This is a wonderfully thoughtful post by The Nerdy Book Club. Check it out. It makes you really rethink your book choices. Unless your district takes book choices out of your hands that is. Information is always good to have but let teachers take the information and make decisions that best meet their students needs I say. This is full of thoughtful info to help you make some good book choices!

http://nerdybookclub.wordpress.com/2014/09/13/top-ten-things-people-said-5th-graders-couldnt-read-but-did-by-taylor-meredith/

Thank you!

I am so excited to say that my Donors Choose project was fully funded today. Thanks to all the donors my students will be able to use 2 Ipads in my reading groups.  You guys are awesome! I will use this blog to update how we will be using them. Google gave the final big donation to make it happen. Thank you Google! You Rock!  Here are two emails, I got from Donors Choose explaining what Google did for my students and Kansas City Teachers.  #Google #DonorsChoose

Troy, Once upon a time, in a city not so far away called Kansas City, Ms. Boltz's students were asking for science centers so that they could learn about insects and plants. Just a little ways up the road, Mr. Pohlman's students would like to explore the world of printmaking with a rotary screen printing press. One state over, Mrs. Belden's students are requesting drums to explore diverse cultures. A few weeks ago, our partners at Google asked us what we thought was a hypothetical question: would it be possible to support every DonorsChoose.org project in the Kansas City area? They were so moved by the work of local teachers like you that they decided to fully fund every currently live project, donating more than $200,000 to classrooms in need. Happy, happy back to school from us and our friends at Google, and thank you for inspiring us and our partners every day. The DonorsChoose.org Team

Troy,

Hooray! Google Kansas City from Kansas City, MO just gave to Read, Write and Think and wrote:

"You go out of your way every single day to give Kansas City students the education they need and deserve. From all of your friends at Google Kansas City, we?re proud to support you, this great city and all its local teachers. Today, to say thanks for everything you do, we?re funding your project and all projects in the greater Kansas City metropolitan area. We hope this helps kick off an amazing 2014 - 2015 school year full of creativity and new learning experiences for your students."

I am so excited!

Ellin Keene Visit

Here are some notes that were put together from a visit by Ellin Keene to my school. She is very good. She is easy to follow and very down to earth, but direct and to the point as well.

Take part in the Picture Book 10 For 10  Event sponsored through: Reflect & Refine: Building A Learning Community, a blog from Cathy Merely.
This can help generate stacks of books for your reading and writing workshops!

 http://reflectandrefine.blogspot.com/2014/08/picture-book-10-for-10-being-brave.html

My 10 Picture books center around a theme of seeing yourself within books and being able to relate to a book on a personal level. These books reflect the population of students I have had over the years.

Something Beautiful by Sharon Dennis Wyeth 

An Angel For Solomon Singer by Cynthia Rylant

The Royal Bee by Frances and Ginger Park and Christopher Zhang

Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting and Ronald Himler

Koala Lou by Mem Fox and Pamela Lofts

Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox

The Table Where Rich People Sit  by Byrd Baylor and Peter Parnall

How Many Days to America?: A Thanksgiving Story by Eve Bunting and Beth Peck

Sector 7 (Caldecott Honor Book) by David Wiesner 

The Lucky Star (Tales of Young Americans) by Judy Young and Chris Ellison

I only have 34 days left. Help me fund my project. Check it out below and please consider donating.

http://www.donorschoose.org/Readwritethink 

Very cool website and series called Meet the Author. Check it out.

http://www.teachingbooks.net/tb.cgi?mta=c

Deep Thinking from pictures to text

Teaching inferring can be challenging. I love using graphic novels and picture books for it. Kids will really get into looking closely and studying a picture. They notice things I miss sometimes, from the shading of the light, to a characters eye color being off due to something. If they can notice these details in pictures then we can transfer it to noticing things in the text, from mood, to the different connotations words can have, to inferring, using clues from the text and our own experiences and experiences from others. They think very deeply when looking at pictures but forget to do that when looking a words, sentences and then paragraphs and chapters. Reading is thinking, it does not matter if it is pictures or words. Teaching kids to tap into the pictures and feelings an authors words create is as important as pronouncing them correctly. There has been a lot push from lately for using short pieces of text,  mostly Non Fiction and justifiably so, but we also need to be working on building the stamina of readers to make it through chapter books. To make it through them with the ability to change their thinking and justify why, they have to have the ability to synthesize through longer texts as well.

This is from the book Amulet: Book One: The StoneKeeper by Kazu Kibuishi. My struggling readers love it, and it helps get them to transfer there deep thinking from pictures to the text.