​I usually write blog posts for other teachers, letters to students, emails to parents. But today, this note is for me and all of the educators out there who are starting the year under very different circumstances. 

Note to Self

1. You are enough. You can’t be the teacher you were in the classroom. You’ll be a different teacher. A great teacher. Stop comparing the incomparable.  

 2. You will work harder than you have ever worked before and you won’t know that you are making an impact. You won’t see the light bulb moments. Trust that they are happening. 

 3. You’ve seen the meme. So many of your favorite teachers were on a screen. Remember Reading Rainbow? Sesame Street? Mr. Rodgers? These people introduced you to learning through a screen and yet they made you feel like you mattered. It can be done; and you’ll do it.

 4. It’s okay to not have some kind of Pollyanna attitude. Give your students you best and then when you need to vent about how impossible this all feels. Call your colleagues, text your village. Wallow in it if you must and then get back to work.

 5. When parents complain (generally or even to you specifically) know that it isn’t about you, or teachers, or really even schools. It’s about this impossible situation they find themselves in. You often take things personally -- don’t. This truly isn’t about you. Be an empathetic problem solver.

 6. You’ve always been told to focus on relationships. Today this is true more than ever. Sure, kids need to learn content, but they also need schedules, and routine, and connection. They need you, more than content. 

 7. When you want to complain about what is happening with your own children don’t. (See #5. You’re doing it.)

 8. Think twice before sending the email because everyone’s email right now is a swell of chaos. Gone are the days of “hey, I just wanted to reach out” Make every communication, short, sweet and purposeful. 

 9. Be a fearless advocate for your kids, your students. If the rules need bending, bend them. It’s a pandemic.
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 10. This will pass. It's not forever.  It is a moment in time and when you look back it, you’ll know that you came out stronger educator than you were at the start of 2020. You’ll return to your classroom, you’ll hug colleagues, you’ll walk the halls and wave at your students. You’ll be you again. A better you. 

-Corey 

We are in the midst of very challenging times. A global pandemic, in-person school cancelled in many parts of the world through the end of the school year, stay-at-home orders for most of us. In the United States, we've been staying put for about five weeks now and teachers, students, and parents are still trying to figure out work, school, and life in general. 

At the Kilmer Library, we've working to create engaging content to keep our students interested and learning without our normal channels for classroom collaboration. One such activity has been our virtual vacations.

I first saw virtual trips brought to life on the amazing Instagram account of Georgia school librarian Martha Bongiorno (an aside: she is a "must follow" for teachers and librarians everywhere). During her spring break, Martha rolled out four different virtual trips (and actually cited elementary librarian Sarah  Curran on Facebook as her original source for the idea). I immediately loved the concept, asked permission to tweak it for my students and ran with it.

Each trip that I put together includes:

Sights to See -- links to famous attractions, a virtual video tour of a city or monument, tours of popular museums.

​STEAM Activities -- hands-on science experiments or building projects, relevant arts and crafts projects, anything that brings out the maker in my students

Travel with a Book -- links to titles in our eBook or audio book collections that take place in the specific setting we are visiting

I built six trips for our week long spring break and then decided to continue traveling, adding a new vacation spot each week on #TravelTuesday. We are now asking for student requests on our social media feeds to add some student voice into our trips! So far, we have visited:

• New York
• Disney
• Paris
• The Great Outdoors
• Island Hopping
• Barcelona
• El Salvador
• Japan

To hop aboard and start making your own trips, make a copy of my Google Docs trip template. And, you can easily view all of our trips on the Kilmer Library website.

It has been so much fun for me to build each trip, but I also think this would make a fantastic student project. In a World Language class, students could be tasked with creating trips to cities or countries where that language is spoken. Beginning students could make them in English, but more advanced language speakers could develop these virtual vacations in another language. Creating a virtual trip could be a great way for students to focus on setting when reading a novel for English class or to focus on specific historical time periods in Social Studies. Imagine traveling to Tolkein's Middle Earth or to 1920s Harlem?

What other ways could you incorporate virtual vacations into your instruction? And where do YOU want to go?

-Gretchen

Another more flexible schedule comes from Nellie, a friend of Gretchen's who is also a pre-school teacher and mom of twin 5th grade boys. Together with her boys, Nellie tweaked an idea she found online and created colored cards with activities listed out. The cards include school work as well as fun things like video games. The boys can move the cards and design each day in a way that works for them. And don't you love how to the boys decorated their cards and the chart? Talk about student voice and choice. 

You know your own children best -- choose a scheduling option that works for them (and you)!

​How are you helping kids learn during social distancing? We'd love to hear from you! In the meantime, stay healthy all. 

-Corey

Our Reading classes come to the library monthly for lessons and activities. Last month, our reading teachers requested that we develop a lesson on external text features -- think: bold print, italics, tables of contents, glossaries, etc. Text features are a fairly dry topic so we turned to one of our go-to instructional strategies: stations. Stations allow for lots of student movement, the ability for us as teachers to push into smaller groups that need extra support, and offer room for lots of differentiation. And, stations let us meet our goal: making text features a lot more accessible and a bit more interesting for our students.

We set up two sets of 5 stations around the library so that our students could spread out and work independently. Then we introduce the activity and give each student a cover sheet with a checklist. As they move through each station, they collect the evidence from each station and check off what they complete.

TEXTO
Text books provide lots of examples of external text features. At this station, we created a BINGO (aka TEXTO) board of text features. Students chose a textbook then work to get TEXTO in a row, column or diagonal, finding examples and writing page numbers for each feature.

Article
We pulled 5 short, accessible articles on a range of topics (youth sports, witches, animals, secret codes, aliens, etc.), then gave students a list of tasks to complete such as:
​- Highlight the title yellow
-Circle the bold words blue
- and so forth.
At the end, they write a 2 sentence summary of what they think the article will be about -- we emphasize that they don't have to read the article start to finish, they are simply to use those external text features to help them figure out the topic of the article.

Hunt
My co-librarian chose 10 high-interest non-fiction books and created a scavenger  hunt for each title consisting of 6 questions. For example: "What's the name of the first chapter? Hint: Use the table of contents." Students work through the hunt finding text features -- and exploring an interesting book along the way.

Match
Using a free Teachers Pay Teachers resource as a guide, we created a text feature matching activity -- students match an example with the correct text feature and purpose. Upon finishing, they complete a quick exit ticket for the activity.

Cards
We pulled two free sets of task cards from TpT (there are a variety of options depending on the level of your students, like this one or this one or this one). Students chose one set of task cards and respond on  answer sheets that we tweaked to work better for our students.

What are some ways that support your students as they read nonfiction texts?

​-Gretchen

Our post this week explores the challenge of teaching students about climate change. It also highlights strategies for promoting public speaking, and collaboration in the classroom. We explore how some schools are helping kids cope with school refusal and last but not least, highlight how one teacher is using her personal experience with Valentine's Day to teach kids first hand about kindness. So put down that grading for a few minutes and Take5.

This article, Eco-anxiety is Overwhelming Kids, is a must read for every teacher and parent. Eco-anxiety is real and helping kids learn about climate change without losing hope is a difficult line to traverse.

Every year, during class presentations I see that my students need help developing their public speaking and communication skills. This Edutopia video story offers an interesting look at the connection between presentation skills and critical thinking. It left me feeling inspired, while giving me lots of actionable ideas. 

I am a big believer in cooperative learning but it is not without it's challenges. In a recent Cult of Pedagogy post, Jennifer Gonzalez explores different cooperative learning strategies and methods for making those strategies work for kids. What cooperative learning strategies do you use in your classroom? What are some highlights and challenges? 

As a teacher, I've encountered many students who have struggled with school refusal. I found this article, describing how some schools are helping students overcome school refusal, illuminating.

What are you reading this week? We'd love to hear from you.

​-Corey

When I was a senior in high school, a month away from graduating, I sat in my Physics class and watched the breaking news of a federal building blown apart. In the early moments of the tragedy, my classmates and I thought this event was unfolding in the nation’s capital. After all, to us "federal" was synonymous with Washington, D.C. But a few minutes into the coverage we realized that this nightmare was in our state of Oklahoma, a hundred miles away. Kids cried and classes were dismissed as we drove home in a world without cell phones to check on family and friends. It was the first time that my innocence was shattered. The first time I watched my community reel from pain. I remember the first nights were sleepless as I mourned people I didn’t know but to whom I felt connected. A few weeks later, we graduated wearing ribbons to honor victims, a somber shadow cast over my home state, an uneasy feeling in our each of our hearts. If this could happen in Oklahoma, no one was safe. ​​

In the article a student reflects on the project, saying “this will probably stick with me for the rest of my life.” That’s what good teaching does. It sticks with us. It challenges us. It takes the darkest moments and tries to illuminate those moments with light, truth, and dignity. The tragedy of Oklahoma City Bombing will always be in the hearts of Oklahomans. Years later it still hurts. I can’t think of a more fitting way to honor those who were lost on that April day than with the heartfelt brush strokes of the next generation under the guidance of caring, capable teachers.

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What do you do to help your students connect with and to explore difficult topics? How do you help students make sense of life's tragedies by making something that resonates beyond the classroom walls? We'd love to hear from you about your teaching journey. 

-Corey

Our large school system has just implemented a new regulation for students in grades 7 through 12 granting them a partial school day off -- excused --  to participate in "civic engagement activities." These activities can include any number of things such as  advocating on behalf of an issue or campaigning for candidates. Our secondary students take both Civics (8th grade) and Government (10th or 12th grade) during their academic careers and, due to our location just outside of Washington, DC, have many opportunities to understand and connect with elections and issues on both the local and national levels. But given how the news media has largely emphasized this as a "day off to protest" (WTOP | The Washington Post | CNN | NPR ), I got to thinking about resources to support a better understanding of activism and the history of protest in America

America's Long History of Protest from CNN is a pictoral history of protest in the United States. It would be a good entry point for a high school lesson.

The New York Times offers a three part unit called The Power to Change the World: A Teaching Unit on Student Activism in History and Today. Part 1 addresses the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School protests, part 2 touches on student-led protests throughout history, and part 3 moves forward with how to help students take action on their own. Another New York Times lesson plan focuses on teaching with protest music.

Picture books are a great tool for students of all ages (says the librarian). This is a great list of 13 Books to Teach Children About Protesting and Activism from the Children's Museum of Art and Social Justice.

I love the idea of helping students "strengthen their voice." Whether or not we agree with their activist positions, one of our roles as educators is to support our students as they find passions and to encourage them to use their voices in support of those passions. This article from EdSurge shares ways we can help strengthen their voice.

Not sure that kids and protest are a good match? Take a look at this piece from Psychology Today: Kids Need to Protest.

And here's a bonus resource for younger students: check out this lesson from Teaching Tolerance on art and activism.

How do you introduce the ideas of protest and activism to your students?

​-Gretchen

Recently, our reading team approached my co-librarian and I with a request for a lesson on setting. They wanted their students to understand the big picture in the setting of a story -- primarily realistic/historic fiction or non-fiction settings -- in terms of geography, climate and terrain, as well as distance and scale. Whew. A lot to cover in a 47-minute class period. But after brainstorming and planning (as well as some consultation with Corey), we pulled together a fun lesson with lots of posibilities. We headed out into the world with our reading classes using Google Earth.

We created a graphic organizer to help our students focus on all the different pieces of setting that they needed to discover. ​ We used the acronym BAGS (as in Pack your BAGS!) to help them remember to:

• Be a Meteorologist
• Ask About Culture
• Get Info on Where & When
• Summarize the Setting

And then we built  five different "trips"  using Google Earth and information from a couple of subscription databases (Britannica Schools and CultureGrams). The trips were based on excerpts from novels and picture books -- we also recorded audio of the excerpts to help support our readers. These trips helped our students explore the strategy while they learned more about the settings of each of the stories. 

A logical next step is to have students work through this "Pack Your BAGS" organizer on an excerpt of their choice, traveling Google Earth and doing a quick database search. 

And, a great extension would be to ask students build their own Google Earth trip for a text they are reading and then share those trips with each other! 

What strategies do you have for teaching setting to your students?

​-Gretchen