Opening Minds ~ Chapters 1-3

It is finally time to read Opening Minds by Peter Johnston. I always reread parts of Choice Words (another of his books) every summer to refresh my thinking about the language I use with my students so I was excited to learn he had written another book on this topic. So far this book has been all that I had hoped for. It is a short book but one that needs to be read slowly in order to provide time for the ideas inside to really sink in and become (hopefully) part of my own speech.

The first chapter sets the stage for thinking about the language we use with our students and just how important every word we use can be. I love the idea of shifting from the negative "I can't do this" to the more positive "I can't do this yet" with just the addition of one single word. This one word has the power to reshape the attitude of the person. While I do work hard to apply this when speaking with my students, I realized that I need to continue to work on applying it to myself. "Using this language does not come easily to me yet."

Chapter 2 explains the difference between the fixed-performance frame and the dynamic-learning frame from Carol Dweck's research and subsequent book, Mindset. People using fixed-performance frame type of thinking usually assume that ability or intelligence is fixed or you are born with skills or abilities in certain areas. Those with the dynamic-learning frame believe that ability or intelligence is always changing and is especially influenced by hard work. The language that we use with our students can put them into one frame or the other. Our goal should be to use language that moves students to the dynamic-learning frame because they will feel more control or agency over their learning and more open to doing things to that will help them learn.

In the third chapter, Peter Johnston talks about the value of change and stability. Understanding that we change as we grow and learn helps students see that they have control over what and how they learn. Stability in the form of a routine (that can be changed at times) is good because students need routine and structure so that they can be free to explore and change their thinking.


Things I Want to Remember/Practice in my Teaching

• Remind myself that "Using this language does not come easily to me yet."
• Use language that points out the ways that students are changing. "Remember how we did this at the beginning of the year...", "Have you learned a new way to solve this problem?", "Do you notice how we have increased our reading stamina?", etc.
• Use language that gives students a sense of agency or control over their own learning.
• Continue to have a regular daily routine and discuss any changes to the routine with the class before they happen.

My biggest hope is that this type of language will begin to permeate all of my interactions with my students. I am looking forward to reading the rest of the book and the thinking of others in their blog posts or comments.  Cathy Mere is hosting the conversation today. Please drop by her blog, Reflect and Refine: Building a Learning Community to join us.

Opening Minds ~ Schedule of Events
We would love to have you read and chat with us. The schedule for the event is:

July 11: Chapters 1-3 Hosted by Cathy Mere at Reflect and Refine: Building a Learning Community

July 18: Chapters 4-6 Hosted by me here at My Primary Passion

July 25: Chapters 7-9 Hosted by Laura Komos at Our Camp Read-A-Lot

July 26: Twitter Chat using #cyberPD - time still to be determined

How to Participate
There are several ways to participate. You can:

• post your thoughts about each section of the book on your own blog. Then add the link to your post in the comment section of the host blog.
• simply add your thoughts as a comment on the host blog (or any of the blogs).
• share your thinking on Twitter using #cyberPD at any time during the month.
• add your thoughts and comments to Cathy's Wallwisher page on Opening Minds
• come up with your own way to participate and add to the discussion.

Opening Minds ~ Book Chat

Last year Cathy Mere, Laura Komos and I hosted an online book chat about the book Conferring by Patrick Allen. We all learned so much by reading together and sharing out thoughts that we decided to do it again this year. After sharing all of our summer professional reading book stacks, we noticed that many of us had the book Opening Minds by Peter Johnston in our stacks. So that will be the book that we will be reading and sharing this summer.

We would love to have you read and chat with us. The schedule for the event is:

July 11: Chapters 1-3 Hosted by Cathy Mere at Reflect and Refine: Building a Learning Community

July 18: Chapters 4-6 Hosted by me here at My Primary Passion

July 25: Chapters 7-9 Hosted by Laura Komos at Our Camp Read-A-Lot

July 26: Twitter Chat using #cyberPD - time still to be determined

There are several ways to participate. You can:

• post your thoughts about each section of the book on your own blog. Then add the link to your post in the comment section of the host blog.
• simply add your thoughts as a comment on the host blog (or any of the blogs).
• share your thinking on Twitter using #cyberPD at any time during the month.
• come up with your own way to participate and add to the discussion. 

We can't wait for the conversation to begin and hope that you will decide to join us. It is a great way to do a little summer professional development and it is a great way to "meet" new friends and colleagues. 

Math Workshop and Explore Time - Follow Up

Math Workshop ~ Follow Up
I thought that I should do just a bit more follow up on how a couple of things that I tried this year went. I wrote about wanting to change my math time into a math workshop time that would be similar to a reader's workshop or writer's workshop here. Then I followed that up with another post on how things were going here. Things have not changed too much since that last post. I did add one more day a week where I veered from the regular Everyday Math curriculum and went more in-depth on a topic or taught it in a different way.

The year ended up with my math block having three days of regular Everyday Math curriculum and content, one day of Math Exchanges and one day of Math Extensions. I am pretty happy with how this worked out. We still "covered" all of the Everyday Math curriculum for first grade but we added so much more - deeper thinking, collaboration on solving problems and looking at problems in various ways to solve them. At this point, I plan to follow the same format next year. We will start the year with Everyday Math curriculum every day and then about mid-year, we will begin to add in Math Exchanges and Math Extensions. I love how my students responded to the challenges of Math Exchanges and Math Extensions. We were all better mathematicians because of it.

Explore Time ~ Follow Up
Another big idea that I wanted to try this year was Explore Time. I wrote about that here. I did manage to have one Explore Time this year  and it went very well but after that, it was just too difficult to find the time. At my school we have so many wonderful "extras" that we do that our days are just packed. Some of these "extras" include Expeditionary Learning, drumming circles, portfolios, Adventure Education, overnight Voyages, All School Meetings, Morning Meetings, Closing Circles and much more. All of these are very valuable but they require a lot of time out of our day.

I know that we make time for the things that we value and I do value giving students choice so I am reworking my plan for Explore Time. I think that next year instead of having a block of time that is dedicated to exploring, I will add an explore center to our center times during the day. During my Readers's Workshop, we have a chunk of time during which we have centers. These are not traditional centers with pre-made activities for students to complete. My centers are a little like Daily 5 work stations where students have different ways to read, write and work with words. I also have a couple of math centers and centers related to our Expedition. I think I will add a new center or two next year. I might add a Wonder Center, an Explore Center and/or a Building Center. In this way, I can give students more time to explore and make choices but within the time frame that we already have set up.

Writing

So this post is mainly just for me because I wanted a way to keep track of these ideas visually and in a way that I can refer back to later.

I am having all of those "ahhhh" feelings that happen to first grade teachers at the end of the year. The students have grown so much that they are sometimes not recognizable. I want to keep track of this feeling and the knowledge of how far they have come to refer back to next year when we are in the middle of the year and we are all working so hard to make this growth happen. This post will inspire me to keep plugging along and working at it.

I am mostly just going to post photos with a few sentences to tell about what growth I see in each photo. There will be samples from all types of writers. I will still see many things to teach each child but I will also see just how far each child has come. So here goes.

This writer is combining things she learned in math, art, our bee study during our Expedition and writing.

This writer used an idea from a book we read as a mentor text and tried fold out illustrations.

This writer used The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer as a mentor text to create this book called, The Frog Room.

This student attempts to add descriptive language to her story to create a setting.

Another writer was inspired by The Salamander Room by Anne Mazer.

This writer was inspired to try a technique she noticed in Ready Freddy books. She added a hidden word to each illustration in her book. She hid the word "life" in each picture because it went with the theme of her book.

This writer was inspired to write his own version of a Fly Guy story.

This writer tried many things on this page - bold print, quotation marks and stretching out a word for emphasis.

This student combined two ideas into a new book of his own creation. He read Wump World by Bill Peet and the play Willy Wonka (that was put on at our school this year) to come up with his own story about The Wonka World.

This writer tried circling words that didn't look right to him and also using all uppercase letters for emphasis.

This student uses descriptive language in his story - "It was a peaceful and calm planet."

This writer had a different way of adding a foldout illustration to his story.

One of our school's character traits showed up in this illustration. This writer shows you what the world would look like with stewardship of the Earth and without.

This writer found his passion in writing. He struggled to come up with ideas all year until we wrote nonfiction. He is working on a series of nonfiction books. So far he has written about worms, bees and frogs. He is taking what he learns during our Expedition and incorporating it into his writing.

Every writer in my crew is not represented here. These are just photos that represent what many of the writers are attempting at this point in the year and will remind me of what things inspire first grade writers next year.

Summer Professional Reading

Even though the school year is not quite finished yet - this will be my last week - I am starting to think about what professional books I want to read this summer. My mind is spinning with end-of-the-year details but I know that soon I will let it all go and be ready to read and think about next year.

Last year around this time, I was on Twitter and chatting with Laura Komos and Cathy Mere about summer reading plans and we decided to have an online book club of sorts. We decided on a book, Conferring by Patrick Allen, and started #cyberPD. For our #cyberPD, we took turns hosting conversations about parts of the book on our respective blogs and had a twitter chat when we finished. Many people joined in and it turned out to be a great experience.

We are planning on doing it again this year. So to get things started, we have decided to share our summer professional reading book stacks and see what we have in common.

 

You can probably see that I have already been reading bits and pieces of some of these books by the sticky notes sticking out of the top of the books. These are all books that I really want to dive into this summer and read deeply instead of just skimming and scanning them.

I also always reread Choice Words by Peter H. Johnston every summer to really prepare myself for the new school year. This year I think I will add two other books, Math Exchanges and Catching Readers Before They Fall,  to my reread pile because they also really reflect my personal teaching philosophy. 

If you have a summer professional reading book stack, please share it in the comments below or on Twitter using #cyberPD. I am always looking for great books to add to my stack. Cathy, Laura and I will be filling you in on the details of this summer's #cyberPD soon.

Be sure to visit Cathy's blog, Reflect and Refine: Building a Learning Community and Laura's blog, Our Camp Read-A-Lot to see their summer reading book stacks.

Addicted

Yesterday I tweeted the following:

Kathy Cassidy responded with this tweet:

I haven't been able to stop thinking about what she said. I completely agree with her that first grade teachers are addicted to that progress and that it is not the same in any other grade. It is certainly true for me. I have taught grades 3, 4, 5, 6, and 8 in addition to 1st grade and I can say that students do show lots of growth in those grades but Kathy is right -- it is just different in 1st grade. The change in 1st graders from the beginning of the year to the end is quite dramatic. I find myself awed when I take a moment to step back and just watch them. I have been able to capture a few of those moments recently.

This moment is the one that I tweeted about yesterday. Cole had a new book from our school's book fair and was reading it to a group of kids during snack time. This happened several days in a row.

Then on Friday, I was conferring with students during Writer's Workshop and just happened to notice how very engaged all of the students were. I jumped up and grabbed my iPad to capture the moment. We have come so far since the beginning of the year. They are all so independent now and have many ideas that they want to write about and share. As I was walking around I also noticed how much their writing has changed over the year - conventions, content, handwriting - all of it is vastly different from where we started in the beginning of the year.

These are the moments we live for as teachers. They keep us motivated and inspired. We need to be sure to take the time to find these moments in each day.

Explore Time

Darn, darn, darn, darn*! I have yet another idea that I can't get out of my head and I think I need to try to make it fit somehow into my day. Darn! I have always (since my college days) wanted to have an Explore time in my classroom but I have always convinced myself that I could never make time for it or that it would be a management nightmare but after recently reading the blog posts below by Katie Keier and Kassia Omohundro Wedekind, I really just can't let go of the idea. I forwarded the posts on to the kindergarten teachers at my school trying to tell myself that if they did this then the kids would have this experience and I would be off the hook but I still can't let it go. I was able to convince myself to let it go years ago when Debbie Miller wrote about it in her book Reading with Meaning by telling myself that there was just no time for it. Then Jennifer Orr posted her Encienda presentation from Educon on her blog and it was all about giving students meaningful choices. She has also written about the value of play several times on her blog. All of these posts along with my own beliefs are forcing me to think about when and how I can add more of this type of Explore time into our day at school. These posts, along with Jennifer's Encienda presentation, have inspired me:

Explore

Literacy Explore 

Math Explore-Investigate-Choice

Playing with the Big Kids

I am thinking that I could have an Explore time as the activity part of our morning meeting - maybe one or two days a week. Darn, I just figured out the "when" now I have to work on the "how".

 

* I say "darn" but I am actually really happy about all of this thinking that these wonderful educators have led me to do on this snow day off from school.