It's that time of year when you go looking for the perfect gift for your child. Does she want a slime making kit? How about the newest Lego set? What about a book? A book? Wait, what? Why would I want to give a book? My answer is why not! Books are a great gift and can be treasured for many years.
As a child every Christmas, my grandmother would send me a book. I always knew it would be a book and not some cool toy or clothes. I gave up shaking the present pretty quickly. As the years went on, I started to have a great collection of books on my bookshelf. These were classics that I wouldn't have chosen for myself. They were also hardcover, which is something I didn't usually get because they are much more expensive. My grandmother gave me all the Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky poetry books, the classics like Heidi and some new ones too. These were not something I would have picked out myself, but I loved them after I started to read them. At our house, my kids get books for presents all the time, and look forward to opening them and reading them either as a family or by themselves. I will often purchase the next book in the series, or the newest book by that author. I ask the kids weeks in advance what they want for a new book and it has made it easier to choose. Books don't always have to be brand new. Scour your local thrift store to find a book. Many books are given away and they are almost brand new. If you aren't sure what to give, get a gift certificate at your local book store and your child can go shopping for their own book. If you want to give the gift that keeps on giving, consider a magazine subscription. My daughter really enjoys the American Girl magazine, and my son really Highlights. Ranger Rick and Kid's Discover are also excellent choices. Your child can look forward to a new magazine every month or so, and you guarantee that there is always something new to read in the house! So this holiday season, I urge you to consider a book as a gift. It might not be ripped open and screamed about, but it will be a great gift! Happy Holiday Reading!
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Last summer I created summer reading bookstore at my school where students came and “shopped” for books. I purchased $4,000 worth of books and the students in my school picked 5-8 new books to take home and add to their personal library. The kids loved it and I am hoping this translates into less of a summer slide. You might not know, but our little village, home of less than 4,000 full time residents, has a 42% free and reduced lunch rate. That means that 42% of our students struggle to make sure they have enough food. That means that they do not have extra money for things like books for their kids.
This summer I am having three Little Free Libraries built and put in our three neediest neighborhoods so students can walk up to the library and exchange a book on an honor system. I have already won a Teachers Literacy Award from Penguin Random House. They gave me $250 in cash and $1,000 in books. I’ve pretty much spent that money on books and supplies for the libraries already! The Lake Placid Rotary Club gave me $1,500 and I have written two grants that are pending. I am looking for your help. Any little bit would help. Here is the link to the campaign I have through Adirondack Gives. It’s like Go Fund Me for the ADKs. Your donations through this organization are tax deductible. https://adirondackgives.org/campaigns/lpes-summer-reading-and-little-libraries/ Here is the information on the Penguin Random House grant I won: http://foundation.penguinrandomhouse.com/learn-more/teacherawards/ Here is the link to Little Free Libraries, the organization I am using to get the libraries on the web: https://littlefreelibrary.org/ We will have a huge opening party when the libraries open in June. If you’re around, I hope you can make it! Thanks so much for your support. The students and teachers of Lake Placid Elementary School appreciate it. High Frequency Words, Trick Words, Sight Words: they all mean the same thing. These are the words you see on your child’s spelling list that don’t follow a pattern and simply need to be memorized. Memorizing things can be easy for some and hard for others, but memorizing is a part of life. You need to help your child figure out how she learns the best. Does she need to write it several times, or sing a song or do a cheer? Does she need to break the syllables into nonsense words and read them like they sound? Teaching students who struggle with spelling has allowed me to create some interesting songs and phrases for the trick words. I hope they can help your child remember them when it comes time to writing them not only for the weekly spelling test, but most importantly, in the real world, when it really counts! We start our week by writing the trick words one at a time on a white board. I say a word, and the students repeat the word. This might not sound like an important step but it is because it allows their brain to focus on the task at hand, and also tells me whether they have heard the word correctly or not. They write the word, and say the letters aloud as they are writing them; tell your hand what to write. This is from Wilson Language, a program designed for adult non-readers and dyslexic learners. Then I added something else. After all the words are written, I say a word and the students find it on their board. They repeat the word, and say the letters aloud, writing a small dot underneath each letter. Again, since this involves the auditory and visual parts of the brain, there is a better chance the letter combinations will be remembered. Once this is completed for all words, I say a word, they repeat the word, then erase the word, one letter at a time, saying the letters aloud as they are erasing it. It doesn’t take long to complete this task, but it is effective. Another strategy I have used is we have songs and silly phrases for almost all of the trick words. Sung to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell” for the word “they,” There is no A in they There is no A in they, I always forget e-y, There is no A in they! Whenever someone starts writing tha, thay, thae, I start singing. I keep singing it until the student fixes the mistake. They all laugh and sing along with me. To the tune of the beginning of the old Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Song (Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me?): This is how you spell should, it rhymes with would and could, Are you ready? Here we go: SH-OU-LD Remember the Oscar Myer Weiner jingle for how to spell bologna in the 70s and 80s? I use it for because. This is how you spell because: B-E-C-A-U-S-E. The kids have helped me come up with things that have worked, and I have passed them along. Again: A comes again, IN again. (Credit to Martina) Friend: My friend doesn’t end on Friday. (Credit to Morin) When: When I see a hen, I count to ten! (Credit to Adriane and Jenna) My daughter is really good at spelling. I’m not sure where she got that because I struggled with spelling forever! However, this year she has had to memorize some tricky words that don’t follow the traditional patterns. She finds that if she scoops the words into syllables and reads them the way the are written, then she can remember them for spelling. For example, favorite is pronounced fa-vor-ite (with the long I sound at the end) so she will remember the silent e. My son needed to learn give, so I taught him the rule that v never ends a word in English. V is too scared to be at the back of the line, so e volunteers to hang out with him. I then point this out with other words when we are reading that end with V. I hope you have found this helpful and you might use it to help your child with those tricky high frequency words. I have learned, however, that you need to start this work earlier in the week, so you aren’t dreading Thursday nights trying to figure out tricks for the words when all anyone wants to do is go to bed! Good luck, and if you have any tricks for the rest of us, please leave it in the comment section. Happy Halloween! As we continue our school year, I want to show you how you can partner read with your younger reader. My littlest one is in first grade, and when given the choice of reading materials, he will chose the easiest book just to get it over with. I don't want to push so much that he doesn't enjoy reading, but I do want him to be reading on his level. Reading on his level doesn't mean an actual letter level, but any book that is challenging enough that he has to work on a word or two on the page. In order for him to read longer books and feel success, we partner read with him. We started out with the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems. He would chose a character to be, and I would be the other one. We had a great time reading with expression and acting out the books. Now I have found that the Henry and Mudge books are great books for him because it gives him a bit of a challenge, and they are longer, so they last for the full 15 minutes of daily reading. He reads a page, and I read a page, and sometimes we don't make it through the whole story. That's fine because now he has something to look forward to when he reads again. If you have a really early reader, check out the video below for a way to partner read with your child. The video is from last spring, when my son was in kindergarten. The book he is reading is really easy for him, so I ended talking about the story as part of our partner time. He was motivated to read it, and that's half the battle! Welcome back! It’s that time of year again; time for soccer practice, ballet classes and school to start! We are in the second week of September, and right in the swing of things.
I wanted to share some things that I have learned as I started this school year that might be helpful for you at home as you start your school year and get back into a routine with your little ones. First of all, I hope you and your children had a great summer, filled with outside activities. Even though it was summer, I hope you still found time to read with your children too. We read a lot this summer, and took numerous books out of the library. My kids used their canvas bags from book shopping day to transport their books to and from the library, and to bring their books on vacation and to camp. Now we are back into a school schedule, and this includes homework! Homework: love it or hate it, it’s a part of life. I’d like to talk about how you can help your child with homework in general, but especially reading homework. First, set a schedule. Does your child need a break and a snack after school before he/she sits down to work? Perhaps your child can come home and immediately start working. Maybe your child needs to have some time to play and can do homework after dinner. Or maybe, your child needs to work in small chunks: do math then play and come back to reading and spelling later. Once you figure out what works for your child, try to stick to that schedule. The second thing you can do is help your child set up a quiet homework space. Get a special container (an old shoebox works well) that holds all the materials he/she might need for homework: pencils, erasers, colored pencils or markers, glue and tape. The container should be in a place where your child can independently reach it and move it to the quiet location for homework. Our quiet location is at the kitchen counter. During homework time, all music and electronics are turned off. Studies have shown that most students need a quiet environment to work. They also need a flat surface. Lying down on a bed is not the best place to do math pages. Lounging on the sofa is not ideal for spelling. They need to be able to sit up, get oxygen to their brain and take on homework! The third thing you can do is offer assistance when needed. I am usually preparing dinner or working on my work when my kids are doing homework. I am there to help and keep them focused on the task at hand. I give strategies like do what you know first, then come back to the tricky ones. I prod them along and make sure they aren’t daydreaming. I feed them healthy snacks as they are working to keep them going. When it comes to reading homework, prepare to be more present. My fourth grader can read silently in her head with her own timer, so she just starts it and does it completely on her own. My first grader, on the other hand, would just stare at the pictures and not read the words if I let him do reading homework independently. To help him, I created a special box that holds books for reading homework. This saves us time and we don’t have to look through a whole bookshelf of books searching for the right one for him. I set a 15 minute timer and sit next to him on the sofa (he’s sitting up, not lounging). He reads aloud to me, and sometimes we partner read. He reads between two and three easy readers in 15 minutes. We talk about the stories and compare a few if they are from the same series. We are loving the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems right now. We are one week into this routine, and so far, it seems to be working for us. Creating a routine and sticking to it as much as possible should help make homework a bit less stressful. I read it, but I don’t know what I just read. Has this ever happened to you? Has it happened to your child? It has happened to all of us, at one time or another. Remember when the tax directions came in booklets, and you had to wade through that nonsense to do your taxes? I would read a small paragraph and have no idea what I just read. As a proficient reader, I realized that I didn’t understand, and I went back to reread it. I would break it down into smaller chunks until I was able to understand the directions.
This happens to readers all the time, but the struggling ones are the ones who don’t realize they don’t understand what they just read. Their reading sounds great out loud, and when you ask them what they just read, they can only recall the last few sentences. That’s because they aren’t doing the hard work of visualizing when they are reading. In Jennifer Saravallo’s, The Reading Strategies Book (2015) she gives a great tip for students who read words but don’t remember what they have read. It’s called Read, Cover, Remember, Retell. I recently taught this to my fourth graders with great success. They were reading nonfiction books, but could only talk about the final sentences on the page. I modeled the strategy, by covering part of a page with my hand. I only read aloud the part that my hand covered (about a paragraph). I then closed my eyes and said aloud what I was picturing when I was thinking about the part I just read. Then I wrote it down on a sticky note so I could remember the main idea of the page. I had to model and model and model it for my struggling readers, but they have it now! It is their go-to strategy for all of their reading because it makes them slow down and really think about the story in small chunks. The next time your child reads a page or a chapter and she cannot remember what happened, show her this strategy. It will help her monitor her reading and remember what the story or section is about. It is a way to slow down her reading so she can make meaning of the story. Hopefully it will help your child to remember what she read. The other day we were driving home from visiting a museum on a rainy Sunday afternoon. Yes, I said rain and it is January in the Adirondacks! Ten minutes into a forty-five minute car ride, my son piped up from the back, “I’m bored! I have nothing to look at but trees and it’s boring!” Despite the fact that I told him to bring something to entertain himself, he was bored! I didn’t want to put in a movie because it was a short trip. We were literally driving through a forest, so playing the ABC car game wouldn’t work. “Let’s play the story game.” I said.
“No, that’s boring,” he replied. Are you seeing the pattern here? After I explained how it worked, both kids wanted to play! Here's how you play: one person thinks of an opening sentence to a story and says it aloud. The next person says another sentence to continue the story, and then the third person joins in, etc. You get the idea. We agreed on some ground rules before we got started. Our rules were no violence and no spooky stuff. My kids hate scary things, so I put that out there before we even started telling stories. Our stories consisted of animals, firefighters, and more animals. It must have been our driving through the forest that prompted so many animals! Both kids loved it! It didn’t involve any writing, so spelling didn’t count, and my five year old didn’t have to worry about forming letters on a page. It made him use his imagination, follow a logical sequence and visualize what was happening in the story so far. In thirty minutes, my kids and I had created at least five stories. It was much better than having them zone out in the backseat while watching a movie, and before we knew it, we were home! Telling a story, even in this funny way, got them thinking about story plots and what characters would do in a story. It is a way to increase their vocabulary, because I am playing along too. Both of my children benefited from having an adult in the game because they would often use some of my phrases in subsequent stories. They got to develop the characters and take them on twists that others hadn’t thought about. My son got mad when my daughter made one of his characters return to the firehouse too soon. He wanted the fire to rage on and invite more firefighters to help with the fire. He got a quick lesson in rolling with it; not all things end up going your way, you know! It also sharpened their listening skills. They had to listen to other people tell the story, and adjust their thoughts based on how the story was proceeding. This will help their comprehension of stories when they read. While reading, they can predict and think about how they would make the story go, and then read to see if they were correct. In the story game, they had to figure out a logical sequence of events, and somehow draw the story to a conclusion. The stories didn’t drag on forever, because I always announced a “final round” which meant they had to wrap up their thought so we could start a new one. Since that car ride, the kids have asked to play this game at home several times. It’s a great thing to do while I am cooking dinner, or getting them ready for bath and bedtime. It keeps them engaged and thinking. Even though they are not actually reading text, they are thinking about the story, and that’s what we want all readers to do when they read. Try it with your kids the next time they are bored in the car. It’s better than a movie or video games, and certainly better than listening to them whine! This year, my family started a new tradition. We do the regular countdown to Christmas on a magnet tree every year. It’s a wooden tree with 24 magnets, and each day one kid chooses a magnet to put on the tree. This has been great, but with two kids, only one can get to do that job each morning. One day, while strolling through Pinterest, I came across a great idea. Take 24 holiday books and wrap them up. Each day your child opens one book to read.
I thought this was great! I already have a box of holiday books that I only bring out in December. The problem is we seem to have so many that they don’t get read because December is just busy. There’s no other way around it. Between the second weekend of The Nutcracker (yes, we all danced in it this year!), Santa arriving at night on the fire truck, the Lake Placid Holiday Village Stroll weekend, bell concert for me, and singing concert for my daughter, December is just busy. I do, however, take the time to slow down and read to my kids each night, not matter how busy we are. Usually, our nightly routine is each child gets to choose a book, and I read both books to both kids. However, the kids are extra tired in December, so by reading one holiday book a night, it ensures we are in bed on time, and we still get our reading accomplished. Here’s what I did. I took all the holiday books, but only had 22. I took some extras out of the gifts I was going to give the kids at Christmas, and wrapped them up to make a total of 24. If it was a book especially for my daughter, like Tallulah’s Nutcracker by Marilyn Singer, I wrapped it in her princess wrapping paper so my son wouldn’t be disappointed if he chose a book and it was a “girly” one. Each child had two books with their own wrapping, and the others were wrapped in regular Christmas paper. Our other family tradition is that Daddy reads ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas on Christmas Eve, so I wrapped that in all the leftover paper and put a large note: Do Not Open Until Christmas Eve. When the kids went to bed before December 1, I explained that my son was going to do the magnet, and my daughter was going to open a book present, and that would be the book we read at night, then we would alternate each day until December 24. The kids were so excited about this idea. I was skeptical because I wasn’t sure they would be happy about the books. Boy, was I wrong. They love it! Each morning, no matter what book is opened, I hear “I love this book!” “This is my favorite!” “Oh yeah!” They had never been this excited about the books before. All it took was a little wrapping paper and a plan. Now, each night we read the book that was opened that morning. We have enjoyed Pete the Cat Saves Christmas, Bear Stays Up for Christmas, The Nutcracker, If You Love a Christmas Tale and many more. We have different versions of the same book and talk about how they are different. We have especially enjoyed The Nutcracker books since we were in the show this year! There’s still time to start this in your house. Find your holiday books, wrap them up, and let the kids open them one at a time. If you don’t have enough, go to the library and check out books. Since you get to keep them for two weeks, you should be good to go between now and Christmas! This also gives the kids something to open, and might suffice until the big day when they get “real” presents. However, in my world, any book is a present! Happy Holidays to you and your family! “The kids stood outside the dark, empty house and stared. ‘What should we do?’ asked Jane.” This is from a story that I made up, but it is a good example of where you and your child need to stop and think. In the story, Jane asked a good question, what should they do? What would you do? What do you think will happen next? When I am reading with my kids at home, and we get to an exciting part, the end of a chapter, or the “cliffhanger,” I always ask them to make a prediction. I use those exact words. I say, “Make a prediction. What do you think will happen next in the story?” “What’s going to happen now that Ribsy is out of the car and in a parking lot, but he can’t find his family? Make a prediction. What do you think?” I asked this in the middle of chapter 1 of Ribsy by Beverly Cleary. We had a great conversation about what could logically happen next in the story. I try to steer my kids away from ridiculous predictions, like aliens are going to come and take him away. We call those distracting predictions, and they aren’t going to help us understand the story better. By making predictions, based on the story, it gives readers a reason to read more. It makes them want to keep reading to find out what happens next. You know what that’s like; it’s late and you really should turn out the light, but you have to find out what’s going to happen next! Predictions can be made in both fiction and nonfiction stories. It seems more natural in fiction stories, however. To start this kind of thinking, I often think aloud for my kids. I look at the cover, read the title and check out the back, then talk about what we might read about in the story. It gets their brains working, and sets them up to listen for specific things we might find in the story. For example, when I read a story about Charlie the Ranch Dog, I looked at the cover and talked about the type of dog I was going to read about. I made a guess that this dog probably works on a ranch, which is a type of farm. I wondered aloud if the farm had cows or horses. I asked the kids what they thought might happen. They guessed that Charlie was going to help round up the cattle. When we got to the part where Charlie does take part in a cattle drive, I commented that our prediction about Charlie was correct. I also pointed out that even if our prediction was incorrect, it was important that we did some thinking before reading. When reading nonfiction stories in school, I have my students write what they know about the subject before they start to read. It gets their brain thinking about robots, for example, before we start our book on robots. They make predictions about what they might learn in the story, based on the table of contents. All of this work can be done at home, in a conversation with your children. Don’t be afraid to talk about what you are thinking while you are reading aloud. Make your thinking alive for your children! This might not sound natural or it may even seem a little silly, but it does work. It’s not always natural to stop and think aloud about what might happen next in the story. However, as an adult reader, it’s something that happens automatically in your head. In order for your kids to do it, they need to see it in action. If you pay attention to what’s happening with your own thinking while you are reading to your kids, and point that out to them, it will become more natural for them when they are reading. Since I did this with a chapter book a few weeks ago, my five year old always reminds us to make a prediction at the end of the chapter. He got used to it when we read Ribsy. If he can do it with a little prompting from me, then you and your children can have these kinds of talks too! Happy Reading and Predicting! See if this sounds familiar in your family: Your kindergartener or first grader is new to reading, and he is so excited about it. He comes home each day with a book he has read in a small group, and starts to read it to you. He whips through it so fast, you know it's just memorized, and he's not even looking at the words! This isn't reading, or is it?
My son reads like this every day, no matter how many times I tell him to point to the words. That usually ends up in tears because he doesn't want to point. He just wants to read it and be done! I know he knows what words are and can point to individual words while he reads, because I've see him do it when he reads a book for the first time. However, this is a reread, and I have decided it is not worth an argument about pointing to the words. Instead of getting into a heated discussion about reading and pointing, our conversation sounds something like this: Will quickly reads his book about farms and things you can see on the farm. I ask him to show me his favorite page. Me: Point to the word "can." (Will Points to "can.") Me: How did you know that was the word can? Will: It starts with /k/. Me: What's this word? (I point to the word see.) Will: See Me: What letters are in the word "see"? Will: S-e-e. Me: Good job! What happened in this story? Will: The kids can see lots of things at the farm. Me: What kinds of things can they see? Will: A horse, a cow, a chicken. Me: Have you ever seen those things on a farm? Will: Those things weren't on the farm we went to with the class. They had goats on that farm. Me: Ah! The farm you visited was different. Do you think all farms are the same? Will: No. Pooh-Pa's farm only has horses. Me: That's right. You know more about farms because you read a book about it, and you went to a farm. You compared the farm you visited to the farm you read about in the book. That's what readers do. They read to find out information and compare it to stuff they already know. I hope you can read another farm book and find some more information about farms. That's about it for our conversation. It doesn't last long, but I try to make it happen every day. I use words like compare, predict and make a connection to introduce that vocabulary to him. I want him to know that reading is about understanding the story, not just whipping through the words and being done. Even kindergarteners can do those higher level thinking skills, like making connections, predictions, and inferences. You just need to guide them a bit. Don't get freaked out when your kindergartener has mostly memorized the book. This is all a part of the process in learning to read. Make sure he is reading every night, and can show you some words on the page. If he starts making up words, or saying words that aren't there, ask him to slow down and look again at the word. You might have to point to the word and ask, "does this say _____?" Then remind him to be a more careful reader and look at the words when he is reading. Once students get toward the end of kindergarten level books (Fountas and Pinnell levels C-D), they can no longer get away with just memorizing the books. However, because they have read a lot of books at the beginning of kindergarten level (Levels A and B), they know a lot of sight words, and can use the picture clues and their sounding out skills to help them figure out the other words. I hope this helps you as your child enters this fantastic journey of learning to read. Just remember to keep reading to your child, no matter how old they are! They need to hear good reading and work on other comprehension skills too. I'll tackle that next month! |
AuthorMy name is Laura Coffin, and I am the reading specialist at Lake Placid Elementary School. I have a BA from William Smith College and a M.Ed. in Reading from Lesley University. I also hold a Wilson Language Level I certification. I teach reading, writing and spelling strategies to help all students! Follow me on twitter @lgaetacoffin Archives
December 2017
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