Being a voracious reader runs in the family, and for Riley, it was like someone turned on a switch and suddenly he wanted to read as much as possible. He still spends time with his friends, plays video games, and builds Lego creations, but any spare minute he can read, that’s what he does. I told him the best advice I could give him was to always have the next book ready to read, and that I would try to help him find new books.

This has led me to a whole new world of books. I read a lot, but not really anything that appeals to an eight-year-old boy. So based on recommendations and what I had read online, I decided that the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan might be a good place to start. I found out what I could about the series and found out that it was based on Greek mythology. I knew Riley hadn’t studied Greek mythology at all so I figured that I would tell him a little about what I remembered when I gave him the first book in the series.

I gave him The Lightning Thief and told him the basics that I remembered about Greek mythology, and then I said something like, “So Zeus was pretty much the ruler of all the other gods. As I recall, his father swallowed him when he was born, and then he came back out, but I don’t remember how.”

That’s when I realized that Riley was giving me a look that said something like, “Aunt Sara has finally lost it,” and I realized I should probably do some more research. So I told him it probably didn’t matter to the story, and that I would read the book too and we could talk about anything he didn’t understand.

It turned out that he didn’t really need anything to be explained to him in order to read the book. It is a book full of adventure, and the Greek mythology is used in a clever way that adds to the story without really needing to be understood. He’s on the third book in the series now (and is very happy to be ahead of me, as I just finished the second).

I still feel like I have only scratched the surface of what books are out there for kids Riley’s age, so I thought I would ask if anyone out there had any recommendations. Are there any great series or individual books Riley and I should know about?

I’m not sure when I wised up to this, but it might have been about the time that Los Angles Unified published their own book called Scrip and Scrippage.  Even the name had an amazing ring to it.  What ever did Scrip and Scrippage mean?  I still don’t know.  This book, now over 30 years old, still holds a place of honor on my bookshelf.  It’s an 11 ½” x 8” book, so it’s oblong.  It has a soft brown cover, brown ink on beige paper.  It evokes memories of change for me.

For no longer did kids have to do rote reports to let me know they had read the book they were reporting on.  They could choose from a dozen fabulous projects.  Each one included detailed directions.  They also included more than writing.  Sometimes art was involved, or math, or social studies.  The reports were often cross-curricular.  Some of my favorites were the projects that had the students. . .

• create personalized stationery and then write a letter from the protagonist describing a significant incident in the book.  The kids would go crazy for this project.  The stationery inspired them to write wonderful descriptions.  The project is just as valid today, especially since the stationery can now be created on a computer.

• combine poetry and summary-writing skills.  Kids had to create a diamante poem about one of the characters.  It was quite a task to get that description down to 16 words.  These kids had always written very long summaries, so this was a good way for them to learn to edit themselves.

• complete an employment application for one of the main characters in the book.  I used to have my students use this when they read animal stories.  I would have them fill this application out as if they were one of the animals.  Some of my more creative students would do things like use animal paw prints for the applicant signature line.

There are many types of creative book reports.  There are lots of sources on the web.  TCR publishes 50 Book Report Ideas (TCR 3948) filled with many creative ideas.  Do yourself a favor.  Find a new way for kids to express what they have learned so that you can take joy in reading what they have to say.

We just recently began making theme bins based on the standards.  We used the science and social studies standards and grouped them in categories to name each bin.  For example, standards on land, rocks, geography, and earth were grouped together and called “Where in the World.”

Included in all of the bins are 3 weeks worth of lessons for each subject area (reading, writing/technology, science/social studies, and math) based on this theme and content standards.  Each lesson also includes a higher level and lower level activity since the students’ abilities are so diverse.  Each teacher created 2 bins for the year and each month we rotate the bins.  This really cuts down the preparation time that each teacher has to spend.  In each bin, there are 3 weeks worth of lesson plans, handouts, games, books, and anything else needed for the unit.

This is a very fun way to teach the students the standards and they love having themes.  And as the teacher, I love having great lessons with half the work!!

My secret weapon was named Maggie, and she had the classroom next door to mine. After school, I would visit Maggie and expound on the mysterious nature of the pre-teen. Maggie would sympathize, and then magically, a new color-coded graphic organizer or a vocabulary game would appear in her hands.  “It works great with my English learners!” or “My kids love it!” she’d proclaim. I’d seen her students’ shiny faces smiling up at her enough to know that anything Maggie gave me would be a winner.

Maggie continued to be my secret weapon all through my first year teaching.  Here is one of the vocabulary games Maggie taught me:

Fly Swatter Vocabulary: This game will be most successful if you wait to begin playing it until your class is comfortable with the class norms and boundaries.  You will need four unused fly swatters.  You will also need a list of eight to ten vocabulary words that your students are studying.  In class, have your students come up with sentences using the words, then send them home with the list of words and their definitions to study for the next day.  Let them know there will be a fun game using the words.  Print out four to five copies of each vocabulary word in a large font size, cut them up (one word per piece of paper), mix up the words, and staple them all over the walls.

When you are ready to play the game, have your students move their desks to the middle of the room and get into four large groups, one in each corner of the room.  These are their teams. Depending on your class size, each team (a quarter of your class) could consist of five to ten (or more) team members.  Each team has the same goal:  to be the first to find the given vocabulary word on the wall, give a correct definition, and give a sentence using the word correctly.  You may decide to separate some students out to become your judging panel.  These students must be impartial and must know the words well (or have notes to refer to).  Once you have done that, have the students in each of the four teams count off, so each team has a #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, and so on.  Give each #1 a fly swatter, then call out a vocabulary word.  Now, you will have four students (your #1s) roaming around the walls as they search for the word. It shouldn’t take them long to find it since you have about five of each word up.  Have your judging panel help you keep track of who hits the correct word first.  That person’s team will then have the chance to try to come up with a good definition and sentence.  Here’s the tricky part, though; it is the team’s #2 who needs to give the definition and the team’s #3 who needs to come up with a sentence. If your judges decide that the definition and sentence are good, everyone on the winning team gets a prize or points toward a prize.  Then you start over, with the #2s swatting, the #3s giving definitions, and the #4s giving sentences. If time permits, keep playing until every student has had a turn with each role.

One great thing about this game is that students become invested in each other’s learning.  Since your students don’t know what number they will be or what word you will call first, this means that every person on the team needs to know the words in order to win.  To encourage this, you may decide to give each group five minutes to study vocabulary together every day for a few days before playing the game.  This game can also be modified for different content.  It can be used to teach vocabulary in any content area, and can also be used to teach word roots and affixes.

So here’s what I did.  You might want to try this, it was easy and it worked.  I read aloud to them.  I picked up a good old-fashioned book, and took the first few precious minutes of the class to read.  Some might question this.  After all it wasn’t getting them right to work, they weren’t being engaged in an assignment.  But to that I say, phooey.  They were getting to hear a story, one that I knew would captivate them.  As 7^th graders they wouldn’t pick up books that they thought sounded “babyish.”  But if the teacher was reading a book to them they had to listen didn’t they?

My students hadn’t had lots of exposure to the bigger world so I tried to find things they could enjoy.  One of my favorites was Old Yeller.  Of course it was what Jim Trelease, author of The Read-Aloud Handbook, would call a “cry book.”  At the end of the book there was always a few students with their heads down on the desk, tears dripping from their eyes.  I found the best way to handle that was to not.  I just let them cry.  If they wanted to talk about it later we did so privately and individually.

Another kind of story the kids liked were those that were a bit absurd.  I remember reading James and the Giant Peach.  Any time I read a book I planned where I would stop each time.  However, with this book we all got carried away.  I almost finished it the first time I read it aloud to a class.  To be that enthralled by a book sometimes makes it okay to just read aloud for an hour.

For a group of particularly challenged learners I read the first of the Little House books by Laura Ingalls Wilder.  With these I had to spend a lot of time talking about vocabulary before I began reading.  While it might seem simple, most of my students were second language learners, so it took a lot to help them understand.  But they did enjoy the books and often asked me to read the next one in the series, which I happily did.

If you teach young students no doubt you read to your kids, but what about older ones?  I always felt if nothing else the kids could hear a really good book.  And it must have worked, as they always calmed down as they listened and enjoyed the story.  I had finished reading and we could progress through the rest of the class, focused on whatever the task at hand for the rest of the day.

All through elementary and middle school, I glanced, gazed, and even stared at some of the most powerful teaching props in existence, the walls. But I didn’t really see them because to students, it is as natural to find something useful on a classroom wall as it is to glance at the wall in the first place. As a teacher, when I first walked into my own middle school classroom and had to decide what to put on my walls, I was baffled. In a way, they were still invisible to me.

I started out with a small library on an old metal bookshelf, a couple of inspiring posters, and some class rules, then quickly added my state’s content standards and a corner for publishing student work. I added multiplication tables, math facts, and writing conventions. I made room for a student-created vocabulary wall.

By mid-year, my students had helped me redecorate. By this point, I saw my walls as some of the most important learning tools I would ever have access to. I began to think back to the many classrooms I had been in as a student teacher and observer. I started to mentally categorize the purposes I had seen classroom walls fill:

Organization—posted agendas, calendars, standards, and bookcases

Resources/Reminders—vocabulary walls, math charts, homework assignments, procedures posters, and class expectations

Recognition—homework, student artwork, and student illustrations of vocabulary words

Physical Props—scenery for readers’ theater, games like “pin the math term on the example,” and often a whiteboard or interactive whiteboard

Community Building—a birthday calendar, getting to know you projects, and both commercial and student-created decorations

The greatest part in my eyes was how involved my students were. They were interacting with their physical space in ways that helped them learn and feel recognized. And it was often my more disruptive students who would jump at the chance to hang out after school and help me add something to the classroom walls. As we’d work, they would talk and I would listen. My classroom walls helped me connect with my students and helped them develop a sense of ownership.

What about you? What do you think it is most important for teachers to have on their walls? What would you add to my list?

On the other hand, in my research I visit a number of classroom blogs online. It’s exciting to see what teachers across the country are doing with technology in their classrooms. However, many of the blogs I’ve read are written by the teacher, as a way of giving information to parents and other members of the community about classroom events and students accomplishments; very little content is student-generated.

My recent experiences in education make me wonder if blogging really has a place yet in the classroom. Our teaching time seems limited, with mandates to “teach to the test.” Connecting students with computers is not always convenient. These issues, and more, raise questions in my mind about the relevance of blogging in the classroom.

Why should students blog?
Blogging helps students improve their writing skills with the promise of an authentic audience. Blogging provides the opportunity for interactive learning.

How can we set up a blog and maintain student privacy and safety?
Have students hand write blog posts or type on a word processor and enlist the help of volunteers to enter the posts on the blog. Display student posts in class to read and discuss comments. Always have your students use only their initials or a “user name” to protect their identity. Label photographs with the event, rather than the name of the school, teacher, or students.

How can I set up a blog and work around district firewalls?
Check with the network administrator to find out if the blog platform you want to use is blocked and ask if they will unblock the site or mark your blog URL as safe. Once the URL has been marked as safe, you can complete the initial set up of the blog from a home computer, if necessary.
Obtain permission to access Edublogs.org, an education-friendly site specifically set up for teachers. Obtain permission to use Blogger.com, with the agreement that the navigation bar will be disabled. This limits the blog’s exposure on the Internet and prevents students from accidentally navigating away from the blog.

How can I make time for blogging?
Rotate groups of students through the blog so that each group posts once a week. Alternatively, assign one group of students to make one (or more) blog posts for a week and then have another group take the next week. Readers may appreciate the consistency more than the frequency.
Incorporate blog posts into routine class assignments, even if students initially write by hand. For example, student notes prior to conducting a classroom debate can be used to begin a conversation on a blog. Post student conclusions from science experiments to start discussions about new learning, how well the conclusions support the hypothesis, and what students would change the next time they performed the experiment.

Summer is a good time to take stock of changes and new ideas we want to incorporate in the new school year. Thinking about this with you has challenged me to consider once again the benefits of blogging – and how it can help me to do my job better – to provide resources for teachers.

Tracie Heskett has taught multiple grades in public and private elementary schools in southwest Washington. She currently writes teacher resource materials and curriculum. She has authored many books for Teacher Created Resources including Blogging in the Classroom, Going Green, and Traits of Good Writing.

When was the last time you spent real time as a student? Having to deal with teachers who you may or may not like with teaching methods that didn’t do anything to enhance your learning style? Who had no concept of learning styles? Did they know or care that you might be visual, auditory, or kinesthetic? And here I was dancing all day–one might have thought they’d make it easier for us. Not so.

The teachers just believed we were all kinesthetic learners who would pick up a tango routine in just a couple of hours. They were wrong about that. Some of us really needed the words written down to remember. So we (I) took notes. Those words then played in my head, and I was able to get the routine much better. Can teachers help adapt the learning?

Then there’s the practice. We practiced on our own with a group of friends. After much discussion as to what the order of the steps was, we all tried to dance the routine. What a sorry lot we were. My husband and I had one step totally incorrect in the practice. It wasn’t until the next morning when we went to class that we found that out. Then we had to relearn it correctly. Hmm, how many of our students do that, practicing something incorrectly with no one ever really checking?

This was Dance Camp, and it was lots of fun. I wanted to be there and knew I would have to work hard. So I was willing to accommodate the teachers. I knew they were pros and I could change things as needed or ask questions.

What about our students? Do they really want to be in class? Sure some do, but what about those that don’t? They also are young and don’t always know what they don’t know. They make mistakes and no one fixes them. School should be like Dance Camp. Hard work, learning new things, practicing, and a reward of something new learned and enjoyed. Let’s think about how we can make learning work best for our students.

I had the absolute pleasure of being a guest reader for Mrs. F’s class at Robert C. Fisler School. If you’ve never heard of this school, do yourself a favor and Google it. It’s modern, tech-focused, diverse, and, well, beautiful.

Mrs. F is the kind of teacher we all wanted in second grade (or any grade, for that matter). She is bubbly, full of ideas, witty, and has passion for what she does. She creates Promethean flipcharts from which students learn lessons, she invites guests to her classroom to help with student art projects, and she plays games with her class.

On the particular day I was there, she played 20 questions with her students. The class can ask 20 questions in order to figure out who the mystery guest reader is. Once all the questions are asked, the reader can enter the room and the storytelling can commence!

The storytelling did commence—with Chris Van Allsburg’s Jumanji. Being a huge fan of Van Allsburg, I couldn’t help but pick one of his masterpieces. And lucky for me, they enjoyed the storyline, as well as the vivid, realistic pictures. Admittedly, Mrs. F and I were concerned that the reading level might be too advanced, but this wasn’t the case. Here and there, I defined or explained various words. And they, too, asked questions. Together, we “oohed” and “awed” over the game’s twists, turns, and characters, which include a fierce lion, a curious collection of monkeys, and a slithering python. One student asked, “Why does the python match the furniture?” And another student promptly piped up with, “He has camouflage!” Talk about insightfulness and intelligence—and, remember, these are second-graders!

We wrapped up the reading with some final questions: Why is it bad that the boys took the game? (They don’t read instructions.) What will happen as a result of them not reading the instructions? (They won’t know to finish the game.) So what will stay in the house? (The monkeys! The lion! The lost guide! The python! The rhinos! The rain!) It was great fun, to say the least.

But aside from the fun, laughs, and all-around surprise from this experience, I learned a very valuable lesson: Don’t ever underestimate students, not even for a second—because the moment you do, you’ll find yourself absolutely dumbfounded. Students are more thoughtful, perceptive, and clever than ever before.

As teachers, maybe this is something you’ve already learned. Maybe it’s an idea you mastered years ago and now consider it to be “the norm.” But for someone who is currently out of the classroom, it was quite a shocker. It was also a real moment of pride. To be able to witness excitement in students’ eyes and to be able to see the passion that drives a good teacher—well, it’s no wonder I had such an amazing day, now is it?

One of the things which has always fascinated me about professional development days is where we hold our meetings. Sometimes we sit in classrooms in those small desks that were made for people much smaller than the adults that fill the room. Other times we sit at the cafeteria tables of our school – you remember those tables, don’t you? Those little, round pedestals with the seats that squeak every time you move – the seats that have no backs on them so you can never lean any way except forwards for fear you might slide off. By the end of the six hours I have very little that feels professionally developed, except parts of my body that have been professionally developed into unnatural positions, and honestly, all I want to do at the end of those days is find a place to “unkink” all my kinks. Have I learned anything? Only to remind myself to bring a pillow next time or to call in sick. But, don’t think that I don’t think the developers of these days are clever; they are more than clever. In fact, I believe this is all what I like to think of as their master plan. There is a reason behind the hours of torturous seating…the true genius of the plan is it is now emblazed across our minds just how amazingly hard it is to sit still all day. Thus, through the genius of professional development, our students are saved.

How’s that, you ask? Well, research has shown over and over that the attention span you have with your students is about (give or take) one minute for the children’s age. So, as a typical middle school teacher, I have about 12 to 13 minutes of my students’ undivided attention before I start losing them. That, compiled with the already uncomfortable seats they are forced to endure all day, makes any master teacher know that after a certain point in the lesson, a good teacher will let the students do one important thing: move. And, once I move them, I once again gain 12 to 13 more minutes of their undivided attention. It’s an amazing cycle, really.

Now, I realize all transition in learning do not have to involve moving. A teacher can simply create a transition of activities and still maintain the children’s attention, but I maintain that for the health and well-being of those students who are trapped in those torture chambers of flawed ergonomic design…we teachers, as caring individuals, must let the masses move.

Need some ideas for allowing movement in any lesson? Try some of these ideas:
• Take an exercise break. Give your students a minute to stand up and stretch or do jumping jacks. The one minute of movement will be a definite payback in the time you’ll gain on their attention spans.
• Divide the students into small groups to continue the learning standard.
• Allow students to take a clipboard and work sitting somewhere else in the room instead of at a student desk.
• Take an in-house field trip. (We once quietly walked the school looking for and writing down all the nouns we could see. I know a math teacher who placed math problems up and down the halls for her students to find and solve.)
• Have your students answer using motions. For example, stand up if the answer to a question is false.
• Allow individual students to stand up when called upon to read.

The goal of each class is to learn. Great teachers do whatever it takes to see that learning takes place. If you are hesitant to make transitions of movement in the classroom, don’t be. You just might find that by allowing your children the freedom to move, you will have something else exciting happening in your classroom: you will open your students’ minds to the joy of learning instead of the pain of “deseat.”

Susan Mackey Collins is a veteran teacher who has taught at both the elementary and middle school level. She currently teaches 6, 7, and 8th grade Advanced Language Arts at Sycamore Middle School outside of Nashville, Tennessee.
She has authored many books for Teacher Created Resources including Cursive Writing Activities, the Discovering Genres Series, and many of the titles from our popular Mastering Skills Series.