> Bonita Could you give some examples of projects? This really intrigues me. Jennifer Maryland
Hi Jennifer, The projects we have used in the past, as I said in my email, were nifty, but not necessarily reading applicable in terms of grading/assessing. For instance--we read the book Dragon Rider as a class ( I know--whole class reading is not something we advocate on this list--that is for a different discussion)--The book is a fantasy quest and the characters travel around the world. We have the students design "baseball cards" to track fantasy creature characteristics, and they use a world map to follow the quest and describe--learn about the different settings in the story. While these activities are fun and allow students to tap into both characters and setting--I did not necessarily feel they provided good fodder for reading assessment. We could use the map to assess some geography understandings, as well as art, and writing. We could use the fantasy creature cards to assess some character development understanding, but not a wide berth of reading comprehension. What we did find is that the activities made students excited about the book and excited about comparing this fantasy book's characters and settings to others that they read independently or in literature circles. Nevertheless--reader's logs and comprehension questions were the best evidence of reader progress--I had envisioned that the projects would somehow provide that evidence, too, but alas it was not so. Now, in Gallagher's book--what he describes doing is this: He reads a book, play, or other thing that he wants to present to his seniors. He makes a two column brainstorm for himself. One column is what he thinks most students could get out of the text without his assistance. The second column is for writing what he thinks he, as a teacher, trained professional, highly honed reader, could bring to the text that students might not find without some guidance. Then--he picks "the things" he wants to address through the particular text. He picks a vocabulary "thing", a reading "thing" and a writing "thing". Those are the things he uses to design his assessment (which he tells his students about in advance of the reading--it might be anything from a broad essential question they must answer in an essay to a presentation or project of some sort that also addresses the essential question) AND those are the things he uses to design his instruction--like using Understanding by Design- -to some extent. What I loved is that Gallagher recognized that for every text there are a multitude of directions to go--so he brainstorms them all and then decides one small set of directions that he wants to focus upon. I tried this with the book "Frindle" at the beginning of this year. I picked 1) some words I wanted to explore: authority, power, discipline, etc. 2) a theme I wanted to examine in light of text evidence--which is the differences and similarities between power and authority and 3) I wanted to look at the use of punctuation to express ourselves (Frindle has all kinds of old and new forms of punctuation--great models for aspiring writers). I made some headway that I really liked as I taught this book--and I had some taste of sweet success most apparent in student discussion and shared anchor charts, although I just wasn't prepared enough to make the student learning and evidence progress entirely to the independent place that I had hoped. I hope to do better with our next shared genre--fantasy. Hope that answers your question... Probably just whets your apetite to read Gallagher's book:) -- Sincerely, Bonita DeAmicis California, Grade 5 _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org.
