When I was a rookie, I was always on the lookout for some sort of regular activities that would happen every week, and give me some sort of skeleton to hang the rest of the week on. When you’re a noob, that 54 minutes show looks mighty long and hard to fill. When I started here, they already had a few of these sort of things in place department-wide. Nowadays (as the kids say) I would chafe at the idea, but back then I was stoked to have some of those minutes already filled. “OK. Monday we have a spelling pretest (the lists were even provided back in the day…and probably will be again soon…sigh), we all had to do a current events thing of some kind (I liked that one…hmmmm), we checked KBAR on Fridays…” KBAR? Wait. I just realized I already ‘splained the history of KBAR back in 2008, when this here blog first started. So here you go. (December, 2008.) When I started at my school (1993), they had an independent reading program they called Kick Back and Read (KBAR). Mostly, it was a chart with a picture of Snoopy on it. Actually there were two kinds
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I was going to tell the whole story about how my KBAR program came to be (the granddaughter of the inventer of the name is in my class this year), but since it’s Wednesday and it’s ten minutes until eight, I’ll save the back-story for later and get right down to the nitty-gritty, as someone used to say sometime. Here’s a short version of how I deal with reading the responses and checking the charts. I ass-u-me (seventh graders love that one) that you have already familiarized yourself with the KBAR concept. What? Fine. Click the link. Then read the rest. I’ll be back, as our former governor used to say. This is from July, 2009′s mailbag. What is your experience with doing the KBAR notebook? I have found that during my student teaching, the students rarely turned in homework if I wasn’t checking it (worksheets or whatever) at the end of every week. Also, is it used just for KBAR work at home? I’m nervous about leaving them to do something at home on a notebook (that many of my students wouldn’t buy since it’s 75% free/reduced lunch). Any alternatives to that issue? During the first week of doing KBAR, I check daily, just to make sure they
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I was working on a post about a book every teacher should read. It’s called Nurture Shock, and I will finish the post about it later. We have a bigger issue to deal with here right now. Over yonder in the comments sections, Mr. M appears to have a rather pesky coworker, and he’s also looking for a little help in the independent reading program department. First of all… O. M. G. I can see why you have “disagreements” with this person. She is obviously insane. She should seek out a mental health professional at once. A 140 page per week quota? What is this, a sweatshop? Do the kids earn piecework for every book and notecard they churn out? Your word exorbitant is not even sufficient to describe this. What does she do with the notecards? How does she prevent lying–both parental and student? (That book I mentioned says that 97% of adolescents lie to their parents about 3/4 of their real life activities.) Is it tied to what she does in class, or is it there just because she’s supposed to have an independent reading program, and of course “mine has to be ‘rigorous’ because I don’t want
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Sr. Enda (my seventh grade teacher) would be appalled that I used the title phrase outside the context of the Catholic Church. But in my seventh grade language arts classroom, my Holy Trinity consists of Father Vocabulary, Son KBAR (reading/writing), and the Holy Spirit of grammar/mechanics. (My ninth grade English teacher referred to the last as the Great Grammarian in the Sky.) Okay that’s a bit of a metaphor stretch, as I squeeze 5 things into 3, but I think you get the idea. A language arts curriculum can seem like it has a million things in it, and the task of trying to integrate them all so they somehow fit together seems daunting. And it’s not like we English teachers have a rigid sequence of skills/concepts that have to be taught in a certain order. I mean we do, sort of, but there’s a lot of overlap and repetition, and it’s not like in math, where (the math teachers insist) you have to learn x before you can learn y and so on. In fact, most English teachers bridle under any outside attempt to sequence their curriculum. But this freedom can be a bit intimidating: What goes first? What
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A few years ago, while we were reading Outsiders aloud, I was about to give them my usual “reading check” type quiz to make sure they were following along, thinking about what we’d talked about, connecting the literary terms to the examples in the book, etc. I can’t quite remember what my inspiration was (probably just to throw them for a loop like I like to do), but I decided to let them “cheat.” My quizzes on the books and stories we read are always open book, but this time I told them they could take the quiz, not only open book, but “open mouth.” I told them they could talk about the questions and answers as much as they want in any way they want, and decide however they want to, which of the answers to choose. “You can share what you know…or not. You can decide whether to heed the wisdom of the group…or not. You just can’t lie. You can’t knowingly tell everyone the wrong answer on purpose.” One class that day came up with the name Quiz for Dummies. The rest of the periods thought that was a little “mean,” so we’ve stuck with Open Mouth. [...]
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