Eastlake Middle School

As promised – here are a couple vocabulary word infomercials written today by 8th graders in Eastlake Ohio.

The Sweetest Town on Earth

Just back from attending the Keystone State Reading Association conference in Hershey, PA. Where one actually can smell chocolate in the air.

I made the six hour drive through hill and dale to sign some books and do a session on my and Sara’s new vocabulary book. Here’s a short video of some Big Word poems created by some Pennsylvanian teachers who attended my workshop.

Now when we work on big words we are not talkin’ necessarily about long or hard to understand words – rather we mean words that carry a lot or meaning. Tier two words according to Beck (don’t worry if you don’t know the reference – it’s pedagogy stuff.)

I like to introduce this method of vocabulary acquisition with some words that are packed with meaning that the students already have some ideas about and once we have our lesson process established then we start introducing  content area vocabulary into the mix.

I'm headed to Eastlake Middle School tomorrow to work with my friend Libby Royko’s 8th graders where we will be writing some vocabulary word infomercials using words from their science class geology unit. So you can expect some rock star videos in the near future. in the meantime here’s a quick one from PA.

Another Satisfied Customer

 

One of the the thank you notes from St. Gabes. Kids have a way of keeping you humble.

High Definition Book Talk

The English Companion Ning is a really cool online community dedicated to English teachers.  Well, later this month their book club will be discussing my and Sara’s new book: High Definition. How excited are we about this?

We’re THIS excited

 

Click on the NING link above for more info.

St. Gabriel’s

 

 

So I returned to the grade school I graduated from almost 35 years ago for a visit and to talk with the kids about and work on public speaking skills with the kids. Amazingly, my fourth grade teacher is STILL there!

 

Thanks for having me guys!

Morocco

High Definition: Vocabulary-Building Strategies Across Genres and Subjects

Available as of TODAY!

Don’t forget to look in the basement…

This Summer had been a crazy busy one – New Zealand and Australia took up almost the whole month of July. Then as soon as we got back I had three days to try and adjust my body clock and I was off to San Antonio to present at an Institute headed up by Colorado comprehension strategy guru Ellin Keene.  Also there were Debbie Miller and Bruce Morgan. This is the second year I have participated in this event and once again I came away with a bunch of new ideas and had a really good session with some quick to laugh teachers.

  Debbie Miller and Bruce Morgan

Unfortunately my body had not yet  acclimated to the 14 hour time difference between Australia and home so  I survived on a couple two hour naps each day.  Add on to the sleep deprivation a series of unfortunate logistical events and things could have got ugly. But, in the end it all worked out, I stayed calm, carried on and was able leave Texas a little bit better teacher than when I arrived thanks to Ellin, Debbie and Bruce.

Directly from disembarking my plane when it landed in Cleveland I drove to Dayton where I keynoted the ending of a teacher workshop series put on by The Muse Machine of Dayton.  What a great organization consisting of teachers who integrate the arts into their curriculum. We had a swell time writing definition poems and memoir, plus I did a twenty minute reading of my own stuff. I hung around and went on a architectural walking tour and attended the awards luncheon at the swanky Dayton Racquet Club.

I was so busy I forgot to take some pictures.

So Now I am home for almost a month – there’s weeding to be done, bicycles to be ridden and just plain old relaxing on my calendar until September when Max and I set off for Morocco to do a little father and son mountain biking in the Atlas Mountains.

Speaking of bicycles – who knows what the title of this post is referring to?

Like, totally Rad(ford)

In Australia a college is not somewhere students go after high school as it is in the United States – the term refers to any school. Thus, Radford College in the Canberra suburb of Bruce (insert Monty Python Australia sketch here) is a K - 12 campus.

This school is the first really foreign school that Sara and I have worked in. When we work overseas we have always been in international schools – places where ex-pats, and locals looking to send their kids to US universities, send their kids in countries where the native language is not English. This time we were in an honest to goodness foreign school – part of the local system. Thanks to our friend Dan Ferri – these Aussies took a chance on a couple of poets from Cleveland Ohio.

You can see they gave us a manageable but busy schedule. As happens quite often our dance card filled up as teachers began talking about our visits into their classrooms and those who were sitting on the fence with a “wait and see” attitude decided they wanted to get in on some of this poetry action. So our schedule became loaded with crisscrossed lines and penciled in times as it evolved during our stay.

Like I said this is fairly common and understandable. Teachers are busy people and have a hard enough time getting to all their lessons and curriculum objectives and sometimes don’t feel there is time for poetry in their schedule. What Sara and I offer is a way that teachers can integrate poetry as a tool in their classroom – so while the finished product may be some sort of verse it still pushes their classroom goals forward and might I add, at a quicker pace than a five paragraph essay, a report, diorama, book report or any other of the myriad text types used for assessment. Ask the teachers at Radford about the narratives we wrote about the water cycle or the definition poems on democracy and you’ll find some recent converts to poetry as a practical classroom addition.

The students and teachers at Radford were engaged and enthusiastic, we visited classrooms of kids from third through 12^th grade and only went to the wrong building one time during our week long residency. Thankfully a breathless fifth grader found us and led us back to the right classroom. It is a whiplash inducing experience to go from a group of eight year olds writing about the toys in their bathtub to a class of 18 year old young men and women studying Plath and Hughes one right after the other but it’s also what makes our job so much fun.

We thoroughly enjoyed our visit and met some really dedicated professionals; including a 7^th grade science teacher who was carting around a pair of orphaned possums in her bag. So thanks to Peggy, Claire, Dylan, Therese, Dan and all the other folks we met during our stay. In the words of the school chaplain, “God bless you mob!”

That’s all I Canberra

What the Aussies lack in pronouncing of syllables in their words – they make up with over the top down under hospitality. After our charmed respite in Sydney I figured things couldn’t get much better and I was wrong. People went out of their way to be hospitable to us at every turn during our stay in the capital city Canberra.

Sara and I got in on a Sunday and weren’t slated to start working for real at Radford College until Thursday (we did visit a few classes on Monday to introduce ourselves to the staff and visited a couple classes to get the lay of the land) so we had a few days to explore the sprawling park like city. Where Sydney piled up tall against its harbor – Canberra spreads out in a radius from the parliamentary building, embassies intermixed with residences and forested parkland. The place is a biker or runners paradise and I took full advantage of the fact borrowing our friend and host, teacher and former NPR commentary star – Daniel Ferri’s mountain bike. Dan’s a re-planted Yankee (Chicagoan really) who now teaches at Radford (this all fits together eventually – trust me.)

 

Anyway – Canberra is nothing like Sydney – in fact it is for the birds. Birds like I’ve never seen in the wild before – parrots – cockatoos – magpies – ravens – swans – crazy looking pigeons with hats on, not to mention the bushy tailed possum that stared us down from a tree during an evening walk or the giant fruit bats with three foot wingspans who darted out from the shrubbery during that same constitutional. Add the kangaroos and rabbits I saw while biking and you’d have thought we were in a wildlife refuge – not the capital city of a whole country the size of the United States.

As for hospitality – on day one we went to the National Museum – the equivalent of our Smithsonian where we wandered about for an enjoyable couple of hours. The walk there was about an hour and a half and we were a bit tuckered out so we asked the lady at the info booth if she could help us obtain a taxi. She said she’s be more than happy to call but as she picked up the phone an older woman behind us poked her head out and said – never mind – I’ll drop them by. So our new friend Marjorie drove us home from the museum – giving us an impromptu tour of the embassies and a view of the gate to the prime minister’s house. In fact everywhere we went – museums – memorials – just walking on the streets – folks couldn’t have gone out of their way enough for us. This was certainly southern hospitality to the nth degree! Oh yeah – did mention that the bus drivers were just as likely to tell you to skip the fare as not?

So what’s up with the dropping of syllables in their words though? Canberra is pronounced Can-bra, Melbourne is Melb’n etc etc. Nobody could give me any explanations other than – that’s the way we do it mate. Of course this ruins the pun in my title but, keep on treating your visitors like you treated us and that’s good enough for me.