Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Inbox: Exploring Literature with ELL and ESL Students

As the number of English language learners in our classrooms increases, teachers are challenged to find meaningful ways to teach language in context. These resources suggest ways to discuss language issues in the context of literary discussions, giving teachers the chance to connect with these students in pedagogically useful ways.

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Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Inbox: Focus on Native American Heritage

National American Indian Heritage Month is recognized each November as a time to learn more about the history and heritage of Native American peoples. These resources provide strategies to explore Native American literature and heritage in your own classroom.

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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Inbox: Halloween and Día de los Muertos

With Halloween and Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in the next week, these resources provide seasonal activities that focus on language arts, literature, and writing.

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Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Inbox: Using Literacy Coaching to Improve Your School

NCTE and the International Reading Association have created a Literacy Coaching Clearinghouse to build a professional learning community of literacy coaches and to provide the education community with information on literacy coaching.

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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Inbox: Get Active at Your School

Next week is Teen Read Week! This year's theme, "Get Active!" encourages teens to use the resources at their library to lead an active life. Students at any grade level can get active with these resources.

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Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Inbox: Coming Out in the Classroom

October 11 is National Coming Out Day, sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation. This year's theme, "Talk About It," focuses on the importance of discussing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues openly and honestly. These NCTE resources explain how language arts and composition teachers can "Talk About It" in the classroom.

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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Inbox: Visual Composition at the Center

This week college-level members will gather for the 57th Annual Convention of CCCC. Program Chair Akua Duku Anokye asked attendees to consider the question "How do we work in the middle spaces with integrity and conviction to clearly and loudly address the literacy needs of a diverse society?" as one issue that might shape their proposals for the Convention. One answer to this important question is to foreground the many literacies that students bring to the classroom. The Ideas Section from this week's Inbox will get you started.

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Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Inbox: Reading Habits in the Internet Age

This week's Denver Post article "Technology Rewrites Rules for Reading" explores how students' reading habits have been influenced by the various online reading that they do. More and more often, teachers, curriculum developers, and school literacy programs must search for strategies that will best meet students' needs. The Ideas section from this week's Inbox offers one way to solve the problem—ask students to explore and share their reading habits and their understanding of text in a digital world.

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Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Inbox: Raising Students' Awareness of Copyright

March 6-10 is Copyright Awareness Week, an event designed to urge teachers from across the curriculum to teach students basic concepts of copyright, so the Ideas Section for this week's Inbox discusses how to explore these issues with students.

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Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Inbox: Celebrate Dr. Seuss and Read Across America Day!

Better known to most readers as Dr. Seuss, Dr. Theodor Geisel was born 102 years ago this week. The Ideas Section for this week's Inbox is titled Celebrate Dr. Seuss and Read Across America Day!. The column includes lesson plans and ideas that focus on reading Dr. Seuss books in the classroom, including a lesson that uses The Cat in the Hat to discuss id, ego, and superego.

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Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Inbox: Reading Across America (and Across the Grades)

March 2 is Read Across America Day, so it's time to begin making plans for celebrations in the classroom. This week there was also an article in The Grand Rapid Times about a cross-level reading collaboration: Reading unites Calvin, Lee. As a result, the Ideas section of this week's Inbox focuses on Reading Across America (and Across the Grades), which includes resources to celebrate reading with students in different grade levels.

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Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Inbox: Improving Instruction for ELL/ESL Students

Inspired by an Arizona Republic article, which outlines the state's struggle to find programs that will improve instruction for the English language learners in the public school system, the Ideas section of this week's Inbox focuses on Improving Instruction for ELL/ESL Students.

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Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Inbox: Reading and Writing in All Subject Areas

The Ideas section for today's Inbox focuses on Reading and Writing in All Subject Areas. As the piece explains, "President Bush's proposal to focus solely on the quality of math, science, and technological education ignores the important critical thinking and literacy skills that take place in the English language arts and composition classrooms. By focusing on reading and writing in all subject areas, we can ensure that students are better prepared to improve the analytical, technical, and problem-solving skills that the President's plan targets. These resources offer suggestions for working toward these goals."

Naturally, students need to do better. They deserve better. But as it's presented the American Competitiveness Initiative comes up short. To suggest that reading and writing aren't just as important to a student's success is shortsighted and foolish. Not only do we want students to be able to read those math, science, and engineering texts in thoughtful and analytical ways, but we want them to be able to compose their own work in relationship to the ideas that they develop in these content areas. The President's plan comes up short. With a wife who is a librarian, you would think that his educational initiatives would more fully represent the full range of learning that students need for lifelong learning and achievement.

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Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Inbox: Does the Holocaust Matter?

NCTE is providing some resources for Oprah's National High School Essay Contest, so the Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on "Does the Holocaust Matter Today?" I also added resources on the ALA awards that were announced on Monday.

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Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Inbox: Research Strategies for the Internet Age

The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focused on Research Strategies for the Internet Age: how to examine resources, avoiding plagiarism, and so forth.

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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Inbox: Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on classroom activities to honor Martin Luther King, Jr. The column includes 5 different lesson plans and several articles.

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Thursday, January 05, 2006

Inbox: Exploring Gender in Fairy Tales

The Ideas section from this week's Inbox was titled, "Exploring Gender in Fairy Tales." The column includes 3 lesson plans and 4 articles.

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Tuesday, December 13, 2005

The Ideas section for today's Inbox focused on Supporting and Exploring Diversity. The articles and lesson plans discuss ways to talk about family histories and culture. The pieces could be done at the holidays—or any time.

Finished up Onomatopoeia: A Figurative Language Mini-lesson. It's really quite standard exploration, using Poe's "The Bells." It's another of the mini-lessons that the Advisory Board called for.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | ReadWriteThink

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Tuesday, December 06, 2005

The Ideas section for this week's Inbox tied to Resolution on Supporting School and Community Libraries, passed at the Annual Convention in Pittsburgh a couple weeks ago. The collection of lesson plans and articles focuses on Building an Independent Reading Program.

The call with the MarcoPolo folks didn't really reveal a good solution for the title bars, so we're just letting the <i> codes show up. On a positive note, however, I finally duplicated the calendar error. He was using straight quotes in his text. When the page posted to the database, the field was truncating at the quotes in his text, and the stuff after the quotation mark in the text just confused everything. I have instructed him to use curly quotes from now on. At least it was a simple solution.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox | ReadWriteThink

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Tuesday, November 29, 2005

The Ideas section for this week's Inbox celebrates the winner of the 2005 NCTE Orwell Award for Distinguished Contribution to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language: The Daily Show :)

How could I NOT take advantage of the opportunity to talk about The Daily Show officially? The official title of the column is "Honesty and Clarity in Advertising and the Media," and it includes 4 articles and a ReadWriteThink lesson plan link.

Spent time today working on the design for the Book Cover interactive. After pulling dozens of books off the shelves in the office, we finally sketched out the templates for the various parts of the cover (front, flaps, back, spine). We're thinking it will launch in January.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox | ReadWriteThink

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Tuesday, November 22, 2005

The Ideas Section for this week's Inbox focused on Best Books, pointing to award winners that have been recently announced at NCTE's Annual Convention and books that have been recently reviewed in NCTE publications.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox |

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Tuesday, November 15, 2005

The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on The Gettysburg Address. Okay, I know. It probably seems like a stretch to some of you, but in actuality, it worked out fairly well. The entry includes some information on primary and secondary sources as well as some resources on Gettysburg-era Doublespeak.

And speaking of Doublespeak, I found out today who is receiving the Doublespeak Award at Annual Convention later this week. It's such a badge of honor for this recipient. Really. It's not a negative thing at all for them. I'm so tickled :)

I spent much of the day noticing that it was pouring rain (not pouring, pounding), working on last-minute details for Convention, and, this evening, working on the War of the Worlds lesson plan. I need to get it online tomorrow for the content report.

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Tuesday, November 08, 2005

The Ideas section for today's Inbox focused on modeling and exploring writing process strategies. It's full of lesson plans for K-12, and a couple of articles for college.

I also finished editing and published Susan Spangler's lesson on pop culture. You’re the Top! Pop Culture Then and Now asks students to explore present-day pop culture by updating Cole Porter’s song “You’re the Top!” to use modern references. One great lesson from IATE! Willie Bobbie, are you jealous yet?

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox | ReadWriteThink

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Tuesday, November 01, 2005

The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on Native American Heritage, in celebration of Native American Heritage Month. The section links to the related ReadWriteThink calendar entry, which includes several relevant lesson plans.

The first of the month also means it's time for a content report. Between last night and today, I edited and posted two more lessons. Designing Museum Exhibits for The Grapes of Wrath: A Multigenre Project is a 9-12 lesson plan that asks students to create six artifacts in a variety of genres that demonstrate their understanding of a related research topic and its significance.

The second lesson, Choosing One Word: Summarizing Shel Silverstein’s “Sick,” explores comprehension by asking K-2 students to pick one word that represents a reading. In this case it's the Silverstein poem, but the activity could be completed with any text.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox | ReadWriteThink

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Tuesday, October 25, 2005

The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on Spooky Resources for Halloween and Dias de los Muertos. The piece includes several lesson plans and two journal articles.

Tags: English language arts | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox

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Wednesday, October 19, 2005

The Ideas column for this week's Inbox focuses on pieces that tie to speakers who will be at NCTE's Annual Convention in Pittsburgh.

Spent today setting up the new ReadWriteThink calendar entries for FY06. In the past, we've gone month by month, adding new entries each month as seemed appropriate. Now that we have gone through that process twice, we have a solid number of entries for each month. For this fiscal year's grant, we looked over the entire calendar. Some weeks ago, I added all of the entries to a wall calendar so that we could see any overall gaps in the greater scheme of things (e.g., weeks without enough entries).

We also looked for gaps in coverage on the whole site. For instance, what authors or kinds of writing did people expect a language arts site to include that were not yet covered adequately in the lessons and/or calendar. We have 30 entries to add over the course of three phases. The new pieces will include authors such as Alice Walker, Amy Tan, and Walt Whitman (as well as some picture book authors and important events).

To set up these entries, I added them all to the calendar, but not marked live of course. I had to hack some ASP to create running lists of the three phases, which took most of the afternoon. Odd how something that takes 5 seconds to say takes 5 hours to do. I ended up having to do a supremely silly nested if-then that handcoded the dates. There's no field in the database that I can use to indicate they're in one of these phases, and I'm too much of a scaredy pants to add a field to the table. One day, I really need to figure out how to play around with SQL, but I'm so afraid to do anything when the only working database I have access to is the site's database. But back the to point, the new entries are under development and should be 1/3 published by the end of the year, and the rest over the course of several months next year.

I guess that I left out that I took numerous breaks to put up those new Halloween decorations. I should get a picture. It's intriguing because we never managed to get the ladder to take down the snowflakes from last Christmas. That means we have ghosts, pumpkins, bats, spiders... and snowflakes hanging from the ceiling now. I need to dig under the desk and figure out what other pumpkinish things I have to pull out.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox | ReadWriteThink

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Tuesday, October 04, 2005

The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on "Coming Out in the Classroom." Next Tuesday (October 11) is National Coming Out Day. This year's theme, "Talk About It," focuses on the importance of discussing lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues openly and honestly. The resources in the section explain how language arts and composition teachers can "Talk About It" in the classroom.

I got some work done on the Gettysburg Address lesson plan, though nothing concrete in the sense of writing down bits of the lesson. Instead, I shared the new focus with Sharon and Lisa, and I spent some time looking for online resources on the myths related to the Address. I found an All Things Considered piece. Unfortunately it's from 1995, so it's not in their archive. I went through a stupid tool, HighBeam Research, with a temporary login to get a copy of the transcript (full of typos). Then I quickly cancelled my membership. I found a treasure trove of CSPAN videos as well, and I figured out how to link to the individual real audio files (rather than going through that listing page). The most interesting fact I learned today was that prior to the Gettysburg Address, when people talked about America, they said "The United States are" and after they said "The United States is." I question the absolute moment of this national shift, but it's still an interesting thing to note, especially since it gives you a chance to talk about grammar in context and in a very meaningful way.

I'm not sure that there's much more to report. I got through the whole day of work and managed to get to the grocery store, though I overdid it and was all ouchy and hurty about 1/2 through Schnuck's. Once I unloaded the car, I took medicine. That was the first time today that I took any though, so I'm doing better. Now if I could only stop ALL the burping and nonsense.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox | ReadWriteThink

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Tuesday, September 27, 2005

I almost forgot! The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on National Newspaper Week, which is Oct 2-8. The articles and lesson plans focus on reading, analyzing, and composing newspaper stories. The section includes a link to a sample chapter from an NCTE book which provides some nice scenarios.

Tags: English language arts | journalism | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox

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Tuesday, September 20, 2005

Preparing for Banned Books Week

The Ideas section in this week's Inbox focuses on Banned Books Week, which runs September 24 to October 1. The resources in the section explore ways to discuss censorship issues with students as well as ways to respond to text challenges in your school.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox

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Wednesday, September 14, 2005

Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month

This week's Ideas section for NCTE's Inbox focuses on Hispanic Heritage Month, which begins on September 15. The resources focus on classroom activities for teaching works by Latino/a authors, including Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, and Gary Soto.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | lesson plans | NCTE Inbox

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Tuesday, August 30, 2005

Building Teacher Support

The Ideas section from this week's Inbox focuses on Building Teacher Support. A recent newspaper article from The Pantagraph discusses the challenges that new teachers face during the school year. Returning teachers also face many demands in the classroom. This collection of resources suggests ways that teachers can build a supporting community among their colleagues to help ensure a successful (and less stressful) school year.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | NCTE Inbox

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Wednesday, August 24, 2005

Establishing a Student-Centered Classroom

The Ideas section of this week's Inbox discusses ways to establish classroom ownership from the start.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | NCTE Inbox

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Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Successful Strategies for Writer's Notebooks and Journals

Another Tuesday, another Inbox. The Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on the journals and notebooks that are such an important part of a writing class. The topic seemed like a useful back-to-school issue to consider. The ways that we introduce and structure writer's notebooks or journals for students at the beginning of the term has repercussions that echo through the rest of the term or school year. The interesting thing about the resources this week is that many will work across grade levels. The ideas in the "Priming the Pump" article in the issue of School Talk that is included, for instance, could be used K to college. You'd just get different responses.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | NCTE Inbox

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Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Creating Community from the First Day of Class

Since it's time to begin thinking about back to school for teachers everywhere, the Ideas section for this week's Inbox focuses on ways to build community in the classroom by involving students in creating the structures for the class and the activities that they participate in.

Tags: English language arts | K12 instruction | NCTE Inbox

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