Writing for others beyond the classroom

Perhaps it is familiarity breeds contempt, or maybe it is just familiarity breeds a giving break. Either way, we do know that students will work harder on their writing when they know that what they are writing is going to be read by more than just their teacher, their parent, or the student next to them. So as the school year is ending and you are thinking about what to do next year, think about having your students produce and publish their work and put it out to the world. Below are two articles about how teachers have gotten their students to activity publish their work either as books or magazines. If you want to try some book publishing yourself (or with your students), you might want to start with a tool like StoryBird (https://storybird.com/), there you can write your story, then have it published into their digital library, and if you really want to you can even buy a printed (soft- or hard-cover) copy of the book for your shelves - or the school library's collection.

Ill. preschoolers develop literacy skills by creating books Preschool students at an Illinois school have written and illustrated two storybooks as part of a two-month project about story elements. After studying author Mo Willems' books, students wrote the books, learning about characters and plot to develop stories using Willems' character, "Pigeon."

Morris Herald-News (Ill.) (4/29/2016)

Ideas for using zines to teach communication skills Having students publish zines, or mini-magazines, gives them a creative project to develop visual and written communication skills, middle-grades writing teacher John DePasquale writes in this blog post. He shares several ideas and templates for zine projects.

Scholastic.com (4/29/2016)

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Large Print

Large print books have been found to be really helpful in so many ways. Below are some of the results of a study about large print. A problem with large print books (on paper) is that there are so few printed, many of the publishers still think of them for "older" readers. One solution for this though is if you or your school have ereaders to read the books you want, then use the settings or font functions of the ereader to change to a larger print. Please take the time to change from the default that you got with your ebook reader and try some different font, it can make an amazing difference with your reading.

Researchers have found a correlation between large print books and assessment results.
findings include: 61% of elementary school students said they remembered characters and plots better when reading large print books.48% of high school students said they read more outside of school after experiencing large print books.Middle school students reported a 43% reduction …

Ebooks as Textbooks - Part 2 - Highlighting

Highlighting can be a very effective tool in reading and learning no matter the kind of text being read: from novels to textbooks.

Most textbooks or other forms of information text will usually used text features along with graphics to help organize information presented in the text. These elements are done to help focus attention on important or key concepts and provide additional information. The text organization itself can include structural elements such as heading, subheading, index, glossary, paragraph spacing, bulleted or numbered lists, sidebars or side boxes, italics, underlines or bold for words or even sections. Graphic content can include the use of symbols, colors, illustrations, pictures, diagrams, charts, and graphs.
The act of highlighting is less time consuming and much easier than note-taking (to be discussed in an upcoming posting). To be effective in highlighting it should be a kind of metacognitive approach of sifting or filtering to identify the important content…

Ebooks as Textbooks Part 6 - Taking Note

The process of taking notes, makes reading that much more of an active process and will aid in comprehension and retention. The addition of your own personal notes are usually easier to understand and remember than textbook material. As a student reads the textbook, he or she may not remember all of that they read when they have finished - this is especially true of very dense texts. But, if a student reads the information and also writes down notes about what he or she is reading at the same time, then that extra step reinforces that information and improves retention. So one of the best ways to retain information you are reading it is to take notes while you are actually reading it, for print books these notes were usually written in the margins of the text and so were called margin notes.

The taking of margin notes is a strategy that focuses your attention on important information from the textbook, novels, or articles that you are reading. Because it involves tagging key words or …

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