From Train Wreck to Triumph! My Experience Teaching ELL Students in a General Education Classroom….We. Can. Do. It. by Sarah Dollah-Said I have been a teacher for over a decade now. I’m totally aging myself, but in that decade I have seen trends in education go …
The blank page is daunting for any writer. Talking in front of peers in middle school might be even more so. A picture, however, can do the talking for us, and once it does, the writing comes. Take a look at my drawing. Yes, look, please. …
Teachers often try to hook students by finding books that “they can relate to” and what that usually translates to is books that deal with the same issues or kinds of people that teenagers encounter in their daily lives. But I often try to search out books that kids can’t relate to, at least not entirely. I want to expose them to lives that are nothing like theirs.
by Cameron Gale Huck Finn was going the way of Hester Prynne in my American Heritage classroom. Which is to say, he was getting chipped and chopped into smaller and smaller segments that I could spoon-feed to my students. Gone were the first eight, then …
As readers discovered favorite authors—Woodson, Sones, Myers, Halse-Anderson, Lupica—and favorite genres—memoir, historical fiction, sports fiction—and talked more about books with their friends, I would find notes on my desk on Fridays, “Mrs. R, If you are going to the bookstore this weekend, we would like ….” The classroom library truly became the students’ library filled with books they cared about and valued—and read.
Because most of my 20 published books show war or genocide through the eyes of a young person, some of my author colleagues affectionately call me the Genocide Queen. I didn’t consciously choose to write about genocide, but I have a compulsion to give a voice to people whose stories are not told.
I’ve read over one hundred books in search of that just-right book for each student, but I just cannot keep up with all the recommendations I’ve been getting from We Need Diverse Books, Nerdy Book Club, Goodreads, and Facebook friends. So this summer’s reading list is 25 books that I have NOT read but have been recommended, and I am inviting my junior high readers to vet these books with me.
People talk about middle schoolers being reluctant readers, but we do not see that in our students. They gobble up good books. Here are their favorite verse and graphic novels.
As junior high English teachers, we see how the push to standardize curriculum and prepare for tests has us spending more time in meetings and reviewing data than reading the latest young adult novels. We ask students to be “readers,” but are we even keeping up with the latest titles or up-and-coming authors? This school year, we wanted to do something for our students and ourselves to make reading class, well, about the power and joy of reading again. We wanted students to find their way back to books this year. We wanted to find our way back to books this year — to be readers again.
Audio files of students’ discussions are artifacts of evidence, evidence of thinking and making meaning that is difficult to capture in a written assignment or test.