Family reading resources

Here is a link to the UK Literacy Trust - a useful site with heaps of resources to help foster early literacy in the home.

http://www.literacytrust.org.uk/familyreading/parents/index.html

Reading mileage activity

I have an 'activity' for Juls teachers, if you wish to participate, and then share with your colleagues at a Juls workshop if you wish...
Cheers, Vera.

This activity comes from : Best practices in literacy instruction, Third edition 2007, edited by L. Gambrell; L. Morrow; M. Pressley , page 101.

• Track the volume of reading that struggling readers in your classroom or school do over a 1-week period. You can think of 'struggling readers' as 'at risk readers' at any level if that helps.
• Compare this to the volume of reading better readers do.
• Use the books (count the words) that the reader sees at Guided reading time and home reading time.
• Just track one at-risk reader and one reader (this will help keep the task manageable).

• Are struggling readers doing at least as much reading as better readers?
• If not what can be done to expand the reading volume of struggling readers?

• Share your findings with other Juls teachers.
• Share what you did to change the amount of reading done.

Waima School Library

Congratulations Waima School on your recent ERO report (November 2009) ! Glenys drew my attention to it, in particular this great comment about the library...

Library. The library is attractive and inviting for children, who benefit from having good access to it. One class uses the library for their daily reading lessons. The board funds a part-time library resource person and ensures that the library is well stocked with interesting materials that include Maori titles and high interest texts for boys. The boys’ section is a recent initiative to motivate boys as readers. Students also have input into the reading resources that are purchased for the library.

So, maybe ERO don't talk about the library in their report on reading and writing in Years 1 and 2, but they know a good library when they see one !

How about posting a photo of the library on this blog, eg the Boys' Section ?

Another wonderful Picture book about faces and feelings

Dear all,

I have just come across another truly wonderful picture book, - that would be especially great to use in the junior classroom at the beginning of the year when the teacher is discussing feelings and faces etc with students.

The title is What's That Look on your face; All about faces and feelings.
The author is Catherine Snodgrass

Once again this title is available from National Library Auckland.

Michael Rosen on the power of the picture book...

The wonderful author and poet Michael Rosen was Britain's Children's Laureate in 2008 /9. Here is the link to his website for the full text of his Patrick Hardy lecture - http://www.michaelrosen.co.uk/patrickhardy.html and there are other gems there too so it is worth exploring...

His Patrick Hardy Lecture talks about the relationship between education and books, a checklist of questions and suggestions about a school's "book culture", and a paean to the picture book and all that it offers to mind and ear and eye... " This is not just a matter of how we read, it’s why we read."

Here is an extract from the Lecture (slightly edited) :

So I’ve become more and more interested in looking at how schools do or don’t help create this book-loving culture. Here’s my checklist of questions to ask of a school, to see if it really is serious about books.

1. Does the school have in place any kind of home-school liaison where someone talks with individual parents about specific books, libraries, book departments, magazines, book clubs, book shows, that might interest this specific child and his or her carers?
   
2. Does the school hold book events all year round with writers, illustrators, story-tellers, librarians, book enthusiasts coming in and talking and performing for the children and parents?
3. Does the school not only invite in a syndicated book fair but also invites in local bookshops, specialist bookshops and has books available for borrowing or buying to support the visiting writers, speakers, performers and story-tellers?
4. Is there someone in the school trained and interested in running the school library and who is on hand to give advice to every teacher to help them with their class libraries?
5. Does the school run book clubs for teachers, parents and children?
6. Does the school give every parent information – perhaps in the form of an attractive pack – on the local library, the local bookshop? Does the school take children and parents to these venues?
7. Do the school and individual classes adopt an author or illustrator for the week, or month or term and investigate, explore and do creative work around that author and illustrator?
8. Do the children make books of their own? Are these readily available for everyone in the school and parents too? Does the school encourage parents to come in and make books with the children? Does the school celebrate and cherish these books as much as it celebrates its most important activities?
9. Does the school encourage children to pass books between each other by means of book swaps, prominently displayed reviews, assembly presentation of ‘this week’s good read’, book posters and the like?
10. Does the school seize every possible moment - eg visits to museums, visits from specialists of any kind, school trips – to support these events and activities with books, eliciting from all and sundry what their favourite books are or were when they were children?
11. Are there regular whole school projects (like, say Black History Month, or ‘The Sea’) where a topic or theme can be supported by books of all kinds, all genres and all ages? Is the school on these occasions inundated with books?
12. Are assemblies and classrooms frequently a place when children are encouraged to become fascinated by something – anything! – to do with a book or what’s in a book?
13. Are the head’s study and teachers’ desks places where special, intriguing, exciting, ever-changing, odd, old, weird books lurk?
14. Does the school keep and use book reviews of children’s books from Books for Keeps, Carousel, Times Educational Supplement, Child and Junior Education, The School Librarian, the broadsheet review pages and the internet?
15. Is there at least one time every week where children will have nothing else to do with a book other than to read it, listen to it, and chat about it in an open-ended way?

This series of points should not be a utopian wish-list. It should be addressed with exactly - yes, exactly – the same urgency and attention to detail that the whole panoply of reading strategies is given. For every sounding out of ‘per’ and ‘ther’ there is an equivalent attention to detail that can be given to any of these fifteen points.

And the obvious, mind-blowingly simple fact stares us in the face: in the very area where the book-loving culture begins, nursery, reception, years 1 and 2, there is, if you like, a world class range of ‘materials’ (!). No, I’m not referring to the Oxford Reading Tree or the Jolly Phonics books or any all-in-one, solve-all literacy pack. I’m talking about - the picture book.

There it sits like some massive inflorescence, budding and flowering and reproducing in all its delightful, complex and beautiful ways, all freighted with the same impulse – how to please, intrigue, and amuse young children and their carers and teachers. When we look at who makes these books, we are talking here about some of the best people to go through art school, some of the funniest, cleverest, most thoughtful people we have and I’m talking here about the whole team – whoever it is who makes up the words, makes the pictures, designs the books, edits, publishes and prints it.

They produce what is a complex art form, that passes on its meanings, makes its suggestions in ways that call on readers to make many, many creative leaps, many, many investigations, many, many connections between parts of pages, different pages, forwards and backwards through the book.

And it does this inviting, in many different ways: visually, orally, textually and in any combinations of all three. Eye and ear are constantly challenged to look and listen here, there and everywhere. The narrative, is in truth a multi-narrative: one moment told in words, next in pictures, simultaneously in both, sometimes complementing each other, sometimes in contrast with each other, sometimes, even in contradiction with each other. There are often more and more details to be found, there are rhythms to be remembered and re-found, there are shapes, patterns, tones, visual rhythms and compositions to be made sense of.

The strategies that we all adopt as older children and as adults in order to read, stick with and unlock stories are all to be found in picture books: plot and sub-plot, goodies and baddies, mysteries to be uncovered and guessed about, heroes on quests, heroes being tested, loss, compassion, achievement, solidarity, pain, intrigue, subversion, scheming, psychologising, resolution and much more.

What’s more, these books address a complex, multi-faceted audience. Picture books are not solely for or about children. They are artistic interventions into the many different kinds of relationships between children and adults. The reading-situation itself is nearly always one shared by at least one carer and at least one child, or at least one teacher and, nearly always, several children. The books are both for and about these relationships. In the books, parents comfort their children, or get the wrong end of the stick or are indifferent. Surrogate children in the form of animals and soft toys get lost or face tremendous ordeals. These open up moments of talk between adults and children as the book is read on many disparate occasions afterwards. How many times have I been asked by parents who’ve been asked by children, is there a mummy in ‘We’re Going On A Bear Hunt’? Is that larger female figure a mummy or an older sister? Is the bear sad? Did he just want to play? These are the brilliant gaps left by Helen Oxenbury (nothing to do with me, I hasten to add), where talk between children and adults arises spontaneously. And these are serious questions from the child, and of course, about that child itself. The child who asks about the missing mummy is a child, who like all of us, wondered what life would be like without mummy. The child who asks, ‘Is the bear sad,?’ ‘Did he just want to play?’ is the child who at one time wanted to play or join in and couldn’t and was left out.

Meanwhile, adults who, as they read these books with their children, wonder about their own childhoods and wonder about their own parenting, caring and teaching. If you’ve ever been a carer of any kind, it’s impossible to read ‘Not Now Bernard’ without knowing that you’ve been a not-now-Bernard person. It does the work of a hundred guides on parenting, a hundred TV programmes on why you are an inadequate parent. ‘Peepo’ is not just a book. It’s a game and, if this doesn’t sound too dull – it’s not meant to! – it’s a social document. There are a hundred details of the way people used to lead their lives, and any number of unquantifiable feelings attached to those people and objects. This is the stuff that history books leaves out: what it felt like to look in a mirror at the moment that a family faced up to the fact that the man was going off to war. Imagine a whole school project on, let’s say, how we used to live, or World War Two. As the school gears up for visits to the local museum, visits by old people, children go home to quiz their grandparents, a host of books come into the school from Nina Bawden’s ‘Carrie’s War’, through Michael Forman’s ‘War Boy’, archives from the local library or town hall, so ‘Peepo’ can take its place amongst it all. Perhaps the year 1 children will perform it, which will be videoed and there’ll be copies of the book for them to buy so that they never need forget what it felt like to look through those holes and find the next picture. Grandparents can say how they remember their parents talking about bomb shelters and rationing...You would be hard pushed to find any other artistic form that has the power and potential to help create conversations like this.

This is something far too valuable to be let to go into decline or restricted to privileged reading situations.

All this is a what I’ll call the ‘literacy of literature’ not the ‘literacy’, per se. This is not just a matter of how we read, it’s why we read.

I suggest that the question, - why we read – should be addressed with just as much attention as schools are giving to the question of how we learn to read.

And so to point 16: I don’t think any meeting held by teachers to help parents understand what literacy is, should ever be without the presence in the room and the time to look at them, of such books as Trish Cooke’s and Helen Oxenbury’s ‘So Much’, Tony Ross’s ‘I Want My Potty’, Shirley Hughes’s ‘Dogger’, books by Anthony Browne, Penny Dunbar, Michael Foreman, Mick Inkpen, Lauren Child, Quentin Blake, Colin MacNaughton, Emma Chichester Clark and many, many more – apologies to those I’ve not mentioned.

17. There should be Beano annuals and football programmes open at the Junior Supporters pages, there should be books that tie in with TV shows and films.

18. Teachers could and should wrap up a meeting with parents with a read-aloud session, say, of a Julia Donaldson/Axel Scheffler masterpiece, with compulsory joining in!

19. Parents and grandparents should be encouraged to bring in and show off the books and magazines, no matter how humble, that they’ve kept since their childhoods.

Go to Michael's website to read the whole talk from this passionate advocate for children's books and reading. This "book culture" is what was a missing element in the ERO report on Reading in Years 1 and 2 - see earlier post in this blog...

New junior books to consider for your class or school library

Dear all,

I have the opportunity to check through the new picture books that arrive at the Christchurch National Library Centre. I have come across these 5 titles which I feel may be suitbale for junior classrooms. They are all available through the National Library Auckland office if you wish to borrow them.

Do you know Millie by Gordon Winch ( about moving and making friends)

Click clack splish splash by Doreen Cronin

Robot by Jon Scieszka

The Wonkey Wonkey by Craig Smith (includes a cd of the author singing the words)

Not last night but the night before by Colin McNaughton

The toymaker and the bird by Pamela Allen (very sad!)

New Zealand ABC wall frieze

Have a look at this NZ ABC wall frieze / poster... http://www.kakarikigreen.co.nz/

A is for aroha, j is for jandals, n is for netball... lovely bright graphics and clear letters.

test post

Dear all,

I am now based in the Christchurch Centre of Natonal Library and enjoying the changing landscapes of Canterbury. I will try and remain an active blogger, - and add informaoitn as it passes me by. I am now based in a centre where there is a collection so I will keep my eyes peeled for new books especailly picture books that would suit the aims of Juls.
Take care and enjoy 2010 Dyane

ERO Report : Reading and Writing in Years 1 and 2

Here is a link to the newly published ERO report on Reading and Writing in Years 1 and 2, due to be sent to schools in Term 1 2010.

http://tiny.cc/EROreportReadingandWritingYears1and2

I was interested to see how the library fitted into effective teaching of reading and writing at Years 1 and 2 from ERO's perspective... I was disappointed.

The word library does not appear at all in the report.

The word libraries appears once in the report in the following sentence on page 18 :
Children had plentiful and appropriately levelled texts in their reading boxes, big books, poetry cards, reading games and in class and school libraries.

The word literature appears 4 times in the report, in each instance referring to professional reading about best teaching practice.

I can't believe that a report about reading and writing in the junior school does not mention the vital importance of ready access to a range of literature and engagement with stories for reading motivation and pleasure, teacher reading role models "readers are made by readers", well-resourced and well-used school libraries to enrich teaching practice, and the creation of a reading culture in the classroom and school...

LPDP report : Improving learning for all

You may be interested in reading the Literacy Professional Development Project report : Improving learning for all

This document is part of a set of materials for teachers and school leaders that summarises research articles and milestone reports from New Zealand’s Literacy Professional Development Project (LPDP). Online users can also access the hyperlinks indicated in blue in the text.

Here is the link to the report.
http://literacyonline.tki.org.nz/Literacy-Online/Community/Literacy-Online-update/LPDP

The Literacy Professional Development Project (LPDP) provides schools with an in-depth professional development programme that focuses on improving student learning and achievement in literacy through evidence-based practice. The project also has a focus on the professional learning that has an ongoing effect on student progress and achievement.

The introduction paper and four research reports, Improving Learning for All: Learning from the Literacy Professional Development Project(LPDP), focus on student learning, teacher learning, facilitator learning, and learning across the whole education system. They contain ideas of relevance to teachers, school leaders, facilitators of professional learning, and policy makers across the education sector.

The content of these reports has been sourced from previously published research conducted by the researchers (Professor Helen Timperley and Associate Professor Judy Parr from the University of Auckland) working within LPDP, in partnership with project members.

Glenys suggests in particular having a look at :
If the Teacher Is Clear about It, the Students Will Get It: Professional Inquiry for Teachers http://tiny.cc/Iftheteachers
and
It’s All about the Students: Helping Students Become Self-regulated Learners
http://tiny.cc/Itsallaboutthestudents

Beyond feedback: Developing student capability in complex appraisal

Here is a link to an interesting article about giving students effective feedback, shared by Glenys Brown.

www.uts.ualberta.ca/documents/Beyondfeedback.pdf

Beyond feedback: Developing student capability in complex appraisal
by D. Royce Sadler, Griffith Institute for Higher Education, Griffith University, Brisbane

Abstract
Giving students detailed feedback about the strengths and weaknesses of their work, with suggestions for improvement, is becoming common practice in higher education. However, for many students feedback seems to have little or no impact, despite the considerable time and effort put into its production.

With a view to increasing its effectiveness, extensive theoretical and empirical research has been carried out into its structure, timing and other parameters.

For students to be able to apply feedback, they need to understand the meaning of the feedback statements. They also need to identify, with near certainty, the particular aspects of their work that need attention. For these to occur, students must possess critical background knowledge.

This article sets out the nature of that knowledge and how students can acquire it. They must appropriate for themselves three fundamental concepts : task compliance, quality, and criteria – and also develop a cache of relevant tacit knowledge.

Keywords: formative assessment, feedback, qualitative judgment, peer assessment, criteria

Teaching juniors to become writers : one teacher's experience

Here is some information from Lynne Shearman, RTLit, from her JuLS Workshop 7 session on writing.

This is the link to the document with the Junior Writing Intentions
http://tiny.cc/JuniorWritingIntentionsLShearman

and Lynne's powerpoint on Teaching Juniors to become writers is on the right sidebar under the heading Powerpoints from workshops.

Reading to a dog

For those who love dogs, you'll completely understand this great story about a programme for learner readers to read to a dog...
http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/10/22/dogs.irpt/index.html
Learning to read? Try talking to a dog [CNN]

I saw this happen at Russell School quite a few years ago - a young boy was out on the verandah, sitting cross legged with a lovely dog (the Principal Keith Dowdle's dog) resting its chin on the boy's knee while the boy read - it really looked as if the dog was listening and looking at the pictures - if only I'd had my camera !

Hi there
Thanks Jeannie for your help . I think I am in now
Raewyn

Notes on the "summer slide"

Overcoming the “summer slide” : students and reading mileage, summer holidays and the school library…

• The “summer slump” or “summer slide” is the decline in reading achievement children suffer just from being away from school and formal literacy instruction.
• Often it is the students who can least afford to lose the reading gains they've achieved during the school year who fall the furthest behind when they return to school after a summer break.
• A New Zealand masters thesis[1] showed a 5.8 month summer reading slide for pupils in a Decile 1 school who were reading at below-average levels. · In a key Baltimore study[2] it was found that low-income children fell further behind than their classmates – characterised as the “the Harry Potter divide”, and that the effects are cumulative and long-term.
• Term 4 is the time to consider how your school can prevent any “summer slide” and what strategies you can implement before the end of term for the coming holiday...

Perhaps the two main actions to consider are

• getting parents on board, informing / reminding them of the powerful benefits for children of reading and being read to, and that even just 10 minutes reading a day by or to children will maintain / develop their child’s reading skills, habit and enthusiasm…
• looking at ways to get books in hands / homes during the holidays and what role the school library or the resource room might play in this, as well as liaison with the public library to encourage membership and use…

There are other strategies, such as making sure children have the skills to choose reading material independently, how to build some fun writing activities into their summer reading programme, or setting challenges – individual, class and school targets for reading mileage.

It would be also be productive to gather evidence of the impact of any initiative you take.

Perhaps the discussion at your school could also include an invitation / challenge to teachers to extend their own summer reading of children’s books – getting to know children’s books that they can promote to their students next year, read aloud, incorporate into their teaching programme…

For more information, discussion or workshops at your school on this topic, please contact your National Library Adviser – Dyane Hosler or Jeannie Skinner.

1 An investigation of the effectiveness of a summer school reading intervention in a low decile school as a way of preventing the summer slide in reading, Shanthi Tiruchittampalam, University of Auckland, MEd thesis 2006
2 Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap Karl L. Alexander, Doris R. Entwisle, Linda Steffel Olson, John Hopkins University, Baltimore in American Sociological Review, 2007, Vol. 72 (April:167–180)

Messages for parents about summer reading...

Here are some notes you may wish to use as a starting point for communicating with parents… Put them onto your school letterhead or in a newsletter, and edit them as you wish…

3 important messages for parents / caregivers / whanau

We know you want the best for your children.
Here are three things you can do which will really help them :

1. Encourage your children to read.

• If your children spend 15 minutes each day reading or being read to, it will help them become excellent readers, writers and thinkers and do well at school and life.
• 15 minutes is only 1 % of each day. It could be in 3 lots of 5 minutes. It isn’t much time but it makes a HUGE difference.
• If you would like some help getting books to read and share, then please ask us, we’d be happy to help.

2. Keep reading and writing happening over the school holidays.

• Many children, especially struggling readers, forget some of what they've learned or slip out of practice during the summer holidays. If you keep reading to your child and encouraging them to read and write, then they won’t lose ground they have made over the year and “slide” back.
• Keep it fun – read anything, write anything – lists, recipes, stories, postcards, comics… Ask your child’s teacher for ideas.

3. Read aloud to your children.

• The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children.
• Reading aloud to children stimulates their interest, their emotional development, their imagination, and their language.
• Reading aloud to your children every day will help them become great readers and listeners, but most of all they will love you for doing it with them and they will remember the times you read to them all their lives !

Jeannie Skinner, Library Adviser, National Library School Services

Summer slump - NLNZ workshop 7

The NLNZ session at Workshop 7 explores the importance of maintaining the progress made by your students in your class during the year by setting up strategies to keep reading and writing happening over the school holidays - avoiding the "summer slump". In this session we discussed what teachers, parents, libraries, the school and the children themselves can do...

Contact Dyane or Jeannie if you would like a copy of the powerpoint to share at your school with staff.

Here are some links to articles about the summer slump :
http://www.readingrockets.org/article/c41/ Summary of articles...

Summer Reading Loss by Maryann Mraz and Timothy V. Rasinski (2007) http://www.readingrockets.org/articles/15218

These are some suggestions from the Whangarei JuLS group on what they plan to do:

• Intend to set up school LibraryThing to record summer reading
• Promote the library in newsletters and the need to read.
• School newsletter item about summer slide
• LibraryThing class site - link up with other classes as "friends"
• I will be better prepared to set up a focus group to monitor over summer.
• Will try and inspire community to make this work
• Look forward to bringing it up at staff meeting to discuss
  
• Good ideas for making books. Will follow through with newsletter
• Will make class slogan for summer holiday reading.
• Had not really thought about this issue deeply and now I realise we can make a difference.·
• Share at syndicate meeting.·

Innovative Teachers' Companion

Andrew Clements, a teacher at Kaikohe West School, heartily recommended this teacher planning diary - the Innovative Teachers' Companion. The website www.itcpublications.com.au

For Australian and NZ teachers, it has double page spreads for teacher daily / weekly planning as usual, interleaved with a variety of teaching strategies for critical and creative thinking. It costs NZ $33 and with purchase comes access to the website with a huge number of resources to download. I imagine that having these ideas and suggestions right in your planning book could be really useful...

I contacted Sharon Birss at the Tai Tokerau Ed Centre which sells it (s.birss@auckland.ac.nz / ph 09 470 1023) and she has kindly given me a 2009 Primary edition (Secondary edition also available) as a sample to show at network meetings etc.

Teachers as Readers (UK research)

The UKLA UK Literacy Association has undertaken research which I find interesting, about teachers as readers and about the relationship between reading instruction and reading for pleasure. There is such a role for the school library to play here...

http://www.ukla.org/site/research/research_projects_in_progress/teachers_as_readers_building_communities_of_readers/

The first phase of the Teachers as Readers research (2006-7) looked at patterns in primary teachers' reading, both personally and professionally - looking at their own personal reading habits and preferences, their knowledge of children's literature, their own childhood favourites and books significant to them, their use of texts in the classroom, and use of libraries...

Teachers as readers Report
http://www.ukla.org/download.php?file=/downloads/TARwebreport.doc

Teachers as readers Questionnaire
http://www.ukla.org/download.php?file=/downloads/tars.pdf

The goal of the second phase of the research is Building Communities of Readers (2007-8) to improve teachers’ knowledge and experience of literature in order to help them increase children’s motivation and enthusiasm for reading, especially those less successful in literacy, to build new relationships with parents and families and to explore the concept of a reading teacher: a teacher who reads and a reader who teaches (Commeyras et al., 2004).

The Executive Summary provides an overview of the research and the key findings as well as recommendations. It argues that teachers need support in order to develop children’s reading for pleasure, which can influence both attainment and achievement and increase young learners’ engagement as self- motivated and socially engaged readers.

http://www.ukla.org/downloads/teachers_as_readers.pdf


Click on the picture to enlarge a summary of key findings :
Reading instruction - oriented towards learning to read, Reading for Pleasure oriented towards choosing to read...

Themed literacy bags for younger students

I recommend checking out the Reading Rockets website http://www.readingrockets.org/
it is full of interesting links and useful resources. I've subscribed to the free monthly newsletter.

From their website : Reading Rockets offers a wealth of reading strategies, lessons, and activities designed to help young children learn how to read and read better. Our reading resources assist parents, teachers, and other educators in working with struggling readers who require additional help in reading fundamentals and comprehension skills development.

In the latest newsletter from Reading Rockets there is a new "literacy bag" based on the "Where the wild things are" by Maurice Sendak. Browse their full library of Family Literacy Bags. And for additional information about Family Literacy Bags, you might want to read this article.

I could imagine these literacy bags being a great resource for Parent Mentoring Programmes or in junior classrooms.