Accountable Talk Tools

Boy, has it been a long time since my last post!  I've been busy, to say the least, with teaching three courses this semester, loving my 1/2 classroom by day and shoveling, shoveling, shoveling the 3 feet + of snow that has plagued the Northeast.  Can we say seven snow days and school on two days during April vacation?

Since last year, my school has had professional development on Accountable Talk across all subject areas.  We want our learners to be thinkers--more than that.  We want our students to think deep, to encourage each other to think deeply and to be able to clearly and accurately explain their deep thinking to others.  We have had quite a few walk-throughs in order to measure our growth (anonymously) throughout our journey.  The results have allowed us to celebrate how far we have come and to plan our next steps to get even better!

Encouraging Accountable Talk in my classroom has been a learning curve.  I was challenged at first to figure out when I could talk and when I couldn't!  At the same time however, I was eager to push my students.  They were ready.

In mathematics one day, my principal and a team were doing a walk-through.  The children were very busy working on a non routine math problem (at the beginning stages).  They hadn't solved it right away.  Some weren't on the right path to getting the problem solved.  Some mathematicians were doing a lot of talking, but were saying incorrect information.  

At first, I thought this went wayyyyy wrong.  I wasn't sure if saying anything to the groups was OK.  Afterwards, my principal said something really powerful.  "You coach the talk, not the math."

Coaching the talking, not necessarily the content was an eye opener for me.  Because I teach first and second graders, my goal was to work on how we talk to each other.  To do this, I need to model it, scaffold it, reinforce it and model it some more!  It's OK to be doing the talking as the teacher when it comes to training our young thinkers how to use accountable talk.  I do this in a number of ways.

If a student appears to be challenged I may say, "How about talk to your team?  Tell them the specific part that has you confused."

If a group is finished with a problem early, I may say, "Talk to each other.  Come up with another way to show your thinking."

In a turn and talk, I am always reinforcing accountable talk "I notice how not only did you say you disagree with your partner's thinking.  You explained why with evidence from the text!"

From the above example, you can notice how I am coaching the talk, not the content of my lesson.  There are so many great resources out there to promote accountable talk.  

My teaching partner and I really like this one because of the icons that diving the type of talk from talk that will ask a question, to talk that will begin to state a friendly disagreement.

In my classroom, I made an Accountable Talk bookmarks and have hung up many banners with questions, response stems, etc.  Both are available in my TpT store by clicking HERE.  Below are some to which I refer when I want to push thinking during mathematics.

I have a whole banner of them over one of my large bulletin boards too.  I have modeled a few at a time over the course of this year.  The reading teacher and the speech therapist in my school have both hung some up in their classrooms too.

Here's what I have used to make handy dandy bookmarks or reminder cards for my students.

Happy weekend.  Melt, snow melt!

A Little of This and a Little of That

Busy, busy, busy just about sums up my winter so far.  A snow day here, another snow day there, too.  I took a bunch of pictures before I left my classroom today because upon looking up from my table I thought to myself, "There's a lot going on here!"  As a result, this post was born.

I'm really liking my new part of my dry erase board where I "post" my objectives.  Before, I had them typed out and would switch them out of clear pocket charts--a real pain.  They had to be refiled which means they were kept in a pile.  To fix this, I hung some letters with ribbon and clothespins.  I added a border and magnetic signs for each subject and viola.  I can erase and change my "We Can!" statements in just a few seconds.  Waaaaay easier.

We are well into our Lucy Calkins unit on Opinion Writing--I'm a big fan of her ideas, her language and her overall philosophy on how to teach writing.  The only problem I have, though, is that I have no more room to hang her anchor charts!  Completely out of room this afternoon, I had no choice but to hang a chart on my bookshelf--it's actually the perfect fit.  Don't you think?

  

On my writing bulletin board we are still enjoying our New Year's project of mine--"Ringing in the New Year."  Our resolutions are not only radiant.  They look pretty nice on display.  Check out this item by clicking HERE.

In science, we are studying matter.  In particular, we are learning about changing states.  We have two ongoing experiments with evaporation happening in our classroom.  Both are so easy and oh so interesting.  Today is day 73 of our evaporating orange water experiment.  All we did was fill an old snack jar with water and food coloring and made predictions on how many days it would take for the water to completely evaporate.  We have been marking its evaporation every so often.  Here's what we have so far.  Boy, this is taking much longer than I had expected.  You can see by my guess of 80 days.

We also started an evaporation race.  I put an equal amount of water in four different containers with four different sized openings.  I measured the water right in front of my young scientists.  We made predictions as to which container would cause the water to evaporate the quickest.  We are watching carefully for the winner.

Moments ago, I uploaded my newest item--  A Bloom's Taxonomy Jar.  I put color coded prompts for each of Bloom's level on large craft sticks in a spray-painted, recycled can (I added some fun accents).  I haven't used these yet, but I plan to send my students off with a prompt to write about after a guided reading lesson.  We will see how this works.  You may get this item by visiting my TpT store or by clicking HERE.  It also comes with a ladder visual to use in explicit instruction regarding the levels of questioning.

Well that's all my pictures.  I hope you have been able to be inspired!  

Care to go on an Informational Text Feature Scavenger Hunt?

Anyone glancing through the Common Core clearly notices right away the major focus on our young learners' reading and writing informational text on a regular basis-- as young as pre-K...yikes!  It's up to us to fill our readers' invisible backpacks with the tools needed to navigate through informational text and the distinct manner in which the information is presented.  We can't just assume that a transition from narrative text to informational text comes natural.  Teaching the text features we often encounter as adult readers when we read for information (WWW, menus, pamphlets, brochures, textbooks, magazines, newspapers etc.) is essential in order for our readers to make sense of what they are reading.  

According to the informational text guru, Nell K. Duke (2004), whom I have had the pleasure to hear speak,

     "More than anything, struggling readers need plenty of      

     opportunities to read text that makes sense to them. Requiring 

     students to spend most of their school time reading books that 

     are too difficult makes it impossible for them to learn and to 

     develop as readers (Allington, 2002).

     "Students should spend most of their school reading time with 

     texts that they can read and want to read. Students tell us that 

     when we give them interesting materials that they can read 

     without too much difficulty, they will read (Ivey & Broaddus, 

     2001). Providing books that span the content areas, match 

     students' reading levels, and encompass a variety of formats and     

     genres is nonnegotiable if we want struggling readers to 

     improve."

The text that students "want" to read is clearly informational--I see this on a regular basis.  This being said, I've put together an "Informational Text Feature Scavenger Hunt" that can help reinforce some of the most common features found when we read for information.  I decided to premiere this activity at our Family Literacy Night held this Tuesday.  I worked with my fellow first grade teachers.  Here's how it works.  Bring on the pics!

Above you see the informational text signs I printed out (graph and diagram).  My first grade team and I searched through our classroom libraries to find the perfect example of each text feature.    Here I am scanning a bar graph of how much a tiger eats.  Then we used poster board and sticky photo squares to make our informational text feature posters.  On each poster went the feature name and the example.  Here are some terrific examples starting with the tiger feeding graph.  We also cut and added arrows to target the feature and to avoid confusion.  

Once our posters were laminated,  we assembled the Informational Text Feature clue books for our young detectives.  In the book are the clues that describe each text feature with a blank for an answer (the name of the text feature found on the posters).

Since literacy night was for the whole school, we did half of the features for K-2 to make it more age-appropriate and all the features for grades 3-5.  We hung the posters along the basement hall where our literacy night station was positioned.  Here is a side of the hall.

Since our youmg detectives were going to be using their clues to hunt for the correct informational text feature, they needed magnifying glasses and we needed detective hats-- both easily found on Amazon.com.  

 

While on the case, our sleuths needed a clipboard.  I made sure I had plenty on hand for students and their families.

This activity was a favorite among students, families and my colleagues.  Look at my first grade colleague, Mrs. Girard spying 

an example she found depicting a table of the planets.  Shhh!  This information remains classified!

  

Oh, no!  Top secret.  I was caught spying a neat table of contents.  This better not be a red herring to throw me off track.

My Informational Text Feature Scavenger Hunt includes all of the informational text feature signs and clue book.  Also, you get directions and an answer key.  Just click here.  You need to find your own examples in your classroom, school, or local library to add to the poster.  Obviously, I can't include them due to copyright issues.  We happened to hang our posters in the hall for our school event, but they can easily be hung in a classroom for a hunt.  You may also be interested in creating informational text visuals to use as teaching points BEFORE you do this hunt.  Click here for a past blog post about this.  Have fun sending your readers on the case of locating the correct informational text feature!