Slice of Life in Three Parts

Today's slice comes to you in three parts. Part one, happy dancing. It is January. In my classroom, January (and February) are magical months. Kids start eating books. They binge read. They forage for sequels. Meet Mohammed. Yesterday, Mohammed checked out The Living by Matt de la Peña.

Today Mohammed says to me as I walk the room conferring with readers about their reading journal entries, "Tell me you HAVE the sequel!"

A boy at his table said, "What? You finished it? In ONE day?"

He said, "I tried to put it down. After a half an hour I was like, let me see how this plays out. I had to finish it. " Mohammed proceeded to tell us why the novel is so good, fast paced and action-packed.

I thought about breaking into my happy dance and fist pumping around the room, but I didn't want to embarrass the kids too much. Instead I asked Mohammed if I could tell the author. He said yes, so I tweeted. And Matt de la Peña answered us right back.

Mohammed  was like...

Score! His table had such a good conversation about the books they were and have been reading that one of the boys convinced Mohammed to try Sandersons' Steelheart next. I preordered the The Hunted. 

Part two, appreciation. Last week Donalyn Miller tweet a link to a post I'd written this time last year about creating individualized essay questions to assess students' independent reading.

I appreciate the tweet.  Blogging is one way I process and share classroom instruction that is working (or not working).  Writing helps me make sense of what I am doing in the classroom. Connecting to a wider audience of teachers and educators is a perk of the practice.  Even better was how her reminder got me thinking about the questions I am writing for students this year. AND even better (and might be my OLW for this year)  it made me wonder why I don't teach students how to create their own independent reading essay questions.

 I mulled that over. 

Part three, get cooking. I emailed the eleventh and twelfth grade IB English teachers at a couple of schools in our district. They shared theme lists they use in the Literature for IB. I went through some curriculum materials and sample IB assessments. Then I gathered verbs from standards and AP prompts. I experimented with ingredients. I got my mis en place in order.  Then I cooked up a sample chart organized by task, convention, effect, theme or tone to try in class.  The directions at the top come from the paper two assessment given by the IB.

I modeled how I created a prompt or question by choosing one task word, one or two convention words, one effect word and one theme or one tone word.  I wrote an example prompt: Show how the author's manipulation of time and use of detail conveys the idea that life can be reconstructed after tragedy. I showed students how to turn the prompt into a question by using how does at the sentence's start instead of show how.  Then, I used my example question to write about Darnielle's Wolf in White Van in my reading journal. Modeling the process went well.

As we worked today, I added a few words to the conventions and effect columns, so the idea is simmering. Still, students played with creating prompts using the chart. I loved listening to them discuss books as they played with language and thought through ideas. 

This year, they will have a "create your own" option when they sit down to write an essay on that synthesizes their independent reading. Later this week, when I hand out their individual essay questions there will be a space where students can write in their own questions. I can't wait to see what they come up with.