Title Talk Sunday Night - Writing About Reading

Sunday night I am excited to guest host the monthly chat, #titletalk, on Twitter with Colby Sharp (@colbysharp). Donalyn is out of town at the amazing ALA Annual Convention, so Colby kindly asked if I could join him. What I am even more excited about is that our topic is Writing About Reading.

Writing about reading is something I’ve struggled with for the past few years. When I was self-contained, it wasn’t an issue. My students wrote me letters each week, I wrote them back. My letters in return were thoughtful, lengthy, and really – in my opinion – beneficial to the students. Enter semi-departmentalization.

In teaching three reading classes a day, I assumed I would continue as I had begun. Trying to grade upwards of seventy-five notebooks per week was insane. Last year I bruised up the inside of both of my arms just trying to carry the notebooks home during the second week of school. It was a mess.

I’m also fascinated by a quote from Penny Kittle in a podcast on Choice Literacy with Franki Sibberson where she mentions that in English Language Arts we have the kids do entirely too much writing about books. I want to know more.

At any rate, this is one area I’ve felt the need to grow and push myself next year. My thinking is that my students’ “writing” might, indeed be writing in a notebook. It might also be blogging, podcasts, or creating videos. And what I keep coming back to is the word authentic – I am a reader, but I don’t write a letter when I’m done with every book. My thinking is evolving even as I type so please join us tomorrow night, I can’t wait to learn from all of you.

If you are new to Twitter chats, or #titletalk, here are a few pointers.

First, the way #titletalk works is that the first ½ of the chat is typically about something in our classrooms, Sunday our topic is: Writing About Reading. The second ½ is titles – and they do fly! We’re going to focus on titles we’ve read so far this summer that we highly recommend or titles we are dying to read before school begins.

Second, the chat is pretty fast. You will never keep up with all of it, and shouldn’t stress. I usually try to contribute to whatever the given question is at the time and then retweet when I see other folks type smart thinking.

Third, I use TweetChat to follow the chat. You can also follow it on Twitter. The reason I like TweetChat is that the Twitter stream you are looking at is only for our chat. It also adds the hashtag #titletalk automatically into your tweets. (If you are on Twitter, you have to do that yourself.) I wrote a blog post awhile ago with screen shots that will help you understand this:

http://readwriteandreflect.blogspot.com/2014/01/reading-in-wild-chat-tonight.html

Hope to see you Sunday night – 8pm EST/ 7 Central.

It's Monday! What are you reading?

I’m joining Jen & Kellee (and many other bloggers) in discussing what we are reading this week. Join us! Go to their site and link up your own blog.

I didn’t get a chance to post last Monday because I was hosting a book tour. So here are the books I’ve read in the past two weeks:

My favorites would have to be The Knife of Never Letting Go and Squish #3: The Power of the Parasite. Two very different books but wonderful in their own way.

On a side note, we had #titletalk last night and the topic was graphic novels. I took screen shots of some tweets from Colby Sharp and John Schu:

Truly, I could not agree with their statements more. I just wanted to put that out there for all parents and teachers that are concerned about their children/ students reading graphic novels. They are reading! And graphic novels are amazing. The amount of work you have to do to infer between panels is unreal. The pictures help the students visualize but they do have to read the words as well. My heart breaks when kids return graphic novels to me and say their parents said they couldn’t read “comics.”  And as teachers if we say we value choice in our reading programs, you cannot take away graphic novels from your students.

Beyond that my husband is an excellent example of what I see in my students. He was an excellent student in school, graduated from the College of Engineering at the U of I. He reads almost daily and a steady stream of comic books. The occasional book slips in but he devours comic books. He was the first person to recommend Bone by Jeff Smith to me, and that is where my purchasing of graphic novels began. Please give these books a chance. Your students will amaze you!

If you need a resource for teaching graphic novels, Terry Thompson’s Adventures in Graphica is wonderful. I plan on reading it again this summer.

Finally, I am beginning my summer #bookaday. My school got out for the summer May 25^th and we start back up August 20^th. By my count that is 86 days or 86 books. (My actual goal is 100). Here we go!