Helping students read better

Adults forget all that they do while reading. We are predicting, making connections, contextualizing, critiquing, and already plotting how we might use any new insights or information. Yep, we do all that when we read.

As teachers, we need to train students in each of these skills, and begin to do so early on. I was recently in a second-grade classroom where 70 percent instruction was in English and 30 percent in Spanish. Most of the children spoke Spanish as their first or home language. (Rebecca Alber at Edutopia)

Don't forget about this resource

Brain Pickings continues to be an amazing site with amazing content. So it certainly deserves another post reminding readers to check it out.

Here's some of the most recent post there:

The secrets of good writing have been debated again and again and again. But “good writing” might, after all, be the wrong ideal to aim for. In About Writing: Seven Essays, Four Letters, and Five Interviews (public library), celebrated author and literary critic Samuel Delany — who, for a fascinating factlet, penned the controversial 1972 “women’s liberation” issue of Wonder Woman — synthesizes his most valuable insights from thirty-five years of teaching creative writing, a fine addition to beloved writers’ advice on writing.

The summer of learning is on its way

Education in America needs to be more powerful if we want to prepare all our children for the real world. We need a learning approach designed for our times – one that builds on the basic “three Rs” of education to add what is, and always has been, the fourth R: Relevance. Today that means preparing young people for an ever-changing world where higher-order skills are in demand and learning never stops. We call this learning approach Connected Learning.

This summer, major advocates for the potential of the Internet – including theJohn D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Mozilla, the National Writing Project, and others – are putting Connected Learning into practice. The Summer of Making and Connecting organizes hundreds of events, projects and programs in communities across the nation, around the world, and online to help youth connect learning to their interests and to enable teachers to learn from and network with their innovative peers. The campaign will engage hundreds of thousands of people in creating things on the web, with hardware, and on paper—working in schools and community spaces and at kitchen tables. The campaign brings together organizations from the worlds of DIY, making, writing, and learning to build the Connected Learning movement. (from the "about" page at the Summer of Making and and Connecting website)

You write like?

Check which famous writer you write like with this statistical analysis tool, which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers.

Any text in English will do: your latest blog post, journal entry, comment, chapter of your unfinished book, etc. For reliable results paste at least a few paragraphs (not tweets).

If you go to the site associated with the hyperlinked text above, you can paste some of your writing into a box, hit analyze and then learn what famous writer your style emulates. 

CCSS foes and supporters at work

Supporters of the Common Core State Standards are moving to confront increasingly high-profile opposition to the standards at the state and national levels by rallying the private sector and initiating coordinated public relations and advertising campaigns as schools continue implementation. (Andrew Ujifusa at Education Week)

Here's a way to get writing

Each month (on the 15th), Prompt & Circumstance will provide new writing prompts in four different categories: Six Words, Run With It, Imagine, and Whatta Character. The main goal of our journal is to help you to ignite your writing process. Please use our prompts however you will, without restriction. If you start off inspired by something, but veer completely off track, that’s okay. We give you permission to twist and shrink and launch.

We hope you produce works you are proud of, or that lead to other works, or that end up being funny when you find them in your journal in 2036. We encourage you to write for yourself, for other journals, or to send your masterpieces to us for possible inclusion in our monthly journal, Promptly. Most of all, we encourage you to write. (from Prompt and Circumstance)

(Even though the folks at Prompt & Circumstance have a way for a reader to subscribe to get prompts via email, I'm not sure that feature is working.

A place to write and respond

2013 E-Anthology

MAY 15 – SEPTEMBER 30, 2013

The NWP E-Anthology is a social media forum that invites members of the National Writing Project Community to publish their writing and reflections and to respond to the work of colleagues. This year's E-Anthology will be hosted within theNational Writing Project Google+ community . (from the National Writing Project website)