Book Review

For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. You can download my E-Book of Websites for the Elementary Classroom for free from Teachers Pay Teachers or Smashwords, or, you can check back here each week for the website suggestion.

Critiquing the books you read is a great way to think back on what happened in the book, analyze what appealed to you and what didn’t, and generally synthesize your understanding of the book.  This is why I have always had students do book reviews or critiques in one form or another.  Some years, I have used my Book Review Bookmarks.  Other years, I have used my Reading Response Journal.  This year, I decided to turn my critiques electronic.  My students have been writing critiques to their books on my Good Reads account.  This has the added benefit of allowing students to share their book reviews and read other book reviews from people NOT in our classroom.  In addition to giving them a real life audience, it gives them a real life purpose.  We have talked about how one person’s review could persuade another person to buy – or not buy – a book.  This was a great link to our economics unit, as well as a reason to write fair and honest reviews.  If you are interested in publishing book reviews with your students, there are lots of ways for them to do it.  Here are three possibilities: 1.  Use Good Reads, a site where people can read, compare and recommend books to each other. 2.  Leave a review on Amazon, most books are sold somewhere on this huge marketplace, so this is a great one for real life usage.  3.  Write a review for Scholastic and apply to have it posted.  Note, not all reviews submitted to Scholastic get posted. 4.  Have students write blog posts about their books.  My son wrote a critique of Horatio’s One Wish, a book he read on his Kindle on his blog – Traveling From a Kid’s Point of View.   Before students write their own reviews, you might want to have them read reviews of others.  If you are looking for reviews geared specifically for children, check out Slime Kids’ Book Reviews, which features 16 different sites that have book reviews written just for kids.

TESOL Teaching Tip #10 - Different Culture = Different Background Knowledge

As a teacher at an International School, many of my students are English Language Learners. Even my native English speakers are living in a non-English speaking country. Due to my unique teaching position, I have had some readers ask for tips on teaching English Language Learners. Here is this week’s Tuesday TESOL Teaching Tip:

ESL Teaching Tip of the Week:  Expect Diverse Sets of Background Knowledge
 This year, my class is wonderfully diverse.  I have students from many different countries, with a few in their first year of living outside of their own culture mixed with a variety of Moroccan students, some who have traveled out of the Morocco and others who haven’t.  Because of this diversity, we regularly have cross-cultural conversations.  For example, I had two girls have a long debate about how popcorn was made the other day.  The girls were working together to write a persuasive essay to their parents about why they should have popcorn for dinner.  The conversation went something like this:



 At this point, I stepped in and showed both students (and a few others who were on each side of the debate) how popcorn could be made in the microwave OR on the stove by showing them videos from YouTube of popcorn being made each way.  Great “ahhhh” moment for students on both sides of the debate.
While this may seem like a trivial thing for kids to understand, the differences in background knowledge can play a big part in how you understand a topic, and the inferences you make during reading.  Most books and tests are designed with an assumption that students share a certain amount of background knowledge.  If you are teaching students who don’t speak English at home OR whose parents come from another culture than the one you teach in, this assumption can be dangerous for students, as they can be deemed as not understanding a topic simply because they have different background knowledge.  Here are a few real life examples I’ve come across this year alone:
1.  On daily language, we had the analogy: Big Bird:yellow::Oscar the Grouch: _______   Ummmm, yeah only students who have watched Sesame Street regularly growing up would know the answer to this question and the majority of the students in the group with this question had NO idea who Big Bird was.

2.) During our Earth Day read aloud, one of the tips for saving energy was not to run the dryer when only half full.  This led to the question by one of my Moroccan students - “What is a dryer?”  Insert long explanation and video before he believed me that most people in the US use a dryer and very few hang their clothes on the line.

3.)  While reading a Raz-Kids book about going on a picnic, the students couldn’t understand what the carrot stick picture was and kept guessing “French Fries”, since carrot sticks are not regularly eaten here.  The packet of apple slices threw them equally as often.

4.)  One of our running records is based around the topic of Peanut Butter, a common food in the US that is not common in Morocco.  This lack of background knowledge caused so many students to fail the quiz based on this passage that I ended up switching passages because all of the kids could pass the next higher level, but not this particular passage.

5.)  One of my reading groups completely misunderstood a chapter of Mister and Me that happened at a church rally.  All three students are Muslim, so I pre-taught a lot of “church vocabulary words” like pew and altar to help them understand.  However, when they read the chapter that had extreme difficulty visualizing what was happening or understanding why they did things like “pass a basket for money”.

So, background knowledge DOES make a difference, in so many ways.  Names – for people, common restaurants or stores etc. throw students during word problems regularly.  Unfamiliar situations cause misunderstandings in reading.  ESL students, or those with a different background from your “common culture” will be at a disadvantage.  So, how do we help them out?
1.  DON’T IGNORE THE DIFFERENCES.  So many teachers breeze over these cultural misunderstandings in an effort to ‘get on with the lesson’.  Not only does this prevent amazing conversations, where all parties involved (including you!) can learn something, but it allows students to sit in muddled confusion and become frustrated.  If a student doesn’t know who Big Bird is, take the time to pull up a picture or video and show her.  Talk as a class about the cultural differences when they occur.


2.  BRING IT UP.  With some populations, these won’t come up in conversation as much.  When I taught in the US, I often had a population of “Hispanic” and a population of “Non-Hispanic”.  The students who were Hispanic had enough exposure to general US culture to think they understood it all and the students who were Non-Hispanic often had enough Hispanic friends to think they understand Hispanic culture completely.  I often pushed the envelope in these situations, bringing in read alouds and math problems that would purposely put one group or the other at a disadvantage and forcing a discussion.  For example, when we read “Too Many Tamales”, I would point out that many of my Hispanic students had a greater understanding of this topic because they made tamales at home with their family.  Then, I would invite students to share how tamales were made.

3.  MIX IT UP.  Kids learn best from each other.  Giving students time to work with students from a variety of cultures and language abilities allows them to learn from that experience and have discussions like our popcorn discussion above.

4.  STRESS THE SIMILARITIES.  Kids expect that everyone around them has had similar experiences.  Sometimes when they start to “get” that their background experiences are different from those of others, they feel weird, or left out.  Stress to them that everyone has different background knowledge and that it’s okay and wonderful.  Put emphasis on the similarities while you learn about the differences.

5.  GET TO KNOW YOUR STUDENTS.  Differences in background knowledge affect more than just ESL students or students from other countries.  Socio-Economic status and ethnic groups can also effect your background knowledge.  Since students understand the world through the lens of their background knowledge, it is vitally important that we understand our students’ background knowledge.  Talk to your kids about what they ate for dinner last night, what they do on the weekends, where they have traveled to etc.  By knowing what your students’ home life is like, you can be better prepared for cross-cultural situations.


What is your best cross-cultural classroom discussion story?

Do you enjoy the weekly TESOL Teaching Tips? Would you like to view an hour long presentation on this topic? I recently presented on Strategies for Teaching English Language Learners at the Everything’s Intermediate Expo. Now you can grab the presentation for just $3.95 from Teacher’s Notebook.


Find more TESOL Teaching Tips here, and come back every Tuesday for a new tip!

The Walk of Shame

  As the end of the year rolls around, teachers have a tendency to pull back into their bag of classroom management tricks.  This year, I pulled back out the “"Walk of Shame”.  The homework policy in my classroom has always been, no homework = no recess.  My students can tell you that I tend to repeat the same anecdotes over and over.  One that I’m famous for is “You had fun last night when you weren’t doing your homework, so you chose to substitute that fun for the fun you would’ve had at recess.”  The other anecdote, which I use for the “I did it, but I left it at home.” excuse is “When you are an adult, if you write the check for your electric bill, put it in the envelope, but forget to mail it in, they’re still going to turn your lights off.”  I’ve told this one so many times that the kids now just say “I know, I know, they’re gonna turn my lights off.”

Anyways, this year the students who had no recess sat on our stage and watched the others play.  Recently, however, we have had a few “repeat offenders” who decided that this was playtime and they would just chat through it.  So, as many teachers do at this time of the year, I pulled back into my bag of tricks and instituted “the Walk of Shame”, which I used a few years back.   Instead of sitting on the stage, students who do not have recess have a designated square of the playground to walk around if they have not done their homework.  Generally, students think that this is MUCH worse than sitting on the edge of the playground making faces at their friends, and it is a great motivator for homework completion, but it also insures that the students get out some of that extra energy and get some exercise to keep that blood moving to their brains.

What classroom management trick have you pulled out of your bag recently?

Earth Week Activities

This year I am the luckiest teacher in the world. I get to teach at the best school ever – International School of Morocco, with some of the best, most creative, teachers ever. Each time I walk into someone else’s classroom, I get inspired and we just seem to spiral great teaching ideas off of each other. It’s a wonderful place to teach, and since we are all collaborating, it’s a wonderful place for our kids to learn – a teacher’s dream, right? I have tried and tried to convince the other teachers to create blogs of their own to spotlight and share some of their amazing ideas, but everyone is super busy. Instead, they have each agreed to let me spotlight some of their ideas right here on Raki’s Rad Resources. So, each Friday night, I will be posting an ISM Spotlight.

To celebrate Earth Day, we had an entire Earth Week at the International School of Morocco.  Here are some of the things that we did to celebrate this week:

Monday morning, we gathered for a whole school read aloud of The Lorax by Dr. Seuss.  That afternoon, our Year 3 – Year 6 (2nd – 5th grade) students used this book as an inspiration for their persuasive posters to convince people to take care of the earth.

    

  

 

Monday afternoon, we had a “Energy Free Afternoon” where students and teachers did not use electricity for the afternoon.  It was a great way for students to realize how many things (like internet and iPad chargers) required electricity.

 

On Wednesday, we did Earth Week Rotations where students moved in their “house groups”, which are mixed age groups of students from Nursery (3 year olds) to Year 6 (11 year olds).  Students moved through these four rotations of Earth Day activities:

Rotation 1:  Bottle cap mural – students used old bottle caps (We’ve been collecting them for weeks.) to create a mural of flours and sky.

  

Rotation 2:  Tagxedos & Hand prints – students brainstormed words about ecology and used them to create Tagxedos.  Then, students created “globe handprints” by painting their hands with blue and green paint.

   

   

      

Rotation 3:  Earth Day RAFT – students worked in groups to create something to persuade others to take care of the earth.  Students chose one Role, one Audience, one Format and one Topic using the organizer below.

 

      

 

 

 

 

Rotation 4:  Mrs. Rumphius – students read the book Mrs. Rumphius, planted sunflower seeds and wrote or draw about how to make the world beautiful.

 

       

 

On Thursday, the Nursery students created a picture of the earth with tissue paper. 

We gathered together to watch the animated version of The Lorax and compare and contrast it with the book that we read on Monday.

 

On Friday, we had a whole school picnic and game session where we taught the students games that you could play WITHOUT buying new equipment or by reusing materials.  Some of the games that we played were egg and spoon races, pillowcase races, sponge races and hot potato.

    

All throughout the week, Year 3 – Year 6 students worked on the Level 4 – Earth Week section of my Spring Holiday packet and worked on the words: natural resources, ecology, environment, reduce, reuse, recycle, litter and protect.

     

How did your school celebrate Earth Day?

Online Books for Kids

For two years, I was the Technology Specialist at a school in Georgia. During that time, I amassed a large collection of websites that I use with my students. You can download my E-Book of Websites for the Elementary Classroom for free from Teachers Pay Teachers or Smashwords, or, you can check back here each week for the website suggestion.


This week, I was speaking with my students about expanding their reading repertoire.  However, since my students often do not speak English at home, and we don’t live in an English speaking country, where you can hop down to the free public library (a service I took very much for granted when I lived in the USA), they often have a lack of new books to read.  We are lucky enough to have a library at the school and kids regularly check out books from there, but they still need a bit more.  So, I shared with my students some places to get good quality books online that they can read to expand their vocabularies and increase their reading fluency and comprehension.
With my students, I only share the FREE options, but I’ve also included a few on this list that I feel are worth paying for. 
FREE Online Books for Kids
1.)  We Give Books - This website is owned by Pearson Foundation, and has hundreds of e-books available for kids to read for free.  The books are really amazing quality, with great illustrations and quality writing.  There is a large variety of fiction and non-fiction books.  In addition, the foundation donates books to kids in need around the world for all of your time spent on this site.  You can sort the books by content and age appropriateness. Even though this is a free site, students will need a log in.



  2.)  International Children’s Digital Library – More than just English, this site has free online kids books in multiple languages including Arabic, Spanish, French and Danish.  There are multiple books in each language and they can be sorted by language and genre, as well as age range.  There are even multiple bilingual books in their library.



3.)  Children’s Storybooks Online – This website has quality stories for young children, older children and young adults.  The books have good quality writing and most books include illustrations.  This site only has fiction books.












4.)  Classic Kids Books – Library of Congress – This site includes 51 classic children’s books for free.  Some are common fairy tales like the Three Bears, but there are many classic novels like the Jungle Book, the Secret Garden and the Adventures of Huck Finn.  These are scanned in copies of good quality with color illustrations.



5.)  Free Kids Books.org – This is a great collection of kids’ books written by independent authors.  All of the books are fiction, although many have science or health tie ins.  You can read the books on the screen or download a PDF version for free.  Many books also have a link to where you can purchase a physical copy of the book.




$$$$ Online Books for Kids
1.) Raz-Kids – Often part of the Reading A-Z package, this is a gigantic collection of leveled books with a listening, reading and recording option for all books.  There are also comprehension quizzes for all of the books.  There are great fiction stories, but also amazing non-fiction connections for most school subjects.  Students earn points by reading, which they can spend in their Raz Rocket.  There are now quite a few books available in Spanish as well.  I have used this quite a bit in my classroom, always with great success.  It generally costs about $100 a year per classroom.



2.)  MeeGenius – A Library of 700 includes classic kids’ stories like Pete the Cat as well as books written just for this website.  There are fiction and nonfiction books available.  You can read 5 of their books for free, but to have access to all of the books, there is a $48 per year.





Any of these sites can be sent home for homework or used in your classroom as a computer center/ literacy center.  You could easily use these books in correspondence with my Reading Response Journal or Reading Logs to track if students are understanding the books they read on these websites.
   

How do you use online books in your classroom?

Find more information about great books for kids at the What to Read Link Up at MyLearningTable.com.