[Mentor Text Monday] I Heart Wired Magazine

Those of you that talk to me on any kind of a regular basis know about my love for Wired Magazine. I love every issue that comes out, and I thank my engineer friend for getting me a subscription. It's online as well,  but I truly enjoy the hard copy each month. Of course it isn't a perfect magazine (what??? impossible!), but I'm accepting of a periodical's growth areas.

I have narrowed down my Wired love-fest to four Mentor-Text-Monday-worthy reasons: Titles, Academic Language, Whole Text Structure and Text Complexity.

Titles

The article titles themselves serve as mentor texts for writing headers, titles, and punctuation for effect. Check out these intriguing titles:

See How Cadbury Hatches 350 Million Goo-Filled Eggs a Year

Are Touch Screens Melting Your Kids Brain?

Ridiculous New UFO Poll Reveals … Nothing Important

This Ex-Astronaut is Stalking Asteroids to Save Civilization

How to Make Fake Brains and Survive the Zombie Apocalypse

Academic Language

Wired Magazine does not shy away from academic language. Using a super-cool tool called WordSift (thank you Kenji Hakuta and Greg Wientjes of Stanford University and the SDAWP Fellow that shared this with me), I was able to sift through the text for various kinds of academic lanaguge.

Whole Text Strucutres

There are also some fascinating mentors for whole text structures:

Bird flipbooks made from old clocks and bike parts

A photo study on the earth's relationship with water

Chased by a Zombie
A Physics problem using zombies. Need I say more?

Text Conmplexity

The text in Wired Magazine is of a high level. I took one text--the body of a short article accompanying a graphic--and ran it through some text analyzers. This text, Science Graphic of the Week: 5.3 Million Years of Sea Level Change on One Cliff Face, was especially high. There is a variety, but expect to find texts that push the limits for your students.

So there you have it. four excellent reasons to go online and spend some time reading Wired Magazine articles. You'll learn at leas tone interesting thing, I promise!

Linking up to Mentor Text Monday on SDAWP Voices.

[Lesson Ideas] Magically Delicious

Here is a presentation I made to help me introduce the concept of Magic Realism at Young Writers Camp.  Feel free to use it, and all images and links should either go directly to the source, or have enough information to identify the source. Please also give appropriate credit to sources if you use this--it's the right thing to do.

Link to Magic Realism Presentation online

See also:

Imagine a Place by Sarah L. Thompson with the art of Rob Gonzalves 

Imagine a Day by Sarah L. Thompson with the art of Rob Gonzalves 

Imagine a Place by Sarah L. Thompson with the art of Rob Gonzalves 

If... by Sarah Perry

It's a good day when...

T'was the first day back from a two-week vay-cay.  All the punkin' heads were reading their books.  Ms. M. notices A. leafing a little too quickly through his and questions his actions.  A. replies, "I'm looking for a hyphenated modifier." And he was!

It's a good day when one of your little turtle doves learns something you taught them, remembers it, and then uses it later, yes?

Hyphenated Modifiers are one of the "Smiley Face Tricks" presented by MaryEllen Ledbetter in her books, activities, and trainings.  I have used Smiley Face Tricks in my classroom, in my teaching of writing, and in my teaching of writing about reading for many years.  They make language accessible to students and give us a common language we can use to discuss our reading and writing.   

Hyphenated Modifiers, or hyphenated compound words, are often a class favorite.  It's a fancy-pants word (see what I did there?) that reminds them of the kinds of things teachers say all the time.  It is more true than we like to believe that students hear their teachers much like Charlie Brown hears his: "wah-wah wah-wah-wah wah." The students I teach have often decided that all of that "teacher talk" is garbage and is fully designed to make them feel foolish.  By the time I get them, any academic vocabulary I might use sends their brains in to la-la land, and I may as well be reading from a college-level physics text.  Seriously--even words like verb, noun, period, apostrophe, indent.  You'd be shocked.

By teaching them the "trick" of the hyphenated modifier, I can give them some of their power back. Learning a five-star word (see what I did there?) like "HYPHENATED MODIFIER" is kind of like opening the door on the rest of those words they never took the time to understand.  It's a word they've probably never heard, their parents may not have heard, and they have almost never been abused with on a test. Once they catch on, they feel like they know something special.  Then I sneak in some others--figurative language, adjective, compound word, syllable. 

So today was a big win.  A. used the term on his own to describe a word he was looking for.  He's ready for the big stuff now, right?  As long as I can keep him from climbing under the table, I think I'll start on complete sentences tomorrow!

Reading Cards

Today's story is not a silly one, it's a method I use in class that is successful more often than it is not.

A key to the success of any caped teacher is giving the students choices--enough choice to feel they are in control of their learning. I use these reading project cards to do that when we read a class novel, individual novel or stories.

Each color is a different kind of project or question:

Blue:  Writing Forms

Blue cards give directions for writing assignments. These are typically between one and three pages, and have the requirements listed on each.  Some of the most popular blue cards are 

• Write a Character Simile Poem.
• Prepare a list of questions to determine whether or not someone has read this book carefully.
• Write a letter to the main character of the book asking questions, showing support, or making complaints about situations in the book.

Red: Grammar Tools

Red cards practice grammar exercises.   They are short and relatively simple.  These card are an attempt to get the students to interact with the words on the page.  Favorites are:

• Find three examples of figurative language in the book, list them, and tell what kind of figurative language they are.
• Find five double-consonant words in the book.
• Alphabetize the words from your two favorite sentences in the book.

Green: Thinking

Green cards are questions that will encourage deeper thinking skills about the book or story.  The answers are typically written in a paragraph. For example:

• Write a new title for your book and explain why this is your choice.
• What was the most exciting or interesting part of the book?  Why?
• If you had enough money, what one object, thing, or place would you buy from the book and why?
• If you had written this book, what one part would you write differently?  Why?

Yellow: Projects

These are the most popular cards.  The students have grand ideas about what they will do, and, hopefully, they are successful!

• Create a set of maps from your story.  They can be 3-D, topographic, road maps, trail maps, or something else. 
• Make a comic book version or an animated version (using Alice.com or stop-motion animation) of your book.
• Make a travel brochure for your book.

When I use these cards, I assign the students a particular number of cards.  The 8th graders are reading Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell.  I assigned them 2 Red cards, a green card, and a choice between a yellow and blue card.  They shuffled through the decks and picked their cards.   This takes some organization, and some pre-teaching, but watching them work on the different pieces, and hearing their conversations about the books is proof that learning is happening.


Projects from Island of the Blue Dolphins--a pastel of the cover of the book and a clay model of the boat the white men used:

Projects from Because of Winn Dixie--a small replica of the guitar Otis plays to calm the animals made from cardboard and duct tape, a cardboard and clay replica of the WInn-Dixie store and the scene where Winn-Dixie knocks over the fruit.

The Littmus Lozenge

We are reading the book Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo.  In it, Miss Franny Block tells the story of Littmus W. Block, who created the Littmus Lozenge.  The Littmus Lozenge has a secret ingredient--sorrow.  Opal and Amanda share their great sadnesses with Miss Franny Block.  I asked the class to write down their great sadness:

"When my grandma died, and I never met my mom's mom or dad, and my Dad having diabetes."

"That I don't know my real dad."

"That my dad left my mom and I."

"If I don't make it to college"

"One of my family members died in the wild fire."

"I sad because I didn't go to my little cousins birthday and these is my first year I didn't go to her birthday." [sic]

"I'm sad because barney is a dinosaur that gets paid in clipped toenails."

"Leaving all my friend at PKMS."

"Getting taken away from my mom, being in foster care, and not seeing my mom and family on my birthday which is today."

"I am sad that I am adopted and I don't get to see my birth family.  I have a lot more sadnesses but I'm not going to share them."