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Monthly Archives: April 2006

A Year has Passed Since I Wrote My Note

Sunday, April 30, 2006

Walked out this morning, don’t believe what I saw Hundred billion bottles washed up on the shore Seems I’m not alone at being alone Hundred billion castaways, looking for a home I’ll send an s.o.s. to the world I’ll send an s.o.s. to the world I hope that someone gets my I hope that someone [...]

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Effective Teaching

Saturday, April 29, 2006

What is it that makes a teacher great? An article from The Age, Learning from the Best attempts to answer that question. The article references an Australian government-funded study, In Teachers’ Hands: Effective Teaching Practices in The Early Years of Schooling (2005). Given equal preparation and background knowledge, what are the qualities of a teacher [...]

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Reading Wars

Thursday, April 27, 2006

What bothers me about the Reading Wars is that they are political, not educational. Politicians empanel scientists to validate their beliefs about which methods are or are not effective, and then impose their views on teachers and students in the interests of what they claim to be a social need. [link to Reading War article [...]

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Who Knows Yet?

Monday, April 24, 2006

Vicki Davis has a great article about classroom blogging. She’s provided a bunch of links that I won’t have time to follow right away, and she touched on a subject that has been simmering on my back burner for a while now. As a teacher of elementary-aged students who have little experience as writers, very [...]

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5 Essential Strategies for Reading the Web

Sunday, April 23, 2006

When I started blogging about literacy education, I wasn’t focused on teaching reading with the internet. My assumption was that reading the web is essentially the same as any kind of reading. I’ve changed my mind about that. What follows is a lengthy, and perhaps overly academic analysis of reading theory applied to information and [...]

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Bearing Witness

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

I have an adult daughter who lives in San Francisco. She’s an actress, and she got involved with a street ministry called the Faithful Fools when she began performing a one-woman show called The Witness. I would have little understanding of what a street ministry was if she hadn’t sent me a book, Bearing Witness, [...]

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The Men That Don’t Fit In

Sunday, April 16, 2006

from The Bard of the Yukon, Robert Service There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest; Theirs [...]

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Democratic Tensions

Sunday, April 16, 2006

I started thinking about this after I read Nani’s, Se Hace Camino Al Andar post pointing to Deborah Meier’s article, Education for What? I didn’t know anything about Deborah Meier until a week ago when I read Jonathan Kozol’s Shame of the Nation, in which he mentioned Meier. I looked for more information about her, [...]

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Opening Fortune Poems

Thursday, April 13, 2006

After a couple of days ripping into the newspaper, it was time for the kids to create something with the words they collected. This was a crux move, and I confess I didn’t know quite how to make it happen. Groups had envelopes marked nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other, all with at least a few [...]

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Found Headline Poems

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

For anyone who has done this lesson or another one like it, I’d be interested in a reaction or suggestion because this is the first time I’ve taught a lesson on found poems. It’s not revolutionary or novel, except to me. My interest in teaching poetry this year was prompted by a new understanding of [...]

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