Book blog update

The Bryan Book Blog

Before Christmas break, I was at a crossroads with my students' book reviews. I had some very high quality reviews, and others that still needed some work.

Thanks to advice from Erik of This Kid Reviews Books, Pernille Ripp, and some great educators from the Maryland elementary school chat (#mdeschat) I think I've found the way forward. When we returned from break, I told my students to publish when they personally felt ready. It was interesting to see the self-reflection my students used in deciding whether or not to publish.

Students were excited to see their reviews online and read reviews from my other classes. Plus, having the work published has allowed students to collect comments on their work. On one of the first days when students were able to comment on others' work I immediately had two girls come to me for advice. They noticed one of the reviews was full of capitalization and grammar errors. They wanted to know if it was appropriate to comment about it. We talked about making the comments constructive and helpful. They were able to comment in a way that highlighted the strengths of the review while still expressing concern that the review didn't match the quality of our other published reviews.

This review of The Candymakers is one of
the highest quality examples on our blog

Due to privacy concerns, my students had to set up their blog pages with self-chosen pen names. At first I was a little worried about the online behavior that comes with anonymity. In practice, it has been terrific. When students don't know for sure who the author is, I find that they are looking at the content of the book reviews carefully, rather than just heaping praise on their friends' reviews. I've also noticed students trying new books that may have been outside their comfort zones based on a published review.

One of the most exciting things for my students has been receiving comments from outside. I've shared the book blog address with the #comments4kids tag on Twitter a few times. We've received a variety of comments ranging from praise for a job well done to questions that ask the reviewer to dig deeper. I'd love to collect even more comments, so please visit the Bryan Book Blog and add your own.

Unfortunately, I still have a few students who haven't published a book review yet. Most of these are students who recognize that they need to make improvements before publishing, but they are choosing to work on other projects when we have reading/writing workshop. I will communicate my expectation that every student publish one review to the blog before spring break. I'll be checking in with these students to see how I can support them in revision and editing before that deadline rolls around.

Having my students blog has been terrific! I love seeing how the process is evolving this school year as my students publish and receive feedback. I'm also thinking ahead to some changes in my approach for next school year when I'll be able to get started with blogging from the beginning. And I will keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine...

Book review botheration

My students are writing a book review blog. I've been excited about this project since reading The Book Whisperer at the beginning of summer. It goes live next week, but I have a problem.

We worked together as a class to identify what a good book review looks like. We looked at professional reviews from The Horn Book and The Children's Book Review, and student-written book reviews at Reader Views Kids. But we were most impressed by the reviews from This Kid Reviews Books. Inspired by his format, my kids decided to write book reviews in two sections: a summary followed by their opinion.

Altered books by Bryan Elementary students

As the teacher, I led discussions about what made for a good book review. We read about writing book reviews and revising with a partner from the Writer's Express handbook. I wrote an example review using the format we chose as a class. I've offered suggestions on their Google Docs. Still, about a third of my students haven't written a quality book review yet. 

Some of my kids' reviews lack detail. When I push for more, they say that more detail would result in giving spoilers. Other reviews lack specifics in the opinion section and just say "it was a good book," without giving examples of the things that made it shine.

Other students have written beautiful reviews that tell just enough about the book to entice a reader. The opinions include reasons why the characters or settings were just right and comparisons to other books. Those reviews are ready to publish and represent the type of work I expect from students in an advanced learning program.

I'm struggling with where to go from here. I know that we'll post the detailed reviews this week, but not the others. This year, I've been working at building a culture of going back to review and revise work until it is top quality. I'm not allowing students to get a low grade and move on. How do I continue to support those students to develop their writing? Where do I find the balance between pushing them to improve and motivating them to write?

Please let me know if you have some ideas. I want my 4th and 5th graders' writing to shine. I know we can get there with some more time and effort. And I'll keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine...

BIG things in math - Part 3

Read part one and part two to see how my fifth grade students began using Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada's "Out of Many, One" in math class.

After figuring out the square footage and weight of the materials used for "Out of Many, One," I wanted to give my students the opportunity to create something large. My original plan was to go outside and measure our school's field, make a scale drawing of the field, figure out an image that would fit the shape, and then use string to mark a portion of the artwork in a little-used corner of the field. A week of very rainy days made that plan impossible, so we figured out a suitable indoor alternative.

My fifth grade math students separated into two teams to design large posters for one of our school's hallways. I showed my kids the wall spaces available for posters before giving them a selection of different size graph paper and the requirement to include a quote or slogan that represented a growth mindset, but otherwise I left them alone to come up with something. 

Our spaces had obstacles including a fire extinguisher

The first day of work on the project consisted mostly of measuring the space for the poster. Both groups recorded a number of measurements, but had a difficult time translating those to a scale drawing. Seeing that my students needed some more experience with scale drawings, we spent part of the next class period looking at diagrams, blueprints, and other scale drawings and discussing how large objects were represented accurately in smaller drawings. We also looked at our second activity with "Out of Many, One" in an attempt to see how we previously worked with scale.

It didn't take long from there for students to complete their scale drawings. When they presented them to me for approval, I asked how much butcher paper they needed and how large the writing and other features would be on the poster to double-check their scale drawings.

Next, students divided up the work on their posters. It was interesting to see how one group put assigned members certain squares from the graph paper while the other group chose one person to work on text and others to complete specific drawings on their poster.

This group used 1/2 inch graph paper

Both groups ran into trouble with teamwork along the way. I did my best to let them solve their issues, but I had to step in a couple times to help. One group had a very difficult time drawing objects on the big poster to the correct scale based on their scale drawing. I frequently checked in and had them look back at the scale drawing to confirm that their poster matched the plan.

Turning the scale drawings into large murals
took a lot of careful measuring

In the end, my students created some nice art for a bare spot in the hallway, got some practice measuring & multiplying, and learned a bit about scale drawings. It definitely took longer than I planned. We spent three full math periods working on the project and used the last ten to fifteen minutes of class frequently for about two weeks. Still, the students really enjoyed the project and it gave them a chance to demonstrate their budding understanding of scale. If I do this with next year's fifth graders, I would want to give them some more opportunities to work with scale drawings before getting to this project and I would want to speed up the process of creating the final posters. Still, it was a fun project and it makes me excited to find more extended problem solving opportunities for all of my math groups. And I'll keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine...  

BIG things in math - part 2

Read part one to see how my fifth grade students began using Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada's "Out of Many, One" in math class.

This satellite image was captured by DigitalGlobe's GeoEye-1 satellite
on Oct. 6, 2014. Image from the National Portrait Gallery's website.

After figuring out how much dirt was used in the creation of "Out of Many, One," my kids tried to figure out just how big this colossal artwork is. We looked at a number of photos of the work, but decided that the one to the right gave us the easiest picture to measure. It didn't take long for students to realize that they needed more information to figure out the scale.

I pulled up a map of the National Mall on Google Maps to give us some context of the area. After a little discussion, we decided that we should figure out the length of another feature in the picture. We chose the road to the west of the DC War Memorial. Although the road had a small curve around the memorial, it was the easiest to clearly identify in the picture and on the map. The road measured 400 feet long. Students used that measurement to come up with a scale for the map and estimate the square footage of "Out of Many, One." If I were to do this project again, I would find measurements for other landmarks, such as the width of the reflecting pool, to see if we come up with similar estimates when basing our scale on other known distances.

Image from Google Maps

We weren't done exploring big things just yet. My students went from using scale to estimate the size of this artwork to creating their own scale drawings for a giant artwork. They're still working hard on that project, and I promise to let you know how it goes.

You can see my students' final project in part three.

BIG things in math

Watch this video. What mathematical questions come to mind?

After two viewings, my fifth graders wondered how many pounds of dirt it took to create Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada's "Out of Many, One" portrait on the National Mall. Through the first viewing, most just wondered what the heck was happening until their jaws dropped at the final reveal.

One of my goals for this school year is to frequently engage my math students in extended problem solving. About once a month, I want to give my students a challenge that takes a week or more worth of math switch classes in order to find a solution. I've scoured all of my books and countless websites for resources, but I'm most excited for the projects that pop into my mind when I hear a great story on NPR, read about something unbelievable from mental_floss, or watch an especially interesting video shared by a friend.

My first attempt at creating an extended problem came together after learning about Dan Meyer's Three-Act Tasks at a recent district collaboration. Later that same day, I saw a video about the "Out of Many, One" project and realized it would make a great first act and a Three-Act Task would be a great kick-off for an extended problem. The first act of a Three-Act Task presents students with a chance to generate mathematical questions and estimate an answer. After coming up with their question, I asked my fifth graders to make a high and low estimate.

For act two, students generate more questions to pull out the information they need to solve the problem. Some of their questions didn't lead to helpful information, but we discussed them all. Eventually, many of my students asked how many truckloads of dirt were delivered to the site. Luckily I had a video for that, too.

The kids still didn't have enough information. They figured out they needed to ask how much dirt a dump truck holds. I had already reverse engineered the problem, so I was able to tell them that the trucks for this project carried between six and seven tons of dirt each.

I encourage a lot of teamwork in my math classes, so students worked together to make the unit conversions and figure out just how to use the information they had to find the answer they sought. Some found an answer right away and began trying to figure out how much sand was there, too.

Finally it was time for act three: the big reveal. We visited the National Portrait Gallery's page about the work to find out some more information and check our answers. Most of the class had been successful in finding an answer close to 1,600,000 pounds of dirt. The best part of act three was comparing that figure to students' initial estimates. The largest act one estimate was 600,000 pounds. One student commented that she didn't even know it was possible to have a million pounds of dirt in one place.

We read some more about the artwork and had a short non-mathematical discussion about the artist's choice to assemble features from many real people into a portrait. It was a great experience for my math students. We weren't done though, that was just our first day and a half, and I wanted my students involved in a problem for a week (or a little more). I'll post later this week about where we went next.

Be sure to read part 2 and part 3.

Year in review

For the last four years, one of my last week of school activities is to ask my kids to write down a few things that they will remember from my class. I assemble their words into a word cloud. I present the 5th grade class of 2014 word could!

Perseverance in mathematics

My math students have come a long way this year! At the beginning of the year, most of them had a hard time "staying in the struggle." They wanted easy answers and algorithms. Thinking about the "why" of mathematics and explaining personal problem solving approaches seemed like foreign concepts.

My students needed perseverance. It was my job to create the environment that would build it. It's taken all of the perseverance I have. I needed to make sure students knew it is okay to make mistakes. I had to tinker with assignment difficulty until I found a sweet spot where students were challenged, but not frustrated. I had to keep pushing and pushing my students and get them to embrace the idea that giving up is never an option.

I think my students have come around to the idea. I realized I needed to work on their parents, too. So I sent home this letter:

Dear parents and guardians of fantastic fifth graders,

Did you know that Colonel Sanders “Original Recipe” for chicken was rejected 1,009 times, Steven Spielberg was not accepted to film school until his fourth attempt, and 27 different publishers rejected the first book by Dr. Seuss?  Yet, all three of them became leaders in their fields.  They didn’t let failure stop them!

Last week, I shared information about the eight Mathematical Practice Standards.  As a teacher, it is my responsibility to incorporate these standards into everything we do in math class. As a human being, it is the first standard that I find myself dealing with everyday: Make sense of problems and persevere in solving them.  Professionally and personally all of us are faced with many problems that we need to sort out and solve.  And frequently we find that our first solution doesn’t work. Yet, whether the problem is big or small, we keep chipping away at it until we find a solution!

Our kids need to be comfortable struggling through problems and making multiple attempts to find a solution.  By now you have probably noticed that the math problems I send home take more than one step to solve.  Real-world problems are rarely solved in one step, and what we do in math class represents that.  This week, I would like you to support your child by letting him or her really think this problem over and use multiple strategies to find the right answer.  Feel free to remind your child how to perform any needed computation, but let your child own the problem and the solution. Learning to deal with a failed first attempt will help your child in the math classroom and beyond.

Thanks for reading,

-Jim Windisch

At our recent parent/teacher conferences, I talked about my new approach to math homework with many of my kids' parents. The overall reaction was positive, but many of them are having a hard time with perseverance at home. A few parents commented that they want to jump in and help by showing how to solve the problem with an algorithm. Others mentioned getting frustrated by the inefficient strategies they saw their kids using to solve the problem. I assured these parents that the important part of problem solving is making sense of the problem and persevering. Their children would adopt more efficient strategies as they become more comfortable with solving problems and manipulating numbers. And then I had the parents who were 100% behind this.  They talked about letting their kids figure it out independently and then listening to the explanation, questioning their children, and sometimes discussing multiple methods for solving the problem.

More than anything else, I want students to leave my class with perseverance. My kids who have support for building perseverance at home are there.  How do I get the rest there? Has someone discovered the magic formula? If you've discovered it, please share with me. And I'll keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine... 

The facts about Sanders, Spielberg, and Seuss in my parent letter came from mental_floss Vol. 13, issue 1

Inspiration from the Common Core Text Exemplars

When I first began studying the Common Core Standards, I was struck by the emphasis on text complexity. Every time I opened my book of English and Language Arts standards I paused when I came to that phrase: the one that set the expectation for students to "read and comprehend ... at the high end of the grades 4-5 text complexity band independently and proficiently."  What was a text complexity band?  How could I know if my students were reading appropriately complex text? I knew that many of the selections in the reading series I agreed to use to fidelity were not complex.  The Accelerated Reader reading levels that I labeled on all of my classroom library books didn't appear to indicate text complexity either: Captain Underpants and the Revolting Revenge of the Radioactive Robo-Boxers by Dav Pilkey is the same AR reading level as Neil Gaiman's (very adult and complex) American Gods.

Then I figured out that the CCSS ELA standards had appendices. And one of these, Appendix B, has a list of text exemplars.  That was where I would find an easy answer, right?  Not exactly - it takes perseverance to figure it out.  I've heard our district reading coaches and others say that the list is not to be used as a curriculum or required book list, but I knew I would need to have my students work with a variety of texts on the list so I could understand how they interacted with complex texts.  Hopefully I could learn from that until I was able to identify appropriately complex texts on my own.  I'm not there yet, but I'm making progress.

I started the year by putting together a Springpad notebook to keep my ideas for working with the 4-5 exemplars and link to the articles and poems that were available for free online. Then I wrote a grant proposal to our local education foundation, EXCEL, to fund copies of a few of the non-fiction books on the list.  All through the school year, I have been trying out ideas with these texts. I'm finding that the complexity is a big jump from the texts I used last year. Still, it is amazing the insights my kids have as they read this material. Here are three of the things we have done:

Celebrity endorsement from Mariah Carey

Bandwagon example (and she doesn't sit on babies)

The Kid's Guide to Money by Steve Otfinoski 

We're just finishing this one up in my reading switch group. Kids have worked to make a business plan and create advertising using information from the book as a guide.  My students also did some terrific persuasive writing and had a class debate over whether kids should be allowed to have credit cards.

"Casey at the Bat" by Ernest Lawrence Thayer 

This poem had a sample performance task from the Core Standards: "Students refer to the structural elements (e.g., verse, rhythm, meter) of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat” when analyzing the poem and contrasting the impact and differences of those elements to a prose summary of the poem." My students had a difficult time with the vocabulary of this poem. I found a nice text summary of the poem in this poetry unit from Pottsgrove School District in Pennsylvania. Even though they had a difficult time expressing exactly what it was that gave the poem a greater impact than the prose summary, my students had rich discussions around these texts.

“Fog” by Carl Sandburg and “Dust of Snow” by Robert Frost 

 I thought these two poems made for a nice comparison and contrast activity with my students.  Both evoke natural scenes of weather, but in very different ways.  First, I asked my students to look at the animal in each poem.  “Dust of Snow” describes the actions of a crow while “Fog” uses a cat as a metaphor for fog.  Next, students examined the rhyme and rhythm of the two poems.  After discussing, students wrote a paragraph comparing and contrasting the two poems. They noticed the metaphor in "Fog" right away and most of my students had a lot of success with this activity.

I would love to hear other ideas for working with the text exemplars list. Has anyone reached a high level of comfort in finding appropriately complex text?  Have you identified some outstanding excerpts from some of the longer texts on the list? I look forward to hearing your ideas.  And I'll keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine...

  

A new approach to math homework

Teaching math has been a challenge this year!  The Idaho Core Standards (CCSS) are a totally different animal than our previous Idaho Content Standards.  It feels like we're jumping at least one grade level worth of content and asking our kids to make more connections and solve more real problems than we ever have before.

It's terrific!

But it is tough.

Due to scheduling factors outside my control, our main math class is at the end of the day.  My kids are tired.  They also see mathematics as a somewhat passive activity.  Their thinking is "there is one right answer to each problem and someone will eventually explain how to find that answer."  They could get by with that attitude under our previous standards: but that won't fly now.

It feels like I tried a million different things for math homework. I sent home review computation, extra practice on our current topics, a few word problems, and work with our online math enrichment program. None of those ideas worked like I wanted. The review wasn't transferring, students weren't confident enough to succeed on their own with the current topics, life happened and homework wasn't done for the next day's class.

Then I read "Rethinking Homework" by Math Minds.  It was a revelation! Homework can encourage conversation about what we're doing in class.  I ask my students to explain their thinking to each other all the time.  Why shouldn't they build a home-school connection and explain mathematics to their parents, siblings, babysitters, and anyone else who can listen to them?

I made a form, put together a problem, and wrote this letter to send home:

Dear Parents/Guardians:

As you are already aware, we have been working with the new Idaho Core Standards this year. Although these new standards have changed my approach in all subjects, the biggest changes have been in math.  The Idaho Core Standards ask students to solve multi-step problems drawn from real world situations and to explain the strategies they used in finding an answer. 

To encourage my students to explain their thinking, I am trying a new type of math homework between now and spring break.  Instead of a nightly skill review page, I will send home a single problem like the one on the back of this page.  Each problem will list the some of the standards students will draw on to solve the problem.  In addition, there is a place for you to respond at the bottom of the page.  Since explaining strategies and understanding is key to success with the new standards, I would like your child to explain his/her thinking to you.  Explaining how he/she solved the problem to someone who may not be familiar with some of the strategies we’re using in class will encourage your child to clearly describe what he/she is doing.  After you have discussed this with your child, please mark a selection at the bottom of the page and sign it. 

Thanks for giving this a try!  Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. 

-Jim Windisch

I'm just two weeks and four assignments into this grand experiment.  I always give my students at least two nights to complete it.  A few of my students have come a long way in explaining how and why they chose strategies to solve problems.  Others have been able to teach their parents something new about math.  Some are struggling with this, but I am supporting them by encouraging them to stay in the struggle and occasionally being the adult to sign the form.

I like to think that it has opened up some more communication about school between my kids and their families.  I know I will be asking parents about it at conferences later this month. And I'll keep you updated as I continue to experiment and refine...