Information Writing for Dummies

Frequently as I look at the Common Core Standards for writing with teachers, a question keeps cropping up: Is there still a place for genre studies? These teachers and I know that narrative, information and opinion writing are not genres per se. They’re more like modes, which Katie Wood Ray defines in her wonderful book on inquiry-based writing units Study Driven as “the meaning ‘work’ that a writer is doing in a text.” Thus narration is the mode writers uses when they mean to tell a story, while information writing, a.k.a. exposition, is the mode for the work of explaining ideas or conveying information.

Genres, on the other hand, are what a writer makes with writing: a book review, a short story, an editorial, a feature article. These genres often employ more than one mode; a feature article, for instance, might begin by narrating an anecdote about the topic, then shift into exposition and end with some argumentation (another mode) that reveals the writer’s opinion.

The beauty of genres is that they can be studied in a way that gives students a concrete vision of what their work can look and sound like. This kind of study also invites students to be more intentional and artful as they apprentice themselves to master craftsmen and wordsmiths in a way that matches my favorite definition of a writer, which comes by way of Saul Bellow:

A writer is a reader who is moved to emulate.

The Common Core Standards don’t mention genres, though neither do they explicitly prohibit us from studying them. And so I encourage teachers to remember their right to implement the Standards as they best see fit, knowing that the benefits of such study are huge. First, closely studying great texts as writers gives students more options of how to organize and convey information than the deadly structure of the formulaic three- or five-paragraph essay, which at its worst asks students to first tell your reader what your going to tell them, then tell them what you said you were going to tell them, and then end by re-telling them what you just told them.

Studying genres also requires students to understand whatever they’re writing about deeply. And as such, the end products are often better assessments of content understanding than forms that encourage students to pluck and insert undigested facts. The third graders I wrote about last fall, for instance, who emulated G. Brian Karas’s Atlantic to write their “I Am China” books fully owned the information they presented. And eighth grade science students using the same mentor text to creatively write about the rock cycle came up with fresh language—such as, ”Some of my minerals dissolve in water the way marshmallows melt in hot chocolate.”—which assured their teacher that they’d learned the content.

Finally (as I prepare to shift from argumentation back to exposition), there’s the fact that engaging in the same decision-making process that real writers engage in makes students better readers. For in considering what point of view or structure will achieve the effects they’re after and deliberating on exactly which details will best suit and support their purposes, students become more aware of the intentionality in an author’s choices. They see that those details and structures carry meaning, which positions them to attend to the meaning of the choices they encounter when they read other writers.

When it comes to information writing, I’ve helped teachers design units of study on feature articles, All About Books, and creative nonfiction like Atlantic. And I’ve invited students to study Dummies books, which they’ve then emulated to convey information about all sorts of topics, from babysitting to ballroom dancing to learning Albanian. Whatever the grade, these units begin by students first exploring some sample Dummies books to discover what they can about their structure and features. And from that, we co-construct a chart of what we learned, like this typed-up one from a fifth grade room that was writing Dummies books about topics of their own choice:

Then we look more carefully at how they’re written by studying two samples, such as these excerpts from Drawing Cartoons and Comics for Dummies and Cake Decorating for Dummies, to consider what might be similar in terms of word choice, voice, syntax,  and tone. (Tip: Looking at two samples allows students to move beyond the specifics of the content to notice similarities or patterns in craft.)

 

Here students are often able to notice that the writer talks to the reader directly, through the frequent use of the word ‘you,’ in a friendly and supportive way, and that he or she uses a range of punctuation—including ellipses, parentheses, dashes and exclamation points—to create a strong, flexible voice. Dummies writers also tend to use multiple examples of lists that follow the Rule of Three—such as three excuses for not decorating a special cake or three reasons why cartoons are important—which helps elaborate and support their ideas and creates a richer texture.

With these noticings in mind, I had the fifth grade students who created the above structure chart help me write the introduction to my topic, which was cooking my favorite food, pasta:

I imagine that it wouldn’t be terribly difficult to shift from personal to more content-related topics, with students writing, say, Mummification or Renewable Energy or The Bill of Rights for Dummies. Such texts would surely be more fun to write and more fun to read than a five-paragraph essay while still accomplishing the meaning work of the mode and meeting the information writing Standard. And students would surely retain more of what they learned about both the content and writing because they’d be more engaged and proud of making such a product—especially when it’s graced with a classic yellow Dummies cover, which can either be drawn or made electronically through the Dummies Book Cover Maker online.

And isn’t that what really matters: holding on to learning and feeling the power of language to engage and inform us in so many ways? Let’s not forget that in the rush to meet all the bullet points of the Standards.

Jumping into the Fray: Some Thoughts on the Common Core Standards

The first chapter of Lucy Calkins, Mary Ehrenworth and Chris Lehman‘s Pathways to the Common Core suggests that educators tend to view the Standards in one of two opposing ways: They either see them negatively, taking the stance of what the Pathways authors dub a curmudgeon, or they embrace the Standards positively as if, as they put it, they’re “gold.”

The authors thoroughly map out the reasons behind each side’s point of view, with ample evidence provided for both. Then they take the high-road and offer readers pro-active ways of working within the Common Core’s framework regardless of their take. But reading that chapter the other week, I found myself wondering which one I was, a curmudgeon or a happy camper who saw the Standards as gold.

Certainly there are many things I like about the Common Core. There’s a kind of elegance in its design and the way it builds and develops key skills as students move and spiral up the grades. And as readers of this blog might already suspect, I like the way the Publishers Criteria pulls back from some common classroom practices, such as automatically pre-teaching background knowledge and engaging in generic strategy instruction, in favor of close, attentive reading.

But here’s where my inner curmudgeon kicks in—though I think what prompts her to make an appearance is less about grumpiness than fear. I do see the Common Core as a positive corrective to instruction that has been focused on strategies that too often have been severed from the strategic end of meaning and that pull readers away, not deeper into, texts. But I worry that the Common Core shifts too far the other way, by virtually ignoring what the reader brings and, as seems evident from the Curriculum Exemplars which can now be found online, suggesting that a definitive ‘correct’ interpretation of a text can be arrived at through objective—and exhaustive—analysis.

As Pathways explains, this view of reading is based on a particular literary theory called New Criticism. Developed in the 1930′s and mostly taught in upper-level college English classes, New Criticism is one of a group of critical approaches and theories that includes Gender Studies and Reader-Response Criticism, among others. Some of these schools of thought have filtered down to primary and secondary classrooms where students use critical lenses to consider what a text might have to say about issues of power, stereotypes and fairness. A watered-down version of Reader-Response Theory also can been seen in many rooms where students are asked to connect to texts at a personal level. My hunch is, in fact, that the Standards also stand as a corrective to this watered-down version of Readers-Response, which often fails to adhere to the close reading aspect of the theory. But again, I fear, it goes too far in the other direction.

I’ll save some of my specific reservations about the New Criticism-based approach for another post. But I will say here that in sanctioning one approach over all others, the authors of the Standards seem to be violating one of the characteristics of college and career ready students: “Students appreciate that the twenty-first century classrooms and workplace are settings in which people from often widely divergent cultures and who represent diverse experiences and perspectives must learn and work together.”

Additionally a close reading of the Common Core material by a reader who “works diligently to understand precisely what an author is saying but also questions an author’s assumptions and premises” (as college and career ready students also must do) might come to the same conclusions I have: that the authors of the Common Core value dispassion over passion, analyzing over creating, product over process, and reason and logic over qualities like intuition and imagination.

That’s not to say that reason and logic aren’t important, but as writer and educator Tom Romano reminds us:

No matter what professions students enter, facts and analysis are not enough. If our decisions are to be both sound and humane, we need to understand emotion and circumstance, as well as logic and outcome.

I believe that weighing the scales so heavily in favor of analysis and logic risks turning schools into places that may support the future lawyers in our midsts, as they move from writing opinions to legal briefs, but do little to nourish the budding artists, social activists, scientists and inventors that fill our classrooms—let alone the readers and writers.

In “The Text Itself,” Tom Newkirk, author of the glorious book The Art of Slow Reading, thinks that the model of reading promoted in the Publishers Criteria and now embodied in the Curriculum Exemplars “creates a sterile and, in my view, inhumanly fractured model of what goes on in deep reading.” For my own part, I find myself also wondering where the next generation of exemplar text writers will come from if we revere arguments over all other kinds of writing and offer analysis as the only way of engaging with texts. And I don’t see how that model builds the kind of life-long readers who, according to the National Endowment of the Arts’ study Reading at Risk, are much more likely than non-readers to participate in the sort of civic life needed for a democracy to thrive.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll be periodically looking at some specific aspects of the Common Core along with the instructional model it’s spawned in the Curriculum Exemplars. And I’ll try to offer alternative ways of meeting the Standards through a humane version of close reading that honors different perspectives without taking on the narrow and reactionary spirit that seems to inform some of the Standards’ auxilliary documents.

In the meantime, though, it’s worth recalling what Pathways to the Common Core reminds us: that embedded in the Standards “is the right for the teachers across a school or district to make decisions” about implementation. And we might also do ourselves a service to remember these words of Albert Einstein:

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

The Limits of Graphic Organizers, or More Tales from a Second Grade Author Study

In Content-Area Writing, authors Harvey Daniels, Steven Zimmerman and Nancy Steineke make a distinction between writing to learn or to think and writing to demonstrate what was learned or thought. Writing to learn, they say, is usually short, spontaneous, exploratory and personal—that is, it’s writing that helps the writer probe, discover, understand or clarify something for him or herself. Writing to demonstrate learning, on the other hand, is more substantial, authoritative, polished and planned, and it’s aimed for an audience.

This fits nicely into my own belief that writing is both a tool and a product. It helps the writer figure out what he thinks then allows him to convey it to others. I worry, though, that we don’t always make this distinction clear, both for ourselves or our students, especially when it comes to graphic organizers, which Daniels & Co. list as a writing-to-learn strategy that can help writers map and cluster ideas. Students, I think, often see graphic organizers as products or assignments to be quickly dispatched and completed rather than as tools to push thinking. And I have to wonder whether they do so in part because we set them up that way.

This was brought home to me and the teachers I worked with in the second grade author study of Tomie dePaola I wrote about several weeks ago. To helps students keep track of individual books, consider how the elements of a story worked together to support the author’s message, and eventually discover patterns across the books they read, we designed two graphic organizers aimed at helping students think deeply. The first was a large attribute chart where the students could note the elements of each story, with a final column left for whatever connections and observations they might notice and make between books. The second was a Venn diagram that we thought would support the comparing and contrasting of the books for that final column.

Both were designed with the best of intentions. And both didn’t work quite as intended because the students seemed to view them as products to complete, not as tools to deepen their thinking. And so we had to push our own thinking to revise and refine these tools.

With the attribute chart, for instance, what the teachers and I noticed was that the students saw each of the columns as separate and discrete. They could identify the elements—the characters, the setting, the problem and solution and sometimes even what they called the lesson. But they weren’t thinking about how the elements were connected and how they contributed to the overall effect of the story. In particular, they weren’t considering how the kind of person a character is affects how they do or don’t deal with their problems, nor how the way those problems get solved can shed light on the themes or lessons of the story.

Instead they tried to pin adages, such as “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” on the stories. And while sometimes those sayings did, indeed, fit, they didn’t always capture the richness of the stories, nor the various things the students had noticed. And so we made two critical decisions. The first was: No more canned adages or maxims. We’d encourage students to use their own words and consider how the lesson was embedded in the story, not something tacked on at the end, which we made more explicit by adding a question beneath the element headers, like this:

The second was that we wouldn’t reduce each book to just one lesson or theme. Instead we’d open the door to multiple interpretations in acknowledgement of the fact that different readers notice and attend to different things and that even simple picture books can’t always be summed up in one idea. Here, for instance are transcripts of two different interpretations of Tomie dePaola’s The Art Lesson:

We had to go back to the drawing board, as well, with the Venn Diagram because, not seeing the organizer as an opportunity to stretch thinking, the students simply took what was on the attribute chart and plugged it into the organizer. And, as you can see, the results were superficial:

Venn Diagram comparing and contrasting The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush and Andy by Tomie dePaola

To counter this, we decided to put them into groups with a basket of books at each table and ask them to talk solely about what similarities or patterns they noticed recurring across the books. Then once they had a chance to trade ideas, we asked them to individually jot down what they’d noticed on a sticky note. And this time their thinking was far more insightful.

Adelita and Gopher tried to solve their own problems. For example, Adelita tried to make Javier come to her, and Gopher tried to find the right colors to paint the sunset.

Both characters Adelita and Little Gopher have a helper to solve their problems. For example, Esperanza helped Adelita to the party and the dream vision let Little Gopher to go to the hill and paint the sunset.

Through this process, students came away with a deep understanding of Tomie dePaola as an author. They saw how in seemingly very different stories—from original tales like the Strega Nona books to retellings of Indian legends and Irish folktales to the more autobiographical stories—he kept circling some of the same ideas or themes: The need to be true to your own self, even if that path is hard; the great gift of having people who help and support you; the consequences of meddling with what you don’t understand; the need to give back to others what they have given to you; and the importance of advocating for yourself.

At the very end of the unit, students watched a video of Tomie dePaola talking about his life, and they literally gasped at the connections they heard between his life and the themes in his books. This allowed them to also circled the writing truth that F. Scott Fitzgerald so eloquently articulated when he wrote:

“Mostly, we authors must repeat ourselves—that’s the truth. We have two or three great moving experiences in our lives—experiences so great and moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anyone else has ever been caught up and pounded and dazzled and astonished and beaten and broken and rescued and illuminated and rewarded  and humbled in just that way before.”

As for those graphic organizers: At best they served as a pre-assessment, showing us what the students could already do and where we, as teachers, could push in. What helped far more was setting up the students with opportunities to talk—and with us, as teachers, having a deeper vision of where that talk could lead.

Capturing the World in a Moment: A Look at Small Moment Poems

Like the words fiction and nonfiction, the word poetry sometimes seems too broad and general to contain all the varied approaches, purposes and styles of poems. And when helping teachers design units on poetry, I usually recommend narrowing the focus down to a few different kinds—which is also a way to ensure we’re not teaching the same thing grade after grade.

By kinds, though, I don’t mean forms, such as cinquains, limericks or even haiku because, unless they’re grounded in the kind of enduring understanding I explored last week, we risk sending the out the message to students that form is more important than content—that it doesn’t matter if your poem is nonsensical or hackneyed so long as it adheres to the form.

Whether it’s the five prescribed lines of a cinquain or the dictates of the five-paragraph essay, this emphasis on form can lead students to either reduce or inflate whatever it is they might want to say in order to fit the form.  Prescribing a pre-determined form also deprives students of engaging in one of the most vital, challenging but necessary aspects of writing: discovering a form that ‘informs’ your content and supports your meaning. (To see a poet who found a form that helped her express her content in a powerful way, check out Amy  VanDerwater‘s villanelle “V is for Vulture“.)

Instead of that, what I mean by ‘kinds’ are poems that seem to have a similar purpose, intention or way of working, such as poems that are built around a central metaphor, like the ones I shared two weeks ago, or poems that describe an object or phenomena in fresh, surprising language, such as “Dragonfly” by Georgia Heard or almost anything in Valerie Worth‘s wonderful collection all the small poems and fourteen more. 

Over the years, depending on the grade, I’ve helped teachers gather different kinds of poems to use for either whole class studies or for learning centers or stations. We’ve gathered poems, for instance, that address social issues, such as “To the Pay Toilet” by Marge Piercy or “Coin Drive” by Janet Wong; and poems that explore identity, such as “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon and “I Am What I Am” by Rosario Morales. We’ve even collected poems about poetry, such as the Billy Collins poem I shared the other week and Naomi Shihab Nye‘s wonderful “Valentine for Ernest Mann.” But perhaps my favorite kind to study with students in grade five and up is what I like to call ‘small moment poems.’

Like their cousins, small moment stories, small moment poems zoom into an often autobiographical moment, but without the trajectory of beginning, middle and end or the trappings of problem and solution. They’re the kind of poems poet Charles Simic means when he says, “Poems are other people’s snapshots in which we see our own lives.” And I love sharing and studying them with older students precisely because of this. For in showing us our own lives in someone else’s moment, small moment poems invite us into one of the great wonders of literature: the way that the particulars of a story or poem can give way to a more universal expression of the human condition, which is another way of saying a theme.

To show you what I mean, let’s look at the poem “Taking Things Apart” from Ralph Fletcher‘s book Moving Day:

From Moving Day by Ralph Fletcher. Copyright © 2006 by Ralph Fletcher. Published by WordSong, an imprint of Boyds Mills Press, Inc. Used by permission.

As readers, we may never have moved to Ohio or had a ping pong table, let alone seen it dismantled, yet it’s the particulars of the poem that lets us feel the ache of being severed from possessions and places we love. That idea is conveyed through the things themselves—through the legless table and the beds left in pieces. And in this way the poem is both about this particular boy facing this particular move and the way we can all feel unmoored and anxious when our lives are taking such turns—as if our selves can be disassembled as easily as shelves.

Key to My Heart © Wendy Starling. Used with permission of the artist. http://www.wendystarling.com

By focusing on small moment poems, we can help students engage in thinking about what larger, invisible universal ideas the poet might be exploring and what aspects of the human condition their own small moments might speak to. As readers, students often do this through connections. But because small moment poems compress and distill a single experience in an accessible way, students are often able to zoom into the feelings underneath the poem, rather than get stuck on the literal level (making connections, say, to ping pong tables or cousins who live in Ohio). This also makes small moment poems great tools for helping students see the difference between a meaningful and what I sometimes call a “that’s nice, but” connection. The former unlocks the heart of the poem, usually via emotions, while the latter is just something the reader remembers that doesn’t necessarily plumb the depths without additional thinking.

Many wonderful small moment poems can be found in the following collections. Take a look and reconnect with yourself in someone else’s moment (just choose carefully for classroom use as some of the poems are not appropriate for younger students):

Poetry Anthologies Containing Some Small Moment Poems: Moving Day by Ralph Fletcher, The Place My Words Are Looking For: What Poets Say About and Through Their Work, edited by Paul Janeczko, What Have You Lost?, edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, Time You Let Me In, also edited by Naomi Shihab Nye, Poetry 180, edited by Billy Collins, Good Poems, edited by Garrison Keillor.

Revisiting The Power of Grammar

Three articles came my way the other week that reminded me of The Power of Grammar: Unconventional Approaches to the Conventions of Language, the book I co-authored with Mary Ehrenworth of the Teachers College Reading & Writing Project several years ago. All three pieces were published by the New York Times, and all three had to do with sentences: “My Life’s Sentences” by the marvelous writer Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Sentence as a Miniature Narrative” by Constance Hale, and finally “Sense, Sensibility and Sentences: Examining and Writing Memorable Lines”  by Shannon Doyle and Holly Epstein Ojalvo.

Each piece puts the humble sentence in the spotlight to explore not only its grammatical parts but its power to move and delight us, to quicken or quiet our heartbeats and pulse through its rhythm, its arrangement, its use of words and choice of punctuation. Each also encourages us to become more aware of the sentence—or as Constance Hale puts it, to become “sentence connoisseurs”—which Doyle and Ojalvo suggest we can do by inviting students to collect and look at sentences alongside us.

Interestingly enough, collecting sentences was exactly how Mary and I began the work that ultimately led to The Power of Grammar. We gathered sentences that had stayed in our minds, like this one from Vladimir Nabokov‘s Lolita, which does, indeed, contain a whole narrative between the first word and the period:

My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightening) when I was three.

And we revisited favorite children’s books to cull wonderful sentences from authors like William Steig, Roald Dahl and Sandra Cisneros.

In terms of study, we didn’t focus on nomenclature or academic vocabulary—that is, we didn’t teach the difference between phrases or clauses or ask students to identify simple versus compound sentences. Instead we asked students to use great sentences as mentor texts, apprenticing themselves to master sentence craftsmen. And what happened when they did that seemed like magic.

In a fourth grade room, for instance, we brought in these two sentence from Leo Lionni‘s picture book Swimmy:

But the sea was full of wonderful creatures, and as he swam from marvel to marvel Swimmy was happy again. He saw a medusa made of rainbow jelly . . . a lobster, who walked about like a water-moving machine . . .  strange fish, pulled by an invisible thread . . . a forest of seaweeds growing from sugar-candy rocks . . . an eel whose tail was too far away to remember . . . and sea anemones, who looked like pink palm trees swaying in the wind.

We studied these sentences closely, just as we’d study craft moves like leads, to see what the writer was up to, using the language the students came up with. The first sentence, the class decided, gave us a sense of where the character was, what he was doing and how he felt. The second sentence was like a list that described what the character was seeing, with the ellipses suggesting that he was moving through both time and place.

We then asked students to look through their writer’s notebooks to see if they had any lists or journeys they might revise using Lionni’s sentence as a mentor, and a student named Mariah found this, which she had written in response to a prompt:

Things I saw on the way to school:

my mom’s face – 2 times

my room

the number 6 train

the gates of the school

my teacher

Apprenticing herself to Lionni’s sentence, Mariah began revising in a way that ultimately allowed her to craft these two sentences, which she later turned into a poem:

The trip to school was full of things to look at, and as I looked from one thing to another I became full of sad-loneliness. I saw my mommy’s face with a sort of funny smile when I woke . . . my room, full of all the things I wasn’t allowed to take with me . . . the train, rushing everyone away from their homes and the people who knew them and loved them inside and out . . . the gates of the school that locked my mommy out . . . my mommy’s face turning away from me and leaving me . . . and the arms of my teacher in a green sweater, who wrapped around me like a living tree.

The shift from her initial notebook entry to her final revision seems breathtaking. She moved from being a recorder of information to a writer who’s using grammatical structures, language and punctuation to fully render an experience in a way that moves and engages her readers. And as readers of The Power of Grammar can see, she was far from the only one.

Unfortunately, though, with genre studies ruling writing workshop these days and the Common Core Standards taking root, it’s been a while since I’ve had the luxury to do this kind of work. But on the heels of these recent articles, I’ve found myself wondering if perhaps there’s an opportunity here to engage in sentence apprenticeship again.

Those of us who’ve been looking at text complexity, for instance, know that one factor that makes a text complex is sentence structure, with texts on the high end of the complexity band increasingly employing sentences with more subordinate phrases and clauses, more intricate details and imagery, along with subtle shifts in reasoning, mood and tone, and sometimes parenthetical asides. Inviting students to apprentice themselves to such sentences and emulate them with their own material can help them better navigate complex sentences as they move into more complex texts. For as Anne Lamott says to aspiring writers in her inspirational handbook Bird by Bird, “becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader and that is the real payoff.”

Working with sentences this way also opens the door to students falling in love with language (without which literacy risks remaining merely functional). It also helps students feel the enchantment Jhumpa Lahiri describes when she writes: “For surely it is a magical thing for a handful of words, artfully arranged, to stop time . . . To affect us and alter us, as profoundly as real people and things do.”

So perhaps it’s time to start collecting sentences again and inviting our students to do the same, not to identify things like appositives or gerunds, but to attend to their power and beauty and think about how they affect us. I’m attaching a few I’ve found recently that in different ways all stood out for me. Please feel free to share them and to share as well any wonderful sentences you or your students discover.

The Cat’s Outta the Bag . . .

(c) Copyright 2012 D.A. Wagner - http://dawagner.com

. . . and the book’s out in the world! Yes, from seed idea to development in classrooms to umpteen drafts and revisions, What Readers Really Do is finally out and available through Heinemann, amazon and other online booksellers. Heinemann has posted a sample chapter, for those who want a taste. But here’s an example of one of the charts Dorothy Barnhouse and I provide in each of the chapters where we step into classrooms, which calls out the ways our practice has changed as we’ve rethought how we teach reading.

(c) Copyright 2012 by Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton from What Readers Really Do (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann)

Blog readers will undoubtedly recognize some of these points from previous posts. And I’ll be looking at the pros and cons of a common pre-reading activity in more depth next week. But for now I just wanted to share the news and invite any and all book readers to let me know what they think. (The cats, I fear, haven’t shown much interest, but the bag was quite a big hit.)

(c) Copyright 2012 D.A. Wagner - http://dawagner.com (with help from Blue & Cosi)

‘Tis the Season

 Earlier this month I received what seemed like a gift from a Secret Santa. Somehow, some way, through facebook posts and tweets, my post, “What Messages Are We Sending Students About Reading,” went viral, bringing over 1,000 readers to this blog in less than three full days.

Clearly it struck a chord in readers who treasure books and want to give children authentic and meaningful experiences as readers. And it struck a chord in those of us who sometimes fear that in our data-obsessed and -driven age, where logic and analysis seem to be valued over wonder and imagination, we risk losing what we most cherish.

I was both humbled and heartened to know how many of us are out there. And so in the spirit of gift-giving, I’d like to give something back to all of you who hold on to the dream of not only helping the students we work with be college- and career-ready, but become passionate readers and writers. Here are three texts that speak to those higher purposes and callings by three wise writers whose words seem more precious to me than frankincense, gold and myrrh. In each case I share an excerpt and a link, which will take you to the full piece where you may also want to poke around for more inspiration and solace.

The first piece is called “The Place of Books in Our Lives,” by the great children’s and young adult book author Julius Lester. In this essay, he looks at the origins of the words book, read, and knowledge, and he makes a powerful, persuasive case for letting children choose what to read without interference or judgment, while exploring what the written word gives us:

Books invite us into realms of the soul by asking us to imagine that we are someone other than who we are. Books require that we temporarily put our egos in a box by the door and take on the spirit of others. Books are the place where the possibility of blacks and whites and men and women experiencing each other is created. I am convinced that if I can bring you into my being through words, I create the possibility that you and I will see that we are more alike than we may have thought. When we can imagine the hurt and anger of another person, we have an understanding in the heart. When we understand in the heart, each of us is less alone.

The second is the preface to The 9 Rights of Every Writer by Vicki Spandel, one of the key developers of the 6-Trait model for writing instruction and assessment. Here she looks squarely at what assessments can and cannot give us, while urging us, as teachers, to hold on to and embrace what is most meaningful and significant about writing, not just what can be easily measured:

In this book, I touch on what I believe to be the most worthwhile goals of writing: writing to think, to move another person, to create something that will be remembered, to find the most salient personal topics that will weave a common thread through virtually all the writing text in one’s life, to develop a unique personal voice with which one feels at home, to develop and maintain a spirit of unrelenting curiosity that drives the writing forward, to be whole comfortable with the act and process of writing. These are all hard things to measure. Moreover, they take time. Significant time. Heavy emphasis on assessment can rob us of that precious time. It can also make us afraid.

The third is a poem called “Revolution for the Tested” by former teacher and award-winning author Kate Messner, which has been making its way around my corner of the cybersphere. It’s an impassioned call-to-arms for both students and teachers to resist the forces of standardization that threaten to rob us of the vital lifeblood of real reading and writing that I’ve been carrying with me every day I walk into a school. Here are two sample stanzas:

Read.

But don’t read what they tell you to.

Don’t read excerpts, half-poems,

Carefully selected for lexile content,

Or articles written for the sole purpose

Of testing your comprehension . . . .

Read for the world.

Read to solve its problems.

Read to separate reality from ranting

Possibility from false promise,

And leaders from snake oil peddlers.

Read so you can tell the difference,

Because an educated person is so much harder

To enslave.

Finally, whether you’re lighting candles on a menorah, reconnecting with the Seven Principles of Kwanzaa, trading presents beside a tree, or just curling up with a good book, I wish you well this holiday season and hope that these offerings fill your heart and spirit with good tidings of comfort and joy.

Till next year . . . .

Beyond All About Books (Part 2)

So how did the teachers and I help students write the wonderful creative nonfiction books I shared in Part 1 of Beyond All About Books? And how did we support those children who struggled with writing and English in general?

We began the way I start every writing unit, by reading the kind of text the students would be writing, in this case our mentor text Atlantic by G. Brian Karas. We’d return to the book many, many times before the unit was through, but the first time we shared it our goal was to help the students get a feel for the genre and think about how it was and wasn’t like other nonfiction they’d encountered.

To help them do that we initially asked each class to tell us what they already knew about nonfiction. Then we read a few pages of Atlantic, stopping frequently to consider how it was similar or different, using a Venn Diagram as a tool to hold on to the students’ thinking.

  Sample Venn Diagram comparing and contrasting types of nonfiction            

That part was not too difficult, nor was helping students grasp the idea of personification, which they took to quickly, ultimately personifying not just the country but rivers, mountains and even monuments like the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids. What was challenging, though, was getting them to be more descriptive–or, in one class’s words, to paint pictures in words. They had plenty of facts but none of the sensory details they’d noticed in the mentor text. And so, short of buying everyone plane tickets to Cairo or Beijing, I brought in pictures that would help them see what a place looked like, and in some cases allow them to infer what it might smell, sound, taste or feel like.

While searching for pictures, I was lucky enough to stumble on an amazing creative commons photography website called Pixdaus, where I found stunning pictures from various countries, like these of China:

In small groups, students studied the pictures, trying out ways to capture what they saw—or imagined what they might hear, smell, taste or feel—in words. Then they returned to the rug to share out what they’d come up with, projecting their picture with a document camera so that everyone could see. Using the details and language they’d come up with, I then modeled how to turn those into a page that sounded something like one of the pages we saw in our mentor text.

I am the green of bamboo forests and rice fields built into my hillsides like stairs.

I am the sparkling lights of cities filled with people, shops and tall buildings.

The sound of people making wishes for lanterns and the smell of good food cooking in woks is me, too.

For some of the children, this was enough to get them going—especially after we showed them how they could use the pictures in the books they had in their classrooms to help them get that sensory feel. But the most reluctant writers in the room needed more scaffolding. I gathered three or four of them at a time on the rug with white boards and markers, two pictures of animals and a syntactical sentence template I designed based on a pattern I noticed in both the mentor text and some of the writing I’d modeled:

(Name the animal you see)   (Say what they’re doing)  (Tell when and/or where).

The first one we did together as a group, with the children talking about what they saw and me writing the sentence down using the template. Then they looked at the second picture and once again spent some time talking to share the various ways they might describe what they were looking at. But this time I asked them to each use their white board, and with the syntax template visible, write their own sentences, using any of the words or details the group had shared. Here’s a sample of what they came up with:

Pandas make a big mess eating bamboo in my green bamboo forest.

Pandas lie on their backs to eat bamboo on the green floor of my forest.

Pandas use their big white tummies as plates in my bamboo forest.

This kind of scaffolding allowed every student in the room to feel successful and contribute to pages that ultimately looked like this:

 But what made me know that the unit was a success was when the students, on their own, noticed something in the mentor text we hadn’t discussed at all and used it as a model for the ending of their books:

 And mentoring myself to the students’ text, I’ll end this post this way:

Don’t forget me. I am Creative Nonfiction.

Giving Thanks

With Thanksgiving almost upon us, I’d like to take a moment between regular posts to give thanks to all those who, in these crazy, stressful times of new standards, more tests and more expectations, help me stay centered and sane.

I’m thankful that I have the privilege to work with teachers, administrators and other educators who somehow manage to steer through the craziness with humor and warmth and grace, never losing sight, in this data-obsessed age, of the hard-to-measure needs of the whole child.

And I’m thankful for the children who make the work worthwhile. There is Kyra, for instance, a sixth grade student, who gives me a hug each time she sees me in the hall because, spying her with a book one day, I asked her what she was reading, and we discovered that we shared a love of historical fiction and the amazing way writers can help us see ourselves in characters who live in different times, different cultures and different places.

And there’s Oscar, a third grader, who reminded me last week that thinking is more important than correctness when he shared the personal narrative he was writing about the time he’d been knocked down by a cow in India. ”In India,” he wrote, “cows can go anywhere because people believe they are holy.” He’d put the sentence in quotation marks as if it was a line of dialogue, which his class was learning about, and when I asked if those were words he actually spoke aloud, he answered without hesitation, “Yes. Those are the words I’m speaking to my reader, because they might not know about the cows.”

Kyra, in turn, reminds me of something else I’m thankful for—what Stephen Greenblatt, this year’s National Book Award winner for nonfiction, described in his acceptance speech as the “magic of the written word”:

“. . . the power of books to cross boundaries, to speak to you impossibly across space and time and distance, to have someone long dead seem to be in the room with you.”

And Oscar reminds me of the importance of readers, which I’m also deeply thankful to have. Publishing a blog post often feels like tossing a message in a bottle out to sea, not knowing when and where, if ever, it might land and be found by a reader. If you’re reading these words, do know how very thankful I am that you’ve pulled them out from the cybersea and taken the time to read them. May they give you as much sustenance, hope and belief in the work we’ve been called on to do as your reading this gives me.

Now on to the turkey. I’ll be back next week with Beyond All About Books Part 2.

Beyond All About Books (Part 1)

We live in a golden age of children’s books, especially of engaging nonfiction picture books that manage to both inform and entertain children by borrowing techniques from poetry and fiction. Joanna Cole‘s Magic School Bus books, where the indomitable science teacher Miss Frizzle packs her students into a bus to explore everything from the human body to the earth’s substrata, are the classics of these genre-bending hybrids. But there are many others.

Bat Loves the Night by Nicola Davies is part of the Read and Wonder series, which uses various narrative techniques to reveal the behavior and life cycle of all sorts of animals.

Diary of a Worm is one of several hilarious and clever books by Doreen Cronin that offers readers all sorts of factual information in the guise of an insect- or bug-written diary.

Postcards from Pluto by Loreen Leedy teaches readers about the solar system through the postcards a group of space-traveling kids send back to their family and friends on Earth.

And Explorers News by Michael Johnstone is part of the History News series, which brings history alive and accessible through a newspaper format that even includes ads and gossip pages.

Students devour books like these, but oddly enough when we study nonfiction writing, we typically ask them to write All About books or the even more generic Report of Information, which can all too often lead to plagiarism, indiscriminate fact plucking and, in my pre-google-image-search days, the ransacking of National Geographics with scissors.

There’s much to be gained by writing All About books, especially in the way that using and manipulating nonfiction text features—e.g., tables of contents, headings and pictures with labels and/or captions—helps students understand how those features support your comprehension as a reader. But clearly that’s not the only way nonfiction writers convey information.

And so, with excitement and some trepidation, I embarked on a unit of creative nonfiction with the third grade teachers from a school in Brooklyn’s Chinatown that has a high percentage of English language learners in both ESL and bilingual classrooms. Many of the students had already written All About books before. And many had struggled with both the writing and the research component, with the teachers often having to spoon-feed information that the students couldn’t access on their own and sometimes pulling the writing out of them, word by painful word. We were curious to see if this kind of writing would allow the students to have a different relationship to both the material and writing, building their identity and sense of agency as more independent writers.

As our mentor text, we chose G. Brian Karas‘s book Atlantic, which uses poetic devices, including personification, to teach readers about the ocean. And we used the countries they were studying in their social studies curriculum for our content.

Karas’s book begins with a single un-nonfiction-like sentence:

I am the Atlantic Ocean.

But it goes on to convey nonfiction-like information in pages such as these:

Studying the text in depth allowed students to create whole class and individual creative nonfiction books on China, Egypt, Brazil and South Africa, with pages that looked like this:

They also studied the different layout of pages in the mentor text, such as these:

which inspired them to create pages like this:

 and this:

Who is the Sinai Mountain wearing orange dress when sun shines on it? I am the Sinai Mountain who looks so beautiful. And I have a important job from people who lives on me. My job is to help people to talk to gods. Also I am 7491 feet tall like a skyscraper.

Of course, the process wasn’t always as simple as looking at the mentor text then emulating what you noticed. Students needed lots of modeling and scaffolds to move past the kind of fact stringing they’d been used to from writing All About books. In Part 2, I’ll share some of the specific supports and scaffolds we offered students, especially those who struggled with English. Those supports ultimately allowed these third graders to more fully own both the content and the writing than their other nonfiction outings had. But we, as teachers, needed to be as creative as the text we were studying.