Patrick Sensei`s Summer Reading Challenge

Transcription

One of summer’s great adventures is reading! Take part
in Patrick Sensei’s Summer Reading Challenge. At the
bottom of this document check out a huge selection of
recommended summer readings.
Can’t wait to hear about what you read in the fall!
Patrick Sensei
Chesterman
Patrick Sensei’s
Summer Reading Challenge
Student _____________________________ Teacher___________________
Check off each task, have a parent sign when you complete five of the ten, and bring this
sheet back to your teacher by the first day of school.
Please see attached sheets for additional information and suggestions for each task!
1
_____ Task 1: Read ten picture books, Easy Readers, or nonfiction books that you
have never read before.
2
_____ Task 2: Read one chapter book aloud with an adult.
3
_____ Task 3: Visit at least one public library this summer.
4
_____ Task 4: Browse around at least one bookstore this summer.
5
_____ Task 5: Write a thank you note to three people in your life that you
appreciate.
6
_____ Task 6: Listen to an audio book.
7
_____ Task 7: Tell three friends about your favorite book, series of books, or
author.
8
_____ Task 8: Journal about anything you’d like! Please include at least three
journal entries.
9
______ Task 9: Visit your favorite author’s website and browse around.
10
______ Task 10: Write and illustrate your own book or story.
Want to share your projects with Patrick Sensei? He would LOVE to see them!
Feel free to bring them in at the beginning of the year with this sheet. Please
remember to write your first and last name on your projects.
_________________________________________________
Parent’s Signature
Chesterman
Task 1: Read ten picture books, Easy Readers, or nonfiction books that you
have never read before.
Here’s a list of awesome picture book and Easy Reader authors. Please read ten
books that you have never read before (or let someone read them to you).
Tedd Arnold
Debbie Bertram
Jan Brett
Doreen Cronin
Tomie dePaola
Helen Lester
Jonathan London
James Marshall
David McPhail
Kevin O’Malley
Tim Egan
Dave Pilkey
Jules Feiffer
Peter Reynolds James
Stevenson
Mo Willems
Jane Yolen
Michael Garland
Bob Graham
Kevin Henkes
Task 2: Read at least one chapter book aloud with an adult (but as a whole family
would be even better)! 
Reading aloud can be such an wonderful bonding experience for families. Please check
out this website for inspiration (maybe you can “Make a Reading Promise” and start your
own “Reading Streak”)!
http://www.makeareadingpromise.com
Task 3: Visit one public library this summer.
This website lists information about fun summer programs, puppet shows and story
times.
http://www.eugene-or.gov
Task 4: Browse around at least one bookstore this summer.
Bookstores often have story times available for children. Please call stores for more
information concerning summer activities.
Chesterman
Task 5: Write a thank you note to three people in your life that you appreciate.
Have you always wanted to thank someone for something they have done for you? This
would be a great opportunity for you to write letters of thanks and appreciation to your
parents, grandparents, friends, teachers, neighbors...ANYONE!!
Task 6: Listen to an audio book.
Listening to an audio book is a great way to pass the time when you are traveling.
Download a book to an electronic device or check out an audio book from the public
library. Either way, just listen and enjoy.
Task 7: Have a discussion with three friends about your favorite book, series, or
author.
Sometimes the best way to find out about new books is to talk with your friends. Tell
your friends about the books you enjoy reading. Maybe you could even read with your
friends. Now that would be fun!
Task 8: Journal about anything you’d like! Please include at least three journal
entries.
If you love to write, this is a great summer activity for you. Get a cool spiral notebook
and you have the perfect journal. Keep a journal of your three favorite summer events,
movies you’ve seen, your feelings... anything. Writing and reading – they’re totally
linked!
Task 9: Visit your favorite author’s website and browse around.
Most authors have their own website with a biography, games and activities, and
information about their books. You can learn a lot about an author by visiting their
website.
Task 10: Write and illustrate your own book or story.
Have a book idea floating around in your head (I do)! Write a book (or a story)!! You
don’t have to wait to become an author. You can be an author right now!
Chesterman
The Reading Nook Booklist for 3rd Grade
7 x 9 = Trouble
by Claudia Mills
Paperback Edition
600 Black Spots: A Pop-up Book
by David A. Carter
Hardcover Edition
Click on image for more details
A Day's Work
by Eve Bunting
Paperback Edition
Amazing Grace
by Mary Hoffman
Hardcover Edition
Apples to Oregon
by Deborah Hopkinson
Hardcover Edition
Because of Winn Dixie
by Kate DiCamillo
Paperback Edition
Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain
by Verna Aardema
Paperback Edition
Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express
by Eleanor Coerr
Paperback Edition
Bunnicula: The Rabbit Tale of Mystery
by Deborah Howe
Paperback Edition
Charlotte's Web
by E. B. White
Paperback Edition
Chicken Sunday
by Patricia Polacco
Paperback Edition
Chocolate Fever
by Robert Kimmel Smith
Paperback Edition
Clever Beatrice
by Margaret Willey
Paper Edition
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
by Judi Barrett
Paperback Edition
Fantastic Mr. Fox
by Ronald Dahl
Paperback Edition
Flat Stanley
by Jeff Brown
Paperback Edition
Fly Away Home
by Eve Bunting
Paperback Edition
Freckle Juice
by Judy Blume
Paperback Edition
Goin' Someplace Special
by Patricia C. McKissack
Hardcover Edition
Gooney Bird Greene
by Lois Lowry
Paperback Edition
Harvesting Hope: The Story of Cesar Chavez
by Kathleen Krull
Hardcover Edition
Horrible Harry Goes to Sea
by Suzy Kline
Paperback Edition
How to Be Cool in Third Grade
by Betsy Duffey
Paperback Edition
Imogene's Antlers
by David Small
Paperback Edition
Judy Moody
by Megan McDonald
Paperback Edition
Judy Moody Gets Famous
by Megan McDonald
Paperback Edition
Kate and the Beanstalk
by Mary Pope Osborne
Paperback Edition
Kate Shelley and the Midnight Express
by Margaret K Wetterer
Paperback Edition
Keep the Lights Burning Abbie
by Peter Roop
Paperback Edition
Marley, A Dog Like No Other
by John Grogan
Hardcover Edition
Mice and Beans
by Pam Munoz Ryan
Hardcover Edition
Milo's Hat Trick
by Jon Agee
Hardcover Edition
My Great-Aunt Arizona
by Gloria Houston
Paperback Edition
Odd Boy Out: Young Albert Einstein
by Don Brown
Hardcover Edition
Pirates
by John Matthews
Hardcover Edition
Ruby Lu, Brave and True
by Lenore Look
Hardcover Edition
Runaway Radish
by Jessie Haas
Hardcover Edition
Satchel Paige
by Lesa Cline-Ransome
Hardcover Edition
Schoolyard Rhymes: Rhymes for Rope Skipping,
Hand Clapping, Ball Bouncing, and Just Plain Fun
by Judy Sierra
Hardcover Edition
Snowed In with Grandmother Silk
by Carol Fenner
Paperback Edition
Sophie's Masterpiece: A Spider's Tale
by Eileen Spinelli
Hardcover Edition
The Conquerors
by David McKee
Hardcover Edition
The Hundred Dresses
by Eleanor Estes
Paperback Edition
The Lorax
by Dr. Seuss
Hardcover Edition
The Lost Files of Nancy Drew
by Carolyn Keene
Hardcover Edition
The Memory Box
by Mary Bahr
Paperback Edition
The Original Adventures of Hank the Cowdog
by John R. Erickson
Paperback Edition
The Patchwork Quilt
by Valerie Flournoy
Hardcover Edition
The Princess and the Pea
by Lauren Child
Hardcover Edition
The Rag Coat
by Lauren A. Mills
Hardcover Edition
The Spider and the Fly
by Mary Howitt
Hardcover Edition
The Toughest Cowboy
by John Frank
Hardcover Edition
The Wizard
by Jack Prelutsky
Hardcover Edition
Virgie Goes to School with Us Boys
by Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard
Hardcover Edition
What Do You Do with a Tail Like This?
by Robin Page
Hardcover Edition
Wings
by Christopher Myers
Hardcover Edition
Zen Shorts
by John J Muth
Hardcover Edition
3
4th Grade Summer Reading Book List and Assignment
Rutherford Public Schools
Wanted- Mud Blossom
Byars, Betsy
Ramona series
Cleary, Beverly
Matilda
Dahl, Roald
The BFG
Dahl, Roald
Minpins
Dahl, Roald
Twits
Dahl, Roald
The Last of the Really
Great Whangdoodles
Edwards, Julie
Various titles such as
Snakes, Lizards, Cats
Eye Witness Jr. Series
Bandit’s Moon
Fleischman, Sid
The Ghost in the Noonday
Sun
Fleischman, Sid
The Whipping Boy
Fleischman, Sid
Wishes, Kisses and Pigs
Hearne, Betsy
When Junior brings home the classroom hamster, Scooty, he
decides to build the best hamster tunnel ever. But when
Scooty goes missing, all evidence points to Mud.
The Ramona books are a series of eight humorous children's
novels by Beverly Cleary that center on Ramona Quimby,
her family and friends.
For most kids, The Trunchbull is pure terror, but for Matilda,
she's a sitting duck.
Roald Dahl’s own granddaughter inspires the story of young
Sophie and the benevolent Big Friendly Giant. Come
celebrate and join them as they take on the Bonecruncher,
the Bloodbottler, and other monsters to help make the world
a better place for children everywhere!
Little Billy strays into the forest, where he meets the
Minpins?tiny people who live within the tree.
Mr. and Mrs. Twit hate everything, including their trained
monkeys, the Muggle-Wumps, who now want revenge.
The Whangdoodle was once the wisest, the kindest, and the
most extraordinary creature in the world. When he
disappears Professor Savant and three children set out to find
him.
Learn exciting facts about animals and reptiles.
Annyrose Smith is an orphan who meets up with a fearsome
bandit. Annyrose and the bandit go on a wild adventure to
find her long lost brother.
Believing that Oliver can spy out ghosts, Captain Scratch
kidnaps him, bringing him aboard the notorious pirate vessel
the Bloody Hand.
The whipping boy, he bears the punishment when Prince
Brat misbehaves. When they find themselves taken hostage
after running away, they are left with no choice but to trust
each other.
Eleven-year-old Louise Tolliver lives with her mother and
her brother, Willie, in Tollivers' Hollow. Like any brother,
Willie gives Louise a hard time, but the trouble
really starts when Louise calls him a pig and he becomes
one.
4
The Year of Miss Agnes
Hill, Kirkpatrick
Ten-year-old Fred has just watched her teacher leave -another in a long line of teachers who have left the village
because the smell of fish was too strong, the way of life too
hard. Will Miss Agnes stay or return home to England?
Adventures of Young
Buffalo Bill
Kimmel, E. Cody
Sword of the Samurai
Kimmel, Eric
Babe, The Gallant Pig
King-Smith, Dick
The School Mouse
King-Smith, Dick
The Water Horse
King smith, Dick
Zooman Sam
Lowry, Lois
Anastasia Krupnik series
Lowry, Lois
The Bobbin Girl
McCully, Emily
The frontier is packed with real-life adventures more
exciting than Bill had ever imagined. He learns how to break
a wild pony with the help of a genuine mustanger and even
builds a cabin with nothing but an ax, a hammer, and some
nails. But the west is a dangerous place, and Bill has to find
out the hard way just how wild it can be.
The samurai warriors of ancient Japan were taught to fight
with their hearts and minds as well as with their swords. But
even the best of training doesn't prepare a samurai for every
situation.
When Babe arrives at Hogget Farm, he reveals a surprising
talent for sheepherding. Mr. Hogget enters him into the
Grand Challenge Sheepdog Trials.
Flora learns to read, no one- her parents in particular - can
see the use in it. She must convince them
reading is tremendously important - especially after she finds
a bag marked poison.
Kirstie, and her brother, Angus, find a mysterious egg
capsule washed up on shore after a storm and take it home.
The "mermaid's purse" hatches into a lovable sea monster
they call Crusoe.
Sam Krupnik wants to be a zookeeper when he grows
up. Sam's mother and his sister make him a zookeeper
costume that he will not take off.
To Anastasia Krupnik, being ten is very confusing. She is
going through a lot in sixth grade. Anastasia knows that if
she didn't have her secret green notebook to write in, she
would never make it to her eleventh birthday.
Rebecca Putney is a bobbin girl who helps support her
struggling family by working all day in a hot, noisy cotton
mill.
The Gargoyle on the Roof
Prelutsky, Jack
Wayside School series
Sacher, Louis
The Warp series
Scieszka, Jon
The terrifyingly talented Jack Prelutsky and Peter Sís have
captured some of the most unforgettable creatures between
book covers (where, we hope, they will stay).
Funny things happen at Wayside School...especially on the
thirteenth floor.
For where the sidewalk ends, Shel Silverstein's world begins.
5
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Silverstein, Shel
It is a place where you wash your shadow and plant diamond
gardens, a place where shoes fly, sisters are auctioned off,
and crocodiles go to the dentist.
A Light in the Attic
Silverstein, Shel
You will talk with the Broiled Face, and find out what
happens when someone steals your knees, you get caught by
the Quick-Digesting Gink, a mountain snores, and they’ve
put a brassiere on the camel.
Falling Up
Silverstein, Shel
The Trading Game
Slote, Alfred
The Friendship
Taylor, Mildred
Sammy Keyes series
Van Draanen,
Wendelin
Here you will also meet Allison Beals and her twenty-five
eels; Danny O'Dare, the dancin' bear; the Human Balloon;
and Headphone Harold.
Andy would rather play ball than collect cards. Grandpa
comes to town for a visit and offers to coach Andy's ragtag
team.
This story takes place 1933 in Mississippi, when an elderly
black man and a white store owner test their friendship
against a backdrop of racism and peer pressure.
An exciting mystery series about a young and fearless
detective named Sammy Keyes!
Little House series
Wilder, Laura Ingalls
The life and adventures of the Ingalls family in the 19th
century American West.
Hank Zipzer series *fix
Winkler, Henry
The Castle in the Attic
Winthrop, Elizabeth
Inspired by the true life experiences of Henry Winkler, this
winning series about the world's greatest underachiever is
funny, touching, and deals with learning differences in a
gentle and humorous manner.
William has just received a wooden model of a castle. When
he picks up the tiny silver knight, it comes alive and the
adventure begins.
The Battle for the Castle
Winthrop, Elizabeth
William receives a magic token that transports him to Sir
Simon’s castle in the Middle Ages.
Caleb’s Choice
Wisler, G. Clifton
An engaging story about a boy’s decision to follow the law
or do what he believes is morally right.
Writing Assignment:
You will complete a written book review in school on either the second or third day of
school. Your teacher will review the process with you. A rubric will be used to grade your
writing assignment.
In addition, you will need to print out and complete the graphic organizer labeled
“GO grades 4 & 5” located in this packet. Bring the graphic organizer to class the first day
of school, Wednesday, September 5, 2012.
6
!
Title
Author
Summary
A Week in the Woods
Clements, Andrew
Ella Enchanted
Carson Levine,
Gail
Halse Anderson,
Laurie
The fifth grade's annual camping trip in the woods tests Mark's
survival skills and his ability to relate to a teacher who seems
out to get him.
In this novel based on Cinderella, Ella struggles against the
childhood curse that forces her to obey any order given to her.
Sixteen-year-old Matilda Cook, separated from her sick
mother, learns about perseverance and self-reliance when she
is forced to cope with the horrors of the yellow fever epidemic
in Philadelphia in 1793.
After foiling a hijacking aboard their airplane, fourteen-yearold Jimmy, his younger sister, and two skateboarding friends
crash-land the plane and try to survive in a forest wilderness
until help arrives.
In Wisconsin, Ida B spends happy hours being home-schooled
and playing in her family's apple orchard, until her mother
begins treatment for cancer and her parents must sell part of
the orchard and send her to public school.
Fifteen-year-old Jason embarks on a ten thousand-mile journey
in 1897 in hopes of making it big after hearing the news that
gold has been discovered in Canada's Yukon Territory.
To the constant disappointment of his mother and his teachers,
Joey has trouble paying attention or controlling his mood
swings when his prescription medications wear off and he
starts getting worked up and acting wired.
Laura and her sister Mary have amazing adventures when their
family moves to Kansas in a covered wagon during the 1800s.
Life is hard and the family struggles to build a farm while
dealing with sickness, fires, dangerous animals, and other
problems.
When Ted and Kat's cousin Salim disappears from the London
Eye ferris wheel, the two siblings must work together--Ted
with his brain that is "wired differently" and impatient Kat--to
try to solve the mystery of what happened to Salim.
When Amy and Dan’s grandmother gives them a choice—take
a million dollars, or the first clue in a dangerous scavenger
hunt—Amy and Dan set out on an adventure to solve the
mystery of the 39 Clues. If they can solve the mystery, they
will be the most powerful people in the world. Their evil
relatives are hunting for the clues too and they aren’t afraid to
kill Amy and Dan for the next clue.
Fever 1793
Getting Air
Gutman, Dan
Ida B. and Her Plans to
Maximize Fun, Avoid
Disaster, and (Possibly)
Save the World
Jason's Gold
Hannigan,
Katherine
Joey Pigza Swallowed the
Key or any other Joey
Pigza book
Gantos, Jack
Little House on the Prairie
or any other Little House
book
Ingals Wilder,
Laura
London Eye Mystery
Dowd, Siobhan
Maze of Bones
(39 Clues series #1)
or any other 39 Clues book
Riordan, Rick
Ramona’s World or any
other Ramona book
Cleary, Beverly
Hobbs, Will
Ramona Quimby expects fourth grade to be the best year of
her life; and although things do not go just as she had hoped,
she still manages to have her share of adventures.
7
Redwall (Redwall series
#1) or any other Redwall
book
Jacques, Brian
Skeleton Man
Bruchac, Joseph
Smile
Telgemeier, Raina
Stargirl
Spinelli, Jerry
Tale of Despereaux
DiCamillo, Kate
The Case of the Missing
Marquess or any other
Enola Holmes boo
Springer, Nancy
The Lightning Thief
(Percy Jackson series #1)
or any other Percy Jackson
book
Riordan, Rick
Varjak Paw
Said, SF
The Witches
Dahl, Roald
When the peaceful life of ancient Redwall Abbey is shattered
by the arrival of the evil rat Cluny, Matthias, a young mouse,
goe on an adventure to find the legendary sword of Martin the
Warrior.
After her parents mysteriously disappear and she is turned over
to the care of a strange "great-uncle," Molly must rely on her
dreams about an old Mohawk story for her safety and maybe
even for her life.
Middle school is even harder when you have braces and
headgear! After losing some teeth in an accident, Raina tries
to deal with her new “brace face” while being teased by her
classmates and having a crush on a boy. (graphic novel)
Stargirl, a teen who animates quiet Mica High with her
colorful personality, suddenly finds herself shunned for her
refusal to conform.
The adventures of Despereaux Tilling, a small mouse of
unusual talents, the princess that he loves, the servant girl who
longs to be a princess, and a devious rat determined to bring
them all to ruin.
Enola Holmes, much younger sister of detective Sherlock
Holmes, must travel to London in disguise to unravel the
disappearance of her missing mother.Enola Holmes series #1
Who stole Zeus’ lightning bolt? After being accused of the
theft, Percy (son of a mortal woman and a Greek god) and his
new friends from Camp Half-Blood must go on a dangerous
adventure to discover the real criminal before the gods destroy
New York City!
Guided by the spirit of his legendary Mesopotamian ancestor,
Jalal, Varjak Paw, a pure-bred cat, leaves his home and
pampered existence and sets out to save his family from the
evil Gentleman who took away their owner, the Contessa.
Mystery in Paris!
A young boy and his Norwegian grandmother, who is an
expert on witches, together foil a witches' plot to destroy the
world's children by turning them into mice.
WRITING ASSIGNMENT: You will complete a written book review in school on either the
second or third day of school. Your teacher will review the process with you. A rubric will be
used to grade your writing assignment. In addition, you will need to print out and complete the
graphic organizer labeled “GO grades 4 & 5” located in this packet. Bring the graphic organizer
to class the first day of school, Wednesday, September 5, 2012.
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8
Title
!
Author
Summary
A Year Down Yonder
Peck, Richard
During the recession of 1937, Mary Alice is sent to live with
her feisty, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois.
Through their adventures, Mary Alice learns to love and
understand this fearsome woman.
Matt, a young cabin boy aboard a blimp, and Kate, a wealthy
young girl, team up to search for the existence of mysterious
winged creatures reportedly living hundreds of feet above the
Earth's surface.
Airborn
Oppel, Kenneth
American Born Chinese
Yang, Gene Luen
What do a Monkey King, a Chinese-American immigrant, and
an American student have in common? Find out in this funny,
surprising graphic novel that discusses girlfriends, best friends,
immigration, and life at school for American kids of all kinds.
Baseball Great
Green, Tim
All Josh wants to do is play baseball on his middle school team,
but when his father, a minor league pitcher, signs him up for a
youth championship team, Josh and his best friends find
themselves embroiled in a situation with potentially illegal
consequences.
Dear America/My Name is
America series
Assorted
Exciting, diary-format stories of kids and teens living in other
places and times. Stories include the life of a girl during the
Revolutionary War, the life of a World War II soldier, and the
life of a girl during the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
The Graveyard Book
Gaiman, Neil
After his family is mysteriously murdered, Bod, short for
Nobody, is raised by ghosts and other creatures that live in a
graveyard. He has a ton of adventures with his new family,
while trying to avoid the murderer who’s still after him!
Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone or any other
Harry Potter book
Rowling, J.K.
Jack Blank and the Imagine
Nation (hardcover) or The
Accidental Hero(paperback)
Myklusch, Matt
Just Ella
Haddix, Margaret
Peterson
When his parents are murdered, baby Harry, who miraculously
survives, goes to live with his terrible aunt and uncle. After
learning he’s a wizard, Harry goes to a special boarding school
for wizards and tries to defeat his parent’s murderer with help
from his new best friends.
Twelve-year-old Jack, freed from a dismal orphanage, makes
his way to the elusive and impossible Imagine Nation, where a
mentor saves him from dissection and trains him to use his
superpower, despite the virus he carries that makes him a
threat.
What happens after “happily ever after”? In this continuation
of Cinderella, Ella finds that accepting Prince Charming's
proposal ensnares her in a suffocating tangle of palace rules and
royal etiquette, so she plots to escape.
Millions
Boyce, Frank
Cottrell
The Cunningham brothers literally have money drop in their
laps when a bag of cash falls from the sky; however, the crooks
who initially stole the loot are hot on the trail to retrieve it.
9
The Misfits
Howe, James
Four students who do not fit in at their small-town middle
school decide to create a third party for the student council
elections to represent all students who have ever been called
names.
Young Sam Gribley leaves New York City and spends a year
living by himself in a remote area of the Catskill Mountains.
My Side of the Mountain
George, Jean
Craighead
National Velvet
Bagnold, Enid
In mid-twentieth-century England, fourteen-year-old Velvet
Brown, determined to turn the unruly horse she wins in a raffle
into a champion, learns that she needs more than hard work and
dedication to achieve her goal of riding her horse in the Grand
National steeplechase.
Skellig
Almond, David
Unhappy about his baby sister's illness and the chaos of moving
into a dilapidated old house, Michael retreats to the garage and
finds a mysterious stranger who is something like a bird and
something like an angel.
The Bad Beginning or any
other Lemony Snicket book
Snicket, Lemony
After the mysterious death of their parents, the three Baudelaire
children must outsmart their evil relative Count Olaf, who’s
determined to use any means necessary to get their
money…including murder!
The Face on the Milk Carton
Cooney, Caroline B.
A photograph of a missing girl on a milk carton leads Janie on
a search for her real identity.
The Lion, the Witch, and the
Wardrobe or any other
Narnia book
Lewis, C.S.
After accidentally entering Narnia, a magical land, Peter,
Susan, Edmund, and Lucy become kings and queens and must
help Aslan, the talking lion, defeat the evil White Witch who
wants to destroy Narnia!
The Wish
Levine, Gail Carson
When granted her wish to be the most popular girl in school,
Wilma, an eighth grader, forgets that she will graduate in three
weeks and her popularity will vanish.
Travel Team
Lupica, Mike
After he is cut from his traveling basketball team--the very
same team that his father once led to national prominence-twelve-year-old Danny Walker forms his own team of cast-offs
that might have a shot at victory.
Waiting for Normal
Connor, Leslie
Twelve-year-old Addie tries to cope with her mother's erratic
behavior and being separated from her beloved stepfather and
half-sisters when she and her mother go to live in a small trailer
by the railroad tracks on the outskirts of Schenectady, New
York.
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Writing Assignment: A written book review will be completed in your reading class within the first week
of school on a date determined by your teacher. Your reading teacher will review the process with you. The
NJASK rubric will be used to grade your writing assignment. You will need to print out and complete the
graphic organizer labeled “GO grades 6-8” located in this packet. Bring the graphic organizer to class the
first day of school, Wednesday, September 5, 2012.
10
Title
Author
Summary
Artemis Fowl or any other
Artemis Fowl book
Colfer, Eoin
When a twelve-year-old evil genius tries to restore his family
fortune by capturing a fairy and demanding a ransom in gold, the
fairies fight back with magic, technology, and a particularly nasty
troll.
Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan,
during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets
out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the
renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.
When thirteen-year-old Logan and his family move into a rundown old house in rural Virginia, he discovers that a woman was
murdered there and becomes involved with his neighbor Arthur
in a dangerous investigation to try to uncover the killer.
After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo
is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are
recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending
messages during World War II in their native tongue.
Falsely accused of theft and murder, an orphaned peasant boy in
fourteenth-century England flees his village and meets a largerthan-life juggler who holds a dangerous secret.
Bud, Not Buddy
Curtis, Christopher
Paul
Closed for the Season
Hahn, Mary
Downing
Code Talker
Bruchac, Joseph
Crispin: The Cross of Lead
Avi
Football Hero
Green, Tim
Handbook for Boys
Myers, Walter Dean
Invention of Hugo Cabret
Selznick, Brian
Last Shot: A Final Four
Mystery
Feinstein, John
Little Women
Alcott, Louisa May
The four March sisters--Meg, Jo, Amy, and Beth—grow up in
nineteenth-century New England during the Civil War. Follow
their adventures as they battle sickness, deal with social class
issues, attend fancy balls, and figure out what to do about the cute
boy next door!
Mr. Was
Hautman, Pete
After his dying grandfather tries to strangle him, Jack Lund
discovers a door that leads him fifty years into the past and
involves him in events that determine his own future.
When twelve-year-old Ty's brother Thane is recruited out of
college to play for the New York Jets, their Uncle Gus uses Ty to
get insider information for his gambling ring, landing Ty and
Thane in trouble with the Mafia.
Sixteen-year-old Jimmy, on probation for assault, talks about life
with three old men in a Harlem barbershop and hears about the
tools he can use to get what he wants.
When twelve-year-old Hugo, an orphan living and repairing
clocks within the walls of a Paris train station in 1931, meets a
mysterious toymaker and his goddaughter, his undercover life
and his biggest secret are jeopardized. Great graphic novel for
visual learners!
After winning a basketball reporting contest, eighth graders
Stevie and Susan Carol are sent to cover the Final Four
tournament, where they discover that a talented player is being
blackmailed into throwing the final game.
11
Olive’s Ocean
Henkes, Kevin
Red Pyramid or any other
Kane Chronicles book
Riordan, Rick
Ship Breaker
Bacigalupi, Paolo
Stormbreaker
Horowitz, Anthony
Stuck in Neutral
Trueman, Terry
The Espressologist
Springer, Kristina
The One Where the Kid
Nearly Jumps to His Death
and Lands in California
Hershey, Mary
The Seeing Stone
Holland, Kevin
Crossley
Uprising
Haddix, Margaret
Peterson
On a summer visit to her grandmother's cottage by the ocean,
Martha gains perspective on the death of a classmate, on her
relationship with her grandmother, on her feelings for an older
boy, and on her plans to be a writer.
When their father gets taken captive by an evil Egyptian god
named Set, Carter and Sadie must learn magic and join other
gods and goddesses on a dangerous adventure to save their father
and kill Set before he destroys the world!
In a futuristic world, teenaged Nailer scavenges copper wiring
from grounded oil tankers for a living, but when he finds a
beached clipper ship with a girl in the wreckage, he has to decide
if he should strip the ship for its wealth or rescue the girl.
After the death of the uncle who had been his guardian, fourteenyear-old Alex Rider is coerced to continue his uncle's dangerous
work for Britain's intelligence agency, MI6.
Fourteen-year-old Shawn McDaniel, who suffers from severe
cerebral palsy and cannot function, relates his perceptions of his
life, his family, and his condition, especially as he believes his
father is planning to kill him.
What does your coffee say about your personality? While
working as a barista in a Chicago coffee bar, Jane introduces
people who might make cute couples, based on what drinks they
like to order. But can she find a coffee match boyfriend for
herself?
Thirteen-year-old Alastair Hudson, who was in an accident five
years earlier which resulted in the amputation of his leg, is
always the first to make jokes about his missing limb, but after
spending a summer with his estranged father and step-mother in
California and learning how to swim, realizes there are better
ways to deal with his disability.
Arthur, a thirteen-year-old boy in late twelfth-century England,
tells how Merlin gave him a magical seeing stone which shows
him images of the legendary King Arthur, the events of whose
life seem to have many parallels to his own.
In 1927, at the urging of twenty-one-year-old Harriet, Mrs.
Livingston reluctantly recalls her experiences at the Triangle
Shirtwaist factory, including miserable working conditions that
led to a strike, then the fire that took the lives of her two best
friends, when Harriet, the boss's daughter, was only five years
old.
Writing Assignment: A written book review will be completed in your reading class within
the first week of school on a date determined by your teacher. Your reading teacher will review
the process with you. The NJASK rubric will be used to grade your writing assignment. You
will need to print out and complete the graphic organizer labeled “GO grades 6-8” located in
this packet. Bring the graphic organizer to class the first day of school, Wednesday, September
5, 2012.
12
Title!
Author!
Absolutely True Diary of a
Part-Time Indian
Alexie, Sherman
Chains or Forge
Anderson, Laurie
Halse
Dairy Queen or any other
Dairy Queen book
Murdock, Catherine
Gilbert
Dear Julia
Zemser, Amy
Bronwen
Frankenstein the Graphic
Novel (Classical Comics,
original text version)
Cobley, Jason &
Mary Shelley
The Hunger Games or any
other Hunger Games book
Collins, Suzanne
If I Stay
Forman, Gayle
Jane Eyre the Graphic Novel
(Classical Comics, original
text version)
Bronte, Charlotte
and Amy Corzine
The Looking Glass Wars or
any other Looking Glass
Wars book
Monster
Beddor, Frank
Reality Check
Abrahams, Peter
Myers, Walter Dean
Summary!
Junior, a Native American who lives in poverty on a reservation,
goes to a new school in this hysterical and realistic novel. He must
deal with his best friend's anger, his classmates' racism, his new
basketball team, and, of course, girl problems.
After being sold into slavery, Isabel puts her life in danger to spy
for the rebels during the Revolutionary War, hoping to gain her
freedom and save her younger sister from a mysterious new master.
D.J. spends her summer working on her family's dairy farm and
training the rival high school's quarterback, only to discover she has
feelings for him. Things get even more complicated when she
decides to try out for the football team herself and they are forced to
play against each other. Will their rival schools keep them from
being together?
All shy Elaine wants to do is be a chef like her idol Julia Child, but
her mother thinks she should do more with her life than spend it in
a kitchen. With help from her new (and only) friend Lucida, Elaine
enters a cooking competition and shows everyone what she's really
made of.
A graphic novel about the hysteria that ensues when Dr. Victor
Frankenstein creates a monster and subsequently casts it out into a
horrified community.
In this thrilling novel set in futuristic North America, Katniss
Everdeen competes in the mandatory Hunger Games, a brutal,
violent competition hosted by the Capitol where teens are pitted
against one another in a televised fight to the death. Will she
escape with her life?
While in a coma following an automobile accident that killed her
parents and younger brother, seventeen-year-old Mia, a gifted
cellist, weights whether to live with her grief or join her family in
death.
Set in England in the 1800s, Jane takes a job as a nanny/tutor and
develops a crush on her new boss, but can they ever be together?
And what are they going to do about the mysterious fires and noises
in the attic? Fun graphic novel format!
When she is cast out of Wonderland, young Alyss Heart tries to
defeat her evil Aunt Redd and regain the throne, while avoiding the
numerous assassins who are determined to kill her!
While on trial as an accomplice to a murder, sixteen-year-old Steve
Harmon records his experiences in prison and in the courtroom in
the form of a film script as he tries to come to terms with the course
his life has taken.
After a knee injury destroys sixteen-year-old Cody's college hopes,
he drops out of high school and gets a job in his small Montana
town; but when his ex-girlfriend disappears from her Vermont
boarding school, Cody travels cross-country to join the search.
13
Sleeping Freshman Never
Lie
Lubar, David
While navigating his first year of high school and awaiting the birth
of his new baby brother, Scott loses old friends and gains some
unlikely new ones as he hones his skills as a writer.
Son of the Mob
Korman, Gordon
Seventeen-year-old Vince's life is constantly complicated by the
fact that he is the son of a powerful Mafia boss, a relationship that
threatens to destroy his romance with the daughter of an FBI agent.
Sunrise over Fallujah
Myers, Walter Dean
Robin Perry, from Harlem, is sent to Iraq in 2003 as a member of
the Civilian Affairs Battalion, and his time there profoundly
changes him.
Swallowing Stones
McDonald, Joyce
The Golden Compass or any
other His Dark Materials
book
Pullman, Philip
Dual perspectives reveal the aftermath of seventeen-year-old
Michael MacKenzie's birthday celebration during which he
discharges an antique Winchester rifle and unknowingly kills the
father of high school classmate Jenna Ward.
Lyra Belacqua sets out on a dangerous adventure to prevent her best
friend and other kidnapped children from becoming the subject of
gruesome experiments in the Far North.
The Shakespeare Stealer
Blackwood, Gary
A young orphan boy is ordered by his master to infiltrate
Shakespeare's acting troupe in order to steal the script of "Hamlet,"
but he discovers instead the meaning of friendship and loyalty.
Walking Naked
Brugman, Alyssa
After being in detention with a girl called "The Freak," Megan finds
herself torn between the developing friendship the two share and
her involvement with a popular clique.
We Were Here
Pena, Matt de la
After Miguel is sent to juvie for a mysterious crime, he decides to
break out and head to Mexico with his new friends.
When My Name was Keoko
Park, Linda Sue
With national pride and occasional fear, a brother and sister face the
increasingly oppressive occupation of Korea by Japan during World
War II, which threatens to suppress Korean culture entirely.
Writing Assignment: A written book review will be completed in your reading class within the first week
of school on a date determined by your teacher. Your reading teacher will review the process with you. The
NJASK rubric will be used to grade your writing assignment. You will need to print out and complete the
graphic organizer labeled “GO grades 6-8” located in this packet. Bring the graphic organizer to class the
first day of school, Wednesday, September 5, 2012.
PILOT
FOR SUMMER LEARNING
Resources for more ideas
Workbooks to boost math skills
•
Summer Bridge Activities. Various authors, Rainbow Bridge Publishing Available for all
elementary school transitions. Lots of colorful worksheets, but may be boring for students who
are already working at grade level. Better for the child who has struggled during the school year
or a child who has not yet mastered basic skills.
•
Summer Smarts : Activities and Skills to Prepare Your Child for ______. Various authors,
Houghton Mifflin Co. Available for all elementary school transitions. Less repetition of skills
and more focus on reading real books.
Books for parents
Ask for the following books in your local library:
•
Calkins, L.M. (1997). Raising Lifelong Learners. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
•
Copperman, P. (1986). Taking Books to Heart: How to develop a love of reading in your child.
Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
•
Cullinan, B.E. (1992). Read To Me: Raising kids who love to read. New York, NY: Scholastic.
•
Freeman, J. (1995). More Books Kids Will Sit Still For: A read aloud guide. New Providence,
NJ: R.R. Bowker.
•
Gross, J. (1986). Make Your Child a Lifelong Reader: A parent-guided program for children
of all ages who can’t, won’t or haven’t yet started to read. Los Angeles, CA: Jeremy P. Tarcher.
•
Hearne, B. (1990). Choosing Books for Children: A common sense guide. New York, NY: Dell
Publishing.
•
Hunt, G. (1989). Honey For a Child’s Heart: The imaginative use of books in family life.
Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House.
•
Hydrick, J. (1996). Parent’s Guide to Literacy for the 21st Century. Urbana, IL: National
Council of Teachers of English.
•
Kimmel, M.M., & Segel, E. (1983). For Reading Out Loud! A guide to sharing books with
children. New York, NY: Delacorte Press.
•
Kropp, P. (1993, 1996). Raising a Reader: Make your child a reader for life. New York, NY:
Doubleday.
•
Lamme, L.L. (1995). Growing Up Reading: Sharing with your children the joys of reading.
Washington, DC: Acropolis Books Ltd.
•
O’Connor, K. (1995). How to Hook Your Kids on Books: Create a love for reading that will
last a lifetime. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers.
•
Trelease, J. (1995). The Read Aloud Handbook. New York, NY: Penguin Books.
•
White, V. (1994). Choosing Your Children’s Books: Preparing readers 2-5 years old. Atlanta,
GA: Bayley & Musgrave. (Also for readers ages five to eight and eight to 12 years).
Parent Introduction—Grade 2
6
PILOT
FOR SUMMER LEARNING
Web sites with information and free literacy activities
Education Place
www.eduplace.com
A wealth of worksheets and online activities
PBS Teacher Source and PBS Kids
www.pbs.org
Resources for teachers, kids and parents, connected to your child’s favorite PBS shows.
Reading Is Fundamental (RIF) Reading Planet
www.rifreadingplanet.org/rif/
Games, articles, booklists and activities to keep you busy all summer.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Research and Improvement
www.ed.gov/pubs/parents
Print and Learn for Kids
www.brobstsystems.com/kids/
Offers downloadable and printable worksheets, sorted by grade level.
Learning Disabilities Online
www.ldonline.org
Many resources for parents whose children struggle with learning or learning disabilities. Search
with keyword, “reading.”
Reading Adventure
www.bookadventure.com/
A free reading motivation program for children in grades K-8.
Get Ready To Read
www.getreadytoread.org/
Information and resources on early child literacy, including a screening tool and skill-building
activities for children.
Parent Introduction—Grade 2
7
EDUCATION WEEK SPOTLIGHT ON MATH INSTRUCTION
■
edweek.org
On Literacy and the Common Core
Editor’s Note: Educators are
emphasizing the use of
nonfiction texts, developing
literacy skills across the
curriculum, and collaborating
with librarians to help prepare
for the common-core standards
in reading. Download this
Spotlight to learn how schools
are meeting the English/
language arts standards.
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
1 Common Standards Drive New
Reading Approaches
3 States Target Third Grade
Reading
4 Scales Tip Toward Nonfiction
Under the Common Core
6 New Research Thinking
Girds Core
9 Rid of Memorization, History
Lessons Build Analytical Skills
11 Common Core Thrusts School
Librarians Into Leadership Roles
COMMENTARY:
13 Four Myths About the ELA
Common-Core Standards
15 Quick Guide to the Common
Core: Key Expectations
Explained
RESOURCES:
17 Resources on Literacy
and the Common Core
Published September 26, 2012, in Education Week
Common Standards
Drive New Reading
Approaches
Schools across the country are
undergoing huge shifts to satisfy the
state-led literacy and math initiative
By Catherine Gewertz
T
he Common Core State Standards
aren’t exactly new; it’s been two years
since most states adopted them. But it
took those two years for the standards
to trickle down from abstraction to daily practice, from a sheaf of papers in a state capital
into a lesson plan on a teacher’s desk. Now
they’re reshaping reading instruction in significant ways.
Whether the standards are shining a bright
new light on reading or casting an ominous
shadow over it remains a point of debate. But
without a doubt, the shifts in literacy instruction envisioned by the common core are among
2012
EDUCATION WEEK SPOTLIGHT ON LITERACY AND THE COMMON CORE
the biggest in recent decades. And they’re farreaching: All but four states have adopted the
literacy guidelines.
The standards paint an ambitious picture
of what it means to be literate in the 21st
century, said P. David Pearson, a professor of
language, literacy, society, and culture at the
University of California, Berkeley.
“I think these standards have the potential
to lead the parade in a different direction: toward taking as evidence of your reading ability not your score on a specific skill test—or
how many letter sounds you can identify or
ideas you can recall from a passage—but the
ability to use the information you gain from
reading, the fruits of your labor, to apply to
some new situation or problem or project,” he
said. “That’s a huge change.”
Just take a look at some of the ways classroom instruction is changing because of the
common standards.
sReading instruction is no longer
the sole province of the language arts
teacher. The standards call for teachers of
science, social studies, and other subjects
to teach literacy skills unique to their disciplines, such as analyzing primary- and secondary-source documents in history, and making sense of diagrams, charts, and technical
terminology in science. A 4th grade teacher
in Shell Rock, Iowa, for instance, had his
students write science books for 2nd graders
in a bid to fuse content understanding with
domain-specific literacy skills.
sReading and writing are closely connected, and writing instruction is explicit. Teaching writing has often fallen by
the wayside as teachers focus on reading, but
the common core demands its return. And
not just any kind of writing—writing studded
with citations of details and evidence from
students’ reading material. Even the youngest pupils are learning to do it: First graders
in Vermont are listening to a Dr. Seuss tale,
over and over, searching for clues that back
up the central thesis of the story.
sThe scale tips toward informational
text. Teachers are under new pressure to
work essays, speeches, articles, biographies,
and other nonfiction texts into their students’
readings. In Baltimore, middle school students are reading newspaper articles about
avatars and school uniforms, along with a
cluster of novels, to explore the theme of individuality.
sThere’s a major press for curriculum
materials that embody the common core.
Acutely aware of states’ and districts’ needs,
the major educational publishers rushed to
issue supplements to their reading programs
and followed with new-from-the-ground-up
programs that purport to be “common standards aligned.” An examination, however,
shows that a shared definition of “alignment”
can prove elusive.
sEducators are training a keen eye on
ways to support students who struggle
with literacy skills. The common standards
make unprecedented demands on students,
such as mastering the difficult academic
vocabulary of each discipline, and teachers
worry that many students could be left behind. In Albuquerque, N.M., educators are
building supports for their many Englishlearners, setting up one school as a demonstration site where teachers get immersed in
the standards and learn strategies for helping
students who are still learning the language.
Other Albuquerque teachers are working
with a national expert to write specially tailored model lessons for 1st and 8th graders.
sEven as the new standards dominate the reading landscape, however,
other literacy issues are also coming to
the fore in the common-core era. Reading proficiently by the end of 3rd grade has
proved a popular rallying point for states,
some of which have recently enacted policies that toughen various requirements—for
teachers as well as for students—in pursuit
of that goal.
sNew literacy research is also exerting
its influence. Findings that have been issued
since the National Reading Panel’s landmark
report in 2000 had a key role in shaping the
common standards, including a more nuanced
approach to comprehension across the disciplines and media. But in an effort to focus on
the end result, critics say, the standards often
leave out—or get ahead of—the research on
strategies teachers can use to help students
achieve these new literacy skills.
False Choice?
The swirls of activity around reading, however, have raised as many or more questions
than they purport to answer.
Some teachers worry that the common
standards’ emphasis on reading informational text, and on writing that’s grounded
in evidence from that text, could leave little
place for reading literature and for the kinds
of personal, creative writing that can unleash
students’ passions.
Advocates of the informational-text approach argue that it is a powerful equalizer in
building content knowledge for disadvantaged
children, and that it’s crucial in building the
skills most needed in good jobs and in college.
Still others argue that nonfiction can engage
some students in ways that fiction can’t and
that devoting more time to it needn’t displace
creative writing and literature.
Some reading experts are frustrated with
what they see as an unnecessarily polarized debate about the standards. It’s a false
choice, they argue, to say that students can’t
write about things they’re interested in and
still learn to base their ideas solidly on what
■
edweek.org
2
“
“Time will
always be something
we have to wrestle
with. Do we have
enough time to get it
all in?”
DWIGHT DAVIS
Teacher, Wheatley Education Campus,District of
Columbia
they’ve read about those topics.
It’s also a false choice, those experts say, to
argue that creative writing has to atrophy if
expository writing expands. Or that reading
great works of literature has to dwindle if
students read more original historical documents. Blending all those literacy experiences
into students’ lives, they argue, is important
for building flexible, strong minds.
How will that blend be achieved without
sacrificing bulwarks of the discipline? An increasingly common element in answers: more
reading.
“We have to dramatically increase the volume of reading kids are doing in English class
and beyond,” said Penny Kittle, an English/
language arts teacher at Kennett High School
in North Conway, N.H.
Where will the time come from for that additional reading?
“Time will always be something we have
to wrestle with,” said Dwight Davis, who is
weaving more nonfiction texts, and more challenging books overall, into the poetry and novels he assigns his 5th grade students at the
Wheatley Education Campus in the District
of Columbia. “Do we have enough time to get
it all in?”
Time isn’t the only resource in scarce supply
as educators put the standards into practice.
There is the issue of money, as well. How will
districts and states pay for the professional
development teachers need to adapt their instruction to the new expectations? And will
all teachers get the support they require to
provide the right kinds of help to the students
with the shakiest skills?
Will schools have the funding to buy instructional materials that encompass a wider
variety of text types? And even if the training, materials, and pedagogy come together
well, will they indeed produce the college and
career readiness that the standards promise?
In the new common-core era, question
marks appear to be a key feature of the landscape.
EDUCATION WEEK SPOTLIGHT ON LITERACY AND COMMON CORE
Published November 14, 2012,
in Education Week
iStockphoto/Jamie Farrant
States Target
3rd Grade Reading
At the same time that
thousands of school districts
nationwide are beginning to
implement the Common Core
State Standards in English/
language arts, many also face
new state reading policies for
the early grades that call for
the identification of struggling
readers, require interventions
to help them, and, in some
instances, mandate the
retention of 3rd graders who
lack adequate reading skills.
A number of states recently
adopted such policies, many
of which have echoes of a
long-standing Florida measure
for reading intervention and
retention for those who lack
adequate reading skills. In all,
according to the Education
Commission of the States,
32 states plus the District of
Columbia now have statutes
in place intended to improve
reading proficiency by the end
of 3rd grade.
Arizona tightens up a recently
Indiana identifies 3rd grade
adopted policy for retaining 3rd
graders who score “far below”
their grade level on a state reading
test, closing what advocates
called a “loophole” that allowed
parents to override the retention.
The state policy calls on districts
to provide one of several options
to assist both retained students
and struggling readers in earlier
grades, including assignment to
a different teacher for reading
instruction, summer school, or
other “intensive” help before,
during, or after the school day.
retention as a “last resort” for
struggling readers. A state board
of education policy says students
who fail the state reading test
at that grade would be retained,
though technically, the state is only
requiring that they be counted
as 3rd graders for purposes of
state testing. The policy allows
for midyear promotions and has
several good-cause exemptions.
Districts must provide a daily
reading block of at least 90
minutes to all students in grades
K-3 and additional strategies and
interventions for those identified
as struggling readers.
PASSED: 2012
Colorado is requiring
schools—in partnership with
parents—to craft individual plans
for struggling readers to get them
on track. For 3rd graders with
significant reading deficiencies,
the parent and teacher must meet
and consider retention as an
intervention strategy, but the final
decision must be jointly agreed
to and approved by the district.
A special per-pupil fund was
created to support specific reading
interventions, such as summer
school and after-school tutoring.
PASSED: 2012
Connecticut instructs the
state education agency to develop
new K-3 reading assessments
for districts to use in identifying
struggling readers. It also
mandates that K-3 teachers
pass a reading assessment each
year beginning in 2013. And it
compels the state to devise an
intensive program that includes
“scientifically based” reading
instruction, intensive readingintervention strategies, summer
school, and other features that will
be offered for a limited number of
schools to use.
PASSED: 2012
PASSED: 2010
■
edweek.org
3
diagnostic assessments and early
interventions for struggling readers
beginning in kindergarten.
PASSED: 2012 (OVERRIDING
GOVERNOR’S VETO)
Ohio requires 3rd graders to
meet a certain threshold on the
state English/language arts test to
advance to the 4th grade, but the
law makes exceptions for some
students. Districts must annually
assess and identify students
reading below grade level, and
develop a reading improvement
and monitoring plan for each
pupil. Such students must receive
at least 90 minutes of daily reading
instruction and be taught by
a “high-performing” teacher.
PASSED: 2012
Iowa requires 3rd graders with
an identified “reading deficiency”
either to attend an intensive
summer reading program or
be retained, except for those
eligible for several good-cause
exemptions. The law also requires,
if state funds are appropriated, for
districts to provide such students
in grades K-3 with intensive
instructional services and support
to improve reading, including
a minimum of 90 minutes of
“scientific, research-based”
reading instruction and other
strategies identified by the district,
such as small-group instruction,
an extended school day, or
tutoring and mentoring.
PASSED: 2012
North Carolina schools must
retain 3rd graders not reading
on grade level, based on a state
assessment, unless they meet one
of several exemptions, including
demonstration of proficiency
through an alternative assessment
or portfolio. Prior to retention,
students must be provided
summer reading camps and
have one more chance to
demonstrate proficiency. The
measure also stipulates regular
Oklahoma calls for schools
to retain 3rd graders who score
“unsatisfactory” on the state
reading test, though they may
qualify for several good-cause
exemptions. The new policy calls
for districts to offer a midyear
promotion for 4th graders who
show substantial improvement.
The law also calls on districts to
identify and provide extra reading
support and instructional time
for students in K-3 reading below
grade level.
PASSED: 2011
Virginia mandates that
local districts provide readingintervention services to 3rd
graders who demonstrate
deficiencies on a state reading test
or other diagnostic assessment.
The measure does not include any
requirements for retention.
PASSED: 2012
—ERIK W. ROBELEN
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the Cure for the Common Core
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read.think.discuss.grow.
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The Great Books Foundation 800-222-5870 www.greatbooks.org
Great Books programs are a great match for
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Here are five key ways that Great Books
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#AROLYN3MITH
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“The Common Core Standards are
rigorous. When we talk about language
arts standards, Great Books aligns with
Common Core because students are
engaged in speaking activities, listening
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writing. Plus, Junior Great Books
anthologies are very high in terms of
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'REAT"OOKSPROGRAMSARElNDINGTHATMEETINGTHE
GOALSOFTHE#OMMON#ORE3TATE3TANDARDSISEASY
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CRITERIA*OINTHEMBYCONTACTINGUSTODAY
6ISITwww.greatbooks.org/corestandardsTOLEARNMORE
How Great Books K–12 Programs align with the Common Core State Standards for
English Language Arts (below and the three pages that follow in this Spotlight).
Reading
Common Core Standards
Great Books Programs
Key Ideas and Details
Students should be able to:
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■
edweek.org
4
Published November 14, 2012, in Education Week
Scale Tips Toward Nonfiction
Under Common Core
College and workplace demands
are propelling the shift in text
T
he common standards expect students to become adept at reading informational text, a shift in focus that
many English/language arts teachers fear might diminish the time-honored
place of literature in their classrooms.
In schools nationwide, where all but four
states have adopted the Common Core State
Standards, teachers are finding ways to incorporate historical documents, speeches, essays, scientific articles, and other nonfiction
into classes.
The new standards envision elementary
students, whose reading typically tilts toward
fiction, reading equally from literature and
informational text. By high school, literature
should represent only 30 percent of their
readings; 70 percent should be informational.
The tilt reflects employers’ and college professors’ complaints that too many young people
can’t analyze or synthesize information, or
document arguments.
Some passionate advocates for literature,
however, see reason for alarm. In a recent
paper issued by the Pioneer Institute, a Boston-based group that opposes the standards,
two language arts experts argue that those
distributions make it inevitable that less literature will be taught in schools. Even if social studies, science, and other teachers pick
up much of the informational-text reading,
co-authors Sandra Stotsky and Mark Bauerlein argue, language arts teachers will have to
absorb a good chunk as well, and they will be
the ones held accountable.
“It’s hard to imagine that low reading scores
in a school district will force grade 11 government/history and science teachers to devote
more time to reading instruction,” the paper
says.
De-emphasizing literature in the rush to
build informational-text skills is shortsighted,
the study argues, because the skills required
to master good, complex literature serve stu-
dents well in college and challenging jobs. The
problem is worsened when teachers make
“weak” choices of informational texts, such as
blog posts, Mr. Bauerlein said in an interview.
“If we could ensure that the kinds of stuff
they’re choosing are essays by [Ralph Waldo]
Emerson or Booker T. Washington’s Up From
Slavery, then that would be wonderful,”
said Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English
at Emory University in Atlanta. “Those are
complex texts, with the literary features that
make students better readers in college.”
The only required readings in the standards
are four foundational American writings, such
as the Declaration of Independence, and one
play each by Shakespeare and by an American dramatist. Students also must “demonstrate knowledge” of American literature
from the 18th through early-20th centuries.
An appendix to the standards lists texts
that illustrate the range of works students
should read across the curriculum to acquire
the skills outlined in the standards. Those
titles are not required reading, but are being
widely consulted as representations of what
the standards seek.
Stories, poetry, and plays share space with
nonfiction books and articles. Kindergarten
teachers are offered Tana Hoban’s I Read
Signs, along with P.D. Eastman’s Are You My
Mother? For 4th and 5th grades, the standards suggest Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s
The Little Prince as well as Joy Hakim’s A
History of US. Middle school suggestions include Winston Churchill’s 1940 “Blood, Toil,
Tears, and Sweat” speech and an article on
elementary particles from the New Book of
Popular Science along with The Adventures of
Tom Sawyer. For 11th and 12th graders, T.S.
Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
is suggested, as are Malcolm Gladwell’s The
Tipping Point and Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.
A New Blend
Taking a cue from the standards, many
teachers are blending fiction and informational reading as they phase in the common
core.
At Calvin Rodwell Elementary School in
Baltimore last month, Erika Parker and her
class of 4- and 5-year-olds were planning a
trip to a nearby farm as part of a unit called
“fall fun with friends.” She read the children
two versions of The Three Little Pigs; they
joined her to shout out the famous refrain:
“Not by the hair on my chinny-chin-chin!”
They were addressing a common-core expectation that they learn to compare points of
view in multiple texts, Ms. Parker said.
She also read the children books and stories
about fall weather, friendship, the life cycle
of pumpkins, and how to grow apples. They
ventured into the schoolyard to learn about
tree trunks and limbs and how trees could be
grafted to produce new varieties and colors
of apples.
“We are certainly still reading works of fiction,” she said later. “They love their stories.
But they also really get excited about something in real life that they can make a connection to.”
Quinton M. Lawrence, too, is trying out a
new blend with his 5th and 6th graders at the
K-8 Woodhome Elementary/Middle School in
Baltimore. The language arts teacher is drawing on newspaper articles, novels, and poems
to explore the theme of individuality.
Children are choosing from a range of novels with a “realistic feel,” Mr. Lawrence said,
including House on Mango Street by Sandra
Cisneros, Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, and
The Skin I’m In by Sharon Flake. They read
newspaper articles about a school uniform
rule and the creation of avatars—virtual alter
egos—in video games.
Through discussion, the students zeroed
in on 10 major components of individuality,
such as intelligence, beliefs, and physical appearance, and they explored them through
the real and imaginary characters they read
about, Mr. Lawrence said. They will write
two-page essays exploring the theme further,
based on additional research from other articles online, he said.
“The idea that students are exposed to
informational text is somehow taken for
granted,” said Mr. Lawrence, whose district
serves a predominantly low-income, minority
■
edweek.org
5
Expanded Bookshelves
Elementary
The Common Core State Standards require students to read
many “informational” texts along with novels, poetry, and plays.
An appendix to the standards lists dozens of titles to illustrate
the range of suggested reading. Some “exemplar” texts can be
found on the bookshelf.
SOURCE: Common Core State Standards, Appendix B
Anchor Standard 10 in Reading: “Read and
comprehend complex literary and informational
texts independently and proficiently.”
Middle school
population. “Most of my kids have not been exposed to newspaper articles. Their parents don’t subscribe to magazines. So
it’s good for them to see these kinds of things, learn about their
structure, as well as the structure of novels.”
Sonja B. Santelises, the chief academic officer of the Baltimore
system, which has been working with teachers districtwide to
design common-core modules and sets of texts in social studies,
science, and language arts, said the emphasis on informational
reading is crucial as a matter of equity for her 83,000 students.
“We’re naïve if we don’t acknowledge that it’s through nonfiction that a lot of students who’ve never been to a museum are
going to read about mummies for the first time or read about
the process of photosynthesis,” she said. She considers it important to use informational readings simultaneously as tools
to build content knowledge and to familiarize students with a
variety of types of text.
When Ms. Santelises visits classrooms, she still sees plenty of
literature being enjoyed, so she isn’t worried about fiction losing
its place in school, she said. “Fiction and narrative have been so
overrepresented, particularly in the elementary grades, that I
feel this is more of a balancing than a squeezing-out.”
In a study that painted a portrait of that imbalance, Michigan
literacy researcher Nell K. Duke found in 2000 that informational text occupied only 3.6 minutes of a 1st grader’s day and
10 percent of the shelf space in their classroom libraries.
The Role of Literature
High school
In the rush to rebalance, however, educators risk cheating
literature, some experts say. “The emphasis on nonfiction is
leading to the development of a whole new universe of activities that will leave less time for the ones about literature,” said
Arthur N. Applebee, a professor of education at the State University of New York in Albany.
Thomas Newkirk, a professor of English at the University of
New Hampshire, said he thinks the common core’s “bias against
narrative” doesn’t serve students well. If teachers seek to make
students ready for real life, he said, they must equip them not
only to argue, interpret, and inform, but to convey emotion and
tell stories.
“The world is much more narrative than the standards suggest,” said Mr. Newkirk, who teaches writing to freshmen and
trains preservice teachers.
“Think about when candidates are running for office, and they
have to tell the stories of their lives, the story of where we are
going as a nation,” he said. “When we honor someone who has
passed away, someone who is retiring, we need to tell their story.
The other skills are important, too. But in the real world,
there are moments when we have to distill emotion, experience. To claim otherwise misrepresents how we operate.”
The question of which faculty are responsible for the new
informational-text expectations is permeating conversation.
Colette Bennett, the chairman of the English department
at Wamogo High School in Litchfield, Conn., said she believes the standards allow her to keep her focus squarely
on literature, with essays and other nonfiction used to enrich that study. Recently, she had students use “The Hero’s
Journey,” a narrative framework designed by American
mythology scholar Joseph Campbell, to help them interpret
King Lear, she said.
“The standards say that 30 percent of a student’s reading
in [high] school should be literary, which is as it should be,”
she said. “That’s my responsibility. My purview is fiction,
poetry, literary nonfiction, and no other teacher is going to
teach that.”
But teachers of other subjects have not been asking their
students to read enough, Ms. Bennett said. “I hear them
saying, ‘Oh, what am I going to drop out of my course to do
more reading?’ And I say, ‘What? You haven’t been doing a
lot of reading all along?’ “
More Time on Reading
To avoid sacrificing literature and still give students deep
experience with informational text, one thing will be required, according to Carol Jago, a former president of the
National Council of Teachers of English: more time.
“Teachers don’t have to give up a single poem, play, or
novel,” said Ms. Jago, who now directs the California Reading and Literature Project at the University of California,
Los Angeles, which helps teachers design lesson plans. “But
students are going to have to read four times as much as
they are now.”
Where will the time come from? From substituting goodquality reading for “busywork,” movies shown in class, and
the hours students spend daily on electronic entertainment
such as texting and playing video games, Ms. Jago said.
In sorting out how to put the standards into practice,
some experts caution against an either-or interpretation.
It’s important for students to be steeped in all kinds of
reading and writing, they say, and it’s all possible with good
planning and collaboration.
“I don’t know why this dichotomy has been constructed in
a way that is so divisive. It’s very unhelpful,” said Stephanie R. Jones, a professor who focuses on literacy and social
class at the University of Georgia in Athens.
“We shouldn’t teach kindergartners as if they’re going to
join the workforce next year. But it won’t hurt us to make
sure we are emphasizing nonfiction a little more in K-5.
And I don’t think fiction has to be edged out at all,” she
said.
“In some college and career paths, it’s important to state
a claim and justify with evidence, and in others, it’s important to be really creative and innovative and not start
with an argument, but have open inquiry and move toward
some kind of discovery.”
Coverage of the implementation of the Common Core State
Standards and the common assessments is supported in part by a
grant from the GE Foundation, at www.ge.com/foundation.
■
edweek.org
6
Published November 14, 2012, in Education Week
New Research
Thinking Girds
Core
In the 15 years since the
National Reading Panel
convened, the knowledge
base on literacy has grown
T
By Sarah D. Sparks
he truism that students
“learn to read, then read to
learn,” has spawned a slew
of early-reading interventions and laws. But the Common
Core State Standards offer a very different view of literacy, in which fluency and comprehension skills evolve
together throughout every grade and
subject in a student’s academic life,
from the first time a toddler gums a
board book to the moment a medical
student reads data from a brain scan.
In doing so, the common-core literacy standards reflect the research
world’s changing evidence on expectations of student competence in an
increasingly interconnected and digitized world. But critics say the standards also neglect emerging evidence
on cognitive and reading strategies
that could guide teachers on how to
help students develop those literacy
skills.
“In our knowledge-based economy,
students are not only going to have
to read, but develop knowledge-based
capital. We need to help children use
literacy to develop critical-thinking
skills, problem-solving skills, making
distinctions among different types of
evidence,” said Susan B. Neuman, a
professor in educational studies specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in
Ann Arbor. “The Common Core State
Standards is privileging knowledge
for the first time. To ensure they are
career-and-college ready, we have to
see students as lifelong learners and
help them develop the knowledgegathering skills they will use for the
rest of their lives. That’s the reality.”
Response to Findings
It’s been 15 years since Congress
convened the National Reading
Panel to distill knowledge about how
students learn to read. That group,
in the heat of the so-called “reading
wars” between whole-language and
phonics approaches to instruction,
focused on five fundamental literacy
skills: the word-decoding skills of
phonemic awareness and phonics,
fluency, vocabulary, and text comprehension. The panel’s seminal 2000
report, “Teaching Children to Read,”
was used as the touchstone of the $1
billion-a-year federal Reading First
grant program, established under the
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
Eight years later, the U.S. Department of Education’s research arm
found that schools using Reading
First did devote significantly more
time to teaching the basic skills outlined by the panel, but ultimately
“reduced the percentage of students
engaged with print,” both fiction and
nonfiction. The study by the Institute
of Education Sciences found students
in Reading First schools were no better at drawing meaning from what
they read than students at other
schools, and the program eventually
was scrapped.
“One of the things we’re seeing
with the common core is, there was
general disappointment with the
NRP report’s five critical skills as part of the
Reading First initiative,” said Ms. Neuman,
who was an assistant secretary of education
during the first term of President George
W. Bush, when the federal reading program
was rolled out. “When the evaluation came
out and the results were very modest, people
said, ‘Well, what’s next, what do we do?’ We
have not seen the emergence of a new model,
and now, that’s on the verge of happening.”
Peggy McCardle, the chief of the child
development and behavior branch—which
includes literacy research—at the National
Institute on Child Health and Human Development, said comprehension became the
“next great frontier of reading research” after
the National Reading Panel. There have
been other, narrowly focused panels on early
reading and English-language learners, but
the National Reading Panel still stands as
the last comprehensive, Congressional task
force on reading.
“What the National Reading Panel had to
say about comprehension was, we do need
to teach kids strategies, and it’s better if
you teach them in combination—and we’ve
taken that much further,” Ms. McCardle said.
“While we don’t have reading comprehension
completely figured out in every way, … we
have it much more figured out than we did
in 2000.”
The common core’s emphasis on more
complex text with higher-level vocabulary at
younger ages—and particularly the use of informational, non-narrative texts as opposed
to overwhelmingly narrative texts—also puts
into practice research showing that there
is no bright line for when students start to
read to learn, Ms. McCardle said. Setting one
would be “an artificial distinction,” she said,
“because the ramp up to learning from reading starts earlier and is just that, a ramp-up,
not a quick switch or a dichotomy.”
Viewing comprehension as a sequential
skill rather than a continuously evolving
one “also implies they don’t need ongoing
instruction after 3rd grade, and we clearly
know they do,” she said.
The Alliance for Excellent Education’s
2006 report “Reading Next” helped spark
the common core’s approach. Education professor Catherine A. Snow and then-doctoral
student Gina Biancarosa of the Harvard
Graduate School of Education found that explicit comprehension instruction, intensive
writing, and the use of texts in a wide array
of difficulty levels, subjects, and disciplines
all helped improve literacy for struggling
adolescent readers.
“There are two really big ideas underlying
the common core,” said P. David Pearson, a
professor of language and literacy, society,
and culture at the University of California,
Berkeley. The standards first set out that
children build knowledge through their close
reading of texts, a concept “consistent with
the last 20-30 years of research,” Mr. Pearson
said.
“But the second big idea is its grounding
in the disciplines,” Mr. Pearson added. “If
you think of science and history and even
literature as disciplines, you can see why
they have separate standards in reading for
literature, informational text, science, and
technical areas. You’re not just learning to
read; you’re learning to read within a rich
content area. This reflects a huge refocusing
of reading research in the last 10 to 15 years
on reading in the disciplines. It’s been timely;
they’ve hit a theme in the realm of education
policy and practice.”
Content and Complexity
Mr. Pearson pointed to research by Cynthia
L. Greenleaf, a co-director of the Strategic
Literacy Initiative at the San Franciscobased research group WestEd, which identified specific literacy skills required in science
and history classes.
Timothy Shanahan, the director of the
Center for Literacy at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a member of the
common-core literacy-standards committee,
likewise has found differences not just in
the content knowledge but the approach to
reading and getting information from text by
professional scientists and historians.
While “reading across the curriculum” research in the mid-1990s also stressed text in
different content areas, Dorothy Strickland,
a reading professor and education professor emeritus at Rutgers University in New
Brunswick, N.J., said the common core leverages emerging research on how students analyze and verify what they read in different
types of text, from literature to a lab report
or an Internet blog.
“One of the key elements of executive function is holding more than one thing at a
time” in mind, she said. “Kids have to read
across texts, evaluate them, respond to them
all at the same time. In office work of any
sort, people are doing this sort of thing all
the time.”
The “Reading Next” report also highlights
labor studies that show the 25 fastest-growing professions from 2000-2010—computer
software engineers, database administrators, and medical assistants, among them—
require higher-than-average literacy skills,
particularly in informational texts.
In a series of experiments across several
grades beginning in 2000, Nell K. Duke,
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a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor, found elementary classrooms spend
on average only 3.6 minutes a day reading
non-story-based informational, as opposed
to narrative texts. In classrooms with high
numbers of poor children, informational
reading occupies less than two minutes a
day.
“Even if there hadn’t been one stitch of
research on informational text with young
children, it’s still conceivable the common
core would have had an incredible emphasis
on informational text because that was what
colleges and employers were saying students
needed to be able to read,” Ms. Duke said.
“Fortunately, there was a nice alignment between the concerns of researchers and the
concerns of the college and business community.”
The fundamentals discussed in the National Reading Panel are still there, too, but
have been given different weight. For example, vocabulary gets much more attention in
the common core, not just individual words,
but their meanings in different contexts and
the nuances in families of related words. In
part, that’s because a student’s depth and
complexity of vocabulary knowledge predicts
his or her academic achievement better than
other early-reading indicators, such as phonemic awareness.
“There was a big push on academic vocabulary and the discourse of the disciplines.
It’s likely come from that whole tradition
of making sure kids not only have general
academic language but deep vocabulary of
history, social studies, science,” Mr. Pearson
of UC-Berkeley said.
The common core also marks a sea change
in the way researchers and teachers think
about a child’s reading level. For example, in
a 2010 study in the Journal of Educational
Psychology, researchers assigned two groups
of poor readers in grades 2 and 4 to practice
reading aloud text either at or above their
reading level; a third group, the control, had
no additional practice. They found students
who practiced reading, even when it was
difficult, were significantly better 20 weeks
later at reading rate, word recognition, and
comprehension, in comparison with the control group.
“It flies in the face of everything we’d been
doing. Since the 1940s, the biggest idiots in
the field—like me—were arguing that you
couldn’t teach kids out of books they couldn’t
read,” Mr. Shanahan said. “We were setting
expectations of such a modest level of learning being possible. We were unintentionally
holding them back, and the common core
called us on that.”
Ms. Strickland and Mr. Pearson said the
common core’s strength comes from integrating many factors that have been identified as
vital to adult literacy—such as facility with
complex text or academic vocabulary—across
all grades and academic subjects. “I think the
idea of 10 standards that play themselves
out grade after grade across different disciplines is a powerful thing,” Mr. Pearson said.
Standards and Grades
Still, researchers said, while individual
standards are backed by evidence that students’ level of mastery of them can predict
their eventual literacy in college and work,
there is much less research supporting the
grade-level descriptors of how those skills
look through the years, or the most effective instructional strategies at each grade.
Mr. Pearson said descriptors at transition
grades, such as in upper elementary and
middle school, may become the “Achilles heel
of the standards.”
“As you move through the grades, it
changes in funny ways, and I don’t think the
changes are based on any actual research,
but on professional consensus,” Mr. Pearson
said. “We may end up in the strange position
of having a standard in 8th grade easier than
one in 6th grade.”
Mr. Shanahan agreed that “some of the targets are a little goofy,” noting, for example,
that the common core requires children to
compare two texts in kindergarten, but there
is no specific evidence that this skill should
develop in that grade versus, say, grades 1 or
2. On the other hand, Mr. Shanahan said, “I
think what the learning progressions tell us
is a 4th grade teacher can no longer be a 4th
grade teacher, or even a grades 3-4-5 teacher.
They need to be a teacher of literacy and understand the precedents and antecedents of
what a student needs to know.”
Getting There From Here
Much of the criticism of the common core’s
research base comes from what it leaves out
rather than what it includes.
In the years since the National Reading Panel, reading researchers have made
significant advances in the development of
strategies for reading and comprehension, as
well as metacognitive factors that contribute
to reading success, such as attention and motivation.
In its preface, the literacy standards
bluntly limit their scope to “required achievements”—the outcomes of reading, as opposed
to strategies for comprehension.
“The standards do not mandate such
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8
COMPREHENSION AND THE
STANDARDS
The Common Core State Standards take
a holistic view of comprehension, asking
students to derive meaning from a mix of texts,
illustrations, and digital media at the same time.
“Our knowledge of comprehension is changing. We used to teach strategies, on the assumption that
those strategies would translate to any text. Now we recognize that transferability has real problems;
we need to teach in the context of the text,” said Susan B. Neuman, a professor of educational studies
specializing in early-literacy development at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
This is one area in which the standards have staked a position on the bleeding edge of research on
learning, said Nell K. Duke, a professor of language, literacy, and culture at the University of Michigan
School of Education in Ann Arbor. “How do you teach kids to read a diagram, how do you teach kids to
read a time line? What typically goes wrong with reading a graphic?”
The common core’s vision of how students ought to learn, grade by grade, to comprehend meaning
differently across different media is sketched out in one strand of the reading standards—part of
“integrating knowledge and ideas.”
KINDERGARTEN: With prompting and support,
describe the relationship between illustrations and
the story in which they appear (e.g., what moment
in a story an illustration depicts).
GRADE 1: Use illustrations and details in a story
to describe its characters, setting, or events.
GRADE 2: Use information gained from the
illustrations and words in a print or digital text
to demonstrate understanding of its characters,
setting, or plot.
GRADE 3: Use information gained from
illustrations (e.g., maps, photographs) and the
words in a text to demonstrate understanding
of the text (e.g., where, when, why, and how key
events occur).
GRADE 4: Interpret information presented visually,
orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs,
diagrams, time lines, animations, or interactive
elements on Web pages) and explain how the
information contributes to an understanding of
the text in which it appears.
a problem efficiently.
GRADE 6: Integrate information presented
in different media or formats (e.g., visually,
quantitatively) as well as in words to develop a
coherent understanding of a topic or issue.
GRADE 7: Compare and contrast a text to an
audio, video, or multimedia version of the text,
analyzing each medium’s portrayal of the subject
(e.g., how the delivery of a speech affects the
impact of the words).
GRADE 8: Evaluate the advantages and
disadvantages of using different mediums (e.g.,
print or digital text, video, multimedia) to present a
particular topic or idea.
GRADES 9-10: Analyze various accounts of
a subject told in different mediums (e.g., a
person’s life story in both print and multimedia),
determining which details are emphasized in each
account.
GRADE 5: Draw on information from multiple print
or digital sources, demonstrating the ability to
locate an answer to a question quickly or to solve
GRADES 11-12: Integrate and evaluate multiple
sources of information presented in different
media or formats (e.g., visually, quantitatively) as
well as in words in order to address a question or
solve a problem.
—S.D.S
things as a particular writing process or the
full range of metacognitive strategies that
students may need to monitor and direct
their thinking and learning,” the common
core states.
Rather, it says, teachers should use their
professional judgment and experience to
decide how to help students meet the standards.
“It’s not because [the common-core designers] rejected that research,” Mr. Shanahan
said. “The notion was that you wanted to
focus on outcomes, not the inputs. It might
be helpful to teach a student whether he’s
paying attention or not, and if not, to do
something. The common core isn’t saying you
shouldn’t do that kind of thing, but that’s not
an outcome.”
Maureen McLaughlin, the president-elect
of the Newark, Del.-based International
Reading Association, sees the lack of readingstrategy research in the curriculum as tan-
tamount to having no research base where it
counts most. “I see a gap between the standards and school curriculums, because typically when [previous] state standards were
developed, they basically became the curriculum,” said Ms. McLaughlin, who also chairs
the reading department at East Stroudsburg
University of Pennsylvania. “If the states
that adopted the common core say to their
school districts, ‘This is the curriculum,’ and
teachers feel they must teach to the test, the
curriculum as it exists would not include the
metacognitive strategies, the writing-process
strategies... and that’s a problem.”
Ms. Neuman, the former assistant education secretary, disagrees. “I like the idea of
focusing on outcomes,” she said. “Comprehension strategies and metacognitive techniques
have often been talked about as repair strategies, but you have to actually know you are
not reading well to use those. So it’s a little
bit of a Catch-22 here. What this new approach is saying is focus on the text, because
many remedial readers rely too much on
their background knowledge and think they
understand what they are reading when
they actually do not.”
The University of Michigan’s Ms. Duke
echoed the researchers’ general concern that
there has not been enough study of what
good comprehension looks like and how
to teach it in new contexts required by the
common core, such as Internet articles, data
tables, and texts that also include graphics.
“When a standard calls for us to get kids
proficient at something we don’t yet know
how to get students proficient at, we really
have to scramble a little bit,” she said. “Hopefully, in a decade, we’ll have really nice research on effective ways to go about this.”
Mr. Shanahan agreed.
“I don’t know of any studies or lines of research that might make us decide three or
five years from now, let’s take out these items
or put these in,” he said. “In many ways, the
common core is silent on that. They’re taking
it on trust that we’ll either know how to do
it or we’ll figure it out, and, as a field, I’m not
sure we do know how to do it.”
Coverage of “deeper learning” that will prepare
students with the skills and knowledge needed to
succeed in a rapidly changing world is supported
in part by a grant from the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, at www.hewlett.org.
■
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9
Published August 8, 2012, in Education Week
Rid of Memorization,
History Lessons Build
Analytical Skills
Common standards could
drive approach
F
or years, bands of educators have
been trying to free history instruction from the mire of memorization
and propel it instead with the kinds
of inquiry that drive historians themselves.
Now, the common-core standards may offer
more impetus for districts and schools to
adopt that brand of instruction.
A study of one such approach suggests
that it can yield a triple academic benefit:
It can deepen students’ content knowledge,
help them think like historians, and also
build their reading comprehension.
The Reading Like a Historian program,
a set of 75 free secondary school lessons in
U.S. history, is getting a new wave of attention as teachers adapt to the Common Core
State Standards in English/language arts.
Those guidelines, adopted by all but four
states, demand that teachers of all subjects
help students learn to master challenging nonfiction and build strong arguments
based on evidence.
Searching for ways to teach those literacy
skills across the curriculum, while building
students’ content knowledge and thinking
skills, some educators have turned to that
program. Designed under the tutelage of
history educator Sam Wineburg, it has been
downloaded from the website of the research
project he directs, the Stanford History Education Group, more than 330,000 times in
the past 2½ years.
“It completely changed the way I teach
history, and my students are getting so
much more out of it,” said Terri Camajani,
who teaches U.S. history and government at
Washington High School in San Francisco.
“They get really into it. And their reading
level just jumps; you can see it in their writing,” she said.
Ms. Camajani was one of the teachers involved in a 2008 experiment that gauged
the impact of Reading Like a Historian
lessons on 11th graders in 10 San Francisco high school classes. Teachers in half
the classrooms had been trained to use the
lessons; those in the other half did not use
them. After six months, students using the
program outperformed those in the control
group in factual knowledge, reading comprehension, and a suite of analytical and strategic skills dubbed “historical thinking.”
Avishag Reisman, who led the curriculum
development and the study as part of her
doctoral work at Stanford University under
Mr. Wineburg, said the program “seems to
hit a number of important goals. Literacy
skills: got that. Higher-level thinking and
domain-specific reading: got that. And basic
facts: got that, too. Students did better on
the nuts and bolts because they were embedded in meaningful instruction.”
And they did better even though their
teachers “didn’t always implement the lessons with the highest level of fidelity,” said
Ms. Reisman, who published her findings
last fall and winter in two journals, the
Journal of Curriculum Studies and Cognition and Instruction. That suggests, she said,
that improved professional development
could produce even stronger results.
The program takes primary-source documents as its centerpiece and shifts textbooks
into a supporting role. Each lesson begins
with a question, such as, “How should we remember the dropping of the atomic bomb?”
or “Did Pocahontas save John Smith’s life?”
Students must dig into letters, articles,
speeches, and other documents to understand events and develop interpretations
buttressed by evidence from what they read.
Four Key Skills
Teachers trained in the approach focus
heavily on four key skills: “sourcing,” to
gauge how authors’ viewpoints and reasons
for writing affect their accounts of events;
“contextualization,” to get a full picture of
what was happening at the time; “corroboration,” to help students sort out contradictory
anecdotes and facts; and “close reading,” to
help them absorb text slowly and deeply, parsing words and sentences for meaning.
One lesson begins by asking whether Abraham Lincoln was a racist. Students are always intrigued by the question, said Valerie
Ziegler, a teacher at Lincoln High School in
San Francisco, because they learned as children that he freed the slaves.
But as they read a group of documents the
lesson provides for them, it becomes clear that
they can yield multiple interpretations, she
said. For instance, Mr. Lincoln said in 1858,
while debating Stephen A. Douglas for a seat
in the U.S. Senate, that he viewed “negroes”
as morally and intellectually inferior to Caucasians, but believed they were still entitled to
equal rights under the law.
The roots of Reading Like a Historian reach
back to Mr. Wineburg’s own doctoral work
in the late 1980s. A cognitive psychologist,
he compared the way historians read documents with the way students in Advanced
Placement history courses read them, in an
attempt to distill the types of thinking necessary for successful study of history. Following
that trail in the ensuing decades solidified his
conviction that history education must be fueled by teaching students modes of thinking
that are specific to the discipline, a view he
explored in his 2001 book Historical Thinking
and Other Unnatural Acts.
Fritz Fischer, the director of history education at the University of Northern Colorado,
in Greeley, sees Reading Like a Historian as
a valuable step toward turning key strains of
thought in history education into a curricular
program.
Many scholars, such as Peter Seixas of
the University of British Columbia and Bob
Bain of the University of Michigan, have long
pressed for historical thinking and use of primary-source documents in K-12 education,
and programs such as the Evanston, Ill.-based
“DBQ Project,” which offers writing resources
for history teachers, and Brown University’s
“Choices” series, draw on that thinking, as
well, he said.
Collectively, such efforts help push history
education in an important direction: They
encourage students to see history as a rich
trove of stories and interpretations, rather
than a staggering assemblage of facts, said
Mr. Fischer, a past chairman of the National
Council for History Education.
The approach, however, requires a type of
preparation that isn’t common in programs
for aspiring teachers, Mr. Fischer said. And for
classroom teachers, it requires time to delve
with students, and “time is what is being cut
from social studies classrooms,” he said.
Mr. Wineburg said that the lessons were designed specifically to fit within the 50-minute
class period. Teachers can choose from among
them, or use them all. But for teachers accustomed to a traditional, textbook-focused classroom, he said, making optimum use of the lessons will require “a deep content-knowledge
base to understand the methodology of historical thinking.”
Shifts in Materials
A central aim in creating the program, he
said, is to “break the stranglehold of the textbook,” which typically plays such a large role
in instruction that it reduces primary-source
documents to “decorations.” A textbook author
himself, Mr. Wineburg said he grew frustrated
that most textbooks’ focus on facts obscured
“the grand narrative of history.” Students
need the chance to experience history as a
weave of questions and interpretations, but
such a shift can be uncomfortable, he said.
“It’s disconcerting to teachers and students
who have been housebroken to think there
are right answers in history,” he said.
The common standards echo key themes in
Reading Like a Historian. Issued in 2010, the
standards place a premium on students’ abilities to carefully read and re-read a complex
text until they’ve mastered its meaning and to
use evidence in that text to build arguments.
Many educators fear that students with
weaker academic skills could struggle under
such expectations unless appropriate supports are provided. Recognizing that urban
classrooms have high proportions of students
reading below grade level or learning English,
Mr. Wineburg and Ms. Reisman adapted the
documents used in the lessons. They shortened them, simplified syntax and vocabulary,
and added word definitions.
Ms. Camajani, who began her teaching career as a paraprofessional in a reading lab for
students with weak literacy skills, said she
found the adaptations “brilliant,” and just
what she needed to help her most readingchallenged students access the material.
One of her former students said he was put
off at first by having to read historical documents.
“To be honest, I don’t like reading,” said
Erick Osorio, who graduated this past spring.
“And when I saw the stuff Ms. Camajani
wanted us to read, I was like, ‘We gotta read
this?’ But it was more interesting than stuff
in other history classes. We learned how to
look for information very deeply. And it really
helped me in English class, too.”
Ms. Ziegler said that her students seem to
enjoy, in particular, challenging the orthodoxies they’ve learned as children. A civil rights
unit on Rosa Parks, for instance, takes on the
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10
popular story that she sat initially at the front
of the bus. The students read documents that
raise the possibility that she sat in the middle,
Ms. Ziegler said.
“What all the lessons have in common is
that you’re trying to solve a mystery, and
for kids, that’s the exciting part,” Ms. Ziegler
said. “It really changes their thinking about
history. They’re so into the investigation that
they don’t even realize they’re learning some
really important skills.”
She leads students in comparisons of their
textbook with others, too, so they can see the
variations. “They begin to see textbooks differently, too,” she said. “They see that they can’t
rely on just one source.”
Something Ms. Camajani likes in particular about the approach is how it “empowers”
her most marginalized students. Some of the
quietest, or least engaged, students have been
hooked by the assumption-challenging exercises, she said.
“I’ve got a really edgy kid in baggy jeans,
who used to not say much of anything, and in
the middle of discussion, he says to another
kid, ‘Can you source that for me?’ He is really
engaged, really challenging things. He’s getting a chance to experience himself as intellectual.”
But to enable that in students, teachers
have to resituate themselves in the process,
Ms. Camajani said. Typically, she has students pair up to examine documents, then sit
in a big circle to discuss their interpretations.
At first, they do what they’re accustomed to:
look to the teacher for the right answer.
“I had to learn to redirect them: ‘Don’t tell
me, tell him,’ ” she said. “They quit looking
to me for the answer and began to engage in
academic, intellectual discourse with one another. I was absolutely stunned. It’s difficult,
because there is some real zing in being the
star of the show. You are the final word on everything. But you have to learn to push the
ball down the hill and get out of the way.”
Catching On
The approach is drawing notice. Dana
Chibbaro, the social studies director in the
39,000-student Newark, N.J., school system,
said it is one of a handful of programs the district has recommended to principals as they
implement the cross-disciplinary literacy expectations of the common standards.
The methodology, more than the content, is
what she hopes teachers can take from the
program, she said. The questioning and analyzing skills it demands of students are important for their futures as informed citizens
who are “critical consumers of information,”
Ms. Chibbaro said. She thinks it does a better
job than does Advanced Placement—which
also emphasizes “DBQs,” or document-based
questions—in teaching students how to engage in deep analysis of text.
The Lincoln, Neb., school district has been
working to incorporate the approach into its
K-12 curriculum.
Randy Ernst, the social studies director in
the 36,000-student district, said the program
addresses gaps that district officials found between their standards and their teaching.
“We were supposed to be teaching history
from multiple perspectives, but we weren’t
doing that,” he said. “We weren’t asking kids
to corroborate.”
Led by dozens of teachers in a master’s degree program funded with a federal Teaching
American History grant, educators in Lincoln
are drawing on Reading Like a Historian to
revise their own instruction for students from
12th grade all the way down to kindergarten,
Mr. Ernst said.
The work blends instruction and assessment. The district has been field-testing new
types of tests created by Mr. Wineburg and his
team, which are slated to be available for free
in the fall on a new website, beyondthebubble.
stanford.edu. Educators in Lincoln have been
trying out what the Stanford team calls HATs,
or “historical assessments of thinking.”
Students analyze documents to answer a
question, and teachers use those short essays
to gauge how well students are absorbing the
lessons, said Rob McEntarffer, an assessment
specialist who has been working on that project. The ultimate aim is to use the approach
to create districtwide social studies tests, to
be used for formative purposes and to help the
district improve its program, he said.
The hope is to extend the assessment work
into summative tests, as well, he said. Document-based analysis and writing would be
embedded into lessons, with teachers using
the results to adjust instruction, while students learn skills like backing up their claims
with evidence. Students would later engage
in the same kind of exercise as a final assessment, Mr. McEntarffer said.
He believes such tests are doubly valuable,
because they are activities that engage students and they can reflect more accurately the
skills teachers most want them to develop.
“I hope it will enable a more focused attention and honoring of student thinking,” he
said. “There has been great critical-thinking
instruction in the classroom, but it’s always
been a real challenge to get that honored on
the assessment side.”
Coverage of “deeper learning” that will prepare
students with the skills and knowledge needed to
succeed in a rapidly changing world is supported
in part by a grant from the William and Flora
Hewlett Foundation, at www.hewlett.org.
■
edweek.org
11
Published September 12, 2012, in Education Week
Common Core
Thrusts Librarians Into
Leadership Role
Educators help teachers
acquire inquiry-based skills
integral to standards
I
t’s the second week of the school year, and
middle school librarian Kristen Hearne
is pulling outdated nonfiction books from
the shelves. She is showing one teacher
how to track down primary-source documents from the Vietnam War and helping a
group of other teachers design a project that
uses folk tales to draw students into crosscultural comparisons.
With the common standards on her doorstep, Ms. Hearne has a lot to do. Her library
at Wren Middle School in Piedmont, S.C., is
a nerve center in her school’s work to arm
both teachers and students for a focus on
new kinds of study. She’s working to build
not only students’ skills in writing, reading, research, and analysis, but also teachers’ skills in teaching them. She and other
librarians say they view the common core,
with its emphasis on explanation, complex
text, and cross-disciplinary synthesis, as an
unprecedented opportunity for them to really strut their stuff.
“When it comes to the common core, librarians can be a school’s secret weapon,”
said Ms. Hearne, who blogs as “The Librarian in the Middle.”
Like most school librarians, Ms. Hearne
has been trained both as a teacher and a
librarian, a combination she thinks is perfectly suited to helping students and teachers as the Common Core State Standards
presses them into inquiry-based modes of
learning and teaching. She helps them find
a range of reading materials in printed or
online form and collaborates to develop challenging cross-disciplinary projects. And like
colleagues around the country, Ms. Hearne
also plays important instructional roles
often unrecognized by the public: as co-in-
structor alongside classroom teachers, and
as professional-development provider for
those teachers.
“The common standards are the best opportunity we’ve had to take an instructionalleadership role in the schools and really to
support every classroom teacher substantively,” said Barbara Stripling, the presidentelect of the American Library Association,
and a professor of practice in library science
at Syracuse University.
Ms. Stripling’s work to implement the
common core in the New York City schools
illustrates the central role school librarians
are playing as the standards move from
ideas on a page to instruction in the classroom. Overseeing that district’s 1,200 school
librarians, Ms. Stripling and her staff analyzed the standards’ expectations for inquiry
and information-literacy, developed sample
lessons and formative-assessment tools
around key common-core skills, and shared
those and other resources during four-day
development sessions with the district’s librarians.
Guiding Teachers
Adopted by all but four states, the standards have prompted coordinating discussions among the library-association divisions that represent librarians in public
schools, city libraries, and higher education,
said Susan Ballard, the president of the
American Association of School Librarians,
one of those divisions. All librarians are affected by the new expectations, she said:
those who help at K-12 schools, at city libraries during the after-school and weekend
hours, and those on college campuses, who
have had to support students unequipped
for college-level research and inquiry.
“[The common standards] drove us to look
at ourselves as an ecosystem, all working
together,” Ms. Ballard said. “Students have
a false sense of security that they can find
anything online, but that’s mostly quick
facts. They don’t know how to ask good, researchable questions, assess information critically. So much of the core is based in inquiry,
and that is what librarians do on a daily basis.
It speaks our language.”
A comparison of the AASL’s own standards
for learning with the new standards showed
similar expectations for students’ skills and
“habits of mind,” she said.
As lead librarian for the New Hanover
County schools in Wilmington, N.C., Jennifer
LaGarde has been focusing intently on “beefing up” her role as an instructional support to
teachers, she said.
“The common core is so much about how we
teach,” said Ms. LaGarde, a national-boardcertified librarian, winner of the ALA’s 2011 “I
Love My Librarian” award, and the author of
the “Adventures of Library Girl” blog. “We’ve
been looking at support materials, but we’re
more focused on shifting to inquiry-based instruction.
“Materials are almost secondary; it’s really
about helping teachers think about new ways
to provide instruction and helping them see
that there is someone in the building who
already knows how to do that,” said Ms. LaGarde, noting that North Carolina, like many
states, requires librarians also to be certified
teachers.
As part of her district’s common-core implementation team, Ms. LaGarde spends a lot
of time providing staff development on the
standards. As the teacher-librarian for Myrtle Grove Middle School, she attends teachers’ planning and departmental meetings
and works one-on-one with them to design
projects and to scour new books, journals, and
subscription databases for interesting and
challenging reading material.
In her school in South Carolina recently, Ms.
Hearne guided one social studies teacher in
preparing for a cross-disciplinary unit on the
Vietnam War. In language arts classes, students read the novel Cracker!, about a bombsniffing dog and its handler during that war.
The social studies teacher wanted primarysource materials to pair with the novel. Working with Ms. Hearne, she found photographs
of dog-handlers from that war, along with videos and transcripts of interviews with them.
Ms. Hearne and the other two middle school
librarians also recently trained science and
social studies teachers, who are now expected
to teach their students literacy skills specific
to those disciplines. That kind of staff-development work is especially important in tight
budget times, Ms. Hearne said.
“There isn’t a lot of money to bring people in
from the outside, so we have filled those shoes
for our district,” she said.
Even as they play that role, however, librarians themselves are drawing on a leaner set of
resources because of cutbacks in recent years.
Between the 2004-05 and 2010-11 school
years, 32 states lost library positions, according to an analysis by Keith Curry Lance,
a consultant with RSL Research Group in
Louisville, Colo. Those losses averaged 161
positions, or 16 percent, per state, but went as
high as 48 percent in Michigan.
Ms. LaGarde said she has had no dedicated
library budget in Wilmington for four years
and instead must resort to “begging the principal” for what she needs. The common core’s
emphasis on complex texts, and in particular
on rich nonfiction, has given her “great ammunition” to expand her collection, as teachers demand new kinds of reading materials,
she said.
In some places, the common core appears to
be driving restorations of those budget cuts.
Ms. Hearne reports that although this is her
third year without an assistant, her book budget has doubled this year. That came in the
wake of her superintendent’s request for a
report on the percentage of fiction and nonfiction, and the age of the nonfiction materials,
in the district’s school libraries, she said.
Revamping Collections
The common standards have prompted
school librarians to “take a hard look” at
their collections to weed out dated material
and bolster challenging fiction and nonfiction
resources, said the AASL’s Ms. Ballard. In
doing so, they are looking especially closely at
the rigor of the readings they offer, since the
standards emphasize assigning students “ongrade-level” texts, even if that means extra
supports are needed to help them. Librarians
are also looking to better balance their collections with high-quality nonfiction, she said,
since the standards use such texts as contentbuilders and vehicles for the teaching of discipline-specific literacy skills.
Paige Jaeger, who oversees 84 school libraries in the Saratoga Springs, N.Y., area,
counted more than 700 “power verbs” in the
standards, such as “analyze,” “integrate,” and
“formulate,” that press students toward more
rigor and inquiry-based learning. That has
implications both for a library’s collection of
resources and for the way teachers teach, said
Ms. Jaeger, who conducted a recent commoncore training for the AASL and posted those
resources on her blog. She is preaching a
three-part gospel to her colleagues: rich text,
raising rigor, and repackaging research.
Ms. Jaeger helps teachers rework their
curricula into research-driven activities that
require students to put those power verbs
into action. “If your assignment can be answered on Google, it’s void of higher-level
thought,” she quipped.
Case in point: the typical report on a
country, which is often little more than an
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12
“
If your
assignment can
be answered on
Google, it’s void of
higher-level
thought.”
PAIGE JAEGER
Coordinator of School Library
Services, Saratoga Springs, N.Y
assemblage of facts. Ms. Jaeger and her colleagues have reshaped it around a question.
Students might be asked what it means to
live in a globally interdependent world. They
could be sent home with an assignment to
examine the labels on their clothing and
food and note their countries of origin. As
a class, they can graph those nations and
examine the emerging portrait of importers
and exporters. Each student could dive into
his or her country’s place in that system and
write about the perils and promises of that
role. Then, imagining themselves as ambassadors at the United Nations, they would
have to figure out what issues are most
pressing for their country and how best to
plead for funding.
That kind of repackaging, Ms. Jaeger said,
necessitates bolstering the rigor and richness of materials students use across the
disciplines. Even as leisure reading at all
levels of difficulty must still be well represented, more-challenging readings for core
assignments are a must, she said. “If you
have a core novel for a language arts class
that’s off by four or five grade levels, you’ve
got to re-evaluate that,” she said.
For instance, the immensely popular Hunger Games books are often read in 8th grade
classes, Ms. Jaeger said, even though the
widely used Lexile framework for text difficulty rates them as easy enough for lateelementary-level students. She suggests
teachers consider as more-challenging replacements The Immortal Life of Henrietta
Lacks, about a woman whose cancer was
instrumental to later scientific research, or
Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World, an account of British explorers whose ship was
trapped in ice in Antarctica in 1914.
Many 9th and 10th graders read Agatha
Christie’s mystery And Then There Were
None, which Lexile rates as appropriate
for 2nd and 3rd graders. Ms. Jaeger is encouraging teachers to consider instead
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the
Night-Time, about an autistic boy’s attempt to solve a dog’s murder. Instead
of The Catcher in the Rye, which Lexile
pegs to the 4th grade level, she suggests
sophomores could read The Stone Diaries, which Lexile places at the 11th and
12th grades.
A Place for Literature
Librarians report having to work to
allay two strains of worry among teachers: that the standards’ emphasis on
nonfiction will reduce the role of literature in the curriculum and that every
text assigned must be a complex text.
“I think those things have been misinterpreted, and people have freaked out a
little bit, thinking literature won’t have
a place” in classrooms anymore, said Ms.
Stripling, the ALA’s president-elect. As
common-core authors have noted, the
recommended balance of nonfiction to
fiction—half and half in elementary
school, rising to a 70-30 split by high
school—takes all subjects into account,
not just language arts classrooms, she
said. Teachers can meet the “complex
text” expectations of the standards, she
said, by “sprinkling” such readings into
their assignments, surrounded by a variety of other materials.
Coverage of the implementation of the
Common Core State Standards and the
common assessments is supported in part by
a grant from the GE Foundation, at www.
ge.com/foundation.
■
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13
Published July 10, 2012, in Education Week
COMMENTARY
Four Myths About
the ELA Common-Core
Standards
DINA STRASSER is
a 7th grade English
educator in upstate New
York and a member of
the Teacher Leaders
Network. She is a
former Fulbright Scholar,
a National Writing
Project Fellow, and
writes The Line, cited
by The Washington
Post as one of the best
education blogs of 2010.
CHERYL DOBBERTIN
is the Director of
NYS Common
Core Curriculum
and Professional
Development for
Expeditionary Learning,
a national school
reform organization. In
addition, she consults
with schools and
teachers regarding
implementation
of differentiated
instruction, adolescent
literacy, and the
Common Core Learning
Standards. Cheryl is
also an instructor in
the teacher education
program at Nazareth
College of Rochester.
Dina: Let me admit this up front: I can be a professional developer’s
nightmare. I am a skeptical, informed, judgmental know-it-all, and can
typically be found sitting in the back with my elbows perched on my
knees, listening with unnerving intensity, and asking questions incessantly.
Professional development consultant Cheryl Dobbertin has graciously,
even eagerly, put up with me over the past few years, and in May, she
visited my school for a session on the English/language arts Common
Core State Standards. I’ve written (skeptically—surprise!) about the
common core before, and came fully armed to Cheryl’s session: I trusted
her to take my skepticism head on.
She did. And we realized together that there are some critical aspects
of implementing the ELA standards that have been obscured by polarizing debates.
Cheryl: No matter what Dina says, don’t believe that all professional
developers and coaches find engaged, thoughtful, questioning teachers
to be a nightmare! In fact, they are a constant source of energy for me.
Recently I’ve had lots of opportunities to help teachers think about the
changes that the common core is bringing their way. I notice that there
hasn’t been a lot of time or attention devoted to teasing out the subtleties of the standards or accompanying instructional shifts.
Dina and I have identified four myths. These statements often appear
to be accepted as fact (and are sometimes delivered to teachers that
way) but are not actually aligned with the spirit and intention of the
ELA common-core standards. Dina tackles 1 and 4, and I tackle 2 and 3.
Myth #1: Text complexity is a fixed number.
Dina: Let’s be honest: The ELA teacher in me shivers with intuitive
horror at the idea of pinning a complexity number on my beloved,
earth-moving texts: novels, plays, poems. Like others, I worry about the
overzealous use of arbitrary quantitative measures (such as Lexile and
Flesch-Kincaid) to mark texts’ difficulty.
Imagine my delight, then, to find this statement buried deep in Appendix A:
“In the meantime, the Standards recommend that multiple quantitative measures be used whenever possible and that their results be
confirmed or overruled by a qualitative analysis of the text in question.”
And there it is: All things being equal, qualitative measures of text
complexity trump quantity. Qualitative measurement is where we find
the breathing room to make considered, nuanced choices about what is
“complex” for our students—collectively and individually. Cheryl shared
an instrument of qualitative measurement with us, in fact, and it made
my heart sing.
It’s important to have this arrow in your quiver. In an educational
landscape laced with high-stakes testing, budget cuts, and stress, it’s
going to be very, very tempting for all of us to fall back on “the numbers”
rather than taking the time to make sure that
we have nuanced and accurate arguments
about what is “complex” for our students.
Recently, faced with eight reading assessments to create within two hours, I was
tempted to go straight to the numbers, relying solely upon them. But I didn’t—because I
don’t trust them entirely, nor do the standards
expect me to.
I hope you’ll join me in making well-informed decisions about text complexity despite
pressures from administrators or parents. If
anyone questions you, point to page 8 of Appendix A of the common core.
Myth #2: All prereading activities are
inappropriate.
Cheryl: Common-core training materials (like
this exemplar, for instance) include some notso-subtle suggestions that “prereading” activities and discussions are a bad idea. Over the
years, many of us have developed a host of
methods to invite students to challenging texts
and stimulate the “need to read.” Frankly, the
idea that we would say “just start reading” to
a roomful of students made me a little crazy.
In my professional circle, we began referring
to the “just start reading” strategy as a “cold
read,” and we struggled with whether cold
reading was always an effective instructional
approach.
But then I tried to understand the meaning
behind this message about prereading activities. Ultimately, it was about making sure students built comprehension by actually reading a text rather than listening attentively to
what others are saying about that text.
Consider a middle school teacher who says,
“We are going to start reading Frederick Douglass’ memoir, Narrative of the Life of a Slave.
This book begins with Douglass telling about
his early years, including that he doesn’t know
how old he really is. He was born in Maryland
... “
That’s really different from a teacher who
says, “We’ve read memoirs before. What are
some of the rhetorical devices we might find
in a memoir? Ok, now let’s read the first two
pages of this memoir together. When you see
one of these devices, put a checkmark beside
it. Then we will stop to discuss what is going
on in this text. Be ready to discuss at least one
spot you’ve marked.”
Both of these teachers think they are setting
students up to read. But the first teacher’s preview of the plot doesn’t create a need to read,
and actually makes it easy for students not to
read. That teacher is also missing an opportunity to set up the expectation that students
should read closely, to analyze the text.
On the other hand, the second teacher activates students’ background knowledge and
provides students with a beginning framework to help them read closely and analyze
the structure of the text. Neither of these
teachers is choosing to do a “cold read,” but
only one of them is setting students up to do
a “close read.” Over time, the second teacher’s
approach is much more likely to develop students with the capacity to “just start reading.”
The bottom line: “Cold reading” is an instructional approach, not a standard. Experiment
with cold reading for the sake of building independence in your students, but there’s no
need to toss out all your prereading activities
that guide students in reading and analyzing
complex texts.
Myth #3: Answering text-dependent
questions is what teaches students to be
analytical readers.
Cheryl: There’s lots of buzz right now about
“text-dependent questioning” to help students
meet ELA standards. Obviously, we want students to be able to demonstrate their comprehension by responding to questions that drive
them back to the text for answers. But let’s not
forget the steps that teach students how to answer text-dependent questions.
In many classrooms, teachers assign reading
(“Read chapter 3 … “) and assess reading (“and
answer these questions”). The focus on text-dependent questions in the instructional shifts
documents that accompany the core seems to
affirm that approach. But these documents
omit modeling and processing, which should
come in between assigning and assessing.
We can invite students to the reading
through purpose and show students how to
read for that purpose through a think-aloud or
other modeling strategy. Students read. They
complete activities that demand they think
about the text (graphic organizer, think-pairshare, or about a million other activities). And
then, they demonstrate their understanding
by answering text-dependent questions.
It’s the middle—the modeling and processing—where students actually get a clue as to
how to be better readers. The questions tell us
that they got there (or not).
Myth #4: The common core abandons fiction.
Dina: This is the myth most frequently circulating about the core. Here’s just one of the
remarks I’ve heard: “Why do we have to shove
nonfiction down their throats all of sudden?”
The heart of the complaint is understandable. It was voiced loud and clear by the National Council of Teachers of English in their
comments on drafts of the common core and
continues to be addressed elsewhere. However,
the whole of the complaint as voiced above is
not accurate.
■
edweek.org
14
To begin with, long before the common-core
standards came on the scene, reading specialists like Harvey and Goudvis were already
arguing that we have wandered too far from
analytic, nonfiction reading and writing. And
true, the core’s emphasis on rhetoric and logic
was once standard in our schools.
Secondly, the common core does value creative and fictional reading and writing, no
matter what provocateur and core author
David Coleman says. It’s right there, a standalone, fully written standard, all the way
through grade 12. The standards even recommend a full 50/50 split between fiction and
nonfiction in the elementary grades, giving
way to an 80/20 proportion in the secondary
grades.
Bear in mind, as well, that the common core
is clear that its recommendations span the
reading expectations for all core subjects. As
a result, it is not advocating for us ELA teachers to dump poetry and novels except for, say,
two months out of the 10 in our school year.
Rather, we’re encouraged to partner with our
colleagues in a substantive way, and work together to help kids approach nonfiction texts
with critical and active minds.
Admittedly, the common core does make
some mystifying genre distinctions. All creative reading and writing is lumped under the
“narrative” umbrella, implying it is always a
description of logical, sequential events, usually personal. This is not only inaccurate (T.S.
Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” anyone?), but arguably preferences a pragmatic, linear view of
writing. Teachers will need to approach this
particular facet of the core with the same critical thinking that the core itself advocates.
Dina and Cheryl: We believe it’s important for
educators to embrace the common-core standards, but to do so in a way that honors students’ needs and the wisdom of great teachers.
The standards are pushing us to examine
our practices, and examine them we must.
We must push ourselves in the same way we
are being expected to push our students. We
educators must thoughtfully read the complex common-core documents in their entirety,
write rigorous lesson plans, and listen critically to those who are trying to help us learn
and change.
Just as important is speaking up to question and clarify our own understanding of the
standards and what they mean for our practice. We must keep “mythbusting” our own
practices and what we are hearing so that the
common-core standards can live up to their
full potential. After all, the intention behind
these rigorous standards—to prepare all students for careers and college—is at the heart
of our work.
■
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15
Published September 7, 2012, in Education Week’s Vander Ark on Innovation Blog
COMMENTARY
Quick Guide to the Common Core:
Key Expectations Explained
How the Common Core
Will Change the Way
Teachers Teach and
Students Learn
By Adam Berkin
S
ince the Common Core State Standards were introduced, there has
been much discussion about what
they mean for educators and students and how they will impact teaching
and learning. While the standards have
been adopted by 45 states and 3 territories
so far, there is a lot of concern, anxiety, and
debate around what is best for students,
potential challenges for teachers, and what
implementation should and can look like.
While many educators, parents, and concerned citizens have delved deep into the
world of Common Core and understand
the detail and complexity, most people have
only a cursory understanding of the changes
that are taking place, and some only know
that changes are coming but don’t know
what they mean.
The new standards are focused on two categories: English/language arts and mathematics. The following are some of the key
differences between the new ELA Common
Core State Standards and many of the current educational standards in place around
the country.
The text is more complex.
Since the 1960s, text difficulty in textbooks has been declining. This, in part, has
created a significant gap between what
students are reading in twelfth grade and
what is expected of them when they arrive
at college. As you might imagine, this gap is
hurting students’ chances of success in college: the CCSS cites an ACT report called
Reading Between the Line that says that the
ability to answer questions about complex
text is a key predictor of college success.
The text covers a wider range of
genres and formats.
In order to be college-, career-, and lifeready, students need to be familiar and
comfortable with texts from a broad range
of genres and formats. The Common Core
State Standards focus on a broader range
and place a much greater emphasis on informational text. Colleges and workplaces
demand analysis of informational or expository texts. Currently, in many elementary
programs, only 15 percent of text is considered expository. The Common Core sets an
expectation that, in grades three through
eight, 50 percent of the text be expository.
Specifically, in grades three through five,
there is a call for more scientific, technical,
and historic texts, and in grades six through
eight, more literary nonfiction including essays, speeches, opinion pieces, literary essays, biographies, memoirs, journalism, and
historical, scientific, technical, and economic
accounts.
In addition, students are expected to understand the presentation of texts in a variety of multimedia formats, such as video.
For example, students might be required to
observe different productions of the same
play to assess how each production interprets evidence from the script.
There is a greater emphasis on
evidence-based questioning.
The standards have shifted away from
cookie-cutter questions like, “What is the
main idea?” and moved toward questions
that require a closer reading of the text.
Students are asked to use evidence from
what lies within the four corners of the text
and make valid claims that can be proven
with the text. The questions are more specific, and so the students must be more
adept at drawing evidence from the text
and explaining that evidence orally and in
writing.
Students are exposed to more authentic text.
In order to ensure that students can read
and understand texts that they will experience outside of the classroom, it is impor-
tant that they are exposed to real texts
in school. The Publishers’ Criteria for the
Common Core State Standards, developed
by two of the lead authors of the standards,
emphasize a shift away from text that is
adapted, watered down, or edited, and instead, focus on text in its true form. While
scaffolding is still considered an important
element when introducing students to new
topics, it should not pre-empt or replace the
original text. The scaffolding should be used
to help children grasp the actual text, not
avoid it.
The standards have a higher level of
specificity.
There is a great amount of flexibility for
educators to determine how they want
to implement the new standards and the
materials they choose to use and/or create; however, the standards themselves are
quite specific. This helps to ensure fidelity in
implementation and common understanding of expectations. Examples include:
s 2, $ETERMINE THE MEANING OF
words and phrases as they are used in a
text, including those that allude to significant characters found in mythology (e.g.,
Herculean).
s2,$ETERMINEATHEMEOFASTORY
drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama
respond to challenges or how the speaker in
a poem reflects upon a topic.
s2)!NALYZEMULTIPLEACCOUNTSOFTHE
same event or topic, noting important similarities and differences in the point of view
they represent.
Additional Expectations
sShared responsibility for students’
literacy development. In grades six
through twelve, there are specific standards
for Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, and Technical Subjects. The message
here is that content area teachers must
have a shared role in developing students’
literacy skills.
sCompare and synthesize multiple
sources. Students are expected to integrate
their understanding of what they are cur-
rently reading with texts that they have
previously read. They need to answer how
what they have just read compares to what
they have learned before.
sFocus on academic vocabulary. One
of the biggest gaps between students, starting in the earliest grades, is their vocabulary knowledge. The new standards require
a focus on academic vocabulary, presenting
vocabulary in context, and using the same
vocabulary across various types of complex
texts from different disciplines.
The Common Core State Standards are
not “test prep” standards. They aim to teach
students how to think and raise the bar
on their level of comprehension and their
ability to articulate their knowledge. Many
educators are already teaching in ways that
align with the new standards, and the standards themselves allow the flexibility for educators to do what works best for their students. However, the depth of the standards
and the significant differences between
the CCSS and current standards in most
states require a whole new way of teaching,
so even the most experienced teachers will
need to make great changes and require
support in doing so.
A lot of publishers are repurposing old
materials and saying that they are “aligned”
with the Common Core. Many of us at Curriculum Associates are former teachers, and
our team has been dedicated to learning
everything we possibly can about the standards so that we can build products from
the ground up that work for first-year and
veteran teachers alike - and help students
learn. We believe in the potential of the
Common Core to help close the achievement
gap in this country, and make our students
more competitive on an international scale.
We hope to faithfully do our part by making the transition easier for students and
teachers.
Adam Berkin is vice president of product
development at Curriculum Associates and has a
diverse background in education. In addition to
his current position in educational publishing, he
has taught at the elementary school and graduate
school level, has written about education for
publications including Children’s Literature in
Education and Instructor, and is the co-author of a
professional book for teachers called Good Habits,
Great Readers. Curriculum Associates is a Getting
Smart Advocacy Partner.
■
edweek.org
16
Copyright ©2012 by Editorial Projects
in Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Readers may make up to 5 print copies
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Visit www.edweek.org/go/copies for
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Published by Editorial Projects
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Phone: (301) 280-3100
www.edweek.org
WEB
LINKS
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17
Resources on Literacy
and the Common Core
NOW FEATURING INTERACTIVE HYPERLINKS.
Just click and go.
RESOURCES
3.6 Minutes per Day: The Scarcity of Informational Texts in First Grade
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1598/RRQ.35.2.1/abstract
Duke, Nell K.
Reading Research Quarterly, 2000
Common Core State Standards Initiative
http://www.corestandards.org/
Reading Between the Lines: What the ACT Reveals about College
Readiness in Reading
http://www.act.org/research/policymakers/reports/reading.html
ACT, 2006.
Reading First Impact Study Final Report
http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094038/index.asp
Institute of Education Sciences, 2008
Reading Like a Historian
http://sheg.stanford.edu/?q=node/45
Stanford History Education Group
Teaching Children to Read
http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/report.cfm
National Reading Panel, 2000
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g Mixes it Up
1 Blended Learnin
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10 Virtual Ed. Faces
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Sharp
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12 Virtual Educat
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Targets
Gifted
Vistas Online for
14 New
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16 ‘At-Risk Studen
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18 The School-Interne
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Digital tools for defining
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4 New Teachers Look for
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7 Exploring Differentiated
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COMMENTARY:
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ASK THE MENTOR:
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tion. This
Spotlight exami
nes how educa
tors
can make “intell
igent” assessments
of their studen
ts and integrate
technology to
deliver personalized
learning exper
iences.
THE PERSONAL
1 The Personal Approach
5 E-Learning Seeks
a Custom Fit
On Personalize
d
Published February 3, 2010, in Education Week Digital Directions
individualized education
plan for every student.
T
eachers have always known that a typical
class of two dozen or more students can
INTERACTIVE
include vastly different skill levels and
learning styles. But meeting those varied
academic needs with a defined curriculum, time
limitations, and traditional instructional tools can be
daunting for even the most skilled instructor.
CONTENTS:
1 Navigating the
Path to
Personalized Educat
ion
4 The Personal
Approach
6 Moving Beyond
One-Size-Fits-All
7 Policies Seen
to Slow Person
alized
Learning
9 Researchers
Tackle Personalized
Learning
10 ‘Hybrid’ Charte
r Schools
on the Move
11 Credit-Recove
ry Classes
Take a Personal
Approach
INTERVIEW:
13 Passion-Based
Learning
for the 21st Centur
y
COMMENTARY:
15 High Stakes
of Standards-Ba
sed
Accountability
RESOURCES:
18 Resources on
Personalized
Learning
Learning
Published March
17,
2011, in Educa
tion Week
Navigating
the Path to
Personalized
Ed
A Vermont initiative
to improve learning
in middle
schools is working
through the challeng
es of using the
latest digital tools
and different teaching
approaches
By Kevin Bushw
eller
I
n a classroom
on the third floor
of a 110-year-ol
d faded beige
brick building,
20 middle schoo
ers of varying
lsizes and attitu
des flip
open their black
HP laptops for
an interactive lesson
on the Declaration
of Independence.
The students
at Edmunds Middl
e School are crafting and revisi
ng poems about
how they would
felt the day after
have
the declaration
was signed, but
a personal twist:
with
Each student
has taken on
sona of a patrio
the pert, loyalist, or moder
ate. Teacher Brent
Truchon, a lanya
rd dangling aroun
the attached
d his neck with
keys and schoo
l ID badge tucke
pocket of his red
d in the
button-down
shirt, moves consta
around the room,
ntly
kneeling next
to students and
laptops to give
their
one-on-one atten
tion where neede
before stepping
to the front of
d,
the class to rally
all to put more
them
imagery into
their poems.
istock/zigarrensc
Implementing
20 Resources on
Online Learning
Published March
On Differentiated Instruction
Editor’s Note: With student
diversity growing dramatically
and schools facing mounting
pressure to boost achievement, many teachers are
looking for ways to attend to
students’ unique learning
needs. This Spotlight focuses
on how teachers are using
differentiated instruction to
give students individualized
support.
hachtel
istock/mbortolin
o
Online and
Editor’s Note:
g models have
blended learnin
students learn.
reshaped how
g can assist
Remote learnin
a variety of
students with
are also
needs, but there
challenges
accountability
virtual
with
ated
associ
Spotlight offers
education. This
best use and
tips on how to
g, inside
learnin
apply online
classroom.
and outside the
ology Counts
tion Week Techn
15, 2012, in Educa
2012
Cover photo illustration_Christopher Powers/Vanessa Solis/Gina Tomko_Digital Directions
arning
ting Online Le
On Implemen
ww
SPOTLIGHT
iStock/k yoshino
2012
●
VIEW THE COMPLETE COLLECTION OF EDUCATION WEEK SPOTLIGHTS
www.edweek.org/go/spotlights

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