the (book) supplier

I can’t believe it’s already April. This year feels like it’s going by so fast already. Here’s my reading list for March. Continue reading »

February was a pretty good month for me. I attribute all of the YA reading to small class sizes and daily full class SSR. I enjoy the opportunity to model enjoying reading for my students who may have never had that experience. So without further ado, the books I read in February. Continue reading »

How’s that for alliteration?

Every Wednesday, during our prepratory hours at school, teachers meet with their professional learning teams. It’s like the in-school version of a PLN, really. The PLTs have become similar to a mini-staff meeting every week, where we go over policy, are given news updates (like NM received a waiver for NCLB), and discuss our school-wide EPSS (Educational Plan for Student Success) goals.

Written into our Reading EPSS is vocabulary across the curriculum. We’ve had a rubric for vocabulary for as long as I’ve been with the district and it was a good rubric to get us started. The rubric, however, limits the method of introducing words to meaning-loaded sentences, and does not address repeated use of target words at all. While content area teachers teach Tier 3 vocabulary (see Isabel Beck’s work) and much of that vocabulary is put into meaningful use within the content of the class, teachers asked for activities for vocabulary that extend beyond the parameters of the rubric.

So last Wednesday I had the opportunity to address the staff during PLTs and present two activities to the staff:  Consensus Board (Kathy Short, University of Arizona), and Round Robin Review.

The purpose of this post is to share some of the ideas for using the Round Robin Review that the teachers came up with.

Continue reading »

I want to keep a record of the bookstacks that I’ve posted for the year 2012. This will remain as a sticky post and appear on my homepage. It’ll be updated weekly with links to bookstack posts.

Week of January 8: Reclaiming Zen and a Rockstar Endeavor
Week of January 15: The Fault in our After Ever After Curveball
Week of January 22: The Stupid Fast Prisoner of the Death Warriors
Week of January 29: Stranger than Dangerous Pie
Week of February 5: Prom Dreamer
Week of February 19: Great Whale Talk, Bad Ones

My favorites for the month were The Fault in Our Stars (hardcore nerdfighter here) and This Dark Endeavor. Now I want to read the original Frankenstein (I was a literature major – not sure how I missed this one). Because I’m not carpooling to class this semester, and I spend four hours on the highway each week, I’ll be “rereading” many of my audiobooks. Continue reading »

In July of last year, I decided that I was going to create QR codes to put in the books of my personal library – a reaction to students wanting book talks (which I was happy about) while I was trying to teach a small group of students.

The project fell flat when a number of my books, which were on the bookshelves in my classroom, were destroyed on purpose. This led me to move the books into the cupboard in an effort to preserve the collection.

After months of thinking about this QR code project, and thinking about the hundreds of books in my collection that aren’t read because students tend to gravitate toward what they can see, I decided that I needed to reevaluate what I was trying to accomplish and decide whether or not the implementation of the project was meeting the objectives I set at the beginning. The solution I came up with was the creation of a card catalogue containing bibliographic information and a QR code for more information. Continue reading »