Campfire on Kinderchat April 24 9pm EDT

TOYS AS TEXTS: What do these toys tell you? How should you play with them?  Click on "See all toys" and try out a few toys to see what they do.

PLAY: Responding to Commercialized Childhoods

STORYING: Tapping into Children's Literary Expertise: Star Wars According to a 3 year old

COLLABORATION: Connecting Children Globally through Skype Play via Mardelle Sauerborn

MEDIA PRODUCTION: Digital Technologies and Bubble Maps

Who's in Your Backpack? Popular Media Audits in ECE

In my literacy methods courses, we're making a list of the kinds of popular media that come to school via children's backpacks, lunchbags, jackets, and shoes...and sometimes as toys and action figures tucked away in pockets. We also don't want to overlook the popular media that children bring in through their play and writing as they create stories around their favorite themes, games, and characters.

Discover particular children’s expertise so that you can build bridges to curricular activities and also help access their expertise to join play groups with ideas for character roles or storylines. Often children are experts on a wide variety of media characters that adults may not know. To find your media experts, ask sincere questions about children’s transmedia items such as, “What does that character do? Is that from a TV show or a movie? What channel is it on?”

Make a list of popular media and lead characters that children know and love. Simply knowing what children are interested in will open up an entire realm of critical, emergent, play-based learning possibilities for you.

(Excerpt from Literacy Playshop, p. 57)

Click here to add your data to our playwatching audit of children's popular media

• In the first column, find a franchise that your students play and then add 1 to the number in the grade level column to represent your classroom.
• Please add any missing media franchises to the list and mark the grade level column that you teach with a 1.

For more information on playwatching and popular media audits: 

Wohlwend, K. E., Buchholz, B. A., Wessel-Powell, C., Coggin, L. S., & Husbye, N. E. (2013). Literacy playshop: New literacies, popular media, and play in the early childhood classroom. New York: Teachers College Press.

Cursive, really? This is not your grandmother's third grade

Once again there's a bill in our state to mandate cursive writing instruction in school. Our third graders who take high-stakes tests with the risk of potential grade retention are already tasked with elementary curricula increasingly filled with test content to prepare them for test-taking. Should precious curricular time be spent on handwriting practice when teachers have difficulty squeezing in core subjects like social studies and science?
Nationally, there is widespread agreement that academic subjects and new literacies take precedence over pretty penmanship: in the new Common Core State Standards adopted by 45 states including Indiana, keyboarding is included; cursive is not. Forward-looking districts are equipping students to read, write, produce, and publish on mobile technologies, making the decision to prepare children to function with 21st century literacy tools. In this environment, the time-consuming enterprise of cursive writing instruction seems quaint at best, falling into the nice-if-we-had-the-time category.
Apparently, one can be pretty successful with minimal cursive skills. Look at  Jack Lew, the US secretary of treasury nominee who may soon be signing all our money. How long did it take him to master this signature?

Hot Topics in Literacy Education for 2013

The International Reading Association released its annual list of "hot" topics in literacy education. Conducted by Jack Cassidy and Stephanie Grote-Garcia, the 2013 survey polled 25 leading literacy scholars and researchers to find what's hot and what's not.

2013 LITERACY SURVEY

HOT:

• Common Core State Standards
• Comprehension
• Adolescent Literacy
• College and Career Readiness
• Informational/Nonfiction Texts

SHOULD BE HOT:

• English Learners/ESL
• Motivation/Engagement
• Struggling/Striving Readers (4th grade +)
• Vocabulary/Word Meaning
• Writing

SOMEWHAT HOT

• New Literacies/Digital Literacies
• Content Area Literacy
• Early Intervention (K-3)
• Political/Policy Influences on Literacy
• Response to Intervention
• Text Complexity

HOT BUT SHOULD NOT BE HOT:

• High-stakes Assessment

The experts agree; these two topics are

NOT HOT AND SHOULD NOT BE HOT:

• Phonics
• Phonemic Awareness

(Cassidy & Grote-Garcia, 2012) http://www.reading.org/general/Publications/blog/BlogSinglePost.aspx/reading-today-online/2012/09/14/2013-what-s-hot-what-s-not-literacy-survey-how-it-was-done

Literacy Playshop: Playing and Storying with Media

To address the realities of early childhoods, we need to think beyond even our best practice in literacy teaching--our  familiar reading and writing workshops--and envision a play-enriched and technology-inspired literacy curricula that makes sense for today’s video-saturated world. In other words, we need expand reading and writing workshops into vibrant and creative classroom studios that I'm calling “literacy “playshops” with media-rich literacy curricula where children produce storyboards, live action plays, and digital films. I documented how literacy playshops bridge literacy, children’s peer culture, and popular media when I spent a year and a half in one kindergarten conducting research for my book, Playing Their Way into Literacies.

Now in a forthcoming book with four graduate students, we have documented how six preschool and K-1 teachers studied, planned, and taught in Literacy Playshop. The teachers supported children’s video explorations and collaborative film projects as we researched in their classrooms to understand how children  produce new kinds of literacies as they make texts together during play and media production. The shift was dramatic. In play spaces where film can now capture the otherwise temporary play scenarios, children created stories on their terms using the materials and narratives that they know best.

Back to School: Support Your Global Kindergarten Teacher

With the steady drumbeat of testing, testing, testing in accountability and reformist discourse, it's crucial to recognize the teachers who rise above it all and focus their attention on creating amazingly responsive learning environments for our youngest learners. It's equally important for these committed professionals to find communities that affirm and reinvigorate their teaching practice.

Some lucky teachers are able to form practitioner inquiry groups to share ideas and coach each other in their local schools or districts. For the rest of us, global connections in social media provide places for early childhood educators to gather and support one another on Facebook groups or Twitter chats. Education chats include a range of options tailored to specific teaching interests and issues: #kinderchat, #ecetechchat, #ellchat, and many more. These groups meet virtually for an hour each week and followers can read or tweet along by typing the hashtag chat name into the Twitter search bar. For example, #kinderchat meets on Monday nights at 9 Eastern time.

The following tweets by two of the kinderchat moderators exemplify the kind of child-friendly, positive teaching that this early childhood professional community promotes:

RT@Matt_Gomez @happycampergirl we discussed our one class rule today - Be Brave! They were so proud to have that rule #kinderchat

RT@happycampergirl Told my partner teacher today: I refuse to rush them for 1st 4 wks. Lots of time, no hurry. #kinderchat

So find a community and join in-- follow, tweet, and support these wonderful early childhood educators!

Putting a New Spin on Reading Assessment with Spider Charts

I want to share an interactive tool here that I developed as a way to see how young readers are coordinating complex reading processes as they learn to read. Spider charts, a standard feature in Excel, help teachers visually display the information readers are noticing and coordinating as they problem-solve print on a page. These charts are useful for illustrating the relationships among semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic cues.

Knowing the kinds of cues that a reader uses--and the kinds of cues that a reader overlooks--can help you target your teaching. On a spider chart, a lopsided corner visually "points" to the kind of cues that readers are using more often or sometimes overusing.

If you know how to conduct a miscue analysis, you can instantly visualize the data here and create your own spider chart by typing miscue data into the yellow cells in the chart below.  For very young children, you might need to do this twice: fill in one chart to show the processes they use as they "read the pictures", then create a second chart to show how they attempted to read the words. As children become more proficient, they learn to integrate all the cues to get meaning from the pictures and the words.

The tool here is interactive in real time: enter your scores in the yellow boxes and the chart below changes instantly. (For a version that works with running records, click here.)


© 2012 Karen Wohlwend 

You can download your graph by clicking the download icon above.

Briefly, the chart corresponds to 4 questions that teachers consider as they listen to readers:

1. What % of sentences fit language patterns (syntactically acceptable)? 
2. What % of sentences make sense (semantically acceptable)?
3. What % of sentences retain the meaning of the overall text (no meaning change)?
4. What % of miscues (words) resemble the letters/sounds of the corresponding word on the page (miscues with high or medium graphophonic similarity)?

For examples and an in-depth explanation for using spider charts with miscue analysis for kindergarten readers, see:

Wohlwend, K. E. (2012). A New Spin onMiscue Analysis: Using Spider Charts to Web Reading Processes. Language Arts, 90(2), 110-118. 

Language Arts Journal: http://www.ncte.org/journals/la/issues/v90-2

For more resources on conducting miscue analysis in general, see:

Goodman, Y. M., Watson, D. J., & Burke, C. L. (2005). Reading miscue inventory: From evaluation to instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

Owocki, G., & Goodman, Y. M. (2002). Kidwatching: Documenting children's literacy development. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.