In the spring of 2012, a group of English Language Arts educators from Franklin, Massachusetts launched a highly successful middle school reading program around THE HUNGER GAMES. In this five-part special series, the teachers who orchestrated the whole-school read will detail, step-by-step, this year’s initiative. The first installment offers a look into how the team made their book selection.

Last year, a dedicated group of literature lovers loaded four school buses with 224 impassioned middle schoolers and sallied forth to the local movie theatre. Our goal was greater than just simple movie-viewing; we were there to celebrate reading and the power of a good book.

In the weeks that followed, those 224 were joined by 36 additional readers, bringing participation to almost 50% of the total school population. Two hundred and sixty sixth, seventh, and eighth graders took part in competitions of mind (trivia), body (relay races), and spirit (talent show) to crown a victor in the 2012 Horace Mann Middle School Hunger Games.

Through circumstances outside of the Gamemakers’ control, two victors ended with the crown (how fitting!), and even before the feathers from Effie’s boa had been swept away, the questioning began: what book were we going to do next year?

The citizens of the Capital (a.k.a. the teachers who worked like crazy to pull of this insanely successful festival of literacy) were thrilled and exhausted at the same time. So, we did what all good exhausted teachers do: we asked the kids for help.

The boys in my homeroom told me I just HAD to read the Charlie Higson Enemy series. An eighth grade girl gushed about her excitement about the upcoming young adult novel Jodi Picoult wrote with her daughter Samantha Van Leer, BETWEEN THE LINES. The daughter of my daughter’s soccer coach recommended MATCHED by Ally Condie. The kids came to us with old favorites and future classics: Eric Morgenstern’s NIGHT CIRCUS and DIVERGENT by Veronica Roth made the list. My own 10-year-old daughter suggested Sharon Draper's OUT OF MY MIND and Kathryn Erskine’s MOCKINGBIRD. About the only recommended book we didn’t take into consideration was FIFTY SHADES OF GREY!

It took probably eight weeks for us to arrive at “the” book for our next reading initiative, and it wasn’t one that was on the original brainstorming list. See, here’s the thing. Some of the books were too violent. Some appealed too much to just girls or just boys. Some, while beautiful stories chock full of teachable moments, were written at a reading level perhaps not challenging enough for eighth grade.

We found ourselves devising a way to do a school-wide reading initiative without all of the kids reading the same book. We talked about working around the question “Where do you belong?” since the answer to that question could be tied to the plot and themes of BETWEEN THE LINES, DIVERGENT, OUT OF MY MIND, and MATCHED. We envisioned smaller, teacher-led book clubs in which students created ways to present their book to the others, leading to students switching groups and reading new titles. We could find a movie, not necessarily an adaptation of a book, dealing with the theme of the importance of finding where one belongs. While it didn’t feel like something that would draw in 50% of the school population, we decided it was an acceptable solution.

And then Erin, reading specialist extraordinaire, met with the principal.

They were there to discuss goals, and he had two words for her, words that have since become a sort of mantra for the teachers involved in the school-wide reading initiative: “Six buses.”

That goal, that challenge, was invigorating and instilled us with new direction. We couldn’t settle. We had to do more than just come up with a follow up to THE HUNGER GAMES; we had to eclipse THE HUNGER GAMES. No small task, indeed.

Given our marching orders, we began our search anew. We needed a story that lent itself to big, fun activities. We needed a book with a strong fan base and a movie with a lot of buzz to suck in readers, non-readers, and the kids who just love being involved in big, fun stuff.

In short, we needed THE HOBBIT.

Deciding on the title was the hard part. Our experiences last year gave us insight into motivating masses of middle schoolers. It turns out the way to middle schoolers’ hearts is to show them themselves on a TV screen. We started with a “Do You Remember?” video, aired over the school video team news, showing pictures of kids enjoying the movie and games last year. The three minute presentation prompted students to recall the fun they’d had and imagine the excitement in store. It ended with “Be Ready for Anything.”

Once the video was shown, we let the rumor mill take over for a day or two. Students could talk of little else. They interrupted class to ask if I knew the book. They grilled me in homeroom and in the halls.

“You have to tell A-period! We’re your favorite!”

“C’mon. Just tell me. I won’t tell anyone!”

We even had staff members asking to be let in on the secret. (We didn’t divulge. One leak and the surprise would be ruined. We didn’t make any new friends that way, but I’m pretty sure most folks understood.) One seventh-grade math teacher was so beleaguered by students who couldn’t stop debating the title of the mystery book long enough for her to teach her lesson that she gave in and allowed twenty minutes for debate. A poll was taken asking which title the kids thought most likely, the results graphed and posted in the hallway.

Two days after the video, Erin took her camera into the cafeteria and asked students to predict the title. The overwhelming majority thought we’d be reading CATCHING FIRE. Thankfully, they willfully ignored the handful of obsessive eighth grade girls who have the movie premiere date etched into their brains and would proclaim to anyone who would listen that the movie wouldn’t be in theaters until fall of 2013. Those interviews were made into another video that was aired for the whole school to watch, and it ended with the news that “The Reveal is Coming.”

That night, the walls of the school were mysteriously decorated with posters written in runes. They said things like, “Get ready for an adventure,” “Don’t be left behind!” and “Read the book, answer the riddles, see the movie.” As I stood in the hall outside my classroom, I heard conjecture: “Those are Greek letters! It has to be a Percy Jackson book.” My morning classes were all pretty convinced that we were either going to show THE LIGHTENING THIEF in the auditorium, or that SEA OF MONSTERS would be in theatres before the end of the school year.

But by mid-day I started to hear rumblings of THE HOBBIT: “Those are runes. I KNOW they’re runes. I’m gonna translate it when I get home. I bet it’s THE HOBBIT.” By the end of the day the tide had turned, and more students were guessing THE HOBBIT than ever, letting us know that the time for the reveal was upon us, if earlier than we’d originally planned.

The next day, Erin took to the airwaves and read the following:

Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea

Brave students of Horace Mann Middle School, you are invited to join in an adventure. The road is long, and the perils are many, but the rewards at the end are beyond measure. Join your classmates, teachers, and friends in reading J. R. R. Tolkien’s original adventure story, THE HOBBIT. Participants will need to prove their mettle, and only those deemed worthy will journey to a distant land to celebrate with a viewing of the feature film. Challenges, both physical and mental, await those sturdy enough to survive the journey there and back again.

Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day
To claim our long-forgotten gold.

The kids reacted to the news with middle-school appropriate responses ranging from glee to skepticism. We are lucky this year; last year’s successes make it easier for us to get partners in crime. The local paper has already been to the school once. The local bookstore sent swag our way. The public library reserved all the copies of the book from in-network libraries, and our PCC bought copies to augment the school library. We’ve even been in contact with reps from Warner Brother’s films.

With all this support, our attention can be spent on keeping student interest high between now and December 14th. It’s too much for one post, but I’ll happily share it with you as we muddle along. Until then, best of luck plotting your school-wide reading adventure!

Mary Cotillo is an 8th grade ELA teacher at Horace Mann Middle School in Franklin, MA. Mother to two children, she enjoys engaging in light saber battles and hanging out on soccer fields. She earned her National Board Certification in 2009.

 

Teaching Tips: How THE HUNGER GAMES Got a Whole School Reading

Beyond the Notebook: Studying Semantics with Tim O’Brien

Take a closer look at the words students find difficult to access, and you’ll see that a majority of them contain one or more letters with variable pronunciations, such as the “o” of on, off, often; in only, once, other; or the “ough” in thought, through, tough. Sure, in the very early stage of learning to read, some children have other problems, such as reversing the letters “b” and “d,” or difficulty blending the sounds of letters into words. But the most common stumbling block tends to be the phonic irregularity of many English graphemes.

If all English graphemes had just one pronunciation, like the “ee” of keep, sleep, deep, Anglophone children would learn to read much faster than they currently do. Instead of needing an average of three years to become proficient readers, they would require merely one, as users of other alphabetically written languages do (Seymour et al, 2003, British Journal of Psychology).

In the 1960s and ’70s, the schools which experimented with the Initial Teaching Alphabet (ITA)—a more regular spelling system for English—found that nearly all pupils were fluent by the end of their first school year. Nearly all learned to write quite confidently in one year, too.

Unfortunately, children had to leave the utopia of ITA at the end of their first school year and switch to normal spelling. For the ablest readers, this caused only a minor setback. They were quickly steaming ahead again. Changing from regular to irregular spellings was very detrimental to the progress of the weakest learners, the ones whose poor literacy progress tends to cause most concern. Perhaps prolonged use of regular phonics, before exposure to common irregularities, has the same effect on some children now?

Just over half of all English words contain some unpredictably used letters (cut, come, couple). Half of those pose reading difficulties as well, particularly the most used ones (one, to, four—cf. bone, go, our).

Helping children cope with phonic inconsistencies is the hardest part of English reading instruction. For the majority of children, parents are the main providers of this help, by patiently listening to them read on a regular basis and gently helping them to access the words they keep getting stuck on, such as should, shoulder, touch.

After umpteen encounters with such words, children eventually learn to read them as wholes, on sight, just as they do when learning to put names to faces. But for pupils who don’t get much help with learning to read at home, who have to make do with just what they get at school, those words are much more troublesome.

Their difficulties made me look for a way of making them a little less dependent on one-to-one help at school. Working as a voluntary assistant with struggling six-year-old readers, I did not merely help them to access the words they found tricky. I noted down all the ones which tripped them up in their remedial lessons with me.

photo: J. Robertson via photopin cc

The words differed slightly between individuals. One girl, for example, kept getting exceptionally stuck on the word “father.” Mostly, the same few dozen words with irregular spellings (e.g. group, soup, touch; break, bread; friend, field) were causing problems for all of the weaker readers, and for very obvious reasons.

This led me to test how the children would cope with them when they were respelt more simply (groop, soop, tuch, brake, bred; frend, feeld). Finding that they could read them easily, I began to use such respellings for helping them to learn to read the tricky words at home.

I would fold a sheet of paper in half and write down the words which stumped them in one of our lessons as a column. I then opened up the sheet and respelled them more simply opposite. For example:

thought	thaut
believed	beleevd
through	throo
washed	wosht
said	sed
people	peepl
could	cuhd

I respelled them using the main English spelling patterns for those sounds, but this was impossible for words like could; because the short /oo/ sound has no unique spelling of its own (put, foot, woman, would—cut, root, wobble, wound). I therefore spelt it , and the pupils had no difficulty learning that stood for short /oo/.

I gave them the sheet, with never more than seven words, to take home for revising in their own time. They were instructed to try and read them with their correct spellings and to use the respellings only for checking that they were getting them right, or to help them out if they could not do so.

Their reading quickly improved noticeably. One girl kept asking why we could not spell like that all the time, since it made reading so much easier, and I used to reply that that was a very long story. But if it was up to me, we would be amending at least some of the spellings which cause predictable reading difficulties for nearly all children.

Chinese children learn to read with the Roman alphabet first. They then learn to memorize the difficult Chinese pictograms with the aid of alphabetic subheadings, until they can dispense with them. Using simpler respellings for tricky English words is a similar method—and one we can use to help struggling readers cope with them as best we can.

Masha Bell is a retired English teacher and independent literacy researcher. She’s the author of the e-book SPELLING IT OUT: THE PROBLEMS AND COSTS OF ENGLISH SPELLING (2012). You can visit her on the web at www.EnglishSpellingProblems.co.uk.

[The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the International Reading Association or its Board of Directors.]

photo: Enokson via photopin cc

Serious readers know that reading is a private affair. They engage their mind with an unseen voice that comes invitingly across those white pages with black symbols on them. Serious readers don't need lures, or need to be enticed to explore the pleasures reading can bring.

But what about unserious readers? Those who have not discovered the joy in letting one's eyes rove along verbal paths, sometimes for hours at a time?

Teachers can enhance the reading process so that, in time, the reluctant reader becomes what Urie Bronfenbrenner describes as a self-connoisseur—an individual who has found that learning is its own reward. Once "hooked," reluctant readers need no further enticements to listen to those unseen voices. They are driven to read and to learn for the sheer pleasure of discovery.

To facilitate such discovery, I like to use the pairs- or group-approach to develop reading skills. Here are a few examples of how I do that.

Have them determine MSF’s (Most Significant Facts).

Give students a few minutes to make note of the two most significant facts they have learned in the assigned reading materials. Then ask them to partner up and tell each other what they’ve written.

The next step requires the partners to find two other people who combined have written four facts, at least three of which must differ significantly from what the original pair of partners wrote. Once the four have formed their own team, give them some time to discuss what they wrote and why.

Use an outline.

Next comes the outline—a BIG outline. It should summarize the main points from a fact-filled passage each child has read. Attach the outline to the wall, and then have a representative from each team come up and write a fact from memory, related to one of the points on the outline. (No notes allowed!) If the writer gets stuck, he can call for help from his group members.

Option: This activity can be done in the form of a relay race. Each person on a team will write one fact, and pass the baton (colored marker) to the next person. The challenge comes after the first person on each team has written one fact: subsequent writers are not allowed to repeat anything that has already been written. Make sure each team has the same number of players. Award points and give the winning team a night off from homework as their reward. If a child writes an inference rather than a fact, the team loses two points.

Assemble and moderate a panel.

You can ask for volunteers. You can make appointments. You can require every group to participate. No matter how you get the people on the panel, though, the “rules of review” will be the same:

• You will pose a question related to a passage the whole class has read.
• The panelists will respond.
• You will intervene if the debate becomes too heated or if any one person is long-winded.
• You will call on those who are not contributing and ask for their opinions. (Tell them you are not doing this to force them to share their ideas, but rather, because you know that the best ideas are often found in the quietest people. Let them know you would appreciate their input.)
• You will involve the audience at appropriate times.
• You will summarize the work of the panel at the end and draw connections to the reading passage.

Tip: Master the art of the segue so you can make the discussion flow seamlessly and easily from one person to another, from one topic to another. It won’t be as easy as you think. Practice by asking a friend to carry on a conversation with you. At the end of his first sentence, you still step in. You’ll take the last word he spoke and use it as the first word in your response. Or take two totally unrelated words and find a common link between them.

• Practice example: “December” and “memory”
• How to segue between them: “T. S. Eliot said that April is the cruelest month of all. But those of you who live in Buffalo, New York, have winter memories, I suspect, that show December has its own kind of cruelty.”

You might even take two unrelated words and ask for a volunteer to relate them in terms of a specific character from a book the class is reading. The rest of the class can decide if the segue was good, great, or golden.

photo: mbeo via photopin cc

Pop-quiz them.

Quizzes can be used for more than just finding out how much learners have learned. They can also be used to remind learners of what they should have learned. And you don’t have to take time to write the quiz out in advance: the “pop” should apply to both your and their willingness to carpe the diem.

Tip: As we cover the material in the book, handout, or curriculum, I pencil in a number in the Instructor’s Guide, next to a point I want them to remember. When I hit ten or twenty, I tell them it’s time for a pop quiz. Then, I just go back to the first penciled number and pop the question. Do all ten and you have an easy 100-point quiz, with each question worth ten points (five each, if you have twenty questions).

Draw the outline of a body on flipchart paper…

…and post it on a wall. Depending on the size of the class, have large groups go up, markers in hand, and write one fact somewhere on the body, a fact related to a reading passage they have all studied. First, though, explain what all of the body parts represent:

Head: Here they will record something that increased their knowledge of the subject.
Heart: Here they will record something about which they feel strongly, perhaps even passionately.
Hands: Here they will record a hands-on activity and what they learned from it.
Legs: Here they will record something that “has legs.” In other words, something that they will continue to use or will share with others.
Feet: Here they will record something that they will take immediate action on.

Tip: If you’re going to have students trace each other’s bodies on the flipchart paper, make sure to have them use pencil or washable marker—never a permanent marker (unless you’re ready to make some parents permanently cranky with you!)

Marlene Caroselli, Ed.D. writes extensively about education topics. Among her books on the subject are 500 CREATIVE CLASSROOM CONCEPTS and THE CRITICAL THINKING TOOL KIT.



Teaching Tips: Grammar Games to Deliver Fun and Confidence

In Other Words: Kids Must Taste Academic Fun!