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This website has quizzes for thousands of books at any reading level. I took a quiz on Cassandra Clare's "City of Bones" which is typically four ninth grade and above so there is material for accelerated readers as well.

Book Adventure is a fun, free way to motivate your child to read! Kids in grades K-8 can search for books, read them offline, come back to quiz on what they’ve read, and earn prizes for their reading success.

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BookAdventure.com | Book Test, Vocabulary & Activities Program

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Book Adventure is a AR Alternative for Homeschoolers and Parents. Our Independent Reading Program Offers Online Book Tests, Reading Comprehension Quizzes, Book Word Lists, Spelling and Vocabulary Lessons, Reading Time Logs and Literacy Interactive Learning Activities including Graphic Organizers for Student's Children's Books.

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Learn Out Loud provides an extensive directory of free audio books, lectures, speeches, interviews, and other educational audio and video resources. All of the materials within the directory can be downloaded as mp3 files or streamed online. The use of audio is helpful to students who learn by listening

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LearnOutLoud.com - Audio Books, Podcasts, & Videos to Learn From

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LearnOutLoud.com is your one-stop destination for audio and video learning. Browse over 50,000 educational audio books, MP3 downloads, podcasts, and videos.

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This site includes resources, articles, suggestions for what to do in the very first days of middle school to start on the right track, and book reviews. This resource is perfect for new middle school teachers who want to get a leg up on teaching.

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MiddleWeb is all about middle school & the middle grades - with a sharp focus on teaching and learning in grades 4-8. Join us, learn about our 5 streams of content, and find out how to get involved.

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In an age of fake news and the dismissal of science, teaching students to conduct research provides them with a critical skill. In "It's a Matter of Fact," teacher librarian Angie Miller shows how students across content areas can focus on a thesis and master resources.

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When you go to the search bar at this site and put in your targeted grade and subject, over 1,000 results show up of meaningful lessons to target student literacy. Students must sign up to use this resource.

These online self-paced lessons for blended learning, funded by the Walmart Foundation, are designed to enhance the literacy skills of struggling readers in grades 5–8.  Each uses videos, interactive activities, note taking, reading, and writing to present students with an engaging science, social studies, mathematics, or English language arts topic.Each lesson addresses a range of literacy strategies, which are listed in the accompanying teacher's guide.Students need to be signed in to complete these lessons. To register your students, refer to "Student Help" through the Help tab on the PBS LearningMedia homepage or click here.

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Resources for Teaching Middle School
                  
                  July 16, 2012              

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Resources for Teaching Middle School
                  
                  July 16, 2012              

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At this website, Elena Aguilar, a woman who has been teaching for at least five years shares her list of resources (books, websites, and blogs) that she compiled when a past student asked for resources.

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Edutopia is a free source of information, inspiration, and practical strategies for learning and teaching in preK-12 education. We are published by the George Lucas Educational Foundation, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization.

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This cold be a great resource for older students reviewing grammar and proper English. The tune is catchy and bashes common mistakes students make all the time and corrects them. The word moron is used and might only be suitable for mature classes.

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"Weird Al" Yankovic - Word Crimes (Official 4K Video)

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This school found a way to incorporate the learning and spelling of new words in physical education while also remaining active.

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Literacy in Physical Education: Word Wall

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This is a website my high school teacher showed her classes as a resource for citing sources in writing. The site can be utilized to cite sources from websites, magazines, podcasts, and more. Citations can be done in MLA, APA, and Chicago style so it can fit any classroom.

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When students are writing essays, it’s helpful to review on the board the basic outline an essay. Making the process as interactive as possible is helpful. Choose a simple topic just to focus on the process: e.g., cats and dogs. Review with the students how to take a position on the topic: e.g., which animal makes the better house pet (the thesis) and support the thesis with various reasons and examples (the body).

Ask for their help in completing the outline on the board. This process clarifies the sometimes confusing and counter-intuitive structure of an essay in an interactive manner.

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Getting to know each other - 'Would you like to move in with me?

Time: 20 min

Preparation: Revise how to form questions with the students before you start the activity. Let students imagine they are all looking for a new flatmate for their shared apartment. In order to find the best suitable person, they have to ask numerous questions that seem interesting and relevant to them (e.g. Find out if you have the same interests so you could do things together, Find out character traits and habits (e.g. orderly vs. messy person) etc.) After having asked at least three people in one-on-one conversations (and writing down things they have in common), students decide who to move in with and justify their choice. This activity takes up at least 20 minutes and is fun to the students as they move freely across the room. Students present their choice in the end, so everyone in the class gets to know at least a few details about everyone. Try to let students who are not presenting write down details about their classmates. A good way is to give students different tasks e.g. one group of students writes down character traits, another group collects adjectives of different habits etc. so you can continue working with adjectives for example.

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Classroom Discipline Blog by Craig Seganti

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Classroom Discipline Blog by Craig Seganti

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http://www.classroomdiscipline101.com/classroom-management/
At this website, the well-known Craig Seganti keeps a blog of all his discipline ideas for students. His abrasive style may not fit certain teachers, but he has seen success in classrooms around the country

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This app is perfect for helping teachers plan lessons because it is an easy way to access the standards to determine what needs to be taught.

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I feel like the purpose of this app is to be a reference and that's precisely what it is. With the standards handy on my phone, I'm able to avoid lugging around binders full of information to endless PD sessions. I have it all right there. I agree that copying and pasting would be a nice feature. For those complaining that it isn't "tailored to their state"...the CCSS were designed to put all the states in the same page with the same standards. Wouldn't tailoring them be exactly what they were meant to move away from? That's not the app designer's problem.

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‎View the Common Core State Standards in one convenient FREE app! A great reference for students, parents, and teachers to easily read and understand the core standards. Quickly find standards by subject, grade, and subject category (domain/cluster). This app includes Math standards K-12 and Langua...

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This app lets teachers and students view and create flashcards for any subject. Flashcards can be used for vocabulary or comprehension as well as to study the answers to test questions.

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Khan academy is a free resource for students and teachers that distributes knowledge in exchange for Energy points which allow you to purchase avatars to represent them. Teachers can set up their profile and connect to student profiles to watch progress. There is a wide range of topics to choose from and students can go at their own pace. Lower level students get reinforcement from this site.

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You can learn anything. Expert-created content and resources for every course and level. Always free.

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From James Neill- Hello in Different Languages

This is a fun, warm-up, cross-cultural activity.  A group of students tries to come up the word or words for "hello" in as many different languages as possible. Older students can start to volunteer other phrases they know in languages other than English. Students will get a small sampling of other languages and this activity can lead to more exploration into other cultures.

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(You will need to click on this to be able to read the cartoon.)

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Learning
Climate

From Howard Miller, Associate Professor of Education at
Lincoln University in the article “Creating a Climate for Learning” 

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Learning
Climate

From Howard Miller, Associate Professor of Education at
Lincoln University in the article “Creating a Climate for Learning” 

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·        Use Miller’s 12 steps to create a positive classroom climate

Miller’s 12 steps

1.      Develop a set of written expectations you can live with and enforce.

2.      Be consistent. Be consistent. Be consistent.

3.      Be patient with yourself and with your students.

4.      Make parents your allies. Call early and often. Use the word "concerned." When communicating a concern, be specific and descriptive.

5.      Don't talk too much. Use the first 15 minutes of class for lectures or presentations, then get the kids working.

6.      Break the class period into two or three different activities. Be sure each activity segues smoothly into the next.

7.      Begin at the very beginning of each class period and end at the very end.

8.      Don't roll call. Take the roll with your seating chart while students are working.

9.      Keep all students actively involved. For example, while a student does a presentation, involve the other students in evaluating it.

10.  Discipline individual students quietly and privately. Never engage in a disciplinary conversation across the room.

11.  Keep your sense of perspective and your sense of humor.

12.  Know when to ask for help.

- See more at: http://www.educationworld.com/a_curr/curr155.shtml#sthash.nAwph1Hz.dpuf

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Power
Writing

From the article “Building
WRITING fluency: A simple routine for any classroom” by Ryan McCarty on the AUSL blog on TeachingChannel.org. 

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Power
Writing

From the article “Building
WRITING fluency: A simple routine for any classroom” by Ryan McCarty on the AUSL blog on TeachingChannel.org. 

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This short exercise could help your students up both their writing volume and writing proficiency.

Materials Needed:

·        Vocabulary Terms

·        Writing Notebook

Objective:

·        Increase writing volume which will increase writing proficiency.

Activity:

Step 1: Give students an important vocabulary term or question you’ve been addressing in your instruction and write it on the board.

Step 2: Instruct students to write (or type) “as much as they can, as well as they can” for 60 seconds.  Have them always write in the same place (writers notebook, science notebook, etc. depending on class).

Step 3: At the end of 60 seconds, tell them “pencils up” and ask them to count the overall number of words and tally it in the margin. Have students circle the errors they noticed while rereading their writing.

Step 4: Have students repeat this procedure two more times, giving them a new related vocabulary word or relevant question each time.

Step 5: For each session have them graph the highest number of words they wrote in any one minute period.  Have them set goals for the numbers of words they will write in any one-minute period next time.

Step 6: At least once a week, have them choose a previously written entry to revise and extend into a more formal explanatory or argumentative piece for homework.

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Reading : How Do I Teach Reading in Content Areas?

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Reading : How Do I Teach Reading in Content Areas?

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Sandy Springer, a teacher with an impressive background talks about how central reading is not only to language arts classes, but also to science, math, and social studies classes, as well as the real world outside of school.
"Teaching a child to read in content areas will help the child prepare for reading recipes and bank statements, complete word problems and excel in the sciences. Instill a love of reading in a child as preparation for both school work and life with tips from an experienced teacher in this free video on education."

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Reading : How Do I Teach Reading in Content Areas?

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Teaching a child to read in content areas will help the child prepare for reading recipes and bank statements, complete word problems and excel in the sciences. Instill a love of reading in a child as preparation for both school work and life with tips from an experienced teacher in this free video on education.

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Picture
Quiz

From
By Elena Chou’s article “5 Creative ESL
Reading Comprehension Activities Your Students Will Love” on the Fluent U
English Educator Blog. 

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Picture
Quiz

From
By Elena Chou’s article “5 Creative ESL
Reading Comprehension Activities Your Students Will Love” on the Fluent U
English Educator Blog. 

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This method of testing is helpful to ESL students because it lets them test through the images they recognize rather than through the words they do not.

Materials needed:

·        Text

·        Pre-written quiz using pictures as answers.

Objective:

·        This activity targets ESL students. This quiz gives students answers in the form of pictures which they can comprehend easier than words.

Activity:

Give students a text to read out loud as a class. After reading the text, students will take a comprehension quiz with answers in the form of pictures. For example, when asking about setting, the students will see pictures of different settings and choose the one that represents the setting of the story. The class can discuss answers to find where students are struggling and where they are excelling.

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I have loved this resource since high school when flocabulary played "The week in rap" on channel one news. This site writes catchy songs for every subject and a wide variety of topics. My favorite is their song for teaching the elements of a short story which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6I24S72Jps

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Educational Hip-Hop Songs & Videos for All Subjects, K-12

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Flocabulary is a library of songs, videos and activities for K-12 online learning. Hundreds of thousands of teachers use Flocabulary’s educational raps and teaching lesson plans to supplement their instruction and engage students. Our team of artists and educators is not only committed to raising test scores, but also to fostering a love of learning in every child.

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This website has some brilliant ideas for lesson plans for almost any grade k-12. They are easily accessible and address many teachable aspects.
I found the lesson plan ABC Bookmaking Builds Vocabulary in the Content Areas: In this lesson, students create an ABC book related to a topic.
"OVERVIEW

Students are engaged and motivated to build content area vocabulary through the creation of ABC books. A small-group activity introduces a variety of ABC books, including books for older readers that use the letters of the alphabet as a starting point to present information about a featured subject. Students then decide on a style and structure for their own alphabet books and choose a word for each letter from content area textbooks, encyclopedias, reference books, or suggested websites. A storyboard is constructed including each of the 26 words, the context in which it will appear, and a quick sketch of the proposed illustration. Students' final ABC books are created using either the interactive Alphabet Organizer or PowerPoint."

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Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students.

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Not your everyday calendar, here you can find important events in literary history, authors' birthdays, and a variety of holidays, all with related activities and resources that make them more relevant to students.

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This lesson plan I wrote and used in Mrs. Hunsberger's sixth grade class. They were reading The Giver and I focused on helping them use context clues to help them come up with definitions for their vocabulary words.

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This resource is packed with worksheets, spelling strategies, comprehension strategies, and Vocabulary strategies. The site also has a bit about content area reading:
"What is Content Area Reading?

Every time you read a text you read it the same way, right? Novels, textbooks, magazine articles and Internet web pages are all the same if they are written in the same language, aren’t they? The answer to both of the questions is “not really”. Readers employ different reading strategies and prior knowledge based on the genre (type of reading) and topic of the text. For this reason it is important that teachers help students, especially those in middle and high school, learn how to “tackle” their particular content area’s texts.

What is Content Area Reading?

Simply put content area reading is the reading that a person (usually a student) needs to complete and understand in a particular subject area. The content areas typically included in this definition are science, social studies/history and math, but any area outside of English literature instruction constitutes a content area. The reading associated with content area courses reflects not only the concepts and ideas important to these subjects, but also the text structures used by those practicing the field.

How are Content Area Texts Different Than Literature?

Since most of the texts used in these subject areas are expository (informational) they require their readers to use different strategies for reading and comprehending them than they employ when reading literature. Consider the differences between a novel and a social studies textbook. Novels are usually set up so that there are distinct chapters, but each page of text looks the same. It features sentences in paragraphs. There may occasionally be a few illustrations, but they are few and far between. Now think about a textbook. While there are chapters and text in paragraphs textbooks also use sidebars, illustrations, headings, footers and colored text to “tell” their “stories”. If the reader focuses only on the components of a textbook that are like a piece of literature, she will end up missing a large portion of the information on the page.

In addition to looking different, content area texts may be written differently than literature. Literature is written in a narrative form which relies on a plot and character dialogue to convey its message to the reader. Content area texts are usually expository meaning that are written to inform, persuade, describe or explain information for the reader. There is no action to tell a story in an expository text. The reader needs to use strategies for harnessing and synthesizing the information in this type of text.

Beyond these general differences specific content areas may use particular text structures or styles of writing. For example, lab reports written by scientists (and science students) follow a certain format that their writers and readers must understand in order to convey information.

How do Readers Go About Understanding Content Area Texts?

Readers need to choose and revise their choices of reading strategies depending on the type of content area text they are reading. Each genre of text requires its readers to use a different set of strategies for accessing its information. The reader must first identify the text’s structure and use his knowledge of this genre to read the text. While reading the text, he must use general reading strategies such as questioning, making inferences and connections and activating prior knowledge and content specific strategies including drawing on subject specific information to make meaning of the text. During this process he is (hopefully) making meaning on three different levels: literal (understanding the information written on the page), inferential (reading ‘between the lines’) and evaluation (making judgments and conclusions about the information). These abilities develop from good content area reading instruction and practice."
http://www.k12reader.com/what-is-content-area-reading/

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Reading Worksheets, Spelling, Grammar, Comprehension, Lesson Plans

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Reading Worksheets, Spelling, Grammar, Comprehension, Lesson Plans -

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Reading worksheets and articles for parents and teachers, covering sight words, vocabulary, reading comprehension, grammar, and other reading essentials.

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Vocabulary Cartoons:

From 15 Vocabulary Strategies in 15 minutes under
Learning Tasks on the Weebly website. 

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Vocabulary Cartoons:

From 15 Vocabulary Strategies in 15 minutes under
Learning Tasks on the Weebly website. 

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This activity lets students be creative with vocabulary and show their humor in an appropriate way.

Materials Needed:

·        Vocabulary Terms

·        Drawing materials

·        Paper

Objectives:

·        Get students to visualize the word and its meaning.

Activity:

Give students a vocabulary term and blank sheets of paper. Tell them to work as a group to create a cartoon in which:

The vocabulary term is spelled out

phonetic spelling is included

there is a brief definition

a linking word is pointed out

a cartoon is drawn connecting the linking word to the vocabulary term

a sentence that uses the vocabulary term shows the link

These cartoons can also be made electronically in older grades.

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The Verb Dome

From Shawn Dowling
on the British Council: Teaching English Website. 

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The Verb Dome

From Shawn Dowling
on the British Council: Teaching English Website. 

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This is a vocabulary activity that uses competition as a motivator and lets students teach each other using what they know.
Materials Needed:

·        A whiteboard or a clean sheet of paper

Objectives:

·        Get students to show what they know for verb vocabulary and get them to help each other expand vocabulary.

Activity:

Create two teams in the classroom. Have them compete to see who can define the most vocabulary words taking turns. Students show what they know by suggesting definitions and teach each other by explaining words they know that others don’t.

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Article Summery Piece- Literacy is Knowledge

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Article Summery Piece- Literacy is Knowledge

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Article Summery #2

Pondiscio, R. (2014). Literacy is knowledge. City Journal. (I couldn’t find page numbers online and there was no issue or volume mentioned, but this is a great article written by the executive director of CitizenshipFirst)

Summery

For this assignment, I read Robert Pondiscio’s work from City Journal about literacy. The article, titled, “Literacy is Knowledge” hit on an issue I’ve thought about for a while. There is a divide between students who come from literature-rich families and students whose first exposure to literature comes in the classroom. The author uses the analogy of bike riding. Many people think reading is like riding a bike, once you know how to do it, you can ride any bike or read any piece of literature. This simply isn’t true. Good readers become so by reading multiple texts and building up their prior knowledge, vocabulary, and comprehension skills. For this reason, students who aren’t exposed to literature will struggle with the simplest texts.

The author makes the case that typical teaching styles, including reader’s workshops are not sufficient for low-income, low-knowledge students to achieve reading success. What the author suggests is that teachers create a condition where these students are exposed to as much of the common body of knowledge-science, history, art, and literature- as possible. They need the knowledge that most literate people have to build the bridges to great literacy. This approach creates more prior knowledge for students to access when they are reading new works of literature. The common core standards are one way to help build the background needed for literacy. When teachers follow the standards, they become the guides to the world Pondiscio believes we need.

Reflection

I thought this was a very thought-provoking article. We learn often that repetition and working on comprehension skills is the best way to teach more literate students, however, we also know the results of these tactics are not producing the results we want. Maybe focusing more on background knowledge is the key. I also really liked the analogy about bike-riding. It made me look at literacy differently because before reading this article, I probably would have agreed that reading was like riding a bike.

The article can be found at the connected link :  http://www.city-journal.org/html/literacy-knowledge-13623.html

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Educators, policy makers and business leaders often fret about the state of math education," the New York Times reported in May. "But reading comprehension may be a larger stumbling block." Indeed, schools and teachers consistently have better luck improving student skills in math than in reading. A fresh reminder of the difficulty came in August, when New York released scores from its first round of tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards, now adopted by most states. Students in schools across the state fared poorly on the tests; some of the city's most celebrated charter schools posted disappointing results as well. The silver lining is that by adopting reading curricula aligned with the Common Core and abandoning failed approaches to literacy instruction, New York City could be poised to lead a reading renaissance in the coming years-but only if city schools also make significant shifts in classroom instruction and exercise patience.

Math is relentlessly hierarchical-you can't understand multiplication, for example, if you don't understand addition. Reading is mercilessly cumulative. Virtually everything a child sees and hears, in and out of school, contributes to his vocabulary and language proficiency. A child growing up in a book-filled home with articulate, educated parents who fill his early years with reading, travel, museum visits, and other forms of enrichment arrives at school with enormous advantages in knowledge and vocabulary. When schools fail to address gaps in knowledge and language, the deficits widen-a phenomenon that cognitive scientist Keith Stanovich calls the "Matthew Effect," after a passage in the Gospel of Matthew: "For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." The nature of knowledge and vocabulary acquisition all but assures that children raised in language-rich homes gain in reading comprehension, while the language-poor fall further behind (see "A Wealth of Words," Winter 2013). "The mainspring of [reading] comprehension is prior knowledge-the stuff readers already know that enables them to create understanding as they read," explains Daniel Willingham, a cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia.

To make matters worse, most reading curricula have focused on developing generalized, all-purpose reading-comprehension "skills" uncoupled from subject-specific knowledge-reducing a complex cognitive process to a collection of all-purpose "reading strategies" to be applied to any book or bit of text that a student might encounter. Attempts to teach reading comprehension as knowledge-neutral put an enormous premium on student engagement. For teachers, reading instruction can often feel more like cheerleading: sell kids on the magic of books, get them to read a lot, and-voilà!-they will emerge as verbally adroit adults with a lifelong love of reading. As generations of results show, this approach doesn't work.

The "reader's workshop" model, in which countless New York City elementary school teachers have been trained, is typical of this focus on "skills." A workshop "mini-lesson" might begin with a teacher "modeling" a skill or reading habit as her wide-eyed charges gather around her. A lesson might be "good readers stay involved in a story by predicting" or "good readers make a picture in their mind while they read." Teachers "model" these supposed good reading habits by reading to students, stopping frequently to do a "think aloud," demonstrating how they are applying these strategies to make sense of a story. Then the children are sent off to practice the skill independently or in small groups, choosing from various "high-interest" books at their individual, "just-right" reading level. While the children read, teachers circulate, ensuring that their students understand the new skill. (It remains to be seen how, or if, the reader's workshop model can be squared with the Common Core. The two approaches appear to be irreconcilable, but educators like Lucy Calkins claim otherwise.)

To the uninitiated, reader's workshop can seem strange, even cultish. Visit any elementary school and you're nearly certain to see posters reminding children how and what to think while reading: "Good readers visualize the story in their minds." "Good readers ask questions." "Good readers predict what will happen next." Books quickly fill up with sticky notes as students learn to stop every few pages to jot down their questions and "noticings." Teachers coach children to be vigilant about aspects of a story that remind them of their own lives and presumably enable them to understand better what they read. Discussions, even among the youngest children, sound rich and fruitful, with children making "text-to-self" or "text-to-text" connections, and classmates politely agreeing, disagreeing, or "adding on," in the argot of "accountable talk."

The ideas fostered in the workshop model (for example, that teachers should use interesting reading materials and encourage a positive attitude toward reading) are thoughtful and humane but insufficient to ensure reading success. Low-income children from knowledge- and language-poor homes need much more. To appreciate why, one must understand something about the nature of reading itself.

Most people think of reading as similar to riding a bike-something we learn to do as children and never forget. Moreover, you likely perceive both riding a bike and reading as transferable skills. Once we learn how to pedal and balance, we can apply those skills to every bike, and so it appears with reading. Once you know how, you can read a novel or a newspaper editorial with equal ease and fluency. Some may read faster, slower, or more or less carefully than others, but generally speaking, either you can do it or you can't.

This view of reading is only partially accurate, however. Translating written symbols into sounds, or "decoding," is indeed a transferable skill. This explains why it's easy to agree on the pronunciation of made-up words such as "churbit" or "trodle." Add an extra "d"-troddle-and we agree that the pronunciation changes from trow-duhl to trah-duhl. This is the magic of phonics, which remains the essential starting point in teaching children to read from the first days of school. The "reading wars" of recent memory, which pitted phonics against whole language, are largely settled. Phonics won, but the low reading scores that give educators such fits typically have less to do with decoding problems than with children's inability to understand adequately what they are reading.

Reading comprehension, like critical thinking and problem solving, is what psychologists call "domain-specific": you need to know something about a topic to be able to think about it. Faced with a text passage about the customs of New Amsterdam, the student familiar with the topic may breeze through with relative ease. For the student who has no idea who the Dutch were, or is unfamiliar with early New York history or has never heard the word "custom," the passage is a verbal minefield. To shift metaphors, a piece of text is like a tower of wooden blocks, with each block a vocabulary word or a piece of background knowledge. Pull out two or three blocks, and the tower can still stand. Pull out too many, and it collapses.

Imagine taking a child to his first baseball game. If you know baseball, you will easily explain what's happening. You draw the child's attention to the most important actions on the field, reflexively tailoring your explanation to the child's level of understanding. If the child knows nothing about baseball, you might explain the basics: what the pitchers and batters are doing. Balls and strikes. Scoring a run when a player makes it all the way around the bases without being called out. You'd explain what an "out" is. If the child knows the game or plays Little League, you might instead draw his attention to game strategy. Would a bunt or a stolen-base attempt be the best move at a crucial moment? You might point out when the infielders move in, hoping for a double play.

Now imagine attending a cricket match and doing the same thing, assuming that you know nothing about the game. Your knowledge of baseball doesn't transfer to cricket, though both games feature balls, bats, and runs. "Sports comprehension strategies," if such existed, would be of no use. Your ability to make sense of what's happening in front of you and to explain it to a child depends on your knowledge of the specific game-not your ability to connect what you notice to other games that you understand. The same is true of reading. Even if you aced the verbal portion of your SATs, you will find yourself in situations where you are not an excellent reader. You might struggle to make sense of a contract, say, or a new product warranty. Your tech-savvy teenage daughter might have an easier time understanding the instructions for upgrading a computer operating system. You didn't suddenly become a poor reader in these situations; you're merely reading out of your depth.

Reading comprehension, then, is not a skill that you teach but a condition that you create. Teachers foster that condition by exposing children to the broadest possible knowledge of the world outside their personal experience. As Daniel Willingham aptly titled one of his instructional YouTube videos a few years ago, "Teaching content is teaching reading."

The specific body of knowledge that students need for broad reading competence is open to debate, but a useful guideline is to emphasize the common body of knowledge-from basic knowledge of history and science to works of art and literature-that most literate Americans know, as reflected in their speech and writing. This has been the precise aim of E. D. Hirsch's Core Knowledge movement. Hirsch's critics have often accused him of attempting to impose a rigid canon, but Core Knowledge is better understood as an attempt to curate and impart the basic knowledge of history, science, and the arts that undergirds literate speech and writing. Regardless of whether schools adopt the Core Knowledge approach or develop their own catalog of essential knowledge, knowledge acquisition belongs at the heart of literacy instruction.

Reading more helps, yes, but not because we are "practicing" reading or improving our comprehension skills; rather, reading more is simply the most reliable means to acquire new knowledge and vocabulary. Prior knowledge is indispensable. Even in the reader's workshop model, teachers often encourage children to "activate your prior knowledge" to enhance understanding. But building prior knowledge has rarely been viewed as the reading teacher's explicit role-at least not until the advent of the Common Core State Standards, which New York has embraced enthusiastically.

First unveiled in 2009, the Common Core State Standards are not a curriculum. They don't designate the specific works of literature or body of knowledge that students must know. But the standards are emphatic about the link between a knowledge-rich curriculum and reading comprehension: "By reading texts in history/social studies, science, and other disciplines, students build a foundation of knowledge in these fields that will also give them the background to be better readers in all content areas. Students can only gain this foundation when the curriculum is intentionally and coherently structured to develop rich content knowledge within and across grades." Herein lies a crucial insight that must precede any serious effort to improve reading achievement: broad general knowledge correlates with broad general reading ability. A "foundation of knowledge" is a necessary precondition if students are to become stronger readers.

Common Core's critics mistakenly characterize the standards as micromanaging classrooms. The standards don't dictate what children must read any more than auto-safety standards determine what car one drives. Instead, they form a framework for instruction. "There is no such thing as doing the nuts and bolts of reading in kindergarten through fifth grade without coherently developing knowledge in science, and history, and the arts, period," explained David Coleman, Common Core's chief architect, in a 2012 speech in Washington, D.C. "It is the deep foundation in rich knowledge and vocabulary depth that allows you to access more complex text," he said.

New York's successful 2010 Race to the Top application focused on improving curriculum, the long-overlooked lever in the education-reform playbook. As part of the state's transition to Common Core, the New York State Education Department (NYSED) funded the development of curriculum materials for statewide use in English language arts and math. The Virginia-based nonprofit Core Knowledge Foundation (where I served as vice president until December 2012) won a contract to produce a statewide version of the New York City reading curriculum that it piloted in 2008 under Chancellor Joel Klein (see "A Solution for Gotham's Reading Woes," Summer 2011). In city schools that retained the Core Knowledge curriculum after the pilot program ended in 2011, foundation officials describe students' progress as "encouraging." The comparative success of these schools offers a tantalizing glimpse of the reading gains possible when schools adopt a well-rounded, knowledge-rich curriculum, implement it effectively, and stick with it.

In February 2013, NYSED recommended that city schools use the state's Core Knowledge curriculum along with Pearson's ReadyGEN. These programs include an intensive dose of phonics married to a series of lessons that stay on a single topic for weeks at a time-exactly the kind of approach to literacy prescribed under Common Core. Proof of the city's seriousness about a phonics- and knowledge-rich approach to reading is also evident in the curriculum that it did not choose: the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, which has dominated city classrooms for more than a decade. City education officials take care to say that schools may continue to use Teachers College programs. But school administrators surely noted the shift.

Education is "not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire," goes a popular teacher adage. Empty buckets seldom burst into flames. A stubborn refusal to be prescriptive about what children read, to put the accumulation of knowledge at the heart of the elementary and middle-school reading curriculum, has almost certainly hindered the reading ability of millions of children. Vast amounts of class time that might have been spent engaging kids with the world beyond their experience have been squandered. Instead, there is endless teaching, reteaching, and practicing the spurious skill of comprehension, hoping that children will somehow "catch" a love of reading.

Raising reading achievement means playing the long game. There are no quick fixes. It is a very different challenge from teaching math, where standards, curriculum, and assessments tend to be closely aligned. In reading, even the best standards leave the choice of specific texts to the discretion of individual teachers and schools. Thus reformers fight pitched battles over English class reading lists. More classics or more contemporary books? Is it better for a middle-schooler to read Twilight or The Scarlet Letter? What these debates tend to overlook is the importance of background knowledge. Complaining that high school students no longer read, say, Huckleberry Finn is an empty criticism if a student comes to the book knowing nothing of nineteenth-century America, riverboats, or slavery, or cannot find the Mississippi River on a map. Absent this background knowledge, Mark Twain's novel will be merely another book that students read but do not understand. Past generations of schoolchildren who enjoyed (or didn't enjoy) Huckleberry Finn had this knowledge base as they read the book. Today, too many students from low-income households do not.

The Common Core Standards make clear that building knowledge is imperative, but this is all that they can do. Coleman has said that the Common Core "restores elementary teachers to their rightful place as guides to the world." It's an image that perfectly captures how to build strong readers-by focusing their attention on the world outside their windows, rather than limiting them to the world inside their hats, or worse, underestimating them by assuming that they could not possibly be interested or engaged if curricular content is not directly relevant to their daily lives. Even the most dedicated teachers cannot cram a lifetime's worth of knowledge and vocabulary into 180 days of reading instruction. But if our schools are not intentionally and coherently building knowledge, they're not teaching reading.

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Teachers College Reading and Writing Project

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Educators, policy makers and business leaders often fret about the state of math education," the New York Times reported in May. "But reading comprehension may be a larger stumbling block." Indeed, schools and teachers consistently have better luck improving student skills in math than in reading.

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Article Summery #1

Dougherty Stahl, K.A., & Bravo, M.A. (2010). Contemporary classroom vocabulary assessment for content areas. The Reading Teacher, 63 (7), 566–578. doi: 10.1598/RT.63.7.4

Summery

For this assignment, I read Katherine A. Dougherty Stahl and Marco A. Bravo’s work from The Reading Teacher about vocabulary assessment. The article, titled, “Contemporary Classroom Vocabulary Assessment for Content Areas” had three parts. The first part deals with how the intricacies of word knowledge make assessment difficult. The second is a set of considerations for teacher-made and commercial assessment. The last third of this article provides specific techniques to provide evidence of vocabulary knowledge.

The authors of this piece wanted to inform the reader that vocabulary is multidimensional, incremental, content dependent, and a skill that develops across a lifetime. The article tries to answer the question, “What does it mean to know a word?” The authors cite a series of educator’s ideas about the stages or continuums of vocabulary knowledge. These ranges go from absolute oblivion on any aspect of a word to a full understanding of meaning, relationships to other words, and metaphorical uses. They also mention Crohbach’s dimensions of vocabulary, which include generalization, application, breadth, precision, and availability.

Another important educator mentioned in this piece is Read.   He wants educators to different types of assessment that can be labeled as discrete or embedded, selective or comprehensive, and either dependent or independent of context. To wrap up, they mention three classroom assessment models for EO and ELL students: the knowledge scale, recognition task, and assessment magazine.

Reflection

This article taught me a lot about the intricacies of vocabulary instruction. I usually use a fill-in-the-blank quiz for vocabulary. This article showed me that this is not the best way to assess vocabulary knowledge. I need to dig deeper and get students to see every aspect of a new word. The article also gave me ways to do so. I really like the assessment magazine idea and would utilize it in a class. I think that and other ideas from this article will help my students achieve as high as they can with vocabulary.

The original PDF can be located at the attached link :
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/scmsAdmin/uploads/006/716/Stahl%20Voc%20Assess%20RT.pdf

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Harry Wong: Why Teachers Need Classroom Management   

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Harry Wong: Why Teachers Need Classroom Management   

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The following article is just a bit of the opinions and strategies of Harry Wong, author of "“The Classroom Management Book” and other works addressed toward teachers to help with classroom management. Wong's ideals are popular in the teaching community. He emphasizes creating structure by really stressing guidelines and rules for the first two weeks of classes so all students know at all times what is expected of them.

Harry Wong: Why Teachers Need Classroom Management
Posted March 31st, 2015
by Eric Gill

Harry K. Wong, Ph.D., best-selling author and motivational speaker, has offered guidance to tens of thousands of teachers and school leaders over the past three decades.A former science teacher, Wong has written and co-written several books, including “The First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher.” More recently, Harry and his wife, Rosemary, wrote “The Classroom Management Book.” Combined sales of their books total more than 4 million copies. A native of San Francisco, Wong taught middle and high school in Menlo Park, California. The Wongs still reside in Northern California — when they aren’t traveling across the United States or touring the globe to present their no-nonsense teaching style. Their model for helping teachers excel starts with a simple, if methodical, approach: Teaching is all about student achievement. Like every other profession, good teachers are good managers. Hence, positive student achievement begins by developing strong classroom management skills.We caught up with the Wongs between their recent trips to China and Missouri. Through a series of email exchanges, we asked Harry to explain classroom management procedures, as well as his decision not to become a brain surgeon, as his parents had hoped. Fortunately, for the millions of educators who have benefited from the Wongs’ books and columns, videos and workshops, he decided to become a teacher.What advice do you offer new teachers about relying on colleagues when it comes to classroom management techniques?Of course, always seek guidance from colleagues. But it must be done carefully because most all teachers regard classroom management as discipline [and] it is not.Management has to do with organization. When you manage a store or team, you organize the store or team. You don’t discipline the employees, customers or players.The best guidance is to ask other teachers to share or show their classroom management plan — typically in a binder or folder — from whence a new teacher can glean ideas they can adapt. To see something specific is better than guidance.What common threads do teachers share in their approaches to teaching and preparing students for the next education level or careers?I do not see any common thread. What I see are teachers who follow what is the prevailing thread, which currently is to prepare every student for college.Schools love to brag [about] what percentage of their graduates go to college. They fail to see that a great percentage never finish the college they go to.It would be better to prepare students for a career, but there is little or nothing in the curriculum that prepares students for the work-world after high school.In this brief video, Wong discusses the difference between disciplining students and implementing procedures that help teachers avoid student behavior problems.You often point out that teachers don’t discipline students; they manage classrooms. How should teachers manage students in differentiated classrooms?Students do not learn when they are disciplined. They learn when the classroom is organized for learning and success.Differentiation refers to instruction, not to management. A store is managed to run well. The differentiation comes in the variety of merchandise that is offered.There was a recent article in “Education Week” where the writer said differentiation does not work. It caused a controversy, but he had some valid points.I have yet to see a differentiated classroom. Nor have I even seen research that supports differentiation. Here is what I have learned. If a student does not succeed in learning what the teacher wants the student to learn — the objective — here is what works:

1. Reteach it again (not the same as differentiating).

2. Check for understanding (assessment) and reteach it again and again.

That’s what music teachers and coaches do. They don’t differentiate.

John Hattie’s [visible learning] research says, give students the lesson objectives before the lesson begins and you will raise student achievement by 27 percent. The student then learns to understand the objective while the teacher teaches to the objective.In an effective instructional template — the lesson plan — a lesson begins with a lesson objective or lesson target. The next thing a teacher does is called instructional strategy. This is where a teacher uses a variety of activities to teach the objective. For instance, you don’t use technology until you post the objective first.With today’s emphasis on technical training programs that seem to mirror the European model, should teachers be preparing some students for careers that don’t require a college education?Yes. But it is not a European model. Only Germany has a [technical training] model that seems to work. Singapore has an excellent career model.How does your business analogy — comparing classroom management to operating restaurants — fit within the current educational environment?What’s interesting is that all stakeholders understand my analogy. All business people, military people, and parents in the work-world accept my analogy [because] that is their work-world. They all come from or work in an environment that is organized.The problem is in education [systems] where many believe that a classroom should be unstructured to allow students to explore and discover their own learning. If they discover their own learning, then they have ownership of what they discovered — more educational jargon.As a counterpoint, Wong shared a recent communication he received from a teacher that reflects his organizational concepts of how to manage an efficient classroom:

“As I am an elementary instrumental/general music teacher, the first five minutes of class are all about awakening my students’ creativity while helping them prepare to focus on my instruction.

Students follow the same entrance procedure in every music class. They enter the classroom, find their assigned spot or seat at their instrument, depending on their grade level. Then, they are instructed to improvise on their instruments within specific guidelines (for example, practice the notes and fingerings for G, A, and B on the recorder, or improvise on the high pitched parts of your xylophone, etc.).

During this time, I am taking attendance, helping students with any instrument issues, and checking for student understanding of previously learned material. This practice allows students to experiment with sound in a structured environment, while simultaneously releasing excess energy and excitement about the instruments.

We are then ready to focus on whatever concept we are learning for the class period. Students are also given opportunities to share their creations when there is time. This helps them learn audience etiquette, respect for others’ work, and pride in what their imaginations can produce.”

Jennifer Roland, NBCT
Instrumental Music
Windsor Hill Arts Infused Elementary School
North Charleston, South Carolina

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Video of Advice From Teachers who Made it Through the First Day

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Video of Advice From Teachers who Made it Through the First Day

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Starting something new can be very scary. These teachers write a letter to their ignorant pre-first-day-of-school selves and share a message that all incoming teachers would benefit from hearing. You can do this.

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If I Knew Then: A Letter to Me on My First Day Teaching

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The app My Class Talk is a convenient way to help teachers keep track of which students are meeting requirements as far as participation. The app keeps track of how many times each student participates in every class they have with a certain teacher (you).
The following is a link to a video that better explains the use of this app:
http://www.myclasstalk.com/

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This resource is a website for teachers and children with a lot of information on literature. Reviews, grade levels, and a short synopsis are available for millions books, Teachers can find relevant books to add to their classroom library. Students can use

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Teacher Resources, Children's Books, Student Activities for Teachers | Scholastic.com | Scholastic

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Teaching resources, children's and teacher books, lesson plans, book lists, classroom resources, educational products from Scholastic for PreK to 12 teachers.

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This website focuses on spelling and language arts activities. There is a way to program spelling lists into the site and practice your test. The internet recognizes the words, says them for the child and even provides a sentence without that sentence being put it by the teacher or child. I see this being a great way for students to review for a test or a way for students to take the test and see their score right away. It's easier for the teacher to grade and harder for students to cheat. Also each child can go at their own pace if headphones are worn so the computer tells each child the next word as soon as they are done and repeats it if they need to hear the word again.

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This site has it all:
Themes- There is a plethora of themes for unit plans which are connected to crafts, vocabulary, worksheets, activities in writing, math, literacy, and social studies, and age appropriate books.
Strategies- Strategies for literacy, centers/stations, classroom management, and literature and author studies.
Printables- Includes worksheets relevant to reading, writing, seasonal events, Spanish, and math.
Note: This resource is targeted to kindergarten to 6th grade so teachers need to make sure materials are appropriate for the age group.

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Busy Teacher Shop - Download K-6 printables instantly!

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Welcome to the Busy Teacher Shop! Printables, worksheets, file folder games, flashcards, themed activities, and more from the creator of Busy Teacher's Cafe. Products can be downloaded instantly!

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Even college students love TED talks. Any class can benefit from short discussions about various topics from experts in various fields. Children will love the passion these speakers bring to their topics and maybe even learn some valuable information.

http://www.ted.com/

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This site is brimming with potential words in flashcard form to help ESL students learn the English language. These cards are set up in a way that the whole class can have fun learning vocabulary while being out of their seat and copying the actions or words on the varies cards. There are different sets that teachers can download to match what they believe the class needs.

http://www.eslflashcards.com/

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This resource is not just helpful for students to learn new vocabulary, it is also charitable and donates food to the hungry around the world. On this site, students pick the definition that best goes with a given term and the terms get progressively harder. For each term the students define accurately, the site donates ten grains of rice to a starving family. Though the main purpose is English vocabulary, students can change the subject to science, humanities, and even math.

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From C. R. Adler’s article “Seven Strategies to Teach Students Text Comprehension

Materials Needed:
• Graphic or Semantic Organizer outlines or blank sheets of paper.
• A text that needs to be comprehended

Objective:
• Help readers focus on concepts and how they are related to other concepts. Graphic organizers help students read and understand textbooks and picture books.

Activity:
Give students a text to read and an organizer to fill out. Examples include:
• Venn-Diagrams (Used to compare or contrast information from two sources)
• Storyboard/Chain of Events (Used to order or sequence events within a text)
• Story Map (Used to chart the story structure. These can be organized into fiction and nonfiction text structures)
• Cause/Effect (Used to illustrate the cause and effects told within a text)
Students will fill in these organizers to help their comprehension of the story/information. Older students may have the option to create their own organizer that best fits their learning style.

Already made graphic organizers are available for free from http://www.educationoasis.com/curriculum/graphic_organizers.htm  (Education Oasis Website)
Cause and Effect Organizers (11 organizers) Go»
Character and Story Organizers (17 organizers) Go»
Compare and Contrast Organizers (6 organizers) Go»
Sequence, Cycle, Timeline, and
Chain of Events Organizers (7 organizers) Go»
Vocabulary Development and Concept Organizers (5 organizers) Go»

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From 15 Vocabulary Strategies in 15 minutes under Learning Tasks on the Weebly website.

Materials Needed:
• Clean, white paper
• Coloring supplies
• Vocabulary Words
• An empty wall
Objective:
• Show definitions through artwork for a concrete understanding of vocabulary words. (Grades 1-8)
Activity:
Give students a list of vocabulary words and have them partner up or work individually to create a poster with:
• The word
• It’s definition
• 3 visual representations of the word
Hang the posters in the classroom as a fun word wall that the students create.

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Video- put yourself in the shoes of a learning disabled child

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Video- put yourself in the shoes of a learning disabled child

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I first watched this video in a Language Arts class to demonstrate the difficulties students with learning disabilities have in the classroom while learning literacy. The video displays how the pace is too fast for these students and they oftentimes stop trying because teachers don't understand how hard comprehension is for them. It's such an important video that we've watched it in two other classes since. We need to be more sensitive to the hard time children can have comprehension and other aspects of literacy.