New Year, New Energy: My Goals for the 2024-2025 School Year

Thank you to Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy and Dr. Shira Loewenstein for sending me to Responsive Classroom training. I learned so much about creating an engaging classroom! 

I am so excited to implement what I learned! I chose four specific areas of focus for the beginning of the school year.

1. Get to know my students and build relationships.

Getting to know my students and their families is always a priority, but now I have some more ideas to use to get to know them while building a community. For example, I am excited to try I Am, We Are, an activity where students think about their identities and discover what they have in common. 

2. Establish and discuss classroom expectations

Melvin J. Berman Hebrew Academy Middle School has established expectations that I will use in my classroom: 

• Respect each other
• Respect the learning environment
• Respect the materials
• Work hard and do your best

As we discuss these expectations, we will also take time to think about what each looks like in practice.

3. Help students set SMART goals

Setting SMART goals, or Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely goals will allow students to think about and articulate what they would like to get out of the school year. Once they have set their goals, we can discuss how the expectations will help them to achieve their goals.

4. Establish and practice classroom procedures.

As we learn about each other, the expectations, and set goals for the year, we will also learn and practice brain breaks, submitting work, class and small group discussion, and how our class time will be structured.

What are your goals for the school year, or for my non-education people, what are your current goals? 

My group's table tent--we had a lot of fun!

Silly Monster, Ghouls Are for Kids: Book Review of The Beast You Are

 

The Beast You Are: Stories by Paul Tremblay

Thank you to Goodreads Giveaways and William Morrow for the review copy of The Beast You Are by Paul Tremblay.

Book Description

The Beast You Are is a book of short stories ending with a novella in verse by the same title. The stories in the volume tend to have dark content, but in many different forms.

The short stories in The Beast You Are are playful, experimenting with plot and structure. For example, one is written as a series of blog posts and comments, another as letters to a magazine with editorial responses, and another as a series of diary-like entries with numbered days. The topics are firmly planted in the horror genre, such as a review of an exorcism, monsters, and pandemics.

Many of the endings leave room for ambiguity and the reader’s imagination. They also deal in the fantastic, not just imagining monsters, but also animal characters.

Would I teach this book? 

I can see teaching this book, under certain conditions. In a fantasy or horror writing class, perhaps, though most of the stories did not seem to fall in the horror genre so much.

I would be more likely to teach a few of the stories than the whole book. At the very end of the book, there are notes about each story with some discussion of the inspiration for them, which could be helpful to writers.

More than anything, this book felt like the writer was writing for enjoyment. Most stories are polished, but the purpose seems less to explore characters or social themes or even create a suspenseful plot and more to push and poke at what a short story can be. From that angle, The Beast You Are could be a good jumping off point for discussion and practice.

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Why Don't You Give the Kid a Break? Book Review of Fish in a Tree

 

Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt


Thank you to Bucks County Free Library for making Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt free and readily accessible to the public.

The last thing Ally Nickerson wants anyone to know is that she’s not lazy--she’s actually doing her best job on her school work.

Ally would rather fall through the floor than admit that she can’t read. She already feels stupid and her classmates laugh at her and act as though she’s stupid. She gets sent to the principal’s office so often she’s no longer a guest but part of the office cast. She doesn’t want to add anything else to her mother’s already full plate--or tray, as it were, since her mother waits tables while her father is on active duty in the military.

Ally is ready to give up on anything good happening in sixth grade until Mr. Daniels becomes the class’s teacher and she begins to think maybe school does not have to be absolute misery.

Fish in a Tree feels heartbreakingly familiar. Ally’s compensations, the frustration of her teacher, and the helplessness of her mother are common responses to undiagnosed learning differences. Reading the story from Ally’s point of view highlights the assumptions we make about children’s behavior as well as the challenges of a classroom teacher to recognize when a child is struggling and know how to help.

I am interested in how Hunt creates Ally as a believable character. She describes what Ally sees when she reads and describes it clearly enough that it feels authentic. While many books touch on the problem of adults being unaware of much of what a child thinks and feels, Fish in a Tree shows this disparity while not making Ally into a victim of adult obliviousness. It does not feel melodramatic, like Ally is a tragic character who needs to be saved, because Ally has attitude and humor, is exceptionally bright, and has found ways to cope with her situation, like the hilarious Book of Impossible Things in which she draws different pictures that her mind has created. The adults in the book are not villains, either, they are simply limited by their own perceptions, and in the case of Ally’s first teacher, their need to create an orderly environment in which students can be taught and kept safe.

I enjoyed reading Fish in a Tree and it had a big impact on my attitude towards teaching. A mentor once told me, “When a child acts out, there is some need they have that is not being fulfilled.” Hunt reinforces this message and reminds adults that patience, understanding, and willingness to be creative is just as important as content knowledge in teaching. While Fish in a Tree is a middle-grade book, I recommend it for adults as well as children.

Would I teach this book? I would absolutely teach Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. One of the most important aspects of reading fiction is growing empathy, and Fish in a Tree provides the experience of a kid who on the outside is a troublemaker, but on the inside is kind and witty. She is talented in ways that traditional schooling does not always recognize and it is fun to live inside her brain as she tells her story. I can see it being a good read for an education class, as well.

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For Those Who Grew Up Loving Little Women, Marmee Brings Out the Adult in You

 

Marmee by Sarah Miller

Thank you to GoodReads Giveaways and William Morrow for the review copy of Marmee.

Like so many other kids, I read and enjoyed Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, having an especially good cry in the pages of the novel. Later, I watched the movie version with Wynona Ryder, which I also enjoyed. Jo is a character that people cannot help but love, as she is strong and ahead of her time. She is not accepting of the restrictions on her as a result of being a woman. She is ambitious, works hard, and comes at the world with such a fervor that the world had better be on notice. All of her sisters are amazing in their own ways, but Jo is the one who we see as especially powerful. She is the one who will rise above.

Jo gets her courage and her power, in part, from her dear mother, Marmee. Sarah Miller’s Marmee tells the story of Little Women through the eyes of the elder Margaret March. Written as a series of diary entries from the same time period as the events of Little Women, Marmee gives insight into many of the things that Jo, Beth, Amy, and Meg intuit but don’t know for sure. We better understand the financial situation of the March’s, the relationship between Margaret and her husband, Amos, and her work in the relief rooms. We also see the flair of temper that pushed Marmee to act and the fervid belief in social justice that motivates many of her choices.

Marmee is a woman ahead of her time.

As Alcott based a good deal of the book on her own experiences, she modeled Margaret March after her mother, Abigail Alcott. Miller researched Alcott’s mother and learned more about who she was and how she was remembered by others. She sounds as though she was also a force to be reckoned with and probably lit the fire for many of Louisa May Alcott’s ambitions.

It has been quite some time since I read Little Women or watched the movie adaptation, but as I read Marmee, it made me nostalgic for the book. I also watered the pages of Marmee, in case you were wondering.

Would I teach this book? If I had the opportunity to teach a class on fan fiction (or fanfic) I would absolutely include Marmee.

I have not read a good deal of the kind of fanfic that comes to mind when the term is used, the stories published online that exist in the universes of Harry Potter, Twilight, and Star Wars. What little I know, I learned from a student who wrote on the topic for an infographic and a listicle for my composition class. She did a fabulous job, and as I assisted her with her research, I learned a bit myself. I do not put Marmee into the category of fanfic in order to denigrate it, but as a way to put it into the context of a larger body of literature. Miller does an impressive job of imagining the elder Margarette March as her own person with a larger history independent of her character in Little Women. Highlighting a character who has less of a voice is one of the opportunities of fanfic. Marmee and other works, such as the plethora of novels written from Mr. Darcy’s point of view, show us that good books get our imaginations going.

In my imaginary class on fan fiction, I would include a wide-range of fanfic, not just published novels, but also fanfic published on the internet. Students would read examples and write their own. We would also discuss the issues of intellectual property rights and the legality of publishing fanfic.

I have talked myself into it. Someone please pay me to teach this class.

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Memoir in Verse Challenges Middle-Grade Readers: Book Review of Brown Girl Dreaming

 

Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

Brown Girl Dreaming is a memoir in verse by Jaqueline Woodson. Woodson writes about her childhood in Ohio, South Carolina, and New York. Her parents split when she was very young and her mom moved with Jackie and her older brother and sister to Greenville, South Carolina, where life was completely different. There they lived with their grandparents and became acquainted with life in the South, including racism and segregation. Their grandmother practiced Seventh Day Adventism and while their mother no longer did, she expected her children to attend services. They are not allowed to play with many of the neighbor children, and so they were lonely.

Eventually her mother moved them to New York, where life was again completely different. There Jackie falls under her sister’s shadow as Odella has great academic gifts and catches on to new concepts quickly. However, one of the book’s strongest threads is Jackie’s love of stories, and the book takes pains to show how telling stories was both a passion and at times an obsession for young Jackie.

There is clear movement for Jackie from the beginning to the end of Brown Girl Dreaming, although the plot does not feel as strong as most memoirs. This is in large part because the book is broken into poems instead of chapters. At times it does not even feel episodic, as many memoirs do, but as though it is trying to capture an event in a moment, and the event is instead strangled by the lines, too trapped to express the whole of it. The lyrics do, however, add weight and beauty.

Would I teach this book? This past school year I did teach Brown Girl Dreaming. It was a choice book for the sixth graders, which a few chose and a few for whom I thought it would be good to push them in the direction of this book. Few students picked it as a first choice, and those who did read it were a bit frustrated with the poetry structure. We read a few of the book reviews that were published when the book first came out, such from The New York Times, Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews. Students were asked to read the reviews and determine what they agreed and disagreed with. It was a challenge in some of the reviews for them to identify what was summary and was opinion. We practiced using evidence to support whether we agreed or disagreed with the writer. We also discussed windows and mirrors in the story, and students were instructed to include a specific example of both a window (something that felt different from their own experiences) and a mirror (something that felt similar to their own experience) in their own reviews.

It was not a favorite among the students I think, in part, because it was so different from what they have read before. The lines and stanzas asked to be read differently from sentences and paragraphs and resist being read through quickly, as many adolescent readers believe that it is the ability to read quickly which makes someone a good reader. The dramas of moving and wishing for a deep, forever friendship resonated the most for them.

 
If you wish to share materials or see the formative and summative assessments I used in teaching Brown Girl Dreaming, please DM me.

 

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