Category: Promoting Reading

Year of Personal Discovery

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Back again – at last! This year my school has a theme for the year of “Believe You Can Achieve”, tying in with the Year of Personal Discovery. I am certainly lining up the opportunities for myself, aside from the obvious part of being in Hong Kong: this semester I am enrolled in a 9-week ESL/EAL course, tackling the Level 1 ActivInspire online course, and  yoga, and am going to be a relief teacher for the English Language Saturday School next term. We only have 9 days left of Term 1, and I’m not quite sure where the first 7 weeks went…

 

Other points of discovery this term have included how to ask Wikipedia to unblock our school’s open proxy so that Year 6 can add carefully researched information to specific articles, and how to export a ppt file into a wmv and embed it into a page on our Moodle-based Online Learning Platform to provide a tutorial on completing the Online Reading Record for the NSW Premier’s Reading Challenge.

The Other Side

I am also making time to read more – spending as many lunchtimes as I can with my nose in a book, sitting somewhere in the middle of the Library so as to be available and obviously aware of what everyone is doing. The last book I finished was Wonderstruck by Brian Selznick, another breathtaking blend of text and illustration brought together in a marvellous piece of storytelling. I deeply enjoyed his first book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, and pounced on this new title excitedly when it arrived. One thing I found particularly interesting was that switching between text and illustration seemed to actually slow me down – I ended up savouring the story at a more leisurely pace, examining the pictures for details to provide the visual equivalent of adjectives and adverbs.
Image courtesy of ShuttrKing|KT on Flickr “The Other Side” Used under CC licence.

Where to begin?

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It’s been quite a while since last I posted to this blog, which is not to say that I haven’t had anything worth sharing – simply haven’t made the time to log in and begin!

Working in an International School continues to have its challenges but also rewards. Simply listening to the students and cruising through the fiction collection is introducing me to new authors and stories I might never have come across in Australia. I am also looking to reacquaint myself with classics of children’s literature, discovering along the way that many of these books ‘hit the spot’ for children who, due to their expat life and friends, are willing to explore more widely. I even found out that my Year 3 students had never heard of The Day My Bum Went Psycho by Andy Griffiths! We are currently remedying that situation… Some of the terminology has to be explained (that was the first time I had ever needed to explain the term ‘mooning’ to a child) but that hasn’t stopped them from enjoying it – one boy was literally rolling on the floor with laughter! A struggling reader, I am sure that this is one book he will be aiming to read for himself, and may perhaps be a powerful motivator for other disinterested children too.

Update on the Blind Speed Dating

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A few of the books borrowed by year 5 and 6 students after the Blind Speed Book Dating:

I find it interesting to see that the range of books being borrowed includes more demanding classics  such as The Hobbit or The War of the Worlds, humorous titles eg from Morris Gleitzman and Paul Jennings, and animal books like Ace and Black Beauty. Some books have been in hot demand, with students placing reserves on titles snaffled early by their classmates.

I think it will be really interesting to follow this up further next week, through asking students to comment on the book they chose from the blind date – has been a good read? Would they recommend it?

Off to grab a book for the weekend!

Speed Dating

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To begin Term 4 the primary grades had a professional development day with Kath Murdoch (of whom more later), which has led staff to rethink some of their plans, thus leaving Library time somewhat unfocussed.

What to do when the plans haven’t fruited yet? Grab a great one-lesson-wonder and run with it! Thus today I ran Speed Dating with two different Year 5 classes. I found a great timer online (don’t worry about the ads on the front page, they are removed when you choose the full-screen view) and filled the IWB screen with the countdown. The first class were instructed to choose a good book to bring to the circle, and we set the timer for 1 minute. Something I noticed was that the children tended to select popular and familiar books, and thus much of the class already knew about many of the books being passed around the circle. Also the 1 minute time limit was a little bit short, I thought, and didn’t allow for anything more than the most superficial taste.

The second Year 5 class immediately afterwards became an experimental contrast group – instead of letting the students choose, I consulted with their class teacher and selected classics, both modern and less so, of a variety of genres and thicknesses – eg Judy Blume, John Marsden, Paul Jennings, Moya Simons, Black Beauty (review), Hatchet (reviews), Danny the Champion of the World. I upped the time to 90 seconds, thinking that the style of some of the older books would take a little longer to draw in the students’ attention. Scanning the range of thumbs up/sideways/down after each book, this second group seemed to have fewer whole-hearted “loves” each round. However, at the end of the lesson almost half the class chose to borrow one of the books they had met during the speed dating. Compared to the first group this was an increase of about 5-6 students, which I feel is a significant difference. Perhaps the popularity and familiarity of the books chosen by the first group actually made the activity less effective? I think that this speed dating technique is likely to be most effective when all the books are complete unknowns.

Next I will try the Blind Date variation of this activity – where the students only have a page of the book to read, and do not know anything else about the book until all is revealed in the last ten minutes. I have done this before with coded post-it notes on the books and photocopies, but perhaps I can come up with something else – maybe brown-paper lunch bags to hide the books, and the photocopies glued to the front and back? I shall have to think quickly – my next Year 5 class is second lesson tomorrow.

Tuning in to My Channel

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My theme this weekend is YouTube. Specifically how to make the best use of YouTube videos in the classroom. Did you see the announcement of YouTube Teachers? I spent an hour or two clicking through all the links on the Teachers’ page, joining up (to see what develops), following the advice on setting up my own Channel, reading other bits and pieces.

Things I learnt:

I have created a playlist of videos about Pete the Cat videos (see end of post), and plan to spend some more time learning how to value-add to playlists.

Why this sudden video-awareness? It was the combination of showing Pete the Cat on the IWB to my Prep class and reading about the new YouTube Teachers initiative, all on the same day. I feel that I haven’t made much effort up till now to explore the possibilities of linking hands-on reading experiences with online variations – partly due to lack of equipment, partly due to just not getting around to it. For children growing up with so much of their lives linked to television or computer screens, it is not hard to understand their desire to see the animation or video of a story. I would like to spend some time thinking about how to match videos and reading in order to bring a richer experience of story to my students. So many books have complementary videos, songs and websites now that I could find myself guilty of negligence if I do not find ways to weave different media together when exploring a theme, or books by a particular author or illustrator.

So far I am talking only about videos etc to support the reading of storybooks – partly because it was on my mind this week, partly because there is so much information already out there (and indeed in the 10 Tips section of YT Teachers) on using a variety of formats to enhance teaching and learning activities. For instance I took a brief look at Charlie and Lola online, but didn’t find much of value – I need to investigate and see what else is there before reading a story to my students.

So, I shall leave it at that with the intention of exploring further ways to mingle traditional print media with online resources to create a more varied and enticing world of story for my students.

To send you on your way with a smile on your face and a song on your lips, I give you Pete the Cat and his White Shoes!

 

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