On winter break

This blog won't be updated until school resumes Monday, January 3, 2010.

Scientific Santa celebrates reading

Yesterday's session of Literary Lunches featured Kris Kringle. Take a look at one of the many highlights.

Oh those darned Brits

Quotation marks are used to set off speech or quoted sentences and words. Despite its simple role, people tend to get confused about the position of other punctuation in relation to the quotation marks. Should it go inside or outside the quotation marks?
It depends. If you are writing in American English, other punctuation should go inside the quotation marks, even if it is not part of the quoted sentence. Here is an example from the New York Times:

“When we have got a contractor city, say, of 180,000 people, and there hasn’t been a completed prosecution of anybody coming out of Iraq, not one,” he said, “what sort of city in America would be like that, where no one is prosecuted for anything for three years? It’s unthinkable.”

If you are writing in British English, on the other hand, punctuation that is not part of the quoted sentence should be place outside the quotation marks. Here is an example from The Telegraph:

A crisis in the US subprime mortgage market will affect Britain, he said, warning that the housing market is likely to weaken as a result. However, he insisted that the economy is starting from “a very strong position”.

The above text comes from Daily Writing Tips. Clicking on it will take you to a short piece on punctuation at Daily Writing Tips. To visit Daily Writing Tips, click here.

School Library Journal rocks

School Library Journal, is the leading print magazine, and now SLJ.com serving librarians who work with young people in schools and public libraries. The two resources give librarians up-to-date information needed to integrate libraries into the school curriculum, become leaders in the areas of technology, reading, and information literacy, and create high-quality collections for children and young adults.

If you think School Library Journal is just for librarians, think again. The journal's website includes blogs, book reviews....a staggering number of resources to keep you reading. Click here to learn more.  Click here to explore the section on adult books for teens.

Literary connections

Though the author Cathy Williams read from at yesterday's session of Literary Lunches may not be familiar, the local event that writer attended is familiar: the annual UND Writers Conference.
Williams read the work of Karen Russell, who participated in the 2010 Writers Conference for which the topic was wit.  Specifically, Williams read the title story from Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

In an online interview at Book Browse, Russell talks about the importance of reading. Click the text below to read more.


What in your own life made you want to become a writer?
Reading, definitely. I loved reading so much; I mean, I still do, but not with that sort of illicit midnight intensity. I was such an anxious kid, and reading was a way out. At sleepovers, I would sneak away and lock myself in the bathroom and read the other kids’ books. Here was a way to step-out of your child’s body and into the mind of a Salem witch or a bunch of warring rabbits. It’s still amazing to me. It was spooky and intimate and totally intoxicating, to step into an author’s private rooms. I’d read the words and they became my rooms. Then I wanted to be a writer myself, to do to others what these authors were doing for me.

Check this out

TED (Technology, Education and Design) is a terrific resource, perhaps best known for its talks. The one above is a dazzler.

What education looks like in high-performing countries

U.S. leaders say we must learn from and emulate what high-performing countries do—the only issue is that what Singapore and Finland talk about is not what's discussed in Education Nation or even in the Klein/Rhee Manifesto. Rather than "more standardized testing" it's actually "more PE and the arts." (from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development blog)

Click the above hyperlinked text to learn more.

Young adult fiction meets social media

When Jacob Lewis helped create the beta version of the Web site Figment with Dana Goodyear, a staff writer at The New Yorker, Mr. Lewis envisioned it as a sort of literary Facebook for the teenage set. 

“I really went into it and thought, ‘We’ll be the social network for young-adult fiction,’ ” said Mr. Lewis, a former managing editor of The New Yorker. “But it became clear early on that people didn’t want a new Facebook.” (Julie Bosman at NYT)

Click the above hyperlinked text to learn more.

Check out Figment by clicking here. (Remember, it's in Beta)

New holiday tradition focuses on reading

Unfortunately, in a season that has already seen record-setting pre-orders for a video game, statistics on reading and literacy are alarming:
According to literacy organizations, less than half of young children in this country are read to regularly.
A high percentage of American families have no children's books in the home.
This holiday season I am putting my column where my heart is, and so I'm asking "Ask Amy" readers to celebrate by giving a book to a child, through a homegrown campaign called, "A Book on Every Bed."
Here's how it works:
Take a book.
Wrap it.
Place it on a child's bed so it's the first thing she sees on Christmas morning (or whatever holiday you celebrate).
That's it (Amy Dickinson, Chicago Tribune).

To read more, click on the hyperlink text above.

Alliance for Excellent Education resources

American youth need strong reading and writing skills to succeed in school, work, and in life. Most students are able to "decode" or sound out words on a page, but far too many then fail to master critical reading and writing skills that include the ability to comprehend the meaning of what they read, understand the use of increasingly complex vocabulary, or to write for various purposes. Yet these are skills they desperately need if they are to succeed in college or work after high school.
In fact, 70 percent of 8th graders and 65 percent of 12th graders do not read at grade level, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the Nation's Report Card. That translates into approximately 6 million struggling readers in grades seven through twelve. Improving the ability of older students to read and write at high levels must become a national priority, especially since students in the bottom quartile of achievement are twenty times more likely to drop out of school than those at the top. (from the Alliance for Excellent Education website)

Click here to for resources on adolescent literacy from the Alliance for Excellent Education.

Paula Davis

          Paula Davis, former GF Central English teacher and current teacher at Northland Technical College, shared an essay she likes to use with her college students as the start their comparison contrast essays.  In "Grammy Awards," by Deborah Dalfonso, the narrator Jill compares two grandmothers who are very unlike each other--one very proper and respectable, the other fun-loving and eccentric.  Both want the world for Jill, and the essay concludes with a wonderful metaphor: one will be her anchor, the other will be her mainsail.

          Ms. Davis also talked about finding time for free-reading, college reading and writing,  and the adjustments students and teachers make in going into a post-secondary school.  She also recited "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost, linking it to the choices we make in our lives and careers.

It was great to have Paula back in GFC, sharing her love of literature with students!

Resource for finding children's books

Children's books can be effective in helping not only elementary students but also high school and middle school students understand content area concepts. Because the text is accessible, students don't have to manage difficult text and new concepts at the same time. In other words, children's books can lighten the cognitive load for students as they encounter new information and concepts.

And, if you're looking for children's books check out JacketFlaps. Click on the hyperlinked text below to learn more.

For Librarians, JacketFlap provides a searchable database containing practically every children's book that has ever been published. You can look for authors and illustrators that might be interested in a library visit by searching our member directory by city, state, or country.

Always lots of resources

Over the last eighteen months I've created and offered seven free ebooks for teachers. In those ebooks I've covered Google tools, web search, video creation, blogging, and other resources of interest to educators. All seven of those ebooks are available in the right hand column of Free Technology for Teachers. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

The "I" in the hyperlinked text above is Richard Byrne, the indefatigable force behind Free Technology for Teachers.  To learn about the ebooks, lick the hyperlinked text above.

For the young and young at heart

Former Grand Forks Central teacher Cathy Woidtke encouraged the audience at Friday's sessions of Literary Lunches to "Find a child to read to this Christmas. It's fun."

Woidtke read from A Christmas Guest by White Bear Lake, Minnesota writer David RaRochelle, and My Penguin Osbert by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel.

"I love children's books...the simplicity of the message," Woidtke said.

In other news, Grand Forks Central sophomore Deion Hanson won an autographed copy of Lois Lowry's The Giver.  Students who attended Literary Lunches during November were eligible for the drawing.

What makes for high quality digital learning?

On December 1, Jeb Bush, governor of Florida 1999-2007, and Bob Wise, governor of West Virginia 2001-2005, released the "10 Elements of High-Quality Digital Learning." 


The ten elements represent the recommendations of the Digital Learning Council (DLC), a diverse group of more than 100 leaders in education, government, philanthropy, business, technology and policy, and are meant to serve as a roadmap of reform for local, state and federal officials to advance digital learning. Read the EdWeek blog post on the announcement. (from the Alliance for Excellent Education website)

Click the above hyperlinked text to learn more...quite a bit more.

And...

The Alliance has also published state-specific profiles that present information about (1) online-learning opportunities in that state, (2) the presence of state policies that support online learning, and (3) how federal policy supports online learning in that state.

Again, click the text to learn more. And, to see profiles of each state's digital learning profiles, click here. 

Thinking about reading

Reading is a cultural activity. This statement may seem obvious, and yet in recent decades an increasing number of educators have considered reading from psychological and even neurological perspectives, as if reading were a process that happens in the agent’s mind and is ultimately regulated by brain mechanisms. (Michael Ben Chaim at The Answer Sheet)

To read more, click the hyperlinked text above.

Books and tweets

Want to create your own Virtual Student Library. Click here to learn how.
 .
Grand Forks Central Literacy is on Twitter. The above information comes from someone Grand Fork Central Literacy follows. If you want to follow Grand Forks Central Literacy, click on the Twitter icon along the side of the blog.

Graduation rates might be increasing

The nation’s high school graduation rate, which declined in the latter part of the 20th century, may have hit bottom and begun to rise, according to a report to be issued Tuesday by a nonprofit group founded by former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell. (Sam Dillon at the New York Times) 


To read more about the report, click the above.

A terrific reading resource

Since 1956, IRA has been a nonprofit, global network of individuals and institutions committed to worldwide literacy. More than 70,000 members strong, the Association supports literacy professionals through a wide range of resources, advocacy efforts, volunteerism, and professional development activities. Our members promote high levels of literacy for all by:


* Improving the quality of reading instruction
* Disseminating research and information about reading
* Encouraging the lifetime reading habit

(from the International Reading Association website)

IRA's website is rich with resources, including Reading Radio. Here's some information about it, again from IRA's website.IRA Reading Radio airs monthly on the BAM! Radio Network, a radio website for the education community. In each installment, IRA interviews an expert on a key topic relating to reading education.

This month's broadcast is about response to intervention. To listen, click here.

Pilgrim and Turkey for Thanksgiving!

Some things just need to be seen... thanks to Kelsey Peterson and Joe Kalka for being so willing and capable (and funny!)






Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

Must-read book on reading

Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy 6-12 is a book grounded in relationships and built on connections—between generations of learning theorists starting with Lev Vygotsky and extending to George Hillocks and Michael Smith; between learning theory and the innovative practice of that theory in secondary English classrooms; and between teachers and learners engaged in two-way learning in collaborative classrooms.( Marean Jordan at NWP website)

Strategic Reading offers a rich array of resources and tools to help both new and experienced teachers work toward the visionary goal of guiding adolescent readers to engagement, competence, and independence. Although the book provides many concrete classroom-based techniques, as well as stories and figures to illustrate them, its primary focus is not on strategies. Rather, it develops an argument—grounded in theory and supported by extended examples of classroom practice—that "reading and writing should create new meaning, connections, and relationships. Reading and writing, like all effective learning is dialectical and social, and makes use of past and present materials to reach into the future" (52). (again.....from the NWP website)

Click on either of the hyperlinked paragraphs above to learn more.

Strategic Reading: Guiding Students to Lifelong Literacy 6-12
Written by Jeffrey D. Wihelm, Tanya N. Baker, and Julie Dube. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 2001. 254 pages.

Common standards movement

Two treats in one week for common-standards gazers: Idaho becomes the 43rd state to adopt the common standards. But it's provisional, folks; this one still has to go to the state legislature before becoming final.
The board of education adopted the standards on Nov. 17, according to Idaho Department of Education spokeswoman Melissa McGrath. The board first considered them in August, and took the final vote last week after a public comment period in October. Now the standards have to be considered and approved by the education committee of at least one chamber of the legislature, which doesn't reconvene until January, McGrath said. (Catherine Gewertz at Curriculum Matters)

Click the above text to learn more.

Barb Beach reads Sidney Poitier

     Barb Beach, retired GFC Spanish teacher (although she spent several years at Valley Middle School and a couple teaching at some other high school in Grand Forks) was so excited to have the opportunity to be able to share her favorite book with students.  The Measure of a Man, noted actor Sidney Poitier's autobiography, includes incredible stories of Poitier's poverty growing up in the Bahamas to being kicked out of his first casting call, while sharing Poitier's views on life and how later generations have life much more complicated in some respects.
      In one of the selections read, Poitier's mother threw Sidney into the ocean to teach him how to swim. As his mother watched, motionless, Sidney thrashed and struggled and finally went under the water.  His father then reached down, pulled him up, and handed him to his mother--who threw him back into the ocean again and again until she was confident he knew how to swim!

Heidi Czerwiec's Poetic Equation

"There's not a lot of math in poetry, and I wanted to do something about that."  Looking at a crime scene photo from the 1930s showing a man in the middle of a fall to his death, Heidi Czerwiec saw the parabola of the movement and created the most interesting of the poems she shared with last week's Tuesday session of Literary Lunches. Blending philosophy with geometry while adding in the lyricism found in her other readings, Czerwiec demonstrated how poetry could be created anywhere.   The implications for poetry in other academic disciplines are intriguing!

An associate professor of Literature and Creative Writing at UND as well as the Director of the UND Writer's Conference, Czerwiec shared other contemporary poets and discussed how students could become published themselves.

More ESEA?

If you're getting an early start on crafting your 2011 State of the Union drinking game, you may want to include these words: "education," "college," "ESEA," and "reauthorization."

Melody Barnes, who leads President Barack Obama's Domestic Policy Council, told an audience at an Education Week event today in Washington that President Obama is going to make reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act a "top" priority in the new year. And he wants both Democrats and Republicans on board. (Alyson Klein at Education Week) (The today is November 12, 2010)

Click on the above hyperlinked text to learn more.

Teens still read for pleasure

Teens read for pleasure, even in the digital age.
That's how it looks in a Rockville library, where 14-year-old Olivia Smith is propped in a comfy chair, deep into a Japanese novel genre called manga. She has been reading on the computer for an hour, and later, when she texts her friends, she will still be turning pages between messages. "I'm sort of a bookworm," she said. (Donna St. George at The Washington Post)

So how does reading look in the digital age? What are students reading? Click the above excerpted text to learn more.

Free voluntary reading: possibly the best way to improve reading

Free voluntary reading (FVR) is not only conducive to reading motivation, it actually works better than direct instruction. Fifty-one out of 54 students using FVR did as well or better on reading tests than students given traditional skill-based reading instruction (Krashen, 2004). In fact, young people who read have better comprehension, research tells us, and they write better, spell better, improve their grammar, and increase their vocabulary. (Carol Gordon at School Library Journal)

Here is the citation for the article referenced in the above excerpt:
Krashen, S. D. (2004). The power of reading: Insights from the research. Englewood, CO: Libraries Unlimited Inc.

Primary source resource

The National Humanities Center Toolbox Library host eight collections of primary source documents and images. The collections are categorized by eras in US History. Each document and image in the collections is accompanied by discussion questions and or a reading guide. (from Free Technology for Teachers)

Click here to go to The National Humanities Center Toolbox Library.

Click here to visit Free Technology for Teachers.

Avid reader shares engaging writing

Retired Grand Forks Central teacher and football coach Mike Berg shared something at yesterday's session of Literary Lunches that he thought not everybody knows about him.

"I am huge into reading," Berg said and then added, "There's never a book very far from me."

Berg read excerpts from Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean, a non-fiction book about a group of smoke jumpers, those who parachute into otherwise inaccessible areas to fight fires. Mostly he read about a fire in Mann Gulch, Montana in August 1949, a fire that claimed that lives of 13 of the 16 men who jumped into the area to fight off its flames. Those men died  in less than an hour. (Mann Gulch is near the Missouri River very close to where Lewis and Clark camped.)

One of the excerpts followed the three survivors, Rumsey, Sallee and Dodge, and what they dealt with on the ground during that fire fight: tremendous flames and injuries in tough, almost impossible to navigate conditions.

Berg said of the book, "It's held my attention," something which he added has been the case with others to whom he's recommended the book.

Local playwright remembers her youth in writing

Kathy Coudle-King wrote the first short story that's part of her book, Wannabe, for a UND Writers Conference open mic. Then, the summer just after the 1997 flood, she wrote more, early in the morning each day, making herself assignments to write about the first's for the characters in the novel. At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, she read an excerpt from that novel, Kissing 101, a sort of primer on kissing delivered by the young girls of the work.

The girls King hung out with when she was growing up in Cuban-American neighborhood in New Jersey served as the models for the characters in the novel, though she said in novel the characters are about 25 percent non-fiction and 75 percent fiction.  These girls, King said, sort of raised one another, because their parents worked long hours. As a result, those girls, "grew up very, very fast."

She said of the girls she hung out with, "We started out at strong girls, but as we grew up, I watched the girls lose their voices. It took them a long time to get their voices back again."

Still, King, typically a playwright, said, "I never set out to write a novel..."

King, who teaches writing and Women's Studies at UND, has a BFA in playwrighting from NYU and an MA in English from UND.

Education news resource

We live in a rapidly changing world, which requires us to learn and adapt on an ongoing basis. Having been nudged, dragged, prompted and coached on my own path from Luddite to a tech competent and tech curious Baby Boomer, I’ve spent some time thinking about what it is that scares us and inhibits us about mastering the various new technologies we encounter. (Bill Williams on technology at The Washington Post)

The above comes from The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post, a terrific resource for news about education. To learn more about this resource, click here.

Taking flight through reading

Former Grand Forks Central Diane Odegard told yesterday's group of students and teachers at Literary Lunches that  it's "always a delight" to read from The Flight of the Odegard, a book by Patrick A. McGuire about her late husband John D.Odegard, founder and dean of UND Aerospace at the University of North Dakota. 

Below is a bit of background on the UND Aerospace program. Click the text for more.

A department which began with only two donated aircraft and two faculty, the John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences has grown into one of the nation’s most widely respected aerospace education programs under his leadership. During his career as an aerospace educator, Odegard’s reputation for leadership earned him industry respect and many honors.(from the Flight of the Odegard website)

Ms Odegard read a section that chronicles when her husband went to Rushford, Minnesota to help in the celebration of the new airport there. Rob Bunke, father of Jim Bunke, one of the early students in the aviation program, was responsible for the opening of the airport.

"Early students were so very close to John," she said.

McGuire interviewed some 165-175 people to write the book, including Ms. Odegard herself.

Here is an excerpt from the book. To read more of the excerpt, click the text. 

People will say about Odegard that when he walked into a room he instantly became the dominating presence. In a space as confined as a cockpit, that same mix of reputation and charisma could easily intimidate a student. One former student who knows that first hand is Diane Odegard, who took flying lessons from John and even accumulated some hours.

Resource for literacy education

About the Alliance: The Alliance for Excellent Education is a Washington, DC-based national policy and advocacy organization that works to improve national and federal policy so that all students can achieve at high academic levels and graduate from high school ready for success in college, work, and citizenship in the twenty-first century. The Alliance focuses on America’s six million most at-risk secondary school students—those in the lowest achievement quartile—who are most likely to leave school without a diploma or to graduate unprepared for a productive future. (from the Alliance for Excellent Education website)


Click the above text to learn more.

The Alliance has published a number of important reports, among them Reading Next ,Writing Next and Writing to Read.

Reading and writing and thinking...

Engage your students in online literacy learning with these interactive tools that help them accomplish a variety of goals—from organizing their thoughts to learning about language—all while having fun. (from ReadWriteThink)

Here at ReadWriteThink, our mission is to provide educators, parents, and afterschool professionals with access to the highest quality practices in reading and language arts instruction by offering the very best in free materials. (from ReadWriteThink)

ReadWriteThink has a number of interactive resources. Check out the above excerpts of linked text above to learn more.

A book that continues to be read

At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, Grand Forks Public Schools school board member Cynthia Shabb read from a text familiar to many Grand Forks Central students: The Giver. This Lois Lowry book follows Jonas as he learns about his new role in a community virtually devoid of choice, a community that is completely ruled by sameness.

Shabb, a former English teacher, read the section in which Jonas hears the rules that will govern his new role. She always read a section in which Jonas gets a memory of and experiences snow.

Lowry was at the Empire Theater Friday October 29, 2010 as part of the Greater Grand Forks Big Read. Her picture book, Crow Call, was selected for the Little Read component of this event, because it addresses war. (The Big Read book is The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, a book that focuses on the Vietnam War.) At Friday's event, Lowry recounted how she got the idea for The Giver.

The following, from a 2004 interview with Lowry, then 68, does the same.

Lowry, 68, got the idea for "The Giver" years ago when she was traveling regularly to visit her parents, who were in a nursing home. Her father was still in decent physical health, but his memory was failing. Her mother was very ill physically, but her memory was intact.

"I would travel home with that in my mind, and I began to think a lot about the concept of memory. When it was time for me to begin a new book, I began to create in my mind a place and a group of people who had somehow found the capacity to control memory," Lowry said. (Karen MacPherson at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette online )

Unexpected Sparrow flies in

Jim Sparrow, Captain Jack Sparrow's "better looking brother," not only read at Friday's session of Literary Lunches, he also played guitar to a packed house (room 159). The younger Sparrow's reading selections were How I Became a Pirate and Pirates Don't Change Diapers both written by Melinda Long and illustrated by David Shannon.

Sparrow was in full pirate regalia and had with him his trusty mate, a Martin guitar. And while he read, his ship "The Great Gatsby," was docked on the Red River near Applebee's. Sparrow also explained that his brother Jack is more well-known because of the trouble he gets into. Jim's relative anonymity is the product of his good behavior, including a dry ship.

Toward the end of the second lunch session, one of Sparrow's crew members showed up, a mate that suggested that the Dr. Seuss classic, Green Eggs and Ham, is a cookbook.

Chaucer, Keillor and Larsen-Schmidt this autumn

Calvary Lutheran Church pastor Kristen Larsen-Schmidt this late fall brought us to April with a Garrison Keillor story "Aprille," which capitalizes on the following, the very beginning of the prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. 




At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, Larsen-Schmidt read this story, one of transformation of a young woman Lois approaching confirmation with some doubt about her beliefs. Kristen-Schmidt spoke of the story's subject as "trying to get a fix on something you think is permanent..." adding "it's hard to figure out who we are..." after events in our lives.

Reading surprising work

For yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, retired principal Ann Porter for read a book by an unlikely author: Madonna. The book was the Material Girl's Mr. Peabody's Apples, a retelling of a nearly 300 year-old-story about rumors and truth.
What followed the reading was a discussion about what's true and what's now as well as how perception has an impact on our realities.

Porter also read It's A Book by Lane Smith, a book which takes a look reading in the digital age.

Porter relayed  her views on reading and literacy, something shaped by her experience as a social studies teacher. "In order to be a good citizen you have to be able to read and think...," she said.

Vocabgrabber reprise

A few Grand Forks Central teachers got to look at and use Vocabgrabber at last week's professional development. Click here for detailed information about Vocabgrabber and what it does.

Local reader reads area writer

Though Gary Malm is no longer in school, he's done some homework recently.. The homework? Finding the right piece to read at Grand Forks Central's Literary Lunches.

And at yesterday's session of Literary Lunches he read from Gary Paulsen's Soldier's Heart, the story of Charley Goddard, a fifteen-year-old, one of the first Minnesota volunteers during the Civil War. Malm, a retired teacher and current Grand Forks County county commissioner,  found the book on a list of the best read-alouds for kids.

He not only read from the novel, he read about Paulsen, a Thief River Falls native. Malm recounted what Paulsen said of the librarian in his home town: "When she handed me a library card, she handed me the world."

Malm himself is an avid reader. "I read all over the place, " he said. "I have four [books] going right now."

And if you're interested in finding out what Civil War battles really looked like, (in their original, uncommercialized state)  Malm suggested you go to Tennessee to see a reenactment of the Battle of Shiloh where it took place.

How do people learn?

How People Learn focuses on thinking and learning, in particular how experts engage in those activities. To read the book online, click the icon above.

Kids rate books

Here are the top 10 books that thousands of teenagers picked as their favorites for 2010, released today as part of Teen Read Week.

The celebration of reading by teenagers this week is an annual initiative of the Young Adult Library Services Association that was started in 1998. Libraries around the world celebrate the week with events and programs aimed at encouraging teens to please for pleasure.
Teens’ Top Ten is a list created by kids ages 12 to 18, who nominate and then vote on their favorite books of the previous year. More than 8,000 kids voted this year on the following. (from the Answer Sheet)

Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire is number one on the list.
Teen Read Week runs from October 17-23, 2010.

Book it

Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school. (David Brooks at NYT)

A culture of books and reading helps kids read better. To learn more, click on the hyperlinked text above.

The power of reading and writing

BROCKTON, Mass. — A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachers and administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have a right to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewide exams. One in three dropped out.

Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuaded administrators to let them organize a schoolwide campaign that involved reading and writing lessons into every class in all subjects, including gym. (Sam Dillon at NYT)

Click the text above to learn the degree to which reading and writing across the curriculum had an impact on Brockton High School.

Wow---widgets and poetry

Wolfram Alpha is a computational search engine. Click here to go to the site. Wolfram Alpha now has a host of widgets that can be embedded on a blog or website.The widgets below are related to vocabulary, but there are many more. Click here to visit the widget gallery.





The original source for this information is Free Technology for Teachers

Yesterday reader at literary lunches was local poet and author Barbara Crow. She also read last week.

Award-winning author Tim O'Brien visits Grand Forks Central

Author Tim O'Brien said that writing The Things They Carried  "was a challenge I set for myself," one he likened to "creating a tennis net seven feet high" for a game of tennis. He said wanted to write something that "could've actually happened," something in which the narrator is Tim O'Brien and he wanted to fiction about the Vietnam War, which he described as a "small daily bunch of horrors, one after the other."

O'Brien, Friday's celebrity reader for Literary Lunches, talked about his work, including The Things They Carried, the selection for the Greater Grand Forks Big Read. The book, a suite of stories about the Vietnam War, in which narrator Tim O'Brien shows the reader glimpses of war. Though the characters are fictional----including the narrator-- O'Brien said that the characters are as real to him as the people in his own life. "Bodies don't have to be with us to be real."

If O'Brien had known what he was getting into, he said he might not have become a writer. Still, he finds "the payoffs of doing what I do...can be enormous." He spoke of one of those pay-offs in particular, a letter he got from a young Minneapolis woman, who wrote about how her parents weren't getting along and how painful it was to live in a household with such turmoil. Then, in an advanced placement English class she read The Things They Carried, a book which she gave to her father to read. Because he soon began to open up, she wrote O'Brien to say, "Thank you for getting a family talking."

Ultimately, O'Brien said he's trying to make art, to write something that will "entrance you...keep you reading."

He also talked about the importance of reading and what students should be reading. "Whatever gets you reading is okay."

He offered advice for young writers. "You don't have to go to war to write a book.  If you have lived up to the age of thirteen, you have enough material to write a novel.  You have known love, disappointment, betrayal.

"Pay attention to the life you're leading, and you'll have a wealth of stories."

O'Brien spoke at UND the night before and, during Literary Lunches,  reiterated sentiments he shared there.  If we want to respond to post-traumatic stress syndrome, we should "stop having wars."

The Things They Carried was a finalist for the 1990 Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award. 

The Big Read is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.

Local sponsors include the University of North Dakota, the North Dakota Council on the Humanities, the Community Foundation of Grand Forks, East Grand Forks and Area, Red River Valley Writing Project, the Chester Fritz Library, Grand Forks Public Schools, Lake Agassiz Reading Council, Alerus Financial, Frandsen Bank and Trust, Friends of the Library, WDAZ and Clear Channel Radio. Grand Forks is one of 75 communities nationwide participating in The Big Read from September 2010-June 2011. 

For a calendar of Greater Grand Forks Big Read events, click here.

(Photos of Tim O'Brien courtesy of Kris Arason )

Get ready to write

The National Day on Writing is October 20, 2010. Click on the hyperlinked text below to learn more and even contribute your writing.

 

9/29/10: Senate passed RES.668 "expressing support for the designation of October 20, 2010, as the "National Day on Writing!"

Get Ready for the 2nd National Day on Writing, October 20, 2010! 

 

Ways to keep up with The Big Read

The Greater Grand Forks Big Read now has a blog, which makes it easy to keep up with what's going on. Click here to visit the blog.

On the Rainy River is one the pieces in Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. The story chronicles how the narrator, also named Tim O'Brien, toys with fleeing to Canada to avoid war. He makes his decision on the Rainy River. (O'Brien's The Things They Carried is the book selection for the Greater Grand Forks Big Read)

The Prezi below illustrates not only what the story is about but also just what a Prezi can do. And it also shows the kinds of resources teachers and students can create about what they study.

On the Rainy River on Prezi

 

A game-changer......a pretty amazing vocabulary resource

If you're looking for a rich vocabulary website, one with games and graphic organizers and links to word lists, vocabulary.com is the place to go. There is enough to keep a reader busy for a while, maybe even a fortnight ;)

One of the best parts of the site is the search function. Simply type in a word and see what happens. Take a look at the result when the word "love" is typed in the search box.

The site also features a host of resources including VocabGrabber, something that's better experienced than explained. Click here to see what VocabGrabber does with the Bill of Rights. And you can add VocabGrabber to your browser toolbar, so you can use it on a webpage.

To create a word list at VocabGrabber, you must have an account; the account is not free. Still the free option is good.....actually, it's kind of amazing.

Speaking of poems

Award-winning local poet Barbara Crow said of a great poem, "It speaks to me."

At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, Crow spoke, through poetry, of the death of her son, one of the main themes of her collection Coming up for Light and Air, a Minnesota Voices Project winner. Among the poems she read from the collection was "The Race," her imagining of taking her son's body from the funeral home out into the world where he comes to life again.

Crow read poems from others, including poems from Joseph Shroud's Below Cold Mountain. Here is one of those poems:

The First Law of Thermodynamics.


He was a good ole boy, and when he died his friends carried out
his final wish–the body was cremated and the ashes stuffed into shotgun shells. They walked through the woods he loved and fired aimlessly into the trees–he came down everywhere in a powdery rain, a pollen of ashes that once was the memory of a boy walking under trees showering him with leaves.

Crow also read work by Philip Booth and recommends poets Tess Gallagher, Ted Koozer and Jane Kenyon. In addition to being a poet and writer, Crow, a native of New Zealand, is a commentator for Prairie Public Radio.

Reading Rockets

Reading Rockets is a national multimedia project offering information and resources on how young kids learn to read, why so many struggle, and how caring adults can help.

The Reading Rockets website includes materials for parents, teachers and administrators. Materials include research, book lists, teaching strategies, videos and podcasts....The site is teeming with resources.
And if that weren't enough, Reading Rockets has widgets, like the one below.

What is wealth?

Marty Martinson, the main character in VJ Smith's The Richest Man in the World is an unlikely hero. He worked at Wal-mart in Brookings, South Dakota. He greeted customers and engaged them in conversation when they were in his check-out line. But Martinson made an impression on Smith, and he made an impression on Grand Forks Public Schools activities director Todd Olson, yesterday's reader during Literary Lunches. It is from this non-fiction book that Olson read.

Olson read an excerpt explaining how Smith and Martinson met and how Martinson's engaging personality got Smith to write a letter to the head of Wal-Mart. Instead of offering up perfunctory greetings to his customers, Martinson talked with his customers and listened to what they said. The excerpt not only showcased Smith and Martinson but also the connections Olson shared during his reading...the kind of connections skilled readers make with ease.

Olson was a basketball coach for 12 years, a math teacher for 14.

A picture is worth a thousand words or so...

Free Technology for Teachers is a terrific blog for learning about online resources. Take a look at Snappy Words, a free online visual dictionary and thesaurus, profiled in a post at Free Technology for Teachers.

And if you're interested in visual dictionaries and thesauri (or is it thesauruses?) take a look at Visuwords.

Snappy Words and Visuwords both do really cool stuff with words. Try them out; the results will speak volumes...almost literally.

Professional philosopher in da house

"The choice to have an active mind is yours," UND philosophy professor Jack Weinstein told yesterday's Literacy Lunches audience.

What he read illustrate what an active mind considers. He read The Basho of Honk, a Nick Paumgarten New Yorker piece about turning responses to NYC's annoying car honking into short poems. Weinstein also read a Jacob Neusner speech from William Safire's Lend Me Your Years: Great Speeches in History. In Professor Jacob Neusner Defines the Social Contract Between Teacher and Student, Neusner argues that "Great teachers don't teach; they help students learn." In other words, great teaching is about getting people to think.

Weinstein, a native of New York City, is the director of the Institute for Philosophy in the Public Life.

A keeper of books

It wasn't just books and reading yesterday when Wendy Wendt direct or the Grand Forks Public Library spoke during Literary Lunches. She offered encouragement and advice to students.

"As you're thinking about your careers, think about what you really like to do," she said.  Wendt liked to read as a child but never thought anyone could work in a library, something she now does and loves.

Wendt read from The Last Book in the Universe by Rodman Philbrick, an author perhaps best known for Freak the Mighty.

And Wendt highlighted upcoming events such as The Big Read with an appearance by Tim O'Brien and a discussion with Lois Lowry about her book Crow Call. Students might be familiar with Lowry because of her book The Giver.

Take a look below at the scheduled events:

Great Conversation withTim O'Brien
Award-winning author, Tim O'Brien, will be appearing in Grand Forks to discuss his book, "The Things They Carried"
Event Location: Chester Fritz Auditorium, Grand Forks, ND 58201-6324

Date: Thu, Oct 14, 2010
Time: 7:00pm – 9:00pm

Book: The Things They Carried

Kids' Big Read Book Discussion of "Crow Call" by Lois Lowry

Story time for children of all ages. Features "Crow Call" by Lois Lowry, the story of a young girl who is reunited with her father after he has been away on military service for an extended time.
Event Location: 2110 Library Circle, Grand Forks, ND 58201-6324

Date: Sat, Oct 16, 2010
Time: 2:00pm – 2:30pm

Book: The Things They Carried

Looking at other worlds

Free Technology for Teachers continues to be an amazing resources for Web 2.0 tools for teachers.  Take a look at the hyperlinked text below.

Show World is an interactive mapping website that takes demographic, economic, environmental, and political data sets and creates maps based on those data. This can be done with Google Earth and Google Maps before, but Show World is slightly different.

Click here to look at Show World.  (It does take a bit for the page to load). Click here to hang out at Free Technology for Teachers.

The maps at Show World could help students gain background knowledge before they read about a particular country or countries.

Better late than never...

The word of the week for September 27 to October 1, 2010 is perseverance.

A glimpse at our professional development

Grand Forks Central special education teacher Kelli Henke (center) digs in with her GFC colleagues during professional development the morning of  September 28, 2010. The focus was vocabulary; teachers worked together in a large group, thinking and talking about how students best learn words. After the large group session, teachers went to breakout session led by the peers.

The professional development was planned by the Grand Forks Central Literacy Committee.

Webinar on common core standards

New times require new approaches to education and greater attention to building the teaching profession. On July 17, 2010, the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) released new “model core teaching standards” for public comment. The model core teaching standards are an initial effort to articulate—through the lens of the teacher—what effective teaching and learning would look like to ensure all learners are college and career ready. Unlike the original teacher standards, which focus on the assessment and support of beginning teachers, the new core teaching standards are standards of professional practice for all teachers. 

These model core teaching standards represent a new vision of teaching with increased focus on twenty-first-century knowledge and skills, personalized learning, a collaborative professional culture, improved assessment literacy, and new roles for teachers and administrators. In order to deliver a first-rate education to every child, policy leaders and educators must engage in the process of first defining effective teaching practice and then shaping policies based on a consistent vision of quality teaching.   

To learn more about the model core teaching standards and their potential for improving teacher effectiveness, join the Alliance and CCSSO for an interactive webinar on Wednesday, October 6 from 2:00 – 3:00 pm (EST). The webinar will also include a question and answer period to address questions submitted by viewers across the nation.   The draft core teaching standards are open for public comment until October 15, 2010. To download the new standards and submit comments, go to [ http://www.ccsso.org/Resources/Programs/Interstate_Teacher_Assessment_Consortium_(InTASC).html ]http://www.ccsso.org/intasc.

To register for the webinar and/or submit questions, click here.

Reading and writiing work

BROCKTON, Mass. — A decade ago, Brockton High School was a case study in failure. Teachers and administrators often voiced the unofficial school motto in hallway chitchat: students have a right to fail if they want. And many of them did — only a quarter of the students passed statewide exams. One in three dropped out.

Then Susan Szachowicz and a handful of fellow teachers decided to take action. They persuaded administrators to let them organize a schoolwide campaign that involved reading and writing lessons into every class in all subjects, including gym.

Their efforts paid off quickly. In 2001 testing, more students passed the state tests after failing the year before than at any other school in Massachusetts. The gains continued. This year and last, Brockton outperformed 90 percent of Massachusetts high schools. And its turnaround is getting new attention in a report, “How High Schools Become Exemplary,” published last month by Ronald F. Ferguson, an economist at Harvard who researches the minority achievement gap. (Sam Dillon at NYT)

Follow the above linked text to read more. To download and read the report, How High Schools Become Exemplary, click here.

UND President Robert Kelley's reading tomorrow is postponed. Check back at this blog soon for an update.

Important event this week

         UND President Robert Kelley will read for Literary Lunches   
                          first lunch only September 30, 2010. 

Getting organized

LiveBinders is a terrific online tool for compiling and organizing information from the Internet and your desktop. Instead of bookmarking sites, you use LiveBinders for putting material in an online binder that you can share through a variety of platforms. You also have the option to make your binder(s) private, so that it cannot be shared.

Below is an example of  LiveBinder...about using LiveBinders. Click on the binder to explore it.

LiveBinders Tips and Tricks

Barrington Bunny's story

"A good story keeps working on you," Pastor Roger Dykstra told yesterday's literary lunch-goers, and the story he read, Barrington Bunny, certainly did just that.

Dykstra, the lead pastor at Calvary Lutheran Church in Grand Forks, read this seemingly simple Martin Bell story--one he first heard as high school student---about a bunny in search of companionship on Christmas Eve. Barrington, the lone bunny in the forest, searches for a Christmas party. He's unable to find a party he can join and is about to lose hope when a wolf explains to him that all the animals in the forest are his family, something that prompts him to find unique gifts for the other animals.

Spoiler Alert: After Dykstra finished the story, he joked that it took him "eight times to read before he could read it without crying." Certainly there were no tears from anyone you'd know at Literary Lunches yesterday.  ;)

Dykstra said something about Barrington Bunny that will keep "working on"  those who heard him: "I believe that sometimes you being you is exactly what the world needs."

Lunch and re-thinking what we think we know

At yesterday's session of Literary Lunches, Tori Johnson, director of special education for Grand Forks Public Schools, read from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon, a book whose narrator is Christopher John Francis Boone, a 15-year-old boy with autism. She prefaced her reading by not only talking how some people with autism have difficulty reading facial expressions, but also by saying, "When you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism."

In Johnson's selection, Boone discovers the corpse of a dog on a pitch fork. The police arrive. It's then we get a glimpse into Boone, who notices even the slightest detail about the police.

Johnson also read an excerpt from The Last Lecture by the late Randy Rausch. The excerpt candidly focuses on how whining doesn't help people. And Johnson concluded with work by the poet Maya Angelou.

The Big Read is on the horizon

"We are so pleased to host a Big Read in Grand Forks,” said Wendy Wendt, director of the Grand Forks Public Library. “Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a fictionalized memoir of an infantry soldier as his platoon trudges through the jungles of Vietnam. We chose this book because of its potential appeal to those who may not have a habit of reading books for recreation. We also thought the strong armed forces presence in the greater Grand Forks area would afford many community members a story in which they could identify – veterans, active duty military, and their family members. In addition, people who have never been personally affected by military service gain some small insight into the sacrifices made for this country by reading this book.”

Grand Forks Big Read community partners include the Grand Force Air Force Base, the Grand Forks Public School District, Northland Community College, and UND, which will be bringing the author, Tim O’Brien to the community on Oct. 14 and 15. Other community participants include the arts community, the Myra Museum, Turtle River State Park and many others. (text from University Letter, University of North Dakota Faculty/Staff Newsletter online)

The word of the week for September 20-24, 2010 is...

Reading the classics

Friday's installment of Literary Lunches featured the words of Harper Lee's famous character Scout spoken by WDAZ news reporter Brady Mallory. Scout is the narrator of  Lee's classic To Kill A Mockingbird.

Mallory's excerpted the following: When Mrs Dubose insults Atticus Finch, his son Jem destroys her camelias. Dubose demands retribution in the form of Jem coming to read to her every day. Jem is only released from reading each day when Dubose's alarm clock rings. Unbeknownst to Jem, every day she sets the alarm to go off a few minutes later than it did the day before, thus extending the reading time. When Dubose dies a few months later, Jem learns that she had been using this reading time to distract her mind while she weaned herself off morphine, so she could die free and clear, beholden to no one nor anything. Jem learns that even though he thought he was only working off his punishment, he was, in fact, doing a great service to Dubose.

The Big Read, a month of activities, speakers and performances to encourage and celebrate reading, will kick off Monday [today]with a party that will give away copies of The Big Read’s focus book, “The Things They Carried” by Tim O’Brien.
The event launch will be from 3 to 4 p.m. Monday on the sixth floor of the Grand Forks County Building in downtown Grand Forks. The Big Read is sponsored by the Grand Forks Public Library and other community organizations.
“The kickoff event on Sept. 20 will be an opportunity to learn more about the Big Read and pick up a free copy of ‘The Things They Carried,’” Wendy Wendt, director of the Grand Forks Public Library, said in a news release. (from The Grand Forks Herald)

For more on O'Brien and The Things They Carried, click here.