking, is making connections.

For younger kids, 20 questions about pictures instead of reading passages.

Game: Guess who? A series of pictures of people with descriptions. Ask yes or no questions, put down each picture that doesn't match.

If you are doing a lesson and it's too difficult, you have to know how to go down a few levels, then work back up when they are comfortable.

Major topic: Visual imagery
What? Being able to create pictures in your mind.

Making connections in the brain: neurons sprout dendrites; dendrites don't touch each other. The gap is called a synapse. That gap is bridged by chemicals, neurotransmitters (e.g. adrenaline). There are positive ones and negative ones. The negative ones make you feel anxious, scared, etc.

Story of struggling reader who came for tutoring... said one day "I love you"; "you don't love me, you don't know me; you love the way you feel when i'm around you." A few months later, reading problems fixed, still coming because of good feeling. Asked "can you show me how to do what you did with me? I've got friends who are about to make bad choices and I want to help them.

Visual imagery - picture worth 1000 words. Helps students make solid connections.

Example, picture map of United States. Candidate got on the plane in Miami, FL. went to ..., etc. etc. listed off all of the places. Because you made a mental picture, you could remember all of those places.
Remember example of what I'm wearing. Once your mind starts working, it keeps working.

Second reason for using visual imagery with kids, it gives you pleasure. Avid readers, raise your hands. I don't expect many. Okay, when you read a book, and then a movie comes out, which do you like better? The book, of course. You are making pictures in your mind.

Third reason for using visual imagery, it will improve comprehension.

Visual imagery is very powerful.

So, how do we teach it?

First floor, out of the context of reading.
Example: Everybody, picture an elephant. With your arm show me what the elephant's trunk is doing. Arms down. Put the elephant in an environment. Now picture elephant raising his front right foot. Now give it polka dots. Raise your hand if you changed your elephant's color when you gave it polka dots. What color was your elephant? Put your elephant in clothes. What clothes is your elephant wearing? Make your elephant stand on its head.
Go back to a kitchen that is somewhere in your past. Go to your seat at the kitchen table. Think about the smells, sights. All of your senses can be activated.
In your mind, picture a 3 x 3 grid. Number each of the spaces, 1 through 9. Start in the upper right hand corner. Move down 2, left 1, up 2, left 1, down 1. What number are you on? Some of you are there on the third floor and had no problem doing that. To scaffold, give them the grid on a piece of paper and a red disk to cover. Next, take away the number, or take away the marker. Then let a kid call the directions. Use number cards to do a comprehension check with the kids of the whole class.

Story about little Jerome, who said his TV set wasn't working. When it "warmed up", he was happy.

Second floor, you read and have them make the pictures. Read passage from "Sarah Plain and Tall". Could also have them buddy read, where one reads, one visualizes, then switch off. Also, read a picture book, but don't show pictures. They visualize, then show them the pictures to compare. Also, read them a picture book and give them a wide angle lens. Ask them what's happening to the right and left of the picture you can see. Picture your favorite car. You're in it. Now you're going through a drive through. Where are you? What are you wearing?

Some people say that they can't tell a joke. As your comprehension gets better, you'll get better at telling jokes.
First floor activity: tell a joke, and have your students try to tell the joke back. By the third floor, try three jokes.
Inquest dramatization - I'm going to read first two pages of a chapter book, these two are going to act it out for you. Freeze them and ask questions. Read beginning of The Great Gilly Hopkins. 1) dramatization, 2) stop periodically to ask audience to ask questions.

Teach the students to make the pictures in their minds. As they move into 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade, there won't be pictures for them.

BREAK

I'm going to read a passage. As I read, I want you to go outside of this classroom and make a connection. When you do, raise your hand. I'll ask you to share your connections. Record in Inspiration.

Guided Reading, demonstration.
First floor. Warm up by listing six things to pick up from the grocery store. Who can list them backwards? Second floor. Read passage to them. Challenge them to remember everything. (Passage about caterpillars and moths.) Third floor, they read and remember everything.
Steps: 1) Challenge to remember, 2) Read to them, 3) record what they remember, 4) read again and make additions and corrections, 5) short term memory test, bar graph in reading journal. 6) Week or two later, long term memory quiz. 7) Graph in reading journal. Goal: by the end of the month, how many of you can get your LTM scores the same as your STM scores? That makes the kids responsible for their own learning. Guided reading procedure is very powerful.
Remembering 12 items and saying them backwards is a subtest of intelligence tests. Could you do that? Yes.
We study Alzheimer's here at USF. My friend is in one of the classes and they do a lot of these same activities to do with young children to get them to think. We pay a lot of attention to keeping people from losing their minds, but we don't pay enough attention in schools to making sure kids develop their minds to begin with. We test them so that we can say 'you're smart', 'you're not', but we don't pay enough attention to helping them develop their minds and become smart.

Chunking. Social security numbers, phone numbers with area codes. Cleaning garage: big job, break into chunks. When something isn't manageable, you break it into chunks. Break text passage into chunks. Use procedures on each chunk, like guided reading or visualization. Mnemonic devices.

Readers Theater
Story grammar
Once the students understand the framework, your mind wants to fill the framework.

Sunday reading

I feel like I've been bouncing around all day. In Barry (2002), I've been reading about post-structuralism, deconstruction, modernism, and post-modernism.
Online, I fell down a rabbit hole. When I was talking to Michael about "The Death of the Author", he mused about the death of the blogger. I searched that phrase, curious if anyone had developed that idea. Only six hits for that exact phrase, which is so rare.

One of the hits led me to a post on a blog called Reassigned Time.

This is an academic blog and this particular entry from early 2007 mourns Michael Bérubé's decision to stop blogging. It's also an interesting take on the place of blogging within academia and on academics who blog. This led me to Bérubé's blog (he restarted his blog last month), and that led me to this article in the Pittsburgh City Paper about Bérubé and his views on politics and academic freedom.

Via Facebook, I was led to this video from last week's "Rebooting the News" conference in Philadelphia. The workshop focuses on copyright and fair use and has given me a really good reason to look forward to November 11th. For more information, check out Renee Hobbs' Media Education Lab.

Good stuff.

Wilde quote

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Oscar Wilde

Notes from A's Class

Midterm review
Talking through each item from midterm in brief
Interaction with Text will be on final
Remove graphophonic cues if a student is too dependent on them. The R are in the WS. The Rays are in the World Series.
Discussion questions: for basic sight words, needed to identify how to teach them, not just how to reinforce them.
Teaching phonograms. Why? Learn one, get 10-12 words. Circumvents teaching the vowel rules. It's fun.

If you're in the 40s, and have good scores for everything else, you are on track for an A.

Final is the same format, without the phonics section. By now, your mind should be comfortable with the teaching and with the test, so the final will seem easy.

New content
Comprehension (major topic, next three weeks)
What? Understanding what you read (internalizing, communicating with the author)

Every teacher would say that they teach comprehension. Most do not. They check comprehension. Checking comprehension doesn't help them comprehend.

Road blocks to comprehension: lack of vocabulary; lack of schema (timeline around the top of your room. Major markers, like the year of their birth, Pearl Harbor, 9/11; works of art; works of literature; lack of fluency; lack of interest; distractions; not interacting with the text; pronoun referent.

"Global Warfare" passage

Shouldn't we be teaching them what these road blocks are? Don't you think that a third grader or a fourth grader could understand that? We need to get more honest with the kids. If they know what the enemies are, they will avoid them.

Thinking
Very important to every part of our lives. Why don't we teach it? How many classes have you had in thinking? How many bulletin boards have you seen about thinking? All we got is "put on your thinking caps". When some teachers invites questions, it's after the fact, and they ask you to ask questions if you don't understand, meaning that you have to declare to the class that you don't understand.
Teaching without requiring the students to think prepares them only to answer low level questions, information recall. Ask questions before and during reading, model asking questions, give them wait time - allow them to think. Don't use questioning as interrogation.

Self-questioning (this will be on the final)
Teach the kids to ask the questions themselves. Picture a mother preparing her son to leave for school - do you have your lunch money, do you have your homework, etc. The son is thinking, "let me get out of here". Instead teach the kid to ask his own questions.
Three floors in a building: to get from first floor to the third floor, we need scaffolding. If you're teaching on the 2nd floor and your students are looking at you with blank faces, go back down to the first floor. Back to the example: first floor, the mother is asking the questions. Second floor, mother and son share the asking. Third floor, son asks.
In reading, first floor teach self-questioning out of the context of reading. (20 questions, with the teacher thinking of something; 20 questions with one student asking the questions of the students; celebrity game, but with animals or foods).
Second floor, involve reading. In "stump the teacher", the students think of the questions to ask the teacher. The teacher reads a text passage, then turns it over. The students ask questions of the teacher. If students can't think of questions, go back to the first floor because they are not thinking. Once the students have asked all of the questions they can think of, the teacher asks questions of the students. The teachers should ask higher level questions. Write them down ahead of time. "What word was used that meant 'not wise'?" "How much would 2 acres be worth?" You are modeling for them questions that they can ask next time. They will want to play because of the reversal of roles, but they are modeling just the kind of self-questioning you want them to be doing.
Third floor, "stump the teacher" after both teacher and students read it. When you go to the 3rd floor depends on the students.

Review examples of the Literacy Notebook, one over the top and one reasonable.
Must have table of contents.
Must be organized.
You can work together. Yours and your friend's could be identical.
It should reflect what we've been learning.
It can include things from other classes.

Toward developing exclusion/inclusion criteria

For the research blog, I'm excluding research for which literacy is a context to study something else. In the example listed below, the literacy classroom is used as a context to study social positioning. The research blog will focus on research about literacy, not about other things in a literacy context.

Zacher, J. (2008). Analyzing Children’s Social Positioning and Struggles for Recognition in a Classroom Literacy Event. Research in the Teaching of English, 43.

Configuring the new blog

Still working out the kinks on the process of content production for the new research review blog. So far, I've included these journals:

From IRA

RRQ - Reading Research Quarterly
RT - Reading Teacher
JAAL - Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy

From AERA

ARER - American Review of Educational Research
RRE - Review of Research in Education
EEPA - Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis
ER - Educational Researcher
RER - Review of Educational Research
AERJ - American Educational Research Journal

AERA, not included
Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics - focus is on research methods

From NCTE

RTE - Research in the Teaching of English
TP - Talking Points
EJ - English Journal

NCTE, not included
Voices from the Middle - doesn't publish research
College English - not focused on K12
Teaching English in the Two Year College - not focused on K12
College Composition and Communication - not focused on K12
English Education - doesn't publish research

Need to consider:

Reading Horizons
Writing Center Journal
The Australian Journal of Language and Literacy
Written Communication
Journal of College Reading and Learning
Reading Psychology
Reading
Journal of Second Language Writing
TESOL Journal
English for Specific Purposes
Journal of Reading
Language and Learning
Studies in Writing
Pedagogy
Journal of Child Language

Also, find some that deal with brain science.

The new blog

Croce on Genres

"All books dealing with classifications and systems of the arts could be burned without any loss whatsoever."

Benedetto Croce, quoted in The Power of Genre (p. 6) by Adena Rosmarin.

Fluency and Acting

I just woke up, so this may not be the revelation it feels like now.

In my dream, I was at some kind of celebration for the newly relocated Tampa Zoo, with which somehow our research group was involved. K and S had just been introduced on stage and now the gathered crowd was watching a video on a large screen on stage. I was backstage watching it. Some of the people in it were actors - I recognized Dean Winters - but others clearly weren't. There was an older woman speaking, and she was really bad, like you sometimes see in community theater, not at all able to make her words sound like natural speech. As I was waking up, I thought about this woman and why she couldn't act. It's like she had no awareness of the difference between how she sounded and how people normally speak. That's weird because, of course, she's heard, and produced, countless hours of natural sounding speech all through her life. But, she's never been directed to examine the differences. The distinctive features of natural speech have never been pointed out to her.

I thought about A's review in class this week, talking about the components of fluency - pitch, juncture, and flow. That woman was acting the same way a poor reader reads - with no fluency, no understanding of how the ideas are represented in the text. Only she wasn't reading, she had actually memorized it without connecting the underlying thoughts. Or, she had memorized it, connected the thoughts, but never considered the distinctive features of fluent, natural speech.

When we teach movie-making to kids, we touch on acting as a discrete set of skills because they are the actors in their own movies. When we do that, we need to use language that ties the ideas that we are teaching back to reading. We need to teach them to attend to the distinctive features within the text that cue pitch, juncture, and flow. We can do this the same way we teach reading fluency in the classroom. Let me qualify that by saying, we can use the engaging and effective strategies that are sometimes used in the classroom to teach fluency. The key is that, in the context of movie-making, they have a real purpose to learn how to read fluently. They want their movie to be good, so the fluency strategies that we are teaching serve the purpose of helping them make their movie better. In the process, we will be helping them become better readers.

This is another way in which the kinds of projects that we do can support the acquisition of traditional literacies. This connection has probably already been made in research about Process Drama.

Notes from A's Class

Vocabulary
Who is putting new words in their heads by 3rd grade?
Make a concerted effort to continue putting new words in their heads. If not, by third of fourth grade, they may look like they have a word recognition problem when really they have a vocabulary problem. A student reading comes to the word "proficient" for the first time. If that word is not already in their head, they won't be able to read it. If they have heard it used before and know what it means, they will be able to figure it out from context.

What: learning the meaning of new words
Why important: Comprehending text; communicating; building self-esteem.
How: be a model (push their vocabulary in spoken comments, comments on papers. To be an effective teacher, you have to make them want to learn. Don't you think if you put new vocabulary into your praise, don't you think they'll want to know what the word means?); continue reading to the students; teach with the why in mind. Teach them morphemes; teach a few a week and their vocabularies will grow exponentially; antebellum and beligerent. Start with words they don't know. Not only does it exponentially increase their vocabulary, it allows them to figure out words they don't know. Spectacles, inspect, spectator. Teach them etymology; history or story of words; how you were named; If your mind doesn't wonder, it will wander. Teach them word play. Word searches are the lowest form of this. Crossword puzzle incorporates semantic, syntactic, and grapho-phonic clues.

Gutiérrez & Orellana 2006, ELL Genres of Difference

Gutiérrez, K. & Orellana, M. (2006). The "Problem" of English language learners: Constructing genres of difference. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 40, no. 4, 502-507.

Essay describing the limitations of many studies of ELL populations that result from methodology common to these studies. The authors describe these studies as a genre, with common characteristics, from participant selection to methods of analysis, typical of its members.

This might be an interesting article for AM's current project.

This article does not relate to genre in children's writing or literature.

Hillocks 2005, Form vs. Content of Writing

Hillocks, G. (2005). The focus on form vs. content in teaching writing. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 40, no. 2, 238-248.


In this essay, George Hillocks (University of Chicago) discusses the "obsession" with teaching form (parts of the paragraph, structure of sentences, elements of style, etc.) to the exclusion of teaching how to create written content from subject matter. Further, Hillocks offers a discussion of research to support the idea that there are more important things about teaching writing than teaching forms.

No information on genre in writing instruction.

Altman 1999, Preface and Chapter 1

Altman, R. (1999). Film/genre. London: British Film Institute Publishing.

Although I may be shifting my focus to genre in literature and writing instruction in the classroom, Rick Altman's book still provides some interesting framing. In his first chapter, Altman walks us through the history of literary genre theory.

Altman suggests that literary genre theory has been historically under-theorized, or maybe theoretically malnourished. He begins by listing the unexamined assumptions that underlie Aristotle's Poetics which are transmitted intact down through the ages.

• Classical Genre Theory
• Aristotle - analyzes works of others to define genre by traits of the work (not effect produced, notes Altman)
  
• Horace - extends Aristotle's analysis into rules to writers
  

• Neoclassical Genre Theory
• Torquato Tasso
• Pierre Corneille
• Nicolas Boileau
• John Dryden
• Alexander Pope
• birth of tragicomedy
• birth of drama, then melodrama
• Nineteenth Century Genre Theory
• Romantic movement - mixing of genres
  
• Friedrich Schlegel - provided theoretical underpinnings to abolition of generic differences
• Stendahl - led the assault
  
• Victor Hugo - led the assault
• establishing new canon
• Ferdinand Brunetiére - brought in evolutionary model of genres
• Twentieth Century Genre Theory
• Benedetto Croce - rejected scientific model and attacked the notion of genre
• Before Croce, the genre theory debate was classic versus romantic; he changed it to genre vs. innovation
• René Wellek and Austin Warren
• genres can be based on inner form or outer form
  
• provided a reasoned theory for establishing the existence and exact borders of a genre
• possible to redraw the generic map
• criticized by Altman for failing to recognize the role of the critic or theorist (I don't know quite what he means by this)
• Northrup Frye
• extended Wellek and Warren
• freed genre definitions of a dependence on tradition
• Tzvetan Todorov
• structuralist
  
• strongly criticized and opposed Frye
• distinguishes between theoretical and historical genres
  
• furthers a move by Welleck and Warren and Frye, to critic-defined genres
• defines genre by effect produced instead of (Aristotlean) reliance on traits of the work
• E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
• genre in the reading process, including all reading (not just literary)
• all understanding starts with the identification of genre; the reader interprets based on the genre. If understanding of genre of a work changes, meaning changes.
• Altman seems worried about Hirsch and Todorov placing too much emphasis on the reader, describing it as a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" effect - using a magic word that unleashes power that can't be controlled. "Once labeled by writers and critics, genres might well fall into the hands of untutored readers or out-of-control audiences." I fail to see the risk.
  

On another note, I'm dying to know the current state of film genre theory, given changes brought about by desktop production and online publication. How does the field deal with the rapid emergence of new forms and the empowerment of "unsanctioned" filmmakers?

Also interesting that Altman studied film genres at the University of Iowa with fellow student Henry Jenkins.

Read for LMM

Stein & Albro 1997 Building complexity and coherence: Children's use of goal-structured knowledge in telling good stories. In M. Bamberg (Ed.), Narrative development: Six approaches (pp. 5-44). Mahweh, NJ: Erlbaum.

I'm interested in reading this to see how it relates to the composition process at the camp.

Wollman-Bonilla 2000, Teaching Science Writing to First Graders

Wollman-Bonilla, J. (2000). Teaching science writing to first graders: Genre learning and recontextualization. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 35, no. 1.

Qualitative study of 4 first graders. Case studies.

1. Research Questions

1. To what extent can science journal writing by 1st graders be characterized as 'science writing'?
2. How do children appropriate an recontextualize the conventions of science writing?
   

2. Subjects, Setting, Context

Two classes of 1st grade students, suburban, majority middle class, majority white school. Classes used Family Message Journals, promoting two way communication between parents and students about classroom content.

3. Procedures (briefly)

Field notes from one hour weekly classroom participant-observations
Interviews with both teachers
Case studies on four students, including 4 sets of parents and all messages written from and to these 4 students
Researcher read and categorized writing into genres within scientific writing based on text structure and lexicogrammar.

4. Findings

Participants appropriated linguistic conventions of scientific texts flexibly and recontextualized genre elements to fit the family journal format. Kids could improvise within a genre to fit audience and situation.

5. Strengths and Weaknesses of Study

Limited sample size
Homogeneity of sample
Little data on teacher behaviors; primary focus on text alone

6. Implications

"The belief that personal ownership and self-expression must be foregrounded in teaching writing to children ignores the larger social context and functions for writing in society. Children, especially those from non-mainstream homes, must learn the mainstream genres of power to gain access to cultural capital in our society." p. 62
"Children become critically literate when they realize that texts are socially constructed, according to genre conventions, to serve specific social functions (Martin, 1998; Rothery, 1996)." p. 62

7. Other Comments
As it relates to genre-specific writing, the author identifies the consistency of the Western scientific community in the conventions of the genre of science writing (p. 36).
Scientific writing is intrinsic to the act of 'doing science'; can't teach science without teaching writing.
Theoretical background section will be especially useful.

Quoted section, from page 38:

Another strand of composition research, rooted in the Australian genre movement, has focused on empowering child writers by introducing them to socially valued genres. Within this school of thought, genres are defined as "social processes... for realizing purposes or goals through language," with language characterized by a particular test structure and lexicogrammar (Rothery, 1989, p. 221). Thus, textual and social perspectives on genre are complementary (Bazerman, 1998; Martin 1998). Genres' social functions are established through their structure and functional grammar (Bazerman, 1997, 1998; Cooper, 1999; Cope & Kalantzis, 1993; Halliday & Martin, 1993; Kamberelis, 1999; Kress, 1999; Martin, 1989). Knowing the right genre to use in a situation and knowing how to use it enhances children's power to communicate in society and participate in academic disciplines (Christie, 1989; Martin, 1989; Rothery, 1989, 1996).

Goes on to discuss differences between child-centered approaches, like whole language, and those who believe children must learn genre-specific writing so that they can gain access to discourses of power. Also discusses tension between the view that genre limits creativity and agency and the view that genre liberates and empowers writers. This whole section is great.

Cites Pappas 1991 for children asked to recreate genre-specific text.


Cites

• Cope and Kalantzis, 1993
• Kamberelis 1999
• Martin 1999
• Pappas 1991
• Pappas & Pettigrew 1998

Narrowing the focus

I like the direction that I'm seeing in Kamberelis 1999 and Wollman-Bonilla 2000 with regards to learning to write genre-specific texts to gain access to discourses of power. I'm interested in extending that thinking to video production.

For this lit review, I may turn my focus more toward this. Maybe my question should be limited to the relationship between genre in children's literature and genre within writing instruction. I'd like to relate it to genre in film, but that may be too ambitious for this semester.

I think for the outline that is due next week, I will try this narrower focus and then see how the semester progresses. This may end up being part of a lit review for another paper.

Okay... one more thing: The Wollman-Bonilla 2000 article relates to the Radio Lab episodes "Tell Me A Story" from 7/29/08 and "Making the Hippo Dance" from 9/9/08. In Wollman-Bonilla, they are teaching kids to approximate scientific discourse (objective tone, present tense verbs, precise language). In Radio Lab, they are talking to scientists about the need to make science accessible to the general public by making it more personal, less cold and removed, more subjective, more story-like. In both cases, the authors are advocating the importance of code-switching. Scientists need to able to relate stories to non-scientists. Non-scientists need to be able to adopt a scientific tone to gain access to science.

Still, Wollman-Bonilla is talking about adopting more than just the trappings of the genre; she talks about the inter-related nature of scientific writing and scientific thinking. Radio Lab isn't advocating an abandonment of orderly, systematic, scientific thinking; they are talking about relating scientific knowledge to non-scientists.

Notes from A's Class

Midterm framework

12 Identification

• Example - Consonant digraphs - two letters, one sound
• sh, ch
  

3-4 Discussion questions (Major topics so far)
Format - What, Why, and How

• Inter-relatedness of the Language Arts
• Reading Process - CLR
• Emergent Readers
• Word Recognition
• Fluency
• Vocabulary
  

Multiple choice
New material
Magnifying glasses - word detectives - theme
Kids physically manipulating paper letters
Oral cloze
Kids were having fun

With a worksheet, the goal is just to get it done. The kids aren't having fun. Attitude is a choice. What you choose to do will affect their attitudes. If you don't make learning fun, you won't enjoy teaching.

Read-Write-Think lesson on learning sight words. Semantic clues first, then graphophonic clues, picture of a watermelon. Review entire lesson.

Word recognition - Runny Babbit example
Use with 3rd or 4th grade.
Word recognition skills are learned, shifting to comprehension.

Fluency is the bridge between word recognition and comprehension. To get from word recognition to comprehension, you need to become fluent.

First part is reading with flow - correct pitch, juncture, and intonation.
Why important? I pause when I teach. I'm trying to get knowledge from my head to your head. It's more likely to get there if I speak with pitch, juncture, and intonation. Why important? It causes the words on the page to come alive in the reader's head. The opposite of fluency is word-by-word reading. When a child reads like that, the words are not going to his head. If the words don't come alive, there's no comprehension, no mental stimulation, no enjoyment. If you hate reading, your thoughts go to, 'how many pages do i have left?' We have to create this fluency bridge by grade 2, definitely grade 3.

To make sure kids do well on FCAT, schools work on comprehension. They should be checking fluency. Without fluency, you're checking on the other side of the bridge, they aren't there yet.

How do you make certain that the kids are fluent?


Echo reading (works on pitch, juncture, and intonation)
Very easy to see which aren't fluent. One thing to do is echo reading. One problem is word-by-word readers are grouped together, so all their models are non-fluent, and they weren't read to as kids. You become a good role model reader for them. May need to start by teaching them what an echo is.

5 Chinese Brothers, example of Echo reading. Kids enjoy imitating intonation, even accent, etc.

Model examples - mannequin, model home, HGTV

Start off with phrases. When they have the book in front of them, use entire sentences. Don't let memory become a part of it; make sure they have the text.

Speeches - from a teleprompter. That's reading. They have a speech coach. Gestures.

Buddy Reading -

• with friend
• self-select book
• self-select location
• make sure they aren't 2 non-fluent readers

Stop and Go Reading (working on juncture)
modeling stop and go reading
When you get to any type of punctuation, the next person starts reading. Kids have to focus and pay attention throughout.

With Round Robin reading, kids figure out which paragraph is theirs, then tune out. This is not a good strategy. You need to be a thinker. If it's a bad strategy, stop it. Don't use it.
Oral cloze
Let a student read and leave one word out, let the other students fill in the missing word.
When a reader begins to make more use of syntactic and semantic clues, they become more fluent.

Theme for each month
Logo contest. Logo goes on a bookmark. On the bookmark, put information for parents on how to build fluency, these methods.

NIM - neurological impress method Sit close behind, read aloud together, a little bit faster. Read into their right ear, theoretically impressing the left side of their brain.

Riddles and Jokes Telling a joke requires good delivery, good pitch, juncture, intonation. Have a theme

Vocabulary
Beethoven Lives Upstairs by Barbara Nichol
I told you never to try to teach them words that weren't already in their heads. So you need to put more words in their heads, so that you can teach them those words.
Period book. Timelines. Clothes they wore, vintage pictures. Writing with a feather.
This book is written in the form of letters from Christoph to his uncle, and responses. You could be teaching letter writing. Use compare/contrast on words that are not sight words. Most are. Once they get to the end of the letter, they want to hear the response.
As you go up in age, the words don't get that much more difficult. If they have the strategies, they can read these words.
Vocabulary - Learning the meaning of new words
Humerus - funny bone - acted out, made it come to life
Teaching and learning should make sense. If you can't comprehend,

In life, a good vocabulary helps you to accurately communicate with people. The best single indicator of someone's intelligence is their vocabulary. V. is important to being able to express yourself. Works in receptive and expressive. Works as a ceiling in many occupations. Can't get higher because they like the skills to communicate.

How do you teach vocabulary?
What doesn't work - get a list of words on Monday, look up the definition, write it in a sentence, test on Friday. If you had twenty words a week and did it for ten years, maybe you get 6000 words? You learned 20,000 words by a much better method and you probably don't remember learning them. By the time you were five, you learned those words by your parents talking to you. The best way to make sure that your students have healthy, robust, rich vocabularies? By purposely infusing these words into your speech with children. (Esoteric information is that which is known by only a few.) If you teach 3rd grade, go look at books written for 4th and 5th and 6th grade. Start using those words in your speech.

Enthusiastic Model

Teach morphemic analysis - get a list of Latin and Greek roots. Teach in the context of a word that they already know. When you're riding a bike, you put your feet on the PEDals. PED = feet. PEDestrian. BiPED is an animal that walks on 2 legs. If you want your camera to stay steady, use a triPOD. Cap on your head, CAPtion is the heading of a picture, CAPtain is the head of the team.

Wordplay - let them play with words. What do these words have in common? star, evil, peek, pals, now. Can you find any other words that can be read backwards?
palindromes - racecar
acronyms
Know what they are, give examples.
Wordplay makes them feel smart. They want to share and learn more.





The Reading Teacher's Book of Lists by Edward Fry
I did not say you stole my red bandana.

Shine & Roser, 1999

Shine, S. & Roser, N. (1999). The role of genre in preschoolers' response to picture books. Research in the Teaching of English, 34, 197-251.

This is qualitative study describing the ways in which a small group of preschoolers responded to picture books of different genres. It doesn't relate to my lit review because it does not involve writing. However some references may be helpful:

Devitt, 1993
Dyson, 1999 (Coach Bombay)
Kamberelis 1999
Martin, 1993a
Martin, 1993b
Miller, 1984
Pappas & Pettegrew, 1998
Russell, 1997 (this one looks especially promising)

Dyson, 1999

Dyson, A. (1999). Coach Bombay's Kids Learn to Write: Children's Appropriation of Media Material for School Literacy. Research in the Teaching of English, 33, 367-402.

Year-long ethnographic study of an urban first grade classroom.

I'd like to read this later.

Miles Davis on Knowledge and Performance

"For example, the great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis is known to have told his band members: 'You need to know your horn, know the chords, know all the tunes. Then you forget about all that and just play' (Sanjek 1990, p. 411)."


Kamberelis, 1999
Genre Development and Learning

I realize this is a lot of layers of quoting. I should track down the original source of the quote, especially given the vague wording of "known to have".

Still, great quote. I think it applies to what we teach at camp. They need to know the camera angles, shots, framing, the techniques of editing, lighting, audio. Then they need to forget about all that and tell a story.

Kamberelis 1999 - Genre development

Kamberelis, G. (1999). Genre development and learning: Children writing stories, science reports, and poems. Research in the Teaching of English, vol. 33, no. 4. pp. 403-
460. Urbana, IL: NCTE.

This study is an exploration of children's working knowledge of narrative, scientific, and poetic genres.

1. Research Questions

1. What differences in knowledge of genre are demonstrated in text production of K-2 students?

2. What do their texts and discourses about their texts reveal about how their knowledge of genre develops?

Theoretical frame: Bourdieu's sociology, social semiotics, critical language awareness, Sydney School text linguistics, socio-cultural-historical approaches to literacy

2. Subjects, Setting, Context

54 K-2 students

3. Procedures (briefly)

54 K-2 students wrote samples in each of the 3 genres and provided oral justifications for why their work was representative of the genre. Texts were coded for presence or absence of markers of each genre. He chose markers that were at the text or sentence (micro) level and markers that were at the document (macro) level. He chose markers that were easily differentiated between the genres being studied. He chose those genres because they are the most common studied and produced in elementary school.
Quantitative study. MANOVA, ANOVA

4. Findings

• More experience with narrative than the other genres.
• More experience with macro-level markers than micro-level markers

5. Strengths and Weaknesses of Study

Small sample size
homogeneity of sample
methods of analysis (K students read their pieces to him)
no random sampling
structure of experiment could influence performance of participants

6. Implications

• Kids develop "differentiated and flexible repertoires" of genres

Comparing findings with other studies

• tasks are a significant factor in how kids demonstrate genre knowledge
• tasks can scaffold genre knowledge

The author's implications for pedagogy involve warnings that an over-representation of narrative texts in kids' reading limits kids' ability to comprehend and to write in other genres. He suggests that children need exposure to a greater variety of genre texts. While these implications may be true, I don't think they are adequately supported by the data from this study.

7. Other Comments

Reread this study for firmer grounding of theoretical frames.

"Each genre possesses definite principles of selection, definite forms for seeing and conceptualizing reality, and a definite scope and depth of penetration... One might say that human consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality. A given consciousness is richer or poorer in genres, depending on its ideological environment...The process of seeing and conceptualizing reality must not be severed from the process of embodying it in the forms of a particular genre... Thus, the reality of the genre and the reality accessible to the genre are organically related."
Bakhtin & Medvedev, 1985, pp. 131-135, as quoted on p. 403.

Cites Luke, Focucault, Vygotsky

Other genre studies:
Hicks, 1990
Langer 1986
Newkirk, 1989
Pappas, 1993
Sowers, 1985
Zecker, 1996
Kroll, 1990
Scribner & Cole, 1981


Bakhtin, M. (1986). Speech genres and other late essays (V.W. McGee, Trans.). Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

Berkenkotter, C. & Huckin, T. (1993). Rethinking genre from a sociocognitive perspective. Written Communication, 10, 475-509.

Chapman, M. (1994). The emergence of genres: Some findings from an examination of first grade writing. Written Communication, 11, 348-380.

Chapman, M. (1995). The sociocognitive construction of written genres in first grade. Research in the Teaching of English, 29, 164-194.

Derrida, J. (1980). The law of genre. Critical Inquiry, 7, 55-81.

These cited works also mention genre:
Coe 1994
Cope and Kalantzis, 1993
Fowler 1982
Freedman 1987
Freedman & Medway 1994a
Freedman & Medway 1994b
Hanks, 1987
Hicks 1990
Kamberelis, 1995a
Kamberelis & Bovino, 1999 in press
Kress, 1993
Pappas, 1993
Rosmarin 1985
Swales, 1990
Yates & Orlikowski 1992 * involves genre, communication, and media

Basic Plots

I had a dream last night that led me to a question about recycling basic plots in TV shows. When I woke up and thought about it a little, it led me to a Google search for "100 basic television plot lines". This led me to this blog entry and subsequently to Hatch's Plot Bank.

HPB could be used to develop a tool for classroom creative writing and for camp scriptwriting.
Some of the plots listed in it wouldn't be appropriate for kids, so a derivative would have to be developed.


The blog entry suggests that there is no definitive list of TV plots, but that several people have versions of it, including:

20 Master Plots (And How to Build Them) by Ronald B Tobias

1. Quest
2. Adventure
3. Pursuit
4. Rescue
5. Escape
6. Revenge
7. The Riddle
8. Rivalry
9. Underdog
10. Temptation
11. Metamorphosis
12. Transformation
13. Maturation
14. Love
15. Forbidden Love
16. Sacrifice
17. Discovery
18. Wretched Excess
19. Ascension
20. Descension

6 stories/plots according to Stephen King (From Secret Window, Secret Garden -
Four Past Midnight)

1. Success
2. Failure
3. Love and Loss
4. Revenge
5. Mistaken Identity
6. The search for a higher power, be it God or the Devil.

Literary Conflicts

1. Person vs. Self
2. Person vs. Person
3. Person vs. Society
4. Person vs. Nature/Environment
5. Person vs. Supernatural
6. Person vs. Machine/Technology

Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots

1. Overcoming the Monster
2. Rags to Riches
3. The Quest
4. Voyage and Return
5. Comedy
6. Tragedy
7. Rebirth

Georges Polti's list of 36 is also mentioned. More on this later.

Recommended Book

Dr. S recommended this book for all qual researchers:

Qualitative Research and Evaluation Methods By Michael Quinn Patton

Notes from A's Class

structural analysis

• syllabication
• prefixes and suffixes
• compound words
• contractions

compare/contrast
re|cent
cor|ner
mo|ment

word recognition

• sight
• phonics
• structural analysis
• context clues

Ex. Teaching prefix sub
Start by brainstorming words that begin with sub

game with compound words
act out each part of the word
1 finger for first part
2 fingers for second part
sidewalk, runway

Teaching contractions
You are teaching them the role that the apostrophe plays in a word.
(Get the words out of the kids)
Do you have a million dollars?
I do not.
Oh, you speak so well. [Write it down.] You said 'do not'. Some of us are lazier than that. We say... [class answers 'don't']
Look at these two words.
How many letters are in the first word? How many are in the second? Which letter is missing? That's right, so that's where you put the apostrophe.

Practice getting words out of your friends' heads so that you can do it in front of kids.

Figure out what matters; the rest does not make a difference.

Reading levels

• independent level - easy reading; reader knows the words
  
• instructional level - 95/100 or 95% words read correctly
  
• frustration level - more than 5 words wrong out of 100; less than 70% on comprehension questions

If a kid is always taught at their frustration level, they aren't getting any better. A 1st grade kid taught at 1st grade level, when that's his frustration level, isn't going to progress.
All of the reading you do for pleasure is at your independent level. That's the biggest problem in reading in schools today; not necessarily the method. All kids should be taught at their instructional level.

Sharing pattern books.

Keep the kids engaged and you won't have behavior problems.
When you are planning lessons, keep the kids in mind. What are the kids doing at each part? What are they thinking?

Study now for the midterm.
Lesson plan due next week.

Genre Research Process So Far

For this lit review, I'm researching two main bodies of work:

1. genre as it pertains to literature and writing in school, and
   
2. genre as it pertains to films and filmmaking

To begin a search for published research in the first category, I manually searched article titles for the past ten years (1999-2008) of Reading Research Quarterly (RRQ) for references to genre. I then searched the same time period in Research in the Teaching of English (RTE). I chose the ten year span because I wanted to capture the most recent research on this topic. I plan to review the references in the articles captured through this search to identify seminal pieces from before the ten year period. RRQ and RTE are top tier education research journals and should contain references to other work that will pertain.

To begin a search on the second category, I spoke to the research librarian for education at the USF library. We tried several searches, refining down to a search using Google Scholar (Advanced: contains "genre" AND exact phrase "film studies", 1999-2008). One of the articles produced from that search is Mittell 2001, published in Cinema Journal. That article referenced a book, Film/Genre by Rick Altman, which Mittell identifies as the key work done in examining genre as a discursive practice. Mittell also refers to Jane Feuer's essay in Channels of Discourse as the "most comprehensive discussion of television genre theory".


From here, I will move forward from Mittell 2001 to see what subsequent works cite him and return to the original search results. I also may do a title search, similar to those done for RRQ and RTE, in Cinema Journal and another journal suggested by the earlier search results. I also have to continue tracking down resources for the literature/writing side of the lit review.

Defining Questions of Genre

At summer camp, we teach a lot of different aspects of film-making, and story-telling in general. One that I've considered but haven't yet included in any serious way is genre. I have a sense that genre is important in the creation and viewing of mainstream movies and that a better understanding of genre will help the kids in their productions. One group this summer made a classic heist movie. It occurred to me at the time, but I never had the opportunity to talk to them in any detail about this. Understanding that they were working within an established genre might have helped them make creative choices and might have given them a better understanding of how that particular kind of story works. A lot of movies made at the camp would fall into a horror or horror/comedy genre. Others fit the action/adventure genre. Many combine one genre with elements of parody, like the techniques seen in "Scary Movie", "Epic Movie", "Another Teen Movie", etc.

The second formative moment comes from an interview with one of the campers at the end of the week. In response to a question about making movies in school, he said that they don't make movies in school. Then he corrected, "well, unless it's like, a documentary."

Filmmaking constitutes a literacy skill that is newly accessible through digital video and computers. As filmmaking moves into schools, so far it takes the form of documentary films. Video is allowed, if you are creating a documentary about photosynthesis or the Civil War or some other content-area, documentary topic. That's great, but what about narrative?

Documentary filmmaking is analogous to expository writing. So, the analog to narrative filmmaking in the classroom would be narrative writing or creative writing. If we teach kids to write stories, why don't we teach them to tell stories with film? More to the point, why should we and how do we?

I began with the following questions and rationale:

Title: Genre in Film and Genre in the Classroom

Questions
What models of genre are used in the classroom with regards to reading? With regards to writing? What models of genre exist in the field of film studies? How are classroom deployments of genre similar to narrative film deployments of genre? How are they different? What concepts about filmic genre may be successfully ported over to classroom practice?

Rationale
Video production is becoming an accepted form for student productive behavior in the classroom. So far, most of that student-produced work takes the form of documentaries, i.e. a movie about the water cycle, a video report about Martin Luther King, Jr.

If video production is going to be an accepted form of literate production in the classroom, then the range of acceptable student work needs to expand to include narrative film production. If that is the case, classroom teachers need a framework to understand, teach, and evaluate narrative film production. Part of that framework involves genre.

A rich body of research and tradition of classroom practice involves the use of genre in literature and in writing. Genre is also a well-established construct in the field of film production. Finding the ways in which film genre and literature genre coincide and the ways in which they conflict is the first step in bringing a filmic understanding of genre into the classroom.

After a discussion with Dr. S about these topics, I narrowed the focus of my questions to look at two processes of composition and their models:

How is genre enacted in literature as a model for the writing process?
How is genre enacted in film as a model for the filmmaking process?

More Notes on Mittell

Mittell, J. (2001). A cultural approach to television genre theory. Cinema Journal 40, No. 3, pp. 3-24.

For my paper, I may need to look at film and television genre separately. I want to keep a value structure for importing ideas into the classroom that includes usefulness and practicality.

"Even the most comprehensive discussion of television genre theory, Jane Feuer's essay in Channels of Discourse, ultimately concludes that genre analysis does not work as well as a paradigm for television as it has for film or literature."

Mittell identifies this essay as a first step toward a more comprehensive theory of genre for television. I need to see

1. what follows this work by him
2. and what other work cites this essay
   

Mittell identifies three traditional approaches to genre analysis:

1. definitional - looking for core elements
2. interpretation through a theoretical lens
3. historical - looking at how genres shift over time, "evolutionary dynamics"

He locates one main weakness in most genre analysis as the view of genre as a "textual attribute", a "component of text". Instead, he argues persuasively that genre is not intrinsic to texts, but that it is dependent upon intertextual connections. "Genres emerge only from the intertextual relations between multiple texts, resulting in a common category." He gives many examples, one being "The Great Train Robbery", which was originally classified as a crime film, and years later as a western. The text did not change, but the cultural discourse did and so the genre definitions shifted. He also notes that only some characteristics are used to define genre, for instance, we don't make generic differentiations between TV shows set in different cities, but we do differentiate between shows set in hospitals versus those set in police stations. We cannot understand genre by looking at sh0ws in isolation; we must look at the entire community that creates the genre - including the TV industry, fans, critics, etc. "...(T)exts themselves are insufficient to understand how genres are created, merge, evolve, or disappear. We need to look outside the texts to locate the range of sites in which genres operate, change, proliferate, and die out." (p. 7)

Genres are not timeless and unchanging. "We need to look beyond the text a the locus for genre and instead locate genres within the complex interrelations among texts, industries, audiences, and historical contexts." (p. 7) Analyzing texts is necessary, but insufficient for understanding genre.

Mittell brings in Foucault's "discursive practices" and situates this essay theoretically in line with poststructuralism.

Mittell says that to analyze genre, we need to look at "what audiences and industries say about genres, what terms and definitions circulate around any given instance of genre, and how specific cultural concepts are linked to particular genres." (p. 8) He advocates decentering the text. Instead of seeing the text as a stable object, he sees texts as "sites of discursive practice". (p. 9). He mentions mapping generic discourses. He also brings social situation and power into the discussion.

Mittell acknowledges previous work on genre as a discursive process and cites Rick Altman's book Film/Genre as the key work, described as his "influential textualist semantic/syntactic theory of genre". Mittell contrasts his work with Altman's, saying that Altman still remains too bounded by the text.

"Altman convincingly argues that the film industry promotes multiple genres around any single movie to maximize audience appeals." (p. 10). I need to look for this specifically in Altman's book. This is important to understanding genre, I think. It's also interesting to consider this in light of the parody videos on YouTube, like "Scary Mary", that repackage familiar movies in different genres.


"... genres work as discursive clusters..." p. 11

Mittell's definition of genre:

"... genres are categorical clusters of discursive processes that transect texts via their cultural interactions with industries, audiences, and broader contexts."

Mittell gives a case study in genre analysis using Michael Jackson's music videos, Billie Jean, Beat It, and Thriller. He outlines how traditional approaches might look at the texts, then how he proposes genre should be examined. In his example, he identifies many cultural influences on the work that are essential and are unaccounted for in any examination of genre that stops at the boundaries of the text.

Mittell concludes with five principles of cultural genre analysis:

1. Genre analysis should be specific to the medium, i.e. don't use film genre theory for TV
2. Genre studies must balance between the general and the specific.
3. History of genre should take discourses into account.
4. Genres have to be understood by looking at how they tie into to the larger culture.
5. Genres have to be understood within hierarchies of power within culture.
   

Class notes- book talk

Class notes on book talk:

Language and Control in Children's Literature by Murray Knowles and Kirsten Malmkjaer

Examines how adults teach culture to children through children's literature

Identifies the mechanisms of control, such as dissimulation, euphemism, unification, fragmentation, reification, 

"Suspension of dissent", analogous to suspension of disbelief

Leech and Short, 1981

I wonder about the theoretical framework of this book.

-critical linguistics

Does it take a position on the use of language in children's books to spread culture?

In discussion, Dr. L recommends Shirley Brice Heath's Ways With Words (originally 1983).

Notes on Mittell 2001 A Cultural Approach to TV Genre Theory

Mittell, J. (2001). A cultural approach to television genre theory. Cinema Journal 40, No. 3, pp. 3-24.

This is a theoretical essay that advocates a cultural approach to genre theory as it applies to television.

"Industries rely on genres in producing programs... self-definition... scheduling... Audiences use genres to organize fan practices... personal preferences, and everyday conversations and viewing practices." p. 3

"Importing genre theories into television studies without significant revision creates many difficulties when accounting for the specifics of the medium." p. 3

He's talking about the inadequacy of importing film genre theory into television; the same hold for importing any media studies genre theories into classroom video practice.

Online Reading

Food for thought:

Mark Bauerlein's essay, "Online Literacy Is a Lesser Kind" from the chronicle of higher education.
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i04/04b01001.htm

Will Richardson's blog entry, "Reading Online is Not Reading On Paper"
http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/reading-online-is-not-reading-on-paper/

Mark Federman's essay, "Why Johnny And Janey Can't Read, And Why Mr. And Ms. Smith Can't Teach: The challenge of multiple media literacies in a tumultuous time
http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/WhyJohnnyandJaneyCantRead.pdf

Note Will Richardson's subsequent blog post where he clarifies some points:
http://weblogg-ed.com/2008/color-me-embarrassed/

None of this seems to take into account the really interesting work being done by the UConn New Literacies people:
http://www.newliteracies.uconn.edu/

Notes on A's class

Umbrella example - difference between looking and focusing

Balancing umbrella

Using die mind reading trick

I'm showing you that it's all about focus.

You've got to get the students impressed with their mental capabilities. Dots are called pips.

Make a configuration of four pips. Now put a fifth pip. Raise your hand if put that fifth dot somewhere other than the middle.

quincunx

spell it for them

How many letters?

How many syllables?

Magic fingers, spell it in the air.

If you have three babies, you have _

If you have four babies, you have _

If you have five babies, you have _

quin - means five.

What letter does it start with ?

WHat's next?

How can you make a u into an n?

How many n's were in it? How many u's are in it?

What letters dropped out?

Make students pay attention to the distinctive features of a word.

I'm forcing you to pay attention; i'm not telling you. Tellers belong in banks. You are a teacher. You are activating their minds. Making them do things with it in their heads.

To teach a word by sight, the cardinal principle is this:

Never teach a child to read a word that is not already in the child's head.

What's teh first thing I did with quincunx? I made sure that you knew what it was. Next, I forced you to pay attention to its distinctive features. Use as many of the modalities as possible. Then there needs to be reinforcement.

Can you think of 3 or 4 or 5 things that I did to do that? Write them down.

What letter am I covering up?

What else? I could cut the letters up. Ask repeating letters.

Can you use design on your paper to make an x by connecting dots? And that's the last letter in the word.

The eyes looking is not mental. You need their minds engaged.

Reinforcement can be Word Wall, Puzzle, games (remember games you played as a child - go fish, etc.).

Word recognition

There is no one way. We're all different.

Sight words - What and why -  Fry, Dolch, high-frequency word list. These 300 words make up 65 - 66% of the words you will ever need to read. First 100 words, 1st grade. 2nd hundred, 2nd grade. 3rd hundred, 3rd grade. These basic sight words should be mastered by third grade. No reason for every third grader not to know these words. A word a day is not difficult. But, if you don't have any type of plan, it won't get accomplished. Kids will get out of third grade not knowing these words. Make a plan. Get with the other teachers. Make sure that first grade teachers make sure all kids know these 100 words. 

Can you see all the names on a spreadsheet? Can you see all the words listed off? Can you see making small groups for activity so that you can check off on that spreadsheet?

Put the words on cards. Shuffle the cards. Make it a game. Flip a card. If you know the word, you get the card. If not, it's mine. What's the score? It's simple. It's a game. And when I'm done, I have all of the cards I know I need to work on.

Think about schools. It's reading time, take out your books. And they do lessons, and they're nice lessons, but at the end of the day, are you absolutely sure that your kids have learned?

Make sure that you teach them:

• They are common. (highlighter, newspaper activity)
  
• Many of them are phonetically irregular. (home, raid - rules of phonics. o in come, a in said - phonetically irregular). How many of you have a friend named Jennifer? Do you ever call her Jen? How about Elizabeth? Liz? A long vowel is long because it takes longer to say an a than it takes to say a short vowel. That's why we call them long vowels. Now... we are basically lazy. Over the years we have taken words that have long vowels and we have shortened them. We are lazy. The most frequently used words tend to be irregular because we have shortened them. Write the word TOME. It's a big book. How often do you use the word TOME. Infrequent, so it kept the long sound. How about SOME? We use that all the time, so it's shortened vowel sound.
• Allows them to make use of context clues.

Can you teach any word by sight? Yes. I taught you.

What? Why? How? Study by that.

Phonics

What is it? phoneme-grapheme correspondence

Phoneme - smallest unit of sound

Grapheme - smallest unit of written text

You are putting a sound to a letter.

Here's the problem: How many letters do we have? 26. It would be easy if we had one to one, but in English, we have 44 sounds. That's why English is hard to learn. 

Kids - learning ABCs. You know the word alphabet. Have you made the connection that the word alphabet is from the Greek letters for a and b.

Why do we teach phonics? 

1. Our language is phonetic. Some aren't.
   
2. It's an independent means for students to learn words.
   

We have 26 letters, divided into vowels and consonants. What is a vowel? Has to do with the way we make the sound. 

a, e, i, o, u, sometimes y, w

Open your mouth. Let's do long a to short a, all the way down to u.

Now let's do it with consonants. Starting with B. Let's go. Did you keep your mouth open? You were supposed to keep it open.

A vowel is a sound produced by an unobstructed flow of air. 

What is a consonant?

Now I want you to write down what a consonant is. You're smart now.

Now what is it?

A consonant is a sound produced by an obstructed flow of air.

What are these obstructions? l sound, tongue and roof of mouth, th = tongue and teeth

Season after Fall = winter. Mouth is closed, w is a consonant.

White stuff that falls during winter up north = snow; mouth is open, it's a vowel.

Yellow, y is a consonant.

By, y is a vowel.

Every syllable must have a vowel sound. Otherwise, nothing would come out of your mouth. The vowels allow the sound to come out.

Spelling test: who can spell rhythm. There are two syllables, two vowel sounds, even though only one vowel.

Remember when you learned how to tell when to add s and when to add es to make something plural.

tax

Plural is taxes, two syllables.

key

Plural is keys, one syllable, no e

Build grapheme tree

Show them GHOTI

Between the lions

Phonogram 

What? a unit of sound made up of an onset and a rime. Also called word families.

Why?

1. When you learn one, you learn many
   
2. It circumvents the need to teach the vowel rules.
   
3. It's fun. They are rhymes. The brain is wired to enjoy rhymes.
   

Game - word family, win - lose - or draw

dice, mice, slice, rice

Yall are much happier now than when we were talking about digraphs and diphthongs. Diphthongs don't do it for you. You like phonograms.

There are rules of phonics but we don't use them. Why do we insist that kids learn them?

ab is a phonogram. If I have ab, I can have slab, stab, blab, grab, tab, nab, crab, dab... when you learn one word, you learn 10-15 other words.

ack gives us back, flack, track, stack, sack, tack... it takes us pretty far, so teach it.

five - hive, live, dive, thrive, strive, arrive, jive

bed - fed, Ted, red, shred, shed, bled, not dead or tread (Don't confuse them by using words that aren't in the word family)

Two weeks from today, word recognition lesson due. Easiest thing: a phonic element. Mini-lesson, small group. You could do the BL blend. You could do a phonogram, like a ake word family. 

First, select the element you are going to teach.

Second, come up with words that contain that element.

Third, from those words, choose one as a theme word. (For instance, you are teaching TR blends, may choose the word TRAIN. That gives you a theme. Can't you see a train going in a tunnel? It makes your lesson more interesting - spices it up.

Fourth, get the words that I want to teach from the students heads. (Remember, never teach them a word they don't already have in their heads.)

Fifth, get the students to determine what they have in common.

Sixth, bring in other BL words. Let them see that they all sound the same.

Seventh, a game or activity to reinforce it. 

Example, big blazer velcro words to it. Or blue blanket, they reach under and feel things under it, maybe a block. Think about universals to get their attention. 

Next week, structural analysis, context clues, get you ready for lesson due in 2 weeks.

Structural analysis

Context clues - look at all the words around it, figuring out what the unknown word is.

Rosenblatt Chapter 6

In the space of a few pages in chapter six, Rosenblatt has touched on so many themes I've been working through over the past few semesters. Chapter 6 starts with some observations about how much the world has changed, which seem dated. Eventually, she comes to a discussion of science and the artificial divide between literature/the humanites and science. She's on the other side of the wall from Krulwich. He says science is poorer without story. She says the study of literature is poorer without science, and that science has gotten a bum rap about being necessarily dry and unfeeling. She criticizes the adoption of physics as a model for social sciences. She criticizes an over-reliance on behaviorism.

She also talks about art and the role of the artist in communication.

She also talks about the inescapable subjectivity of research and the need for researchers to interrogate their own cultural biases and agendas.

Complexity

On a recent mini-episode of Radio Lab, Robert Krulwich presented a recent speech at Cal-tech. He implored the audience of future scientists to talk about science to the non-scientists in their lives. He told the story of Newton who published his most important work in the most dense, academic language possible. Newton, according to Krulwich, did this intentionally to eliminate the need to talk to non-scientists about his work. He didn't want to be bothered by questions from people who weren't working on his level. Krulwich contrasts this approach with that of Galileo, who certainly could have chosen to publish his work showing that the sun, rather than the Earth, was at the center of the solar system in scholarly Latin. Instead Galileo chose to put his ideas in a story about friends on a vacation, discussing theories. And he wrote it in Italian so that everyone could understand what he was saying. He wanted to reach a wide audience. He succeeded, and, of course, was placed under house arrest and called a heretic for his ideas.

So the other day, I read a piece by Patti Lather and I found it very difficult to comprehend. On the second reading, I started to get it and then got the feeling that after a few more readings and more work, it would start to become more clear to me. This work is full of dense terminology with complex meanings that have to be painstakingly unpacked before beginning to make sense. For Lather, the payoff is there. When I put in the work, I got a lot out of it. My colleagues are all big fans of Lather, and J explained that Lather uses that language to limit her audience. "If you want to understand what I have to say, you're going to have to work for it", she seems to be saying.

Lather is being like Newton and I think that this question of representation must be a common, if not universal, one for scholars. Do I want to be understood by the masses? Or by the elite few who have the intellect or the patience?

It's a question of accessibility. The question exists for artists too and I wonder if it is the same question. Sondheim, for instance, is difficult at first. He's not going for "easy" and he's not going for "common". But I love Sondheim's work and it's not because his work is difficult. Once you get your brain around it, there is beauty in the complexity of his use of language and music. I don't think his motivation is like Newton's. Or maybe it is. Maybe Krulwich is selling Newton short. Maybe Newton wasn't willing to compromise his vision to make it more easily comprehensible. Saying something using different words is saying something different.

This also reminds me of a classic Radio Lab episode that included a story about the public reaction to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. When it was first performed, the music was so difficult, radical, so unlike anything that had come before that there was a literal riot at its debut. One year later, it was met with accolades, and within a few decades it was so non-radical that it was included in the score of Disney's Fantasia. In that episode, Jad and Robert explain that our brains are incredibly good at finding patterns and that music is all about patterns. Given this, something that initially sounds shocking will always eventually sound normal. Look at the initial establishment reaction to jazz, to rock, to punk, to metal, to anything. Initially, people get upset, but eventually our brains tame the material and we "get" it.

Is the same true with non-musical ideas? If I read Einstein enough, will my brain work it out? If so, maybe we just don't spend enough time dwelling on scientific concepts for our brains to work them out.

I don't know, but I'd love to ask a scientist and a composer to have a conversation about it.

Notes on Leander and Rowe 2006 Rhizomatic

Mapping Literacy Spaces in Motion: A Rhizomatic Analysis of a Classroom Literacy Performance
Kevin M. Leander and Deborah Wells Rowe
Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec. 2006), pp. 428-460
International Reading Association
Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4151813 on 9/14/08.

This paper outlines an alternative way to describe and evaluate literacy performances in the classroom - rhizomatic analysis.

1. Research Questions
In this article, Leander and Rowe are exploring alternative ways of conceptualizing literacy practice. Looking at literacy in a representative way emphasizes stability and continuity. They posit that literacy is much more interactive, fluid, and creative than can be captured in a traditional representation. To this end, they draw upon Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) conception of rhizomatic analysis and use it to analyze a single literacy performance.

2. Subjects, Setting, Context
The researchers analyzed video recordings from a large collection of recordings of classroom performances. They sought methods of representing what they found.


Other Comments
A performance can be mapped and would resemble a map of a large root system. There are larger roots which seem to signify some orderly organization and some segmentation. Then there are many other roots that shoot off in seemingly random directions, criss-crossing and providing multiple points of departure. If this is applied to a classroom literacy performance, lines of segmentarity are those that seem to carry the idea of structure (like the introduction, following an outline, anything that is conventional and predictable) and lines of flight are the many criss-crossing other roots.
Rhizomatic analysis is primarily concerned with the movement of ideas and the interaction of concepts and bodies, not in defining and organizing meaning.

Rhizomes in this context are an analogy to rhizomes in nature. Rhizomatic relations are seen in roots, particularly things like crabgrass that grow in every direction at once. They are contrasted with arborescent, or tree-like, relations that are hierarchical.

Key Concepts
multiplicity
connection
heterogeneity
asignifying ruptures
lines of flight
lines of segmentarity
assemblage
deterritorialization

Notes on Marsh 2006, Pop Culture in the Literacy Curriculum

Popular culture in the literacy curriculum: A Bourdieuan analysis
Jackie Marsh
University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England

Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2 (Apr. - Jun. 2006), pp. 160-174
Published by International Reading Association
Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/pss/4151728 on 9/14/08.
----

1. Research Questions
1) "What are the beliefs and practices
of preservice teachers with regard to the use of popular-culture and media texts in the primary literacy curriculum?"
2) "How do structural and agentic elements shape the dynamic between these beliefs and practices?"

2. Subjects, Setting, Context
This longitudinal study looked at the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of preservice teachers in regards to the inclusion of pop culture in the literacy curriculum. Marsh uses a theoretical lens based on the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to examine how the agency of the teachers was limited by the institutional stance on pop culture.
18 teacher education students were interviewed over the course of their 3 year program. Responses of 3 students were analyzed.

3. Procedures (briefly)
Group and individual interviews were conducted. Transcripts were coded using inductive coding. Validity was enhanced by having dyads of students independently code samples. The coded data were then organized into concepts.

4. Findings
1) Student teachers may be excited about the idea of incorporating popular culture texts into the classroom, but they are pressured to conform to norms of the school structure and not include these texts.
2) Teachers capitulate to the values of the structure that has become habitus for them and that is reinforced throughout.

5. Strengths and Weaknesses of Study
All of the data are based on self-report from the participants. Although member checks were performed, this remains the strongest limitation of the study.

6. Implications
More work needs to be done on the inclusion of popular culture texts in the classroom. There seems to be a disconnect between the vision the field of education has about what are appropriate texts for children and the actual texts that are present in the lives of children outside of school today.

7. Other Comments
Bourdieu believed that structures, such as a school curriculum, impose the sociocultural values of one unfairly advantaged group over all other groups in a society and that individuals within such a system can comply (passively or actively) or resist the reconstruction of the dominant value system.

In Marsh's section titled "Restricted beliefs and practices", the author discusses teacher concerns about the inclusion of popular culture texts in the classroom because of what is perceived as non-age-appropriate content. That section also discusses teacher anxiety over technological innovation and invokes the Freudian concept of the "uncanny" to explain this unease. This section applies to the tension that the counselors and I experience during the summer camp because of the inclusion of popular culture texts.

Notes on Zines for Social Justice

Zines for Social Justice: Adolescent Girls Writing on Their Own
Barbara J. Guzzetti and Margaret Gamboa
Reading Research Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 2004), pp. 408-436
Published by: International Reading Association
Retrieved electronically on 9/13/08 from http://www.jstor.org/stable/4151741

This is an important study for our work with Fast Literacies because of its theoretical framework and research design. It contributes to broadening understandings of the relationship between in-school and out-of-school literacy practices. The theoretical framework also includes gender and identity formation.

1. Research Questions
1) What influences and enables adolescent girls in writing zines that promote social justice and refute stereotypical notions of how gender, sexuality, class, and race should be performed?
2) How do these adolescents develop and use literacy practices to form and express their identities?

2. Subjects, Setting, Context
The subjects were three adolescent women (AP students) who write and publish a 'zine. Data collection occurred at and near a high school.

3. Procedures (briefly)
Case study - "complete study of a bounded and integrated system". Did not look at writing process; only considered the writers, their content, and their motivation. Data collection included formal and informal interviews, observations, artifact collection (including the zines, in-school writing samples, photos of bedrooms and workspaces, influential music), open-ended questionnaires, field notes, and structured focus groups. Member checks were conducted with participants.
Data were analyzed using constant comparison. Trustworthiness established. Established "warrants" for assertions. Sought outside perspectives from other researchers.

4. Findings
1) The participants were influenced and motivated by a punk rock DIY ethic and feminist and progressive beliefs. They were supported by their middle class status, their race (white), and the technology tools used for publication.
2) The participants violated writing rules and expectations of in-school writing and chose topics freely based on interest. They borrowed from and responded to popular culture forms.

5. Strengths and Weaknesses of Study
This study adds to the breadth of adolescent literacy practices described in research. It provides a rich description of this particular case. The study is not generalizable to any other population and should not be interpreted too broadly in its implications for other students. The participants are all white, middle class or higher, and female.

6. Implications
The authors conclude (with the assent of all involved) that zines should not become writing assignments in the classroom. This kind of sanctioning would fundamentally change the nature of the writing. Instead, they recommend teachers adopt more opportunities for choice in writing topics, genres, etc., and that teachers adopt the "ethos" of zines. They also recommend more opportunities for ungraded writing and unshared writing.


7. Other Comments

"Why is it important to study why and how adolescents produce and consume zines as a literacy practice? There are two reasons offered by literacy researchers. First, as Donna Alvermann and Allison Heron (2001) noted, it is important for teachers to become aware of how students use literacies to form and represent their identities, to construct meaning, and to pursue their own interests. If teachers can become aware of who their students really are, and what motivates them to read and write, and learn how adolescents develop, practice, and refine their literacies outside of school, educators will be better equipped to connect those out-of-school literacy practices to the work students do in school. " p. 411

Research cited to show that students of both genders tend to write in gender-stereotypical ways: Burdick, 1997; Christie, 1995; Dyson, 1997; Kamler, 1994; MacGillivray & Martinez, 1998

"Susan Hunt (1995) discovered that adolescent males were more likely to write about philosophical questions, adventures, and social problems, while female students were more likely to write about relationships." p. 412

Research cited to show that some girls write against stereotype and cultural expectations: Blair, 1996; Christie, 1995; Guzzetti, Young, Gritsavage, Fyfe, & Hardenbrook, 2002.

As part of their theoretical framework, the authors cite Gee 1996 and Street 1994 to establish a sociocultural perspective on literacy as more than technical reading and writing. They also cite Scribner & Cole 1981 to establish that students' beliefs about purposes and value of literacy shape how they learn and practice literacy.

The authors' theoretical frame include identity construction (Bakhtin), d/Discourse (Gee), and gender (including Lather, Heath). This theoretical frame would be useful to examine in greater detail in any study dealing with gender representations at the camp.

Brief Notes on Rosenblatt Sections 1 & 2

Section 1: The Province of Literature

Chapter 1: The Challenge of Literature

Literature should be viewed as a living context, without limitations of any particular lens. "...the teaching of literature necessarily involves helping the student handle social, psychological, and ethical concepts"

Chapter 2: The Literary Experience

Reading is transactional. Understanding does not exist on the page or in the head, but in the space between. While understanding the author, the literary movement, the time period, etc., are important, it's ultimately about a transaction between the author and the reader. The reader has to have sufficient life experience to understand what the author is trying to communicate.

Section 2: The Human Basis of Literary Sensitivity

Chapter 3: The Setting for Spontaneity

The relationship between the teacher and students that allows productive interchange with literature.

Chapter 4: What the Student Brings to Literature

Preoccupations and needs the adolescent brings to literature.

Chapter 5: Broadening the Framework

Clarifying the student's response to literature; the kinds of knowledge that will contribute to understanding.

Life Online

I read a great article this morning about the peculiarities of life online.

NY Times article

The article hints at how our participation in sites like Twitter and Facebook change our behavior. While a person may have the same number of strong ties, technology is allowing us to have a great many more weak ties. According to the article, more weak ties make us more able to solve problems. There are many upsides and downsides explored in the article, but I think that it's clearly not a matter of individual choice. The great societal ouija board is moving toward more access to the personal information of more people. Individuals may choose to opt out, but there is a cost, and that cost is increasing. People my age and older may be a lot less uncomfortable about publishing their lives, but a lot of younger people are a lot more at ease living in the digital spotlight. I also think that privacy is largely an illusion these days, so even if you think you  are flying under the radar, you are fooling yourself.

A's Class, after the break

Notes from A's class

Pattern Book Lesson

* First, describe who you are teaching.

(Highlight ESOL adaptations. Pattern book lessons by nature are good for ESOL students.)

Title of the book

Describe the environment. (Env. is important. Most of you can remember where you were when you were read to.

Using Rosie's Walk. Hook them, start engaging them. (Maybe where overalls.)

That book is one sentence. What's the pattern? (across yard, around haystack, under beehives) What's the theme? being on a farm.

Have a theme; brings life to your party. Have nice extra touches. When you have a theme, you think of these extra things. Without the theme, you don't.

Back to Rosie's walk. Maybe a matching activity post-reading, to match those nouns with the prepositions. They may not know what a mill is. So maybe bring in a bag of flour, build that schema. Rosie also goes under the beehives. Bring in honey, show them the process on the computer.

When I see flour and honey, I think of cooking. Maybe the cooking is in the post-reading section. Let's get some math in there. Make biscuits, cut them in halves, cut them in fourths. In the end, in the celebration, we're going to have biscuits and honey. They're going to know where everything came from. Get them thinking about where the things that they eat come from. That gets them to be thinkers. That's not on the Sunshine State Standards, but it's what's important.

Rosie the hen is a female animal. I might have a bulletin board of female animals. Female deer is a doe. Female horse is a mare. I'm increasing their schema. Not for this book, but in general.

Reading

We'll have about 4 readings. With each reading, add a layer, and a modalities.

First reading, working on conventions of print, moving my finger from left to right.

Second reading, I want to get the words into the kids' head. (One way is rhythm. Book lends itself to what to do  in each reading. Could be getting kids to fill the picture word.)

Third reading, get the kinesthetic in, and some repetition. Make each of the preposition into a hand motion. Let the kids decide the movement for each one.

Reading four, they are reading it using the labels and acting it out in class.

Sequence

Day 1: Pre-reading and first reading (maybe 20 min)

Day 2: Review pre-reading, add something new (maybe teach them the word oblivious). Reading 2.

Day 3: Reading 3, reading 4. Maybe bring in blue celophane and make a pond. Bring in stuff each day to make something else. Print the words on the floor. Soon you'll have them acting out the book. 

Day 4: Post

Day 5: Post

Story about teacher with neighbor kid:

"We've been working at it for a long time." To be successful with kids, it needs to feel like fun, not work.

Post-reading

Next week

Second thing: make use of the arts. 

Third thing: food.

Integrate curriculum.

Let's say you do the apple tasting. Tie in math, in the shapes you cut or the fractions. Tie in science - taste buds, etc., social studies, etc.

If it has a seed in it, it's a fruit.

I want them to learn Mozart. Don't limit them based on when you learned something. When you feel you are losing them, say this, "I'm going to tell you something that you're not supposed to learn until fourth grade. Don't tell anybody that I'm teaching you this in first grade." They will want to share that with others, their parents.

PRODUCT

find letters that make

PROUD

You want them to have pride in what you've taught them.

Enrich your lessons.

Why shouldn't all children have an enriched curriculum? Don't make it just the basics for them.