Recycling and Inferring

Here is another activity that I found in, Comprehension Connections:  Bridges to Strategic Reading by Tanny McGregor.  I really like this one and we have fun with it in class.  I choose some of my recycling from home and bring it in to class.  I tell my class that there's a new family on my street and I haven't met them yet, but I'm curious about them, so I brought their recycling to try and figure out what they're like.  

The kids have to use the pieces of recycling to decide what the family is like.  One of the kids told me, "They're rich."  When I asked why he said, "They have bottled water."  When I asked how this shows that the family is rich, he explained, "Not everyone can afford to buy bottled water."  The kids work in small groups connecting the recycling "evidence" with their inferences about the family.  This leads us to the discussion of inferring while we're reading.  It can't be a wild guess.  You have to be able to back it up with a piece of evidence and explain how that evidence validates your inference.

You can click on the pictures above for organizers that I use when we start working with inferring.

Building Reading Comprehension Habits

Building Reading Comprehension Habits in Grades 6-12:  A Toolkit of Classroom Activities by Jeff Zwiers has many different graphic organizers and tools to use in developing reading comprehension.

Different levels of questions - "on-the-surface questions," "under-the-surface questions," "life application questions," - is one that I like.  It has a sample of the different kinds of questions and then a sample "question tree," with some other questions starters.  

Word Play

I use games out of this resource, Word Play:  Fun Games for Building Reading and Writing Skills in Children with Learning Differences, by Lori Goodman and Lora Myers, when I'd like the whole class to be up, moving around, and being creative.  I've used different games from this book in all my classes from grade 9 locally developed English to grade 12 writer's craft.  The games are interactive and cooperative and/or competitive.

One of my favourites is called "Odd or Peculiar."  I even like the title!  :)  It is a good one for thinking about a range of words very quickly and is great to do before creative writing.  Think of a category - such as fruit, or games, or vegetables, or whatever you want.  Your students can work in small groups to think of all the different objects that fit in that category and divide them into 2 groups - odd and peculiar.

Example:  Category - Fruit

Odd - cherries, blueberries, apples (2 letters the same beside each other - just like odd)

Peculiar - bananas, oranges, grapefruit (no letters the same beside each other - just like peculiar)

When we play it in my class, I give them about 3 minutes to come up with as many as possible in each group under one particular category.  Then one person from each group comes up and writes them on the board.  We cross off all the ones that are the same and the groups get points for original words that none of the other groups have.  Then we try again with a different category.  We usually play with 3 different categories - fruit, games, and animals are my go to categories.

Some of my other favourites from this book are, "Find the Art in Article." That involves reading through a section of text and finding all the small words that are hidden in the larger words.  Most small words wins.  Another game I like is, "Words All Over Me." Pick a body part like arm, and have the kids write words that rhyme with arm on small pieces of paper and then have one person in the group stick all the rhyming words on their arm.  Most original rhyming words wins.  

Wallwisher

Wallwisher is an interactive website that another teacher, Eilidh, shared with me (thanks!).  You can click on the picture below to link to the wallwisher home page.

We talked about wallwisher as an option to include technology in your class by having your students use their smartphones to post to the wall that you have displayed on the screen in your class.  Students could work in pairs or small groups and probably everyone would have access to a phone.  It may be an alternative to brainstorming when not all students feel comfortable contributing orally.  The picture below is from wallwisher's site and lists a few of the options they've come up with for using wallwisher.

I am currently working on a wall that is posting options for how to use wallwisher in your classroom.  You can go to the wall where I'm brainstorming ideas for class use by clicking the picture below.  Please add your own ideas for how you could use wallwisher in your class.  I am the moderator for the wall, so they get sent to me and then posted.  Thanks!

Emotional Intelligence

Stop!  Think!  Choose!  Building Emotional Intelligence in Young People,  by Matta Mapes has some activities to help your class work together to overcome some of the challenges of diverse students in a classroom.  The text is broken into skill building units - "Knowing Yourself," "Accepting Yourself," "Managing Yourself," "Connecting with Others," "Communicating with Others," "Cooperating with Others," and "Handling Conflicts with Others."  I find that some of the activities work well for ice breakers to get the students talking to each other and knowing a little more about each other.  Two of the ones I like are "Who Am I" and "How Do Others See Me?"  There's also a guided imagery script about imagining the future.  If your students are willing to try it, it produces some interesting results.  It asks them to picture themselves at various times in their future and gives prompting questions to get them thinking about what it might be like for them at certain times in their future.  I have found this book really useful in essential/locally developed, applied, and alternative classes.

There is also a section at the back of the book called "Techniques for Developing Emotional Intelligence Skills through Content Areas."  It includes lesson ideas for incorporating emotional concepts into art, drama, English, science, health, math, music, physical education, and social studies.

Engaging Kids in Reading

Reading Reasons:  Motivational Mini-Lessons for Middle and High School, by Kelly Gallagher has some quick, eye-opening lessons on the importance of reading.  One of the ones I like is called, "How Much Will You Be Paid To Attend Class Today?"  It demonstrates how people who graduate from high school usually make considerably more money than those who don't, and then adds in further financial benefits of post-secondary. Stenhouse publishes it.  You can click on the cover below to go to the website where they have a preview of the book.

When I googled the book before posting it this morning I also found a slideshow that looks like it has been developed by a literacy teacher in Florida.  It highlights some of the key points in Reading Reasons.  You can click on the picture below to link to the slideshow.

Resources for Practicing Making Inferences

Cris Tovani's text, I Read It, But I Don't Get It, has some really great ideas in it.  It is specifically for working with high school students.  It is available from Stenhouse Publishers, and they have the first portion of the text, including the table of contents available to view on their website.  You can connect to the site by clicking on the picture of the text below.

One of my favourites from this text, for inferring, is using Chris Van Allsburg's children's book, The Wretched Stone.  This book available from the Thunder Bay Public Library, but I also checked our Insignia library catalogue and many of our elementary schools have this book as well.  Remember you can access the Insignia Library System by going to the Staff Resources page of our board's website.  The Wretched Stone is a very interesting picture book that definitely leads into higher order thinking discussions - is it about the end of the world, a discourse on media... ?  My Mom, my sister and I had a huge discussion about it, and then my Dad mocked us by interpreting it on its literal level.  That's what we get for taking ourselves too seriously!  :)  There is a lot to talk about with many opportunities for students to give specific evidence, from the pictures/words of the text, to support their opinions.

Now that I'm talking about Chris Van Allsburg's work, I'll add in a couple more of his titles that I like.  Two Bad Ants is also a great picture book to use for helping students access making inferences.  The ants find their way into a house and we see them in various human spaces overwhelmed by the size of everything, and wondering what everything is.  Students can say what they think it is and how they made that decision.  I have used this with locally developed and essential level English classes to talk about making inferences.

The final Chris Van Allsburg title that I'll mention today (but he has so many) is The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.  It is not actually a book, but a collection of pictures with a caption for each picture.  There is also an explanation of the collection at the very beginning.  The pictures are very creative and I've used them as a starting point for creating pieces of writing.

Both Two Bad Ants and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick are available in many of our elementary school libraries.  Check them out!