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Other ways I encourage these kinds of discussions includes having students choose their own groupings and books for independent book "clubs" and using the Web as a vehicle to create audio and/or video "book trailers."

"People don't really understand the nature of reading. They feel that reading is a skill, that it's transferable, so once you're a good reader, you can read anything that's put in front of you," says Daniel Willingham, a University of Virginia cognitive psychologist who focuses on K-12 education. "But that's only true for decoding—what you learn until grade three or four. After that, when you see good readers versus poor readers, what you're looking at is mostly differences in the knowledge that kids bring to the reading. It's easy to read something when you already know something about the topic. And if you don't know about the topic, it's utterly opaque to you."

That's why children should read newspapers and magazines, texts about nature and technology, and biographies—genres that increase real-world knowledge. This is especially important for poor children, who may not be exposed to as much "background" information at home: the random vocabulary, facts, and associations that make it easier to do well on tests like the NAEP and SAT, and to succeed in the workplace.

Marshmallow Design Challenge Posted on September 28th, 2011 by mxl In this lesson, K-12 student teams have a limited period of time (18 minutes) to build the tallest free-standing spaghetti structure that can support a marshmallow. They learn how engineers collaborate to design, test, and improve on their ideas, as well as examine hidden assumptions that can derail the creative process and final product. Read More

Lesson: Design From Nature Posted on September 25th, 2011 by mxl In this lesson, students in grades 6-8 discover how engineers can use biomimicry to enhance their designs. They learn how careful observation of nature — in this case, reverse engineering a flower — can lead to new innovations and products. Read More

Lesson: Concrete for Kids Posted on September 6th, 2011 by mxl Concrete for Kids is a fun, hands-on activity to introduce students to engineering and concrete as an engineered material that engineers use to make the structures we use every day, including bridges, buildings, and roads. In this two-period lesson, teams of students in grades K-12 mix and pour concrete to form beams which, once hardened, are tested to see how much weight they can hold before breaking. Read More

Ms. Wertheimer warms them up with a text-dependent question: "Are all of these native peoples nomadic?"

"On page 6, paragraph 2," he says, "the first sentence: 'The Haida and Tlingit of the Northwest built permanent wooden homes called longhouses.' "

seems to engage the kids

"How can we possibly teach reading when our kids just won't read?"

classrooms are one of the only text-driven environments that our students experience. Beyond school, U.S. students spend most of their time with media consuming digital information from televisions, radios, and computers. Much of this electronic information is visual or is processed passively, in small bites.

So how can you drag the wayward brains in your classroom back to deeper reading? Begin by recognizing that today's students are driven by opportunities to interact with one another. Conversations—whether they are started on Facebook, through text messages, or in the hallways—play a central role in adolescents' lives. Understanding that participation is a priority, the best teachers create social reading experiences and blur lines between fun and work.

pleasure is not incidental to reading—it’s essential

experience the pleasure of entering a story world

The pleasure of play is what readers experience when they become lost in a book

It simply doesn’t make sense to try to “purge ‘ineffective’ teachers and principals.”  His listener, almost giddy with gratitude now, prepares to chime in, as Samuelson, without pausing, delivers the punch line:  That’s right, it’s time to stop blaming teachers and start . . . blaming students!

His focus is not on students’ achievements (the intellectual accomplishments of individual kids) but only on “student achievement” (the aggregate results of standardized tests)

As I’ve noted elsewhere, we have reason to worry when schooling is discussed primarily in the context of “global competitiveness” rather than in terms of what children need or what contributes to a democratic culture

If we use technology to invert that idea, so that kids could watch the teacher's demonstration of the skills and concepts at home (and with the ability to rewind when necessary,) we could allow kids the opportunity to apply and practice their knowledge in the space where they can get help, collaborate, etc... doesn't that make more sense? (Interestingly, I was trying to imagine what that would look like in an English classroom, and I realized that is, in many respects, similar to what we do already when we ask kids to read the book at home, and then come in and interact with the community to uncover the deeper aspects of the text. Hm.)

Four Corners and Anticipation Guides:Both of these techniques “activate schema” by asking students to react in some way to a series of controversial statements about a topic they are about to study. In Four Corners, students move around the room to show their degree of agreement or disagreement with various statements — about, for instance, the health risks of tanning, or the purpose of college, or dystopian teen literature. An anticipation guide does the same thing, though generally students simply react in writing to a list of statements on a handout. In this warm-up to a lesson on some of the controversies currently raging over school reform, students can use the statements we provide in either of these ways.

Gallery Walks:A rich way to build background on a topic at the beginning of a unit (or showcase learning at the end), Gallery Walks for this purpose are usually teacher-created collections of images, articles, maps, quotations, graphs and other written and visual texts that can immerse students in information about a broad subject. Students circulate through the gallery, reading, writing and talking about what they see.

Graphic Organizers:

Word Walls and The Name Game Each day we have one person who is our helper and we focus onher name. When everyone has had a turn, we start another round.I find it easiest to go in alphabetical order by first names. I write the students names on sentence strips, using one colorfor boys, and another for girls.First round: We reveal one name each day, beginning with a cheer:?Gimme a B (B), Gimme an i (i), Gimme an l (l), Gimme another l(l), Gimme a y (y). What?s that spell? (Billy). One more time!(Billy). Then I ask if anyone ?notices? anything about Billy?s name andwe look for letters in common with other names, or count lettersand look for other names with the same number of letters. Thenwe take a good look at the student, discussing colors ofclothing, so each child can draw a picture of the helper. Iwrite the helper?s name on the board and encourage everyone totry to write that person?s name and then draw a picture of thehelper. The helper gets to take home the pictures drawn byothers, his is put up on the bulletin board with the name cardI?ve made. 2nd Round: The self-portraits are put into a class book and thename cards are transferred to an alphabet word wall. Each day weread the alphabet and names, then take the helper?s name off tocheer and ?notice? letters about this name and others. We formthe helper?s name in magnetic letters, scramble them up and taketurns putting them in the right order. 3rd Round: When we read the alphabet, we say the sounds inaddition to the letters and names. This time we cheer, writethe letters in the helper?s name on the board and then count howmany of those letters are in the names on the word wall. Thenwe talk about which letter has the most, least, etc. We havealso added another name cheer: ?Bryan, Bryan, that?s his name.It starts with B, it ends with n, hooray, Bryan! We stillscramble the name with magnetic letters. At some point we begin to add sight words to the names on thewall, usually starting with go and we. In December, or after wecome back from Christmas, we take the names off the word walland put them in a pocket chart for the kids to use duringcenters. We continue to add sight words the rest of the year,reading the alphabet, and saying the sounds and words each day. Here are additional name ideas; some I?ve tried, some I haven?t.*Count the syllables.*Write the names like a rainbow.*Name poems from the website Korky?s Kool rhyme machine (http://www.literacyhour.co.uk/learning_activities/rhyme/rhyme.html)*Think of words that begin the same as the name.*Make up tongue twisters.*Fill out an interview sheet.*Mystery person (hangman type game where you draw blanks for theletters and the kids guess letters until they know the name.* Use the letters in the name and look for smaller words. *Cut up name puzzles to keep in a literacy center.*Change the initial consonant and play with the word (Sue, Bue,Lue, etc.).*Another name cheer: No matter what I do or say,My name will always be the same,It starts with_____It ends with ____Now count to 3 and say my name,1,2,3,_______.

Nearly 40% of parents with children aged 2-to-13 who read ebooks plan to purchase a new e-reading device for their children this holiday season