Real Author, Engaged Learning

My first graders and I had our very first author Skype visit! Now we are hooked! We had the great pleasure to visit with children’s book author Ame Dyckman, who published her first book last year, Boy + Bot. A second book is scheduled to come out this year, and she is already working on her third publication. Boy + Bot is a simple story about friendship and differences. Many of the beautiful  illustrations are wordless, but brought to life by Dan Yaccarino’s art. Ame gave freely of her time, a generous 30 minutes, visiting with us in Florida from her living room in New Jersey.

To prep the students for our visit, I showed them the book trailer and then read the story. The students quickly articulated the theme: Friendship and being different. Several students listed how their friends are different from them, but are still great friends.

Then we brainstormed possible questions to ask Ame. Our curious students generated a long list, ranging from “What was your inspiration?” to “How long did it take you to write the book?” to “How do you publish a book?” to “Where do you live?” to “How many pets do you have?” and “What is your favorite sport?” Each student then chose a question and wrote it on a piece of paper. To avoid duplication, we went around the room and replaced those questions that were repetitive.

During the Skype visit, two of our students introduced the class and then each student asked their question. Ame was so engaging and entertaining, generating more and more questions and comments! If we hadn’t kept her for 30 minutes already, our students would have gladly visited with her some more.

One student asked Ame to read a story and much to everyone’s delight, she read Bark, George by Jules Feiffer, one of her favorites. To top it all off, Ame had sent a package with Boy + Bot bookmarks, stickers, and bracelets — enough for each student in the class and extra for the library.

My take-away: Skyping with Ame Dyckman was a perfect introduction to virtual visits with authors. Students were engaged and inspired. This was an authentic event, telling students that authors are indeed real people who work hard at their craft to produce beautiful stories.

Thank you, Ame!

Acrostic Poetry and PicCollage

In 3rd grade, we continued our celebration of National Poetry Month. Students wrote acrostic poems and created an artifact for their blogfolios. An acrostic poem uses the letters of a word or name to begin each line of the poem, and each line must in turn relate to the word — a fun and very simple form of poetry. The subject can be anything. For our mini-lesson, students used their first names for their topics.

We began by looking at an example of an acrostic poem. Then, using pencil and paper, students brainstormed a list of words or phrases that describe them best and used those words/phrases to let their creative juices flow and draft their poems.

Once poems were written, students used the PicCollage app for iPad to create their artifacts. I modeled the process and then it was the students’ turn.

In PicCollage, they took photos of themselves (or had a friend do it for them). They “clipped” their images and then added their poems. To make the first letter of each line stand out, the instructions were to choose a background color different from the rest of the text.

This was a fun and quick lesson, forcing students to think of attributes that describe themselves and apply them in a creative way.

Visualizing Shel Silverstein

It’s National Poetry Month–and since I love Shel Silverstein’s work (and we have a good number of his books in the library), I did a mini poetry session with 3rd grade in the library last week. As an introduction, we watched “Ickle me, Pickle me, Tickle me too” (see ShelSilversteinBook’s channel on You Tube) read by Silverstein himself. My goal for this lesson, however, was for students to understand “visualization” as a comprehension strategy: Make a mental picture to help you understand text.

I adapted a great lesson about visualization from a math (yes!) site and read-aloud the following poem:

Shapes

A square was sitting quietly

Outside his rectangular shack

When a triangle came down–keerplunk!–

And struck him in the back.

“I must go to the hospital,”

Cried the wounded square,

So a passing rolling circle

Picked him up and took him there.

As I read the poem, students were drawing their visual interpretations of the poem. It was interesting that a couple of students were worried about what or how to draw. I had to emphasize and re-emphasize that there is no right or wrong way and that we all form different mental images of text. The result was a very unique illustration from each student. Some focused on the shapes, some on the hospital.

Then I shared Silverstein’s illustration with the class. As it turns out, he chose to not illustrate one part of the poem. Can you guess what is missing in Silverstein’s illustration?

(From A Light in the Attic, 1981)

3rd Grade Global Study Project: Socializing Students to Information Overload

One modern classroom skill is global awareness. Our third graders have been taking advantage of many “Skypportunities” across the globe over the last few months. So when considering a research project for 3rd grade, I thought it only befitting to do country studies with the students.

Introduction

After each student had chosen a country to study, they brainstormed specific information they wanted to learn about the country. We then collected the information in a KW chart.

I then used the KW chart to create a Note Taking Graphic Organizer for the students. I used all of the students’ questions and added three of my own:

• Identify one way this country is different from ours
• Identify one way this country is the same as ours
• Would you like to visit the country some day? Why or why not?

Research

For their information resource, students searched the Kids Infobits (Gale) database. Since they had been introduced to the database earlier, students knew how to navigate this information resource. We spent four 45-minute sessions finding information, reading text for information, and summarizing information using the note taking organizer. I like the Kids InfoBits database as it exposes students to different types of source materials (reference, magazine and newspaper articles, maps, graphs and charts, images). The students quickly figured out that a lot of the information they needed could be found in one of the “Country Overview” reference articles. One student discovered that there are pie charts in the “Graphs and Charts” section showing a country’s religions, which nicely complemented their math lessons where they were learning all about such graphic representations.

Product

For a product, students created a Top Five Reasons to Visit/Live report (see “Foundations for Independent Thinking: Look to Bloom and Marzano” by Liz Allen) using Tech4Learning’s Pixie software. The project required not only a transfer of information collected on the organizer to Pixie, but students were challenged to provide detail and/or comparisons in their statements. For example, rather than simply writing: “They have lots of different religions”, a more specific statement would be, “Judaism is the major religion in Israel.” Or, rather than stating that “They have interesting places to visit”, “In China, you can visit the Great Wall, which is so big that you can see it from space.”

After all their hard work, students shared their products with the class. There were lots of questions for each presenter from curious classmates!

Negotiating Information Overload

To some degree, this was very much a student-driven project, as students chose a country to research and generated research questions about the country of their choice. The level of engagement was high throughout the project. Students really enjoyed finding out about unique animals and special foods and loved to share the information with their classmates as they were discovering new information during the research process.

Still, reading text for information clearly is challenging for all students. And even though we used a kid-friendly database for our information resource, not all information was easily understood. Students were challenged to learn new vocabulary (e.g., population, climate, transportation, reference source) and needed many reminders to not simply scan an article but to read it in its entirety. I limited the research stage to four sessions. Some students had already completed their organizers after three sessions, others were not finished after four–but all students had enough information to create their products.

Creating the Top Five Reasons report again challenged them to think critically by using the information they had gathered, evaluate it, and then apply it in a new way. Initially, we required the Top Ten reasons, but found that most students simply listed very basic information (as mentioned above). So we changed the requirement to the Top Five insisting on quality statements: Convince me to want to visit or even live in the country.

I think students found this last step so challenging because while they had gathered a lot of information, they often did not read texts in their entirety but rather skimmed or scanned them for the information sought and then moved on. I’ve observed this research behavior in many of my older students as well: Skim or scan the first few results of a Web search, then enter a new search or simply give up.

Not reading closely also caused some students to provide incorrect information. For example, one student claimed that the South Korean currency is the “Korean dollar” and another student claimed that Boxing Day is celebrated by Kangaroos boxing each other! While very imaginative, the information obviously is incorrect.

If I were to do this project again, I would begin by modeling the information gathering process with a focus on how to closely read and extract information.  Also, I would focus the information sought on more unique facts and encourage students not to get overwhelmed.  So rather than determining the political system or size of the country (neither of which really tell the students much anyway), focus on customs and culture. Some such questions were included in the graphic organizer, but they were not the focus of the research. I believe fewer but more in-depth questions would have forced the students to read text more closely and made it less challenging to come up with those reasons that can convince me to live or move to another country!

Introducing 2nd Grade Students to Research

To celebrate Black History Month our 2nd grade teacher asked me to collaborate on a student research project. Her general goal was for students to each learn about one famous African American. For me, this was an opportunity to bolster students’ information literacy skills by engaging them in some heavy duty research.

Pre-Activities

The first step was to assure students were able to define the biography genre. I asked them to explore a number of different biographies and then we collaboratively identified the information one can find in them. Next I introduced the students to our research tool, the Kids InfoBits (Gale) online database, which offers student-friendly articles on a variety of subjects. Inspired by a “scavenger hunt” created by librarians at Round Rock Independent School District, I created an adapted version for my students to let them explore Kids InfoBits.

Research

To guide their research, students used a simple graphic organizer (see timeforkids.com) requiring the completion of four major areas of information. Additionally, if students could find one, they were to add a quote by the famous person they were researching.

It turned out that some students felt overwhelmed by the amount of information available through the database and/or found the online articles too difficult to comprehend. So the classroom teacher supplied lower reading level print biographies to those students. Since the print text also offered many pictures, students were able to extract information more easily.

Finally, I always want my students to self-check their work before we move on to the next step. So once the research process was completed, students used a Biography Check form I created using the Comic Life app for iPad.

Product Creation

My colleague and our school’s Director of Teaching & Learning, Andrea Hernandez, suggested students create an Associative Letter Report (see “Foundations for Independent Thinking: Look to Bloom and Marzano” by Liz Allen) as their cunulative project.

Similar to an ABC-style book, an associative letter report asks students to take what they know about a topic and organize the information around a specific letter. For example, a student assigned the letter “B” and Rosa Parks might write “B is for Rosa Parks because she was brave when she would not budge from her seat.”

So before creating the reports, students had to think of nouns and adjectives to describe their person–and to ensure all those nouns and adjectives begin with the same letter. This was not an easy task and involved some problem solving and thinking outside the box. We did not require a minimum number of words, but left it up to each student’s ability. Some of them thought of six words, others just two.

Students used the Pixie2 software (Tech4Learning) to produce their reports. We gave a few guidelines, including font must be black for readability, titles should be large enough to read, one image per page. As before, once the reports were completed, I asked students to self-check their work by providing them with another checklist (also created with the Comic Life app for iPad).

Student products are presented in the following videos:

Part 1

Part 2

Presentations

Students presented their projects to the class. We video recorded each presentation. As a next step, the classroom teacher will upload the report artifacts and recorded presentations to each student’s blogfolio. To conclude the project, students will reflect on their work and presentations.

Reflection

My goals for this project were for students to conduct research, read for information, apply critical thinking skills to organize the information found, and create a final product using the information. It was an ambitious project, especially since the students had no prior research experience. But the students learned by doing. And while the research process was at times frustrating for some, I think all students improved their stamina to stay actively engaged in more in-depth projects.

The Pixie project was a great tool for differentiation. As their products show, some students created up to six separate slides with full paragraphs of text, while others created only one or two slides in the same amount of time with only a sentence or two. In this group of 19 students, there is clearly a range of developmental and academic ability represented and the project served this range well.

It definitely helped that the classroom teacher agreed to add an additional hour per week to our schedule. Initially, we met only once weekly — not at all enough time to allow students to “connect” to the project. In the future, I would definitely work out a schedule with the classroom teacher that involves the children multiple times weekly.

At times, a visitor to the classroom may have considered the lessons chaotic, but if he had listened closely, he would have heard students talk excitedly about “their famous person” to their desk neighbor, shared an image with another student, or helped a classmate in the use of Pixie. Students were focused on their work and engaged in learning throughout the project.

A Big Red Flag: Citations as a Source of Concern

My 4th and 5th grade students are currently writing ebooks: 4th grade on the short-lived local French colony, Fort Caroline, and 5th grade on the Lost Colony of Roanoke. The ebooks are culminating projects based on a previous unit I did with both classes using Diigo to organize information.

We began our ebook unit by looking at several excellent student-produced, non-fiction examples I had downloaded from the iTunes store. The examples included not only text, but also student-produced images as well as audio and video recordings.The books were creative and informational and served to motivate and inspire my two classes as they have begun the process of creating their own ebooks.

As beautiful as the books are, however, not one cited any information sources. As a librarian, this is a big red flag! My practice as a school librarian is guided by the common beliefs expressed in the American Association of School Librarians’ Standards for the 21st-Century Learner (2009), one of which is:

“Learners…share knowledge and participate ethically and productively as members of our democratic society.”

In our copy-and-paste information world, how do we teach our students to use information both correctly and ethically? Most of my career, I have worked in higher education.  I have spent many hours teaching college students the various citation style formats. Even for these students, it is not an easy, nor enjoyable, task. But, as I tell my elementary students, you may not use someone else’s idea or work product and publish it as your own. It is as simple as that. Also, citations allow readers to not only access the original source, but also potentially find more information.

So I’ve spent the last two sessions with my 4th/5th graders discussing the need for crediting sources and creating citations. For this age group, I’ve decided to use a simplified Modern Language Association (MLA) format, consisting of author, web page and website titles, publication format, and date of access. (For this project, student research consists entirely of web pages.)

As for understanding the need to cite sources, my students are savvy, already getting lots of practice as regular student bloggers. But creating formal citations is so much harder. Students have to understand not only the various elements of a citation, but also where to locate those pieces of information and then putting it all into the correct format. It is a tedious and time-consuming task, but we are getting there.

The process has been a learning challenge for my young student authors–and  their librarian alike. But as the AASL points out, source citation is a matter of ethics. I cannot wait to upload our ebooks to the iTunes store. But first, we have to master the specifics of full and proper citation! Those ebooks will be examples of not only “sharing knowledge” but also “participating ethically and productively as members of our democratic society.”

Resources
Copyright and Fair Use Guidelines for Teachers (Edudemic.com)

EasyBib: Free Bibliography and Citation Maker (Imagine Easy Solutions, LLC)

MLA Style (Purdue Online Writing Lab)

Rhyming Dr. Seuss

Since March 2 was Read Across America Day, a celebration of Dr. Seuss’s birthday, I have been reading various Dr. Seuss books with 1st grade. Last week we read Oh, the Places You’ll Go and talked about how pictures can be a clue to a story character’s emotions. This week, we read Green Eggs and Ham. The story consists of only 50 words and lends itself beautifully to develop phonemic awareness — rhyming skills in this case (another great title for this lesson would the The Cat in the Hat). After reading, students brainstormed the different rhyming pairs Dr. Seuss used in the story.

I am — Sam — ham fox — box mouse — house tree — see train — rain here — there — anywhere car — are goat — boat

A 1st grade teacher’s blog inspired this lesson. I created a Seuss hat template and added the words I will read to each hat section.

Using red markers, students then colored every other hat section in red. They used black markers to complete the I will read sentences by either using one of the rhyming pairs we had brainstormed or creating their own pairs.

Coloring can be such a Zen-like experience for the kids! It did not take long for one girl to sing “I will read, I will read” and so on (interesting melody, same lyrics) and for the rest of the class to chime in. A fun 30 minutes with a great group of kids!

A Lesson in Social Bookmarking in the Classroom

Introduction
Diigo (Digest of Internet Information, Groups and Other Stuff) is a free social bookmarking tool that allows its users to store, manage and share Internet resources. Users can bookmark, highlight, tag, and annotate selected web pages while reading online. As they are stored in the cloud, bookmarks can be retrieved from any computer anytime and anyplace. Resources may be shared with other users.

As a social bookmarking tool, Diigo clearly has the potential to make reading and research a social activity in the classroom. In collaboration with our social studies teacher, I’ve used Diigo with our 4th and 5th grade students: 4th graders were researching the pre-colonial French settlement Fort Caroline (Jacksonville, Florida) and 5th graders were gathering information on the Lost Colony of Roanoke (North Carolina). Using the researched information, students are currently in the process of creating eBooks about their topics.
Objectives for students were:

• to research and become familiar with informational texts about their respective topics
• to use Diigo to collect and organize their new information
• to apply various Diigo features, including highlighting and annotating of web pages or text passages and  tagging of web pages for organization and classification

Setup

With an educator account, I created a Diigo Group for each class. Privacy settings of educator accounts are pre-set, limiting communication to assigned teachers and their students. Also, by default, student profiles are private. Each student was provided with their login information and created an avatar for their profiles using one of the following websites:

• picassohead.com
• weeworld.com
• buildyourwildself.com
  

In each classroom, we then created tag dictionaries to categorize websites, ensuring consistency of keyword tags. We brainstormed tags to include in each dictionary, for example “Ft. Caroline” instead of “Fort Caroline”, or “Native Americans” instead of “indians” or “natives”.

Steps

Since our students already had an introduction to Web search techniques in an earlier unit, I began by focusing on annotations. The great benefit of Diigo’s annotation tool (virtual “sticky notes”) is that it allows students to summarize a website’s important concepts and main points. Annotations encourage student interaction and engagement and are central to collaborative research. The students explored: What are the elements of a quality annotation? We brainstormed and I used the definitions students gathered to create a reference sheet:

While the process may seem straightforward, students struggled with the concept of a quality annotation. I’ve blogged about this issue here.

Evaluation

Research is not simply about finding information, but also evaluating and synthesizing the information found. The skills necessary to evaluate and synthesize require students to read text closely and paraphrase the useful information, respectively. These are critical, transferable skills, but working with elementary students I have learned that these are often the most difficult for the students to grasp.  Thankfully, we were not under any time constraints, giving us time to model and review when needed.

For my students, Diigo is a powerful collaborative learning tool in the classroom. Students interacted with informational text and with one another and were motivated to stay on task. They read, highlighted, tagged, and annotated relevant websites for their research projects.

The annotation process, however, was harder to learn for my 4th than my 5th graders. Fourth graders also spent a lot more time looking for relevant images than focusing on reading text. Reasons may be maturity, existing skills, class size (20 vs. 11 students), time of day (Friday afternoon classes for 4th grade), or a combination.

Overall, this was a great collaborative project. Diigo allowed my students to not only manage information, but also to hone their communication and collaboration skills — all vital to success in school and their overall future. I would like to repeat this lesson, possibly on a grander scale: Not only with a classroom at another school, but perhaps “classmates” in another country.

Quality vs Safety

I always strive for quality work. Producing quality work, however, involves stepping out of my safety zone and challenging myself. But it also involves time. In the case of research, the process of producing quality work can be quite laborious.

My 4th and 5th grade students are currently researching Fort Caroline (the first and rather short-lived French fort in the U.S. located here in Jacksonville, Florida) and the Lost Colony of Roanoke, respectively. To organize our research, we are using Diigo, a powerful social bookmarking tool. I’ve created a Diigo Group for each class via an educator’s account. Within each group, students are collaboratively collecting websites on the topics and annotating them using Diigo’s highlighting and sticky note tools.

So while the process seems pretty straightforward, it is actually quite messy. I’ve now spent two 50-minute sessions with each class searching, collecting, and annotating. Students are finding that they have to closely read each web page, evaluate it for its merit, and then offer a quality annotation. This last step is hard.

Before beginning the actual search process, we came up with a definition of Quality Annotations. I’ve compiled it as a quick reference sheet and then added annotation starters.

With each class, we’ve looked at the web pages collected and the annotations added. Students clearly love Diigo’s highlighting feature and are good about not simply highlighting large sections of text. But they do need to work on their annotations! Too many of them simply say “informative” or “descriptive”.

While the above are not representative of quality work, students are capable as shown in the following examples:

So the big question is: How do you ensure quality work? In this case, how do I get my students to read text or examine an image closely, evaluate the information provided, and then offer a quality annotation that contributes to the class collaborative research?

My plan is to begin our next session with something we should have done before starting our research: Brainstorming research questions. What do we want to know? Then, each student will edit their “My Library” (Diigo terminology for bookmarked web pages etc.) and evaluate their work according to the following criteria:

• Does the web page / image provide important information that answers my research question?
• Did I highlight the important information?
• Did I add a quality annotation?
• Are all my research questions answered, or do I need to search for more information?

1st Grade Authors

A discussion of basic literary elements (character, setting) using several different picture books led to the creation of eBooks by my first grade students. By creating the eBooks, students were to demonstrate understanding of character, setting, and a sense of sequencing, while practicing their written storytelling skills. To begin the process, I used a wordless picture book (relies entirely on illustrations to tell a story) to allow the students to show off their creativity and imagination while developing their writing skills. They needed to interpret the illustrations (visual literacy) and then write sentences about each picture (reading and writing literacy) to tell a story. I chose a total of six pictures from The Red Book by Barbara Lehman (2004). Students used the Book Creator app on the iPads to create their masterpieces. Following are the various steps:

1. We began by looking at an example, the Butterfly ebook created by our school’s last First grade class (in 2011). We discussed how this book is visible to anyone in the world with an Internet connection and the importance of doing a really good job when publishing.

2. As a class, we used our visual literacy skills to briefly describe all six pictures I had preselected from The Red Book.

3. With a copy of the six pictures in hand, students then each decided on the order of the pictures for their own stories and used a storyboard template to develop their stories.

4. The next lesson was spent transferring (typing) handwritten text from the storyboards to the Book Creator app.

5. Once typing was completed, students created the artwork on paper with colored pencils. I then used each student’s iPad to take photos of the pictures and  imported them into each story.

6. An important part of the eBook creation process was the review and edit process. Students used a Book Checklist while reading through their stories and carefully marking off each box.

Check out some of the very creative eBooks by the 1st grade authors!

Talia’s book from Martin J. Gottlieb Day School

The mom and dad from Martin J. Gottlieb Day School

7. Reflections

Lastly, it was time to reflect on our learning. We first reviewed the process of creating our eBooks by remembering all the different steps. We also discussed the different products used (iPad, pencil and paper, storyboard template, editing checklist). Finally, we talked about the skills we learned (identifying literary elements in fiction, using different products, matching illustrations with our sentences, editing our work). Before video recording student reflections, I offered my own reflection as a model for the students.

My Reflection

• I’ve learned that 1st grade students are very creative.
• I’ve learned that even though they cannot yet spell many words perfectly, 1st graders like to write. And they like to draw too!
• I’ve noticed that 1st grade students know all about setting and character and used both in their books.
• I’ve discovered that 1st grade students quickly learn new words, like font, end mark, and checklist.
• Also, I’ve discovered that 1st grade students love working with the iPads. They are little wizards with this tool! Swiping and tapping comes naturally to them, and even though I only asked them to change the font size to make it more easily readable, they immediately discovered how to change the font style altogether.
• I’ve learned that creating eBooks is a great skill builder.
• I’ve truly enjoyed working with 1st grade on our very first eBook creation!

Student Reflections

Listen to the student reflections in the following brief video. I am looking forward to your feedback!