[writeclub] NaNoWriMo Wrap up

It is December, and NaNoWriMo is a wrap!

Out of all of the girls, we ended up getting nine completed stories handed in with the word count totalling 39,500 words.

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I am beyond excited to read these stories in their entirety.  We had romance, dragons, parallel universes and monsters in forests!

What worked well?

• Every lunchtime throughout November we had a sign on a table in the Learning Commons set aside for the NaNoWriMo girls and they could eat their lunches at the table.
• We set up my mother's old typewriter, which is about 50 years old as a prop and the students loved to type with it. "Where is the delete button", they would ask!
• Every few lunchtimes we had a bag of lollies to share.
• Every few lunchtimes we had quote cards for them to pick up.
• Every few sessions we took a word count log to see how they were progressing.
• We celebrated the half way mark with chocolates.
• We encouraged the students to print out drafts of their work so that we could proof as they go and offer advice.

What didn't work well?

• We tried to bring in other English teachers into help with the proofing, but given that it is a busy time of the year it didn't work too well.
• We always had one or two girls who loved the notion of writing but then produced nothing.
• Not every student wanted to share their writing along the way, so some of the final drafts are a bit rough around the edges.

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They loved the idea of an anthology and come Sunday night at 7pm I had nine stories in my inbox. If I can get them edited and proofed by next week I will put them together into a booklet that the girls can go and get copied and bound if they want to.

[writeclub] Quote Cards for #nanowrimo Writers

As part part #nanowrimo I have been regularly creating quote cards for my students. I guess I am hoping that the quote cards inspire them to write a bit more. Collectively they have written over 20,000 words so far, I think that it is a fabulous effort.

Here is what I created using Canva and gathered the quotes from various quoting sources online.

[writeclub] Day 12 NaNoWriMo breaking though writers block

It is nearly half way through the NaNoWriMo challenge and several of the students have hit the writers block wall.

So lots of talk at Write Club today about how to punch through that wall:

• Building good writing habits, 
• using the kitchen timer to drop everything and just write for 20 minute,
• giving yourself permission to jump around the story rather than write from start to end in chronological order.

The students have so far written over 20 thousand words combined with an average of 1800 words per story. I think that it is a great effort!

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I've been keeping them motivated by providing gummy snakes and/or bears and every few day I put our another motivational quote card for the kids to collect and decorate their writing space with.

[writeclub] Day 6 #NaNoWriMo

Today was Day 6 for NaNoWriMo today and we set-up one of the big tables in the Learning Commons with a "reserved" sign for students participating in the month-long writing program. 

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When National Novel Writing Month was mentioned we had three students interested in it, today at lunchtime we had eight students sitting around the table typing away. The students seem to be liking the little quote cards that I have been making in Canva; printed in 280 gsm card.

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I have '1k', '2k' and '3k' badges for students that have made it past these milestones. The badges are not my idea, I have just adapted them for our kids.

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The next write-in session will be on Friday with treats and more quote cards, I can't wait to read what the students have written.

[writeclub] Day 1 #Nanowrimo in the Learning Commons

Day 1 NaNoWriMo and we originally had three girls interested in doing the writing competition.
Something happened and we now have 8.

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A sign in sheet, some gummy bears, quote card and button badges for all. An old typewriter was also set up for students to tinker on; I think that it added to the ambiance!

The lunchtime was spent writing the first section of their 3,000 stories. Here is a summary of the ones that I read at the end of the teaching day:

• A World War III spy thriller with a fortune teller.
• A girl who lives in a bland world discovers colour.
• A girl falls down a portal and travels back in time to meet her grandmother.

In Australia we have a four day long weekend, which coincides with a horse race on Tuesday. I am hoping that many of the students will find the time to do some writing over the weekend and I will have some more entertaining stories to read on Wednesday of next week.

#freebookmarks for your #schoollibrary - Halloween

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Using the frames in Canva, we imported some Halloween Colouring in sheets into the frames. The result was some Halloween colouring in bookmarks. Something different for 2019. The black border makes them very easy to splice in our guillotine.

Card was 280gsm through our photocopier.

[click to download a large copy]

Enjoy!

Reading Circle Bookmarks

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The bookmarks are a result of unpacking Dr Margaret Merga’s book “Reading Engagement for Tweens and Teens”.

Early in the book she talks about the types of influences that impact on teen reading engagement or the “will to read”. The Reading Circle format at our school is part of encouraging a shared social habit in reading and encouraging students to talk about what they do and don't like in a novel. But that can only happen when we model good social engagement habits.

We hold our Reading Circles twice a term and in between reading circles we do reading conversations/observations to find out what students are reading and how they are tracking.

Bookmarks were made in Canva to try and focus the students when we do Reading Circles.

[write club] Using Music to get into the mood for NaNoWriMo

I've been playing with the idea of a playlist or song to get me into the NaNowriMo "mood". 

When I was young and did annual dancing concerts, the dance school would play a song as a lead in to the start of the concert. Back then it was Neil Diamond "Crunchy Granola Suite", quite a long song. Everyone back stage knew that once that song started they would have 4 minutes to get onto the stage for the first performance. Every time I listen to Crunchy Granola I have flashbacks to leotards and tap shoes.

When I started thinking of songs for NaNoWriMo, I automatically thought of Elvis Costello's "Everyday I write the book" or The Beatles "Paperback Writer".

The song has to be uplifting or perhaps well suited to the genre that you are writing about.
For example: If you were writing a Murder Mystery you might have "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" on your playlist.  I love this remake of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" by Mona Lisa Twins.

Dive down the rabbit hole and find a song that gives you a pep in your step for NaNoWriMo!

[write club] NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month

November is nearly here, which means that NaNoWriMo is nearly upon us (National Novel Writing Month). 

I've tried this a few times with writing clubs over the years. Sometimes the kids embrace the concept, other times they don't. This year with the aid of Canva, I decided to make a NaNoWriMo Calendar for our writers. 

Printed off in A3, they can pin it up on their writing desk and at the end of each day record their progress each day.

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Here is a downloadable copy of the calendar.

[click image to download]

Our first task next week is to have a think about characters and plot, so that we can start writing on the 1st of November!

Why is reading important for your brain?

We know that reading is important and it is a good habit for our students engage in.

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Readers Digest put out a short sharp article on this topic with links to articles to let you dive deeply into the cognitive benefits of reading regularly.

This report into the "shadow activity' following regular reading founded the basis of our "Drop Everything and Read" campaign. 10-15 minutes a day of reading a novel with a storyline, characters and conundrums provides the cognitive load needed to generate this "Shadow activity".

So where as a fortnightly wider reading time might be good at providing feedback to the teacher librarians and gathering student voice data on where students are with their reading, 10 minutes reading at the start of every English class (or every day) will provide a greater cognitive benefit.

For English teachers and Teacher Librarians it is about striking that balance in the classroom and putting together a program that meet the needs of the reading group.


Reference

Peyser, M. (2019). This Is Why Reading Is So Important for Your Brain. [online] Reader’s Digest. Available at: https://www.rd.com/health/wellness/why-reading-is-important/ [Accessed 18 Jul. 2019].

Executive function skills and the motivation to read

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Some of the comments that are coming back from the Year 7 cohort about reading is that the 'Drop Everything and Read' wider reading campaign is giving them permission to read.

To me that sounds funny; why would you need permission to read? Why can't you just enjoy the process?

Intrinsic motivation is an interesting concept. For many of us, getting up in the morning isn't driven by the intrinsic motivation to start the day at a decent time. It is driven by the fact that we have work to go to, or kids to get up or animals to feed. The routine of our life is the motivating factor. For many of us, when those factors are removed, the morning routine falls apart. As adults we have developed those executive function skills to get up and get the jobs done that need to be done.

But for teenagers, many are still developing their executive function skills that drive them to set independent goals, meet self-set deadlines and also keep themselves organised.

For many years I have noticed a decline in the development of executive function skills amongst students. The school diary was often the mechanism to teach them these skills. Assignment dates would be set, tasks would be broken apart, times would be set to study for tests. Once upon a time we would help students create homework timetables and meet with them weekly to talk about their homework habits. Yes it was hard work by the pastoral teachers and parents, but you are not born with organisational skills; systems have to be developed that work for you. Part of this process was also learning to talk to teachers about completing tasks on time, such as 'role playing' how to ask for an extension on a piece of work.

With the large scale integration of Learning Management Systems into our schools, this skill is being super-seeded by looking at an electronic calendar that your teacher has populated for you with due dates. There is no processing or negotiation involved, the dates are just there ...

Online tasks are automatically given due dates and often the system doesn't allow for students to break down these tasks over a series of dates to suit their learning needs. Most electronic calendars do not allow for notes or reflections to be inserted. Perhaps the simple physical act of recording homework offline in a handwritten diary might have more benefits than meets the eye.

So is there a correlation between executive function skill and the motivation to read?

We have been recording our Drop everything and read data for 7 weeks now. We can see that the kids who under-achieve in many subjects are not good at reading regularly and those that are good at reading regularly achieve higher marks in their classroom tasks. Perhaps we didn't need 7 weeks of data to tell us this ...

But what about their executive function skills? Is there a link?

Does the simple act of learning how to plan, increase the likelihood of finding time to read recreationally?

Perhaps this is the next research project for me!

Planning your Library Displays

It's getting closer to the pointy end of the year and even though we are still operating in 2019, planning has already started for 2020 Library Displays.

We keep a rudimentary spreadsheet with date, topic, plan and evaluation. Evaluation gets done after the display gets taken down. What worked well and what didn't. What do we need to change for the following year?

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You also need to keep an eye on the school calendar, or a curriculum week can sneak up on you without you realising it. You should be the first person to know about Science Week, not the last.

How do you plan your library displays?

Melbourne Writers Festival 2019 [Schools Edition]

It has been a few years since I have attended the Melbourne Writers Festival. This year we took a group of girls from both the Write Club and the Book Club into city.

Getting our bookshop fix on at Readings at the State Library.

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Do Something About It

The Year 9-12 girls joined me for this panel session talking about how to be an advocate and how to write about advocacy. On our panel was three wonderful women; writer Laniyuk, poet Elena Gomez and writer and critic Sonia Nair.

The group explored their individual motivations on writing, how to be an accessibility advocate (or an accomplice) and how to use social media to "do something about it". Our girls were taken with the idea of an "accomplice" and how they might be able to advocate for causes that are important to them. There was talk about the importance of solidarity and that it involves a lot of listening and learning before taking action. In a culture with information and compassion fatigue; how do we cut through all of that to make our voices heard?

Goodbye, World

Our second session required some travel between Treasury Place and the State Library and we were overjoyed to find out that the speaker of this session Lynette Noni had taken out the 2019 Gold Inky Award last night for her book 'Whisper'.

Meeting back up with the rest of the group, this talk was all about Young Adult novels; the writing process, where to find inspiration and how to weave the story. Lynette spoke passionately about the world that she had created in the 'Medoran Chronicles' and how her characters were her best friends. From how to work out character names to techniques in plotting she kept the group engaged for the 45 minutes and we kept on talking about ideas that she generated for the rest of the afternoon.

Next Year?

Even though the Melbourne Writers Festival School's Program runs all day, we found that just the two sessions worked well with our students. Enough to get ideas from but not too much to exhaust us. The debrief in the Learning Commons when we got back to school was enlightening and hopefully a few of them have some ideas about where to take their writing.

Book Week Morning Tea

We had a morning tea to celebrate Book Week. What started off as a small morning tea, ended up being bigger than Ben Hur!

Our English Domain leader suggested that we all bring a dish that had some literary connection. She circulated the following web site from The Little Library Cafe and encouraged us to choose a dish that we could bring.

Library staff helped out with signage to make it a bit more formal looking using Canva.

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Simple dishes such as "Picnic at Hanging Rock".

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Turkish Delight from the local Middle Eastern Deli (much better than the commercial brands).

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And some amazingly creative Mandrake Cup Cakes by one of our English Language teachers.

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She bought the baby's and the folage from one of our local $2 shops and hot glue gunned them together. Chocolate packet mix for the cupcakes and icing and chocolate sprinkles complete the illusions of soil.

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These are some of the other delectable offerings at morning tea. Staff were encouraged to bring along the book that inspired the piece as well. See more images here.

Coffee and Walnut cake The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Lemon Cakes The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Circular cut Sandwiches The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle

Lady Bracknell’s Cucumber Sandwiches  The importance of being Earnest by Oscar Wilde

The Queen of Hearts Jam Tarts Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

Mandelines Madeleines by Marcel Proust

Mandrake Cupcakes Harry Potter by JK Rowling

Hummas H is for Hummas Joel Rickett

Turkish Delight The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

Cheese, Crackers, Fruit Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay

Pumkin Pasties Harry Potter by JK Rowling

Quiche Lorraine The Quiche of Death: Agatha Raisin mystery by Marion Chesney (MC Beaton)



Resources:

Dugdale, J. (2019). Books’ best bakes: cakes in fiction from Dickens to George RR Martin. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/oct/08/baking-in-books-cakes-in-literature

Canva. Web based desktop publishing.
https://www.canva.com/

The Little Library Cafe
http://thelittlelibrarycafe.com/

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#freebookmarks for your #schoollibrary - Spring Bookmarks

Here are some bookmarks inspired by the change of seasons, which is just around the corner in Australia.

Made in Canva, we print these off on 160gsm card through our colour copier.

Download the image and print as A4, splice and go!

Getting students to fill out survey's

We gather data for a variety of reasons, but the biggest one is to be able to make informed decisions within a school environment. Without data we are stabbing in the dark and hoping for a good result.

Ross Todd (2015) talks a lot about Evidence Based Practice (EBP) and guiding decision making and programs using evidence.

When school library staff are developing or running programs, often we are doing it with a class that isn't our own. So getting information or data out of the class is often a monumental task!

Emailing students a survey to do in their own time, your response rate might be 30-40% of the intended recipients.

So how can we get a more complete dataset from our students?

If left to our own devices, many people will put off doing a survey unless there is an extrinsic motivator; a reward or a due date.

In a school if you are collecting data from an entire year level, then you would want that dataset to be complete.  For our Year 7 'Drop Everything and Read' Campaign, the dataset is n=138.

Our first initial response to the weekly reading tally was a 40% response rate. Prompts sent out to classroom teachers to remind students to complete the survey, raised it up over 62%. Direct instruction from teachers resulted in a jump to 82% and the Year 7 English teachers will followup with students who have not completed the survey so that we can aim to have a 90% complete dataset.

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Why is a complete data set important?

With this project we are hoping to show that Teacher Librarian intervention and a well planned campaign will increase reading habits throughout a year level cohort. If we get positive results back, we can then then use this data as part of our planning for 2020. Without this data, there is no evidence that our interventions are working to improve recreational reading.

Do it by hand?

Of course, if we got the students to complete the survey by hand, we might get a more complete data set to start with. However, we would have to manually enter in the data by hand. With limited time and resources, this option is not preferable!

References:

Todd, R. (2015). Evidence-Based Practice and School Libraries: Interconnections of Evidence, Advocacy, and Actions. Knowledge Quest. Accessed at: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1048950

Reading: Brain altering stuff

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about how the brain is altered by regular recreational reading. Not checking your iPhone but reading a novel; a continuing story with plot and characters.

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During our wider reading sessions I often get asked whether the students can read the newspaper.  The answer is "no". Newspaper reading is fragmented, disjointed and doesn't offer the cognitive benefits that reading a novel has.

There are distinct advantages to reading an ongoing novel or short story. A research report done on the effect of ongoing reading on the brain (Bergland 2014) showed:

• "becoming engrossed in a novel enhances connectivity in the brain and improves brain function" 
• "enhanced connectivity included the students' left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with language comprehension"

The challenge we have is allowing our students to read. Giving them permission to read and to steal those moments of 10 or 15 minutes to read their novel. Before dinner, while waiting at the bus stop, at the end of a class.

We know that at the start of puberty, there is a tremendous growth in brain development. We also know that during the teenage years you either "lose it or you lose it"

Further Reading:

Bergland, C. (2014). Reading Fiction Improves Brain Connectivity and Function. [online] Psychology Today. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-athletes-way/201401/reading-fiction-improves-brain-connectivity-and-function [Accessed 29 Jul. 2019].

Coghlan, A. (2016). Revealed: the teenage brain upgrades that occur before adulthood. [online] New Scientist. Available at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2098557-revealed-the-teenage-brain-upgrades-that-occur-before-adulthood/ [Accessed 30 Jul. 2019].

Siegel, D. (2014). Pruning, Myelination, and the Remodeling Adolescent Brain. [online] Psychology Today. Available at: https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/inspire-rewire/201402/pruning-myelination-and-the-remodeling-adolescent-brain [Accessed 30 Jul. 2019].

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Encouraging a regular reading habit

The data from our reading observations has shown that there is a large chunk of our Year 7 students that are not reading regularly.

Reflecting on the Wider Reading data, we can see that there is a group of girls who are just not reading outside the wider reading sessions every fortnight. Their reading is disjointed and often they pick up a different book each week. The only book that they have finished all semester is their class set text. We know that reading competency, vocabulary range and imagination will develop if students read novels regularly.

They have sports practice, they have homework, they have production rehearsals. The excuses are endless and sometimes quite creative. Students don't understand the benefits of reading regularly and they are not willing to make the changes or sacrifices to steal 10 minutes here or 10 minutes there for their reading.

So what are we doing about it?

We have put together a 'Drop everything and read' campaign. I purposefully called it a campaign because it has a start and an end date. We are doing this in Term 3 because we now know a fair bit about our Year 7 readers, we have 6 months of reading observations about them. Now it is time to change some habits.

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So we have started off with bookmarks to launch the campaign and classroom posters encouraging them to find the 10 minutes a day to read. To steal it from the time before dinner or when waiting for a bus.

Students will use the bookmarks (hopefully) to record how many minutes they read per week and enter the data online so that we can tally up which class has read the most. Yes there is competition between the English classes, however, we are not targeting individual students even though we will have that data so that we can verify and encourage their efforts when we talk to them during the wider reading sessions in the Learning Commons.

The plan is to see how they go and encourage them along with some lolly packs and perhaps button badges if I have the time to make some.

After I presented to two of the classes this afternoon, there was a buzz and lots of questions:

1. Do I have to read?
2. Will there be chocolate?
3. What if I forget to read?
4. Can we each get chocolate?
5. Can I listen to an audio book?
6. Is there chocolate?

When exiting the classroom after presenting the ideas, a student who is a big fan of Tui Sutherland leant into me and said "I am going to knock it out of the park".

I am going to try and blog as much as I can about this project.

Three simple ways to use the Makerspace 3D Printers in your Art Curriculum

Three ways in which you can use your School Library Makerspace 3D Printer to enhance the Art curriculum.

1. Flourishes for Textiles 

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As part of our textiles curriculum, students are shown how to create and print custom buttons on our 3D Printers. If they don't like buttons, they can custom print a tag to be sewn onto their garment or in this case (image) iPad pouch.

This is a quick and easy task that is designed to get them thinking about the application of 3D Printing in the textile realm.

2. Create jewellery

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As part of a Year 10 graphic design unit, students designed their own jewellery and then we scanned in the diagrams, converted them to 3D shapes using Selva3D and printed them off. In reality, it is probably more a laser cutting exercise than 3D Printer, but we didn't have a laser cutter.

3. Create Makers Mark stamps for ceramics

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This is such an incredibly simple concept. Students who do ceramics normally sketch their name on the base of the object that they have made. A Makers Mark stamp is another extension of that and an opportunity to talk about branding.

If you want to take this concept pone step further, creating a metal "makers mark" can be done via shapeways and here is an example of one. You could create it as a keyring and get it printed in metal.

What do we do during wider reading observations?

Every two weeks we sit down with every Year 7 class in my school and we do "reading observations" with them.  I meet with them briefly for 30 - 90 seconds or more and record:

• What they are reading during that session
• What they have been reading at home 
• Whether they have found it hard to find time to read and why
• Whether there is a book they can recommend to me (if they have read more than one book since I last saw them)

The data gathering is fast and furious. We have codes that we use in our notes to record the data and then I transcribe the data before we forget the interaction.

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We stealthily move throughout the reading couches with our clipboard, taking down the student ID number, and the reading observation notes for the sessions. We can get through 28 students in a 40 minute time period, if there are no interruptions to the session. The teacher's role is to get the students sitting and reading and then if they wish, model reading themselves while maintaining a bit of classroom control.

I have tried to do this task on a tablet and/or laptop, but the distraction that the technology causes often outweighs the benefits. The clipboard has a printout of a record of what they have read, so questions can be asked about whether they continued to read a particular book or if another student is reading their book.

We are slowly learning names as well, so for some students I don't even have write down an observation because I see them at the circulation desk borrowing piles of books and we have conversations when they return their books.

Transcribing the notes takes about 20 - 30 minutes per class. Sometimes I check to see if students are borrowing anything as well to confirm whether they are or are not engaging with our collection.

In terms of time release, it takes us the equivalent of 0.2 (or a class) to manage, transcribe and work with a wider reading class.

#freebookmarks for your #schoollibrary Wintery Quotes

It has been a while in between posts on this blog.

My STEAM role in the school that I work in is eating up too much of my Teacher Librarian time, even though there is a cross over.

But here are some wintery bookmarks!

I've printed mine on 280 gsm through our Fuji Xerox colour copiers.

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And here is the high resolution file for you to print out (click to get full size).

Enjoy!