Time for some little ideas!

By little, I mean narrowly focused, not unimportant!

I've been frustrated lately by reading assignments that are way too difficult for students. I bet they have been even more frustrated than I have! This is particularly difficult when content area teachers are doing their best to bring in authentic reading material such as current news in the field. The problem is that such material is written at a level that precludes independent reading. Instead, students end up needing a great deal of support.

When teachers assign reading material, sometimes it is difficult to know until after students have done the reading whether the material is too easy or too advanced. Here are two tools that can make evaluating the reading level of text a little easier.

For a rough estimate, Microsoft Word has the option to evaluate readability statistics as part of the grammar and spelling check. You turn this feature on by clicking on the MS Office button in the upper left hand corner, clicking on Word Options, choosing "proofing", and checking the box that says "show readability statistics."



Copy and paste or type about 100 words of the text into MS Word and save. Then, when you are in a document, go to the reviewing toolbar and run the spelling and grammar check. At the very end of the check, you get a window with a Flesch-Kinkaid reading level. It's not perfect, and I personally think it skews a little low, particularly if the text has a lot of dialogue. However, it is a great quick and easy check that a reading selection isn't way off base.

The second tool is a program that you can download called Reading Rater that is free. It's nice to sometimes do a cross check between the two, but I have found them to be consistent.

Hope these are useful for you!

Reading with Diigo and Dragons

Literacy and technology have been intersecting in class this week in great ways!

I am a big fan of Harvey and Gouvis' work on the need to teach students reading strategies. Last year, students mentioned in their end of year surveys that we read too much non-fiction for our short texts and they missed reading short stories. Looking over the year, I realized they were right, we read very little short fiction although we still read novels.

In an effort to correct this, I decided to incorporate fairy and folk tales into our reading strategy instruction. I found two great resources for tales online. My teaching partner received a grant several years ago to explore the world of the Grimm Brothers. Usually, we like to use one or two of those tales in class. This year I found Professor D. L. Ashliman's collection of tales. These tales are, well, much "Grimmer" than the sanitized versions students are usually familiar with. Their background knowledge gives them the boost they need for comprehending these stories though, which have more complex vocabulary.

The other site is a more general collection of folk and fairy tales, from many cultures and time periods. It's part of the 4to40 website.

Here's the really cool part. The kids used the tools built in to Diigo to demonstrate their use of the reading strategies that we've been practicing with paper text. I used the Diigo for educators feature to set all the students up with an account that meets COPPA requirements. When it came time to assess the students' work I had such a great time. With all the stories to choose from, the students really felt that they genuine choices. Part of their grade was choosing a story that was appropriately challenging, but not too hard. (Differentiation, anyone?).

I try really hard not to give assignments that I'll dread grading. These were just plain fun to grade since I got to read a huge variety of stories through the students eyes. I hadn't read most of the stories in these versions before, so while it took a while to grade them, is was also truly pleasure reading for me. BTW, the students did beautifully and many mentioned that they really enjoyed the assignment. Wow--fun to complete and a pleasure to grade. In my world, that's about as good as it gets!

Now for the dragons. The students have been blogging about their independent reading. So many have become absorbed in the Inheritance series by Christopher Paolini that I felt I needed to check them out. WOW--I'm now almost finished with book two and I can't wait to get started on number three. I just love the feeling of being buried deep in another world!

Wordle

I tried something interesting today. Our diversity director sent out two different articles written about the the U.S. House of Representatives issuing an apology for slavery and for Jim Crow. His point was that the two articles were quite different. I had heard about Wordle, which makes the images based on the frequency with which words appear in the article. So, I made images of the two articles. The first article was written by Darryl Fears and appeared in the Washington Post. Here's the Wordle for that article.



The second article was written by Jim Abrams for the Associated Press and distributed widely. Here's the Wordle for it.


I left out the headlines for both because those are seldom written by the journalists who write the articles.
Discussion fodder in conjunction with reading the articles? I think so.

Wouldn't it be interesting to have students create something similar with two pieces, either historical, literary, or current?