Magazines in the Classroom

I recently was contacted by someone wanting to donate to my classroom their entire collection of National Geographic magazines from 1964 to 2014. That's 600 issues spanning 50 years of history. I was super excited about the prospect. I could think of plenty of ways to use them in my own classroom. I asked if I could break up the collection and if he minded if I asked other teachers I knew if they wanted some of the set. I am always happy to make another teacher's day.

I drove down to get them, and I felt like a kid at Christmas when I brought the boxes into my office and finally got them open. Of course I kept a few that I thought the girls would be interested in, mainly anything with dinosaurs. And of course the Apollo 11 one from 1969, because how could I miss that opportunity. 

Special delivery! The man even donated a new class pet for one of our newcomers classes. And quite a few laughs in the office as I might have screamed a bit. 

(Yep, that's a southern devil scorpion, probably about full-grown)

There was a bookstore in Houston that used to donated boxes of old magazines to teachers that I used to get all sorts of magazines from. I used them for a variety of activities. I had a handful of Life magazines from the 1960s and 1970s that my students always enjoyed looking at. When they were born in the 1990s and even in the last few years I started having students born after 2000. These time periods just seem so foreign to them. I know in this digital age it is easy to pull up images on a computer screen, but I feel there is something to be said for the usefulness of magazines in the classroom.

So I thought I'd quickly share some ways I used them in my room.

1. For Visuals - I talk over and over about the importance of visuals. Magazines provide tons of visuals to support building background knowledge for content and vocabulary learning.
   
   
2. As part of your classroom library - magazines like National Geographic make great additions to a classroom library. Even younger students and students with lower language proficiency levels can appreciate the pictures.
   
   
3. As part of a Science/Social Studies learning center - magazines like National Geographic provide plenty of visuals and and maps to support student learning. 
   
   
4. As mentor texts - there are a variety of non-fiction articles to read, and use as a guide for non-fiction writing
   
   
5. As a reading text - Magazine articles provide short texts that can be used to practice a variety of skills, especially summarizing, which can be a big task for English language learners. I used to laminate interesting articles and organize them into a reading crate for students if they finished work early. 
   
   
6.  For visual writing prompts - This could look different ways. First, if there is a really interesting picture students could make inferences about it and use it as a visual writing prompt. Second, if it is a magazine that you don't mind students cutting, they could create collages to make their own picture of whatever the topic is and then use that as a spring board for writing. For lower proficiency levels labeling parts of a picture with words or phrases is writing. (this can also be used for speaking practice too.)
   
   
7. For looking for rhetorical devices - the non-fiction writing in magazines offers a variety of examples of different rhetorical devices for students to identify and practice with.
   
   
8. For discussion/debate - magazine articles can provide great practice for English language learners to discuss what they read and maybe even have a debate. Current events can be great ways to spark discussion and debate.
   
   
9. For language practice - I had a stack of pictures cut out from magazines that I used with my newcomers and I would ask things like: what is he doing? to practice present continuous verbs. Or I'd ask them to describe the picture depending on vocabulary we were practicing. For example when we learned about family vocabulary with my newcomers I would ask them to imagine the people in pictures were a family and have them describe their relationships.
   
   
10. Comparisons - magazines can be useful for comparing two people, two pictures, two situations, or even two sides of the same story. No matter whether this is used with inferences with pictures, or by sharing two articles the skill of comparing and contrasting is another important skill for students.
    
    
11. To practice questioning - magazines can be a great tool to discuss questioning, because we naturally ask questions to learn more about topics we don't understand.

I'd love to hear how others use still use them.

Alternative Assessments: Othello Foldables

I recently had a lively discussion about alternative assessments with a group of middle and high school teachers. It is always a touchy topic because in education so often assessment is such a dirty word because of standardized testing, penalties for not meeting AYP, and all sorts of other initiatives aimed at monitoring student progress. It was a common sentiment in the group that they felt they spent more time testing than teaching. That's definitely understandable as testing season is in full swing. 

I shared some ways that I used alternative assessments in my own classroom. At first this was met with some skepticism, "The test isn't differentiated, it's not in an alternative format, how will that prepare them?" I've been asked this many times, the problem is, you see, the test was never my goal post. I decided I would teach my students to read and think critically, I didn't ignore the test, but it was not the end result.

Before you ask, yes, I taught a tested area. In fact it was their English test required for graduation. No joking matter, but also a low goal. I knew what objectives my students needed to master, the power objectives if you will, the ones that showed up over and over again. They were always on my mind. But I never felt like traditional assessments showed my English learners knowledge, or language growth. 

I grabbed a file folder, large manila envelope, some glue and some construction paper and I walked them through an assessment I could use with the unit I was sharing with them. I had taught this unit, or elements of it for years, and these are based on some of the things I had my students do in their interactive notebooks. We talked about all the skills the students would work on when creating their project, and the study tool they were creating, and how adaptable this was to different content.

The cover can be decorated to yours or their liking. Mine just includes the title and some important themes from the play. They could have drawn important symbols/themes/you name the skill you want to highlight. I did this pretty quickly, don't be too harsh on my art skills.

When you open it up, you can see it is very organized. The left hand side include places to summarize information from pre-reading lessons to build background for my students. The top one concerned Shakespeare's life, a brief history of the time period, and the theater. The bottom left is concerned with the history in the play. It has a map that shows Venice and Cyprus, but also the Ottoman Empire and Mauritania. It unfolds to leave room for students to summarize important information about these places.

Gluing the manila envelope down on only 3 sides creates a pocket in the middle. In there is housed a worksheet my students completed after a matching and sorting activity of basic drama terms. 

In the middle, on the front of the manila envelope is a place for students to summarize each act of the play to keep the events straight. You may have noticed we are hitting retelling and summarizing quite hard so far in this, and that is because it is a challenging and yet important skill to master. Being able to pick out important information and put it into your own words is challenging for ELLs. It is also something that can be scaffolded to support students no matter what level of language proficiency they are at. 

On the left hand side is a table for students to record all of the names other characters call Othello, and then make inferences about what they mean, and how they feel about Othello. They also have to decide the significance of it.

When you open the manila envelope, there is a place to record information about characters. There is also room for students to create a character web that tracks how characters are related to each other and how they interact with each other. 

When you open the manila envelope again, there is a place for students to record examples of the 4 primary themes that we follow throughout the play. There is also room for an analysis of the themes, what the message is about each one and why it is important. I did a writing assignment with my students that prompted them through answering these questions.

Then finally inside the half of the manila envelope that is not cut to make the book is a pocket for students to store important quotes from the play. I chose several from each Act and students had to record information about. Here students had to look at literary devices and determine things like purpose and tone.

I hope you enjoyed it!

My Top 9 Favorite Websites for Simplifying texts

As class sizes grow and the complexity of standards increase, the need for differentiation rises, and the time to be able to do it drops. So, I always try to find resources to help adapt the same materials for different reading levels so that all students can be successful with the same content.

Here are 9 of my favorite websites and tools for simplifying texts. I will highlight some pros and cons of each as I’ve encountered in my own classroom.

1. Rewordify

Rewordify will simplify complex vocabulary to make a difficult text easily to understand. You can customize the amount that is simplified and the way it looks – As an English teacher, I like the side-by-side text option. There are also various pre-made activities cloze reading etc using the original vocabulary that might help with supporting vocabulary development. Why this is at the top of the list – you choose the text to simplify

2. Books That Grow

Offers a selection of fiction and non-fiction texts at various reading levels that can be sent out to students on any device. Why I like this one – my district went BYOD so there is a lot of technology available, and it includes many of the texts in a secondary ELA curriculum, it is not just elementary.

All of the 4 following are very similar and allow for teachers to access a variety of non-fiction and news articles in a variety of levels. Each has slightly different functionality and I have ranked them in order of my favorites.

3. News in Levels – not only has the different levels but has videos to match the levels and questions after that encourage students to write and speak.

4. Newsela – has the many nice features, like quizzes afterwards, but there is a fee for creating the virtual classrooms and tracking student progress

5. For The Teachers – I used to print these out as anchor activities, for extension and further independent practice with skills.

6. Breaking News English

The next 2 create summaries of text on webpages, or that you can copy and paste.

7. Text Compactor – copy and paste, works pretty well sometimes summaries are not perfect

8. TLDR – works with websites, works pretty well sometimes summaries are not perfect

9. Finally, there is a feature in Read&Write, it increases white space, and reduces the number of sentences. Works pretty well, but as all of these tools, it is not perfect

I've added this to my collection of Technology Tools for English language learners

Review: Snapverter

I have previously shared with you all reasons why I love Read&Write for Google in the classroom – I share it with so many people, they should probably give me commission. Recently Texthelp has released Snapverter, an add-on for Read&Write for Google that enhances its capabilities. It too can be found here on the Chrome Webstore.

One of the features of Read&Write was the ability to read aloud text on the web and in documents found in your Google drive, but this feature has limitations. Some documents like pdfs don’t read well if at all, and there is so much more text our students are exposed to than just what we see online.

Snapverter allows you to use your smartphone to take a picture of a text and it will convert it to a pdf that can be read aloud. What this means is, potentially anything can be read aloud to students. Worksheets, posters, notes, books, anything! And everything is done right inside your drive. This means that everything is easily saved and shared.

Being the skeptic I tend to be, and unwilling to promote a product that is not quality, I have tested it out. I took a picture of an old copy of Night, by Elie Wiesel, that I had laying around in my office. Using just the camera function on my phone produced a nice quality photo, but when it went through Snapverter, the recognition was off and fragmented, in many places it broke words into the letters and made the text incomprehensible.

Needless to say I was disappointed, but undeterred. I remembered I have a nice scanning app on my phone CamScanner. This is another product that allows free upgrades for education users, so of course I am going to support them. For more information you can go here. When I used the scanner to take photos of articles I use in my workshops and random textbook pages, Snapverter converted them really well.

I went back and used CamScanner to scan a page from Night. I allowed it to smart enhance the photo which reduced much of the yellowing of the page. Doing it this way, I uploaded the new pdf to my drive and Snapverter handed it really well. There are a few places that still produced errors for example it read tarce instead of farce, and bodies instead of Boches. Despite the errors, this proves to be an invaluable tool.

Currently for individual users this is limited to a trial account only, which means 10 conversions and then limited to 1 a week. I think this is adequate for an average user, because it counts documents and not pages. 

Review: Read&Write for Google

In my last post I discussed some effective reading strategies that work for ELLs (English language learners). One of the key topics discussed was vocabulary - it is a problem of a vocabulary gap. Casual exposure to words might lead to some incidental learning, but not the meaningful learning needed to bridge this gap. Neither will list after list of words to memorize. In that same post, I also advocated for incorporating visuals with vocabulary instruction.

I can already hear it...But Lisa, adapting reading passages with visuals and incorporating visuals into vocabulary instruction takes up valuable time! Fear not, there are many tech tools out there to help teachers meet the needs of their students using as little extra time as possible, because time is the one thing a teacher can never have enough of.

Read&Write for Google

This is one of my favorite new tech tools. When I share it with teachers, they always ask why they haven't heard about it before.

Read&Write will read text aloud, allow for dual color highlighting, provide text and picture dictionaries, word to word translation, offer suggestions for words with word prediction, speech to text, allow for annotations, and simplify and summarize text on web pages. Whew! That's a lot, and it doesn't even capitalize on my favorite feature.

My favorite feature of Read&Write is the ability to collect text (from documents in my drive or the internet) through the highlighting, and then have Read&Write create a vocabulary list, with visuals, as a fully editable Google doc in my drive. I am not a fan of the text definitions that Read&Write provides because they are not very student or ELL friendly, however, because the doc is editable I can input my own.

Here's what is looks like from a random website:

The output is not perfect, but it saves time. I can delete images I don't need, change the definition to suit my needs, I can also modify how it looks. Because it is just like any other document, with a little tech-savviness and about 2 minutes I was able to turn the vocabulary list into an adapted text.

Overall, I this product is not perfect, but is a versatile tool. The reading capabilities run into issues one webpages with things like formatting and links, but audio support for ELLs is a great tool for any teachers toolbox. The simplification feature is nice, it increases white space and simplifies the text. I tend to prefer methods that keep most of the same text but simplify words instead of removing sentences. But, it is another useful feature.

I wholeheartedly reccommend Read&Write for Google to ever teacher working with ELLs and struggling readers as a tool to help meet their needs, while saving teachers time. It is also new free for teachers, all it takes is a quick registration after it is installed.

For more infomation:
http://www.texthelp.com/north-america/readwriteforgoogle

Chromestore Link

http://rw.texthelp.com/drive/home/RegisterTeacher

~

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Six Reading Strategies for Secondary English Language Learners

Let me first start by saying, these strategies are good for everyone in all ages. I wrote this specifically with secondary teachers in mind because these are often overlooked. Innumerable times I have seen teachers just pass out something to read with questions, and then act baffled as to why students struggle, much less English language learners. I also get asked all of the time by secondary teachers how they can improve reading comprehension with their English language learners.

1. Building Background

English language learners, especially recent immigrants, are often at a disadvantage because of a gap in background knowledge. This can be because of a variety of things such as cultural differences, differences in schooling – for example things taught nationalistically, or differences in the way different countries write numbers – and just differences in experiences. Our job as teachers is to fill in the gaps to lay a foundation for new learning.

One thing that we can do is incorporating visuals. Visuals reinforce vocabulary knowledge and learning, and provide clues about the text that can support struggling readers. I even go as far as adapting texts and glossaries with visuals. Teachers ask me all of the time why not just give them a dictionary, but looking up a word you do not know in a language you do not understand is little help, if they happen to have bilingual dictionaries, they still may be lacking sufficient academic vocabulary to understand the definition.

2. Vocabulary Instruction

The heart of the English language learners struggles is a gap in vocabulary knowledge. Native speakers have much more exposure to words, and their variations, this creates another disadvantage for English language learners, because the ability to maneuver within the language with finesse - for example knowing that encourage is a verb and encouragement is its noun form – is often taken for granted. Because of this, English language learners need explicit vocabulary instruction and practice.

But which words to choose?

Tier 1: early reader, basic, sight words

Tier 2: high-utility, words frequently used in many different contexts

Tier 3: content area vocabulary, academic vocabulary

Tier 2 words are the most bang for your buck. An English language learner (who need it) will often have support with Tier 1 words from their ESL teacher, and Tier 3 words are the heavy focus of content area classes. Instruction in Tier 2 words is often an afterthought, or neglected all together, but these words often carry a lot of meaning in discourse and texts. Because Tier 2 words appear in a variety of contexts they are more likely to be encountered in different situations and will be the most useful for students to learn.

Often you will encounter more words that an English language learner will need in a particular context, but it is not helpful to overwhelm them either. I limit explicit in depth vocabulary instruction to five words per lesson. This does not mean that they are not exposed to more words, and that I do not explain more words than that, this is instead how many words they are working towards mastery of at one time.

After I have incorporated visuals and given vocabulary instruction, I ask students to describe or tell about the pictures using their new vocabulary words. This is helping to make connections to the content and giving them practice in using their new vocabulary in context.

3. Read-Alouds

When I walk down the halls of secondary schools, I so often see teachers had out reading assignments and questions to answer at the end, or instructions for what students should do with it, but students are left alone to tackle the reading and are alone in comprehension. When I talk to high school teachers in particular, I tell them I read to my students every day, and they say and you taught 12th grade? and your students enjoyed it? Not only did they enjoy it, they understood more for it.

There are a lot of missed opportunities with read-alouds with older students, but it is one of the most powerful things we can do. Yes, our students do need to read to themselves. Yes, for most of our students no one will read the “test” to them – but then again is that all we are after? If we know they struggle as readers, we can model good reading and fluency for them. We can share our joy of reading with them, if it is not something we are willing to do, or even want to do, can we expect them to want to?

Additionally, often with English learners, listening and speaking skills develop earlier than reading and writing. This means we can use read-alouds as an excellent support for fluency and ultimately comprehension.

4. Chunk and Chew
Chunk and chew is what it sounds like - it is breaking the content up into smaller more manageable chunks. I like to follow the 10:2 rule. For every ten minutes of input for students they should have two minutes of "output." That is, they should have two minutes to digest the information. This could be questions/discussion, turn and talk with a partner, drawing, summarizing.

Another important aspect of this is to be able to clarify concepts early and frequently. There is nothing worse than when a reader works through an entire passage and understands nothing because of confusion at the start.

This rule does not apply just to reading, I used it to guide all aspects of my class, after all brain research says that a teenagers working memory has limits and if we want to them to commit something to memory, we cannot max that out.

5. Questioning
So often in the classroom, English language learners are asked few questions and even less ever go beyond a literal, recall of knowledge level. English language learners need to have the same challenging questions to push their thinking and learning. The goal should be higher order questions with a low linguistic demand.

Take this question for instance: Are seeds carried by the wind? This is low level recall, and can be answered with a simple yes or no. But with a little forethought and preparation instead we could ask this question: (holding up pictures) Which of these seeds would be carried more easily by the wind? In this case we are asking students to think critically about the different features of the seeds and how they might interact with the wind blowing. The linguistic demand is still incredibly low. Students can point and use high frequency or recently taught vocabulary to answer. Even a student going through the silent period can answer it by pointing, and another student justifying the response.

Another aspect of questioning is to give students a variety of ways to show what they know. Giving only essay tests, or only multiple choice tests, misses out on a number of other assessment types that might better highlight what a student really does know. So often traditional tests are designed to highlight what a student doesn't know more than what they do, so why not give alternative ways to demonstrate knowledge.

6. Summarizing
This is not so much of a reading strategy, but an important skill to work on with English learners that is coupled well with reading strategies. Summarizing is difficult for English language learners because of the vocabulary gap, and lack of mastery of various sentence structures that I have talked about previously. Seeing information in one way, and then having to break it down and put it into new words is challenging. Being able to summarize and paraphrase is an invaluable skill for language development. If you are struggling with reading comprehension it can be difficult to determine what is important and what is not, so this is a skill that needs explicit teaching and practicing.

It is important to emphasize that when summarizing:

• keep it short, and only tell what was read
• use key words from the text
• include only important information
• leave out less important details