Kristy's Questions to Enhance Comprehension!

Some of you reading this already know the wonderful, inimitable, Miss Kristy. She is starting a TeachersPayTeachers store, and although she's just beginning to update, I highly recommend that you follow her  and do anything she says. I know I do, and I've never regretted it!

I'm super critical about curriculum. Not in a negative, naggy way, but in the traditional sense. I am very cautious about things that claim to be "Common Core Aligned" or that haven't been tested out with actual students. 

So when I say that Kristy is the real deal, I can't be anymore heartfelt. It's not just because she's been Teacher of the Year for her (VERY large) district (oh, yeah, she's awesome like THAT), it's also that she's thoughtful and thorough and practical and kind and inspiring. I learn something from her every. single. time. we are together for more than 20 seconds.

I just bought her Questions to Enhance Comprehension (for a dollar! what the!) to use with my parent conferences the week after Thanksgiving. I'm also translating it into Spanish because, hi, I need it. I'll send it back to her so she can add it to the download, so you'll get that too! I also got the Math About Me to add to their math journals....SO FUN! I got some other stuff too, but check it out yourself.

If you get a chance to look at their I Have/Who Has telling time cards, you'll see what I mean about being critical. So many times, you just see regular old clock faces and times, both in very standard form. It's nothing new or special. Notice that she includes a variety of language options on her cards....not just "who has 9:30" but "who has half past 9?" Those are the details that keep the cognitive demand (rigor) high and provide for rich discussions with even the littlest learners. {LOVE}

Writer's Workshop.....How do you feel about lesson objectives?

There are times when I am convinced that there is no more subversive, no more revolutionary act, than to teach.  Especially in a public school, where your unending goal is to provide every child (no matter their race, language, religion, sexual orientation, economic status, citizenship status....I don't need to go on, right?) the experiences required to be literate...to be critical....to be informed. It is, at its core, anarchy and rebellion. Forget everything you've heard about the "factory model", too, because I see great teachers, every day, pushing themselves and their students way beyond the meager resources they've been allotted.

All that to say this:  I know it's de rigeur to require teachers to start every lesson with an "objective" or to even post them in your agenda, but I kinda don't get it. I think anything worth learning can't really be learned in 50 minutes, so to say "At the end of this lesson you will be able to say that you can (insert anything substantial here)" is absurd to me.

One thing that's been made clear, in the quest to implement the Common Core Standards (in Math and Language, as far as I can tell), is that we need to rethink "grain size". In other words, at what level are we attaching meaning in the curriculum? It's not at the lesson level... or even the chapter level...but at the unit level.


So why do administrators and policy makers insist on these "lesson objectives"? (Rhetorical, btw, I don't actually care haha) We were talking about this at our instructional leadership meeting, and we were trying to figure out how to have collaboration, and coherence, without lock-step lesson planning and without pretending that mastery occurs in 50 minutes.

Our district focus this year is Writing, so we came up with the idea that we could create posters of the standards for, say, opinion writing. Our grade levels would agree on the focus and content of the unit, down to which linking words and organizers we would use. Since we agree that these handful of items is what we will be working on for the next 5 to 6 weeks, with a unit objective of being able to write an opinion, then for any given lesson, in any given room, we could just highlight the one we are focusing on with today's lessons and workshop time. Knowing, full well, that we would be coming back to each one, repeatedly, over the course of the weeks. It gives us the room to attend to the needs of our individual groups of students (what does this class need more of, that that other class may not?) and still know that we have identified (and are providing) the core of the Core, if you will.

 The clothespin just moves to our current focus, which you can see, today, was "Writers tell what they think about many topics." We had already used books and the "things we do" (science experiments, recess, etc.) to mine for "what we think" and today, we added "places we go" to come up with our opinions. 

It was such a lovely lesson, can I suggest you try it? I found different pictures (using Google images, though I suppose I could have taken pictures with my phone) of things around our school...the cafeteria, office, library, PE yard, jungle gym, soccer field, trees they love to climb, the slide area, even a toilet to represent the bathrooms (ohhhhhh did they have opinions about the restrooms! Holy.) I placed them on a poster in their approximate relative locations, and we partner shared different places we go in school, and what our opinions are of each of those places.  "Soccer is my favorite sport" or "I think the bathrooms are disgusting" or "We should be allowed to climb the trees" or "I think it's not fair to play 'ropesies' in tetherball". They simply couldn't run out of things to say!

I made an 8.5 x 11 version (even invested in some color copies) and they pasted them into their writing journals. So just like they had "a heart map" to generate their small moments stories, they now have "an opinion map" to generate their opinion stories. {LOVE}
Click Opinion Map to download the map I made (how different can your school possibly be? Just drag the pics around or add/delete pictures).