Missouri State Council of the International Reading Association

Welcome!  We hope that you find this site informative and that you will return to it often to stay current with IRA and today's reading instruction.  We welcome your comments and questions.

– Mary Jo Barker                                     

MSC-IRA State Coordinator                 

state-coordinator@missourireading.org

Written by Tammy Rhomberg

The Dolly Gray Children’s Literature Award will be presented on January 19, 2012 at the Council for Exceptional Children’s Division on Autism and Developmental Disabilities (DADD) international conference in Miami Beach, Florida. The intermediate/young adult award will be presented to Kathryn Erskine, author of Mocking Bird and Beverley Brenna, author of Waiting for No One. In the picture book category, the awards go to Rebecca Elliott, author/illustrator of Just Because, and Holly Robinson Peete and Ryan Elizabeth Peete (authors) and Shane W. Evans (illustrator) for My Brother Charlie.

Dolly Gray Award – 2012 Award Winner

2012 Dolly Gray Award Winner

Mockingbird

by Kathryn Erskine

Presented at the CEC-DADD's biennial conference in Miami Beach, Florida, January, 2012.

Disability: Asperger Syndrome

Publisher: Penguin

Dolly Gray Award – 2012 Award Winner

2012 Dolly Gray Award Winner

Waiting for No One 

by Beverley Brenna

Presented at the CEC-DADD's biennial conference in Miami Beach, Florida, January, 2012.

Disability: Asperger Syndrome

Publisher: Red Deer Press

Dolly Gray Award – 2012 Award Winner

2012 Dolly Gray Award Winner

My Brother Charlie

by Holly Robinson Peete and Ryan Elizabeth Peete (authors) and Shane W. Evans (illustrator)

Presented at the CEC-DADD's biennial conference in Miami Beach, Florida, January, 2012.

Disability: Autism

Publisher: Scholastic

History of the Dolly Gray Award

Dolly Sharpe Gray was born September 20, 1971 in New York City with severe cerebral palsy. Not quite 18 years later she died in her sleep of a respiratory infection. Dolly's life was in many ways the life of any little girl and young woman. To an extent that one might not have anticipated, she participated in the world that we all share. Literature had a lot to do with it. Like many young people, she loved books. Perhaps because she could not walk and she could not speak, the messages of books about diverse people and places were all the more important to her. Books opened the world to her and promoted something called "awareness."  With the power of words and the realism of story, books tell us about the lives of others, including persons with disabilities. Throughout her life, Dolly was greeted with much acceptance, and benefited from that understanding for which literature is partly responsible. When we can identify with characters and stories we learn to know ourselves better and to become more accepting of those around us. Books offered Dolly something precious as she enjoyed stories showing figures with whom she could identify. The issue was that there were limited books with which she could relate. Without powerful and accurate depiction of persons with disabilities, literature itself is diminished. Today there are many more books for young people which give substance to "inclusion."

The Dolly Gray Award recognizes high quality fiction/biographical books for children, adolescents, and young adults that authentically portray individuals with developmental disabilities. The award was developed by the DADD in 2000 in response to a growing body of children’s literature that includes characters with developmental disabilities, and to assist in dispelling harmful myths and stereotypes portrayed in the media. Special Needs Project, a worldwide leader in the distribution of books related to disabilities, co-sponsors this award. 

A list of all books considered for the award, procedures, and submission guidelines are available on the DADD website:  http://daddcec.org/Awards/DollyGrayAwards.aspx.

Increase achievement by involving your students in self-assessment, goal setting, and goal tracking!

At a recent staff meeting, our principal moved every teacher into a team of two and asked each person to write a personal goal that we would like to accomplish this year.  Our goal sheet included spaces for not only the goal, but also the steps that one would take to accomplish this goal and how specific people could help us. At future staff meetings, we will check in with our partner to share our progress towards meeting this goal.  Also, he challenged us to think of ways to track our progress towards completion.  The principal introduced this activity by saying that he wanted to model for us how we might include our students in goal setting.

 This activity was very timely.  Most teachers in our school are close to finishing their initial assessments of students.  For me, assessments are finished and my Reading Intervention classes are beginning.  Last year, my Reading Intervention team experienced great sucess in improving our students' reading due in part to implementing the specific Assessment for Learning practices of student self assessment and goal setting.  (This student involvement piece of Assessment for Learning is so often forgotten.)  Using the results of informal reading inventories shared with students, goals were chosen by students and communicated to parents and classroom teachers on goal sheets along with the steps to completing the goal.  Goal cards were created and posted on desks or in folders to remind students of his/her goal. Progress was tracked on generic graphs that were personalized for each student.

 
Listed below are the resources I have posted to help you implement the often forgotten student piece of Assessment for Learning.

Goal Setting and Tracking
Click here to see goal setting sheets, goal cards for posting on student desk, and goal tracking charts that you can personalize for the needs of your students. 

Thank you to Sarah Valter for sharing her goal card for the desk.  If you have resources that have worked well in your classroom for goal setting or tracking, please share them. I will post them in the next e-newsletter.

To  prepare your students for goal setting, read aloud Salt in His Shoes by Michael Jordan.

To read more about involving students in assessment for learning, google "assessment for learning stiggins."  Look for the article titled "Classroom Assessment for Learning" in the September 2002 edition of Educational Leadership by Chappuis and Stiggins.

To extent your learning, attend Sarah Valter's session on this topic at the MO Early Learning Conference on November 3-4 at Tan Tar A. Learn more about her session and other speakers at http://muconf.missouri.edu/moearlylearning.  Register for the conference at http://muconf.missouri.edu/moearlylearning/Registration.html.

What is your most important task in the first few days of school?  

BUILDING COMMUNITY!

A few of our members have shared the activities that they have found successful in their own classrooms for building community from the very first day of school! 

WHO AM I? (Gr 1 and Up)

By Wendy Bopp, Rockwood School District

Each student writes numerous T/F statement about self. Classmates try to answer. Student reveals true answers. Process begins with the teacher (click here for teacher example) and is repeated for each student. Class averages their score on how well they know their classmates. A clean copy of all questionnaires is kept. At the end of the year, all students answer all questionnaires again. Once again, the class average is computed and compared to the fall score. Then, students write a reflective essay about how they learned more about their classmates and how /why it impacted our classroom community.

For Gr 1-2 — Guess Who's Who? (Really Good Stuff #157716)

Same idea but involves more picture drawing. Students decorate the border of the paper and complete the information about themselves in each of the squares. Classmates read the information on the mats and guess who each belongs to, then open the mat to see if they were right! On the inside of the mat is a self-drawn portrait of the author.

POETRY AS A PROMPT FOR GETTING TO KNOW STUDENTS  (Gr 3 & Up)

By Alyssa Barker, Ritenour School District

On the first day of class, I will use the attached poem by Matt Fatchen. As students read it, they think they are reading about Halloween because of the scary events described in the poem. However, it is written about the night before the first day of a new school year. After reading it, I ask students to write how each felt the night before school started. (Now, I also have a writing sample from each student.)   Click here for this poem and others to use in the first few days of school.

Next, we do a Four Corners activity. I have the following words posted in each of four corners around the room: Scared, Worried, Ambivalent, Excited. (Of course, we talk about each of these words and their meanings, especially ambivalent.) I ask the students to stand in the corner that best describes their feelings about starting school today. The students in each corner share with others in the corner why they chose this word. Then, each corner shares out to the whole class as to why they chose this word to describe their feelings about starting school today.

Finally, I turn the Four Corners activity into a Human Continuum – a line of emotions with the word "Excited" at the far right and the word "Scared" at the far left. We discuss where "Worried" and "Ambivalent" might fall on the line. Then, each student goes to stand on the line at the place where his/her emotions would land between "Excited" and "Scared." The students share out with the person to the right then to the left.

Throughout these activities, we are looking for common feelings. Students always find that there are other students who feel similarly to them. In eight years, no one has ever chosen "excited" to show how they feel about the first day of school in middle school.

SUMMER PICTURE OF FUN (Gr K and Up)

By Marcia Strickland, Rockwood School District

Probably my most favorite thing I do to build community is that I send each student a postcard as soon as lists are posted and ask each one to bring a picture of something fun they did over the summer. They share what they did, and we do other activities with the picture. The picture gives them an easy way to share with the class and a focus for what to say when they share.

INCLUSION ACTIVITIES

By Courtney McAllister, Northwest R1 School District

This year we have an advisory group that meets everyday for the first 20 minuntes of the day. We will be doing inclusion activities like Stand If … Examples: Stand if you like to play sports. Stand if you are the oldest child in your family. This will enable students to see commonalities with other students.

We will also do an activity where students are asked to write about themselves from the point of view of what other people see of them on the outside and then what they know of themselves from the inside. We will share to show that what we think we know of others may not always to true. It will also enable students to learn what they have in common with others.

Content Area Literacy IS Teaching for Social Justice: Focusing on Unsuccessful Readers

By Carol Lloyd Rozansky, Ph.D.

When adolescent students have difficulties reading, we have traditionally focused on identifying and remediating the skills and strategies they do not have and simultaneously place them in low-level academic courses. However, learned skills and strategies in remedial reading classes rarely transfer to academic courses. This paper suggests a application of content area literacy strategies that are framed in schema theory, culturally relevant pedagogy, motivation to read, and liberatory education. Examples from various content areas are included.

To read more abstracts, click here.

A Professional Book Review of Comprehension Through Conversation by Maria Nichols

Learning occurs when we have the opportunity to think WITH others.  (Peter Brunn)  "Thinking with others" usually comes in the form of talk … talking to learn.   Want to make a big difference in student achievement with a subtle change in your instruction?  Maria Nichols offers us just that.  She encourages us to have our students "think and talk with others in purposeful ways as a means of generating ideas and constructing understanding."

While reading this, one may be thinking, "Hey, I do that."  But, let's clarify exactly what is meant by that statement.  Do you have your students share ideas with a peer?  Do you have your students talk to other students during a lesson to make one's thinking clear to others?  Well, that is simple communication.

The purposeful talk that is described in the first paragraph is also called "dialogue" by David Bohm (1996).  Bohm describes dialogue as "a coming to an intellectual exchange willing to see and hear something new in the exchange, and actually creating a newer, stronger understanding because of the exchange. … participants achieve a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts – ideas that are bigger and better thean any individual might have conceived on their own."  Nichols says "these learners depend on each other's thinking to enrich their understanding and construct meaning."

How do we create such an environment in our classroom?  Nichols points out several supports and strategies that will enable each teacher to accomplish this in his/her own classroom.

1. Change your wording when sending students off to talk with a partner.

Old:  "Tell your partner what you are thinking."

New instructions:  "Build a conversation with your partner about your thinking."

2. Teach with more small group and less whole class lessons.  This will offer more opportunities for dialogue.

3. Post charts around the room to support the student's use of language in their talk with the partner.  For example, these may be sentence starters that help students to disagree with another person's ideas or add on to another person's ideas.

4. Build a strong classroom community to enable students to take risks with sharing their thoughts and feelings.

5.  Value ideas more than right answers.  Allington and Johnson in their research into the classrooms of highly effective teachers found that dialogue includes "large amounts of "tentative talk" which they define as open-ended talk that proposes possibilities and allows others to build off the thinking, complete the ideas, or contribute in other ways." 

6.  Teach students to "say something meaningful" to advance the dialogue by referencing the text and pushing their construction of meaning.

7.  Keep lines of thinking alive by continuing to develop a topic to the full extent possible before moving off in a different direction.

8.  Teach students to "learn to listen to the ideas of others, value their thinking, be flexible and willing to let go of ideas in the face of compelling evidence to the contrary, and be interested in understanding other points of view even if, in the end, they are not swayed."

Talking to learn is a powerful strategy that can be used across the curriculum to increase student achievement.  Could it be the change to your instruction that will yield huge benefits for your students this year?