Literacy Speaks Volumes

The Writing Workshop is much more than a program designed to help children acquire the skills necessary for written language. It is a classroom in which you and your students form bonds that become the foundation of learning. In the Writing Workshop, your teaching becomes individualized as students focus on topics that matter to them and you respond to their efforts. Because students write about their interests, worries, and dreams, the material of the Writing Workshop arises from the fabric of their lives. Writing Workshop is a method of writing instruction that developed from the early work of Donald Graves. The idea is that coaching students to write for a variety of audiences and purposes was more effective than traditional written instruction. This method of instruction focuses on the goal of fostering lifelong writers. It is based upon four principles: students will write about their own lives; they will use a consistent writing process; they will work in authentic ways;

Evolving Readers are Evolving Writers At the same time that evolving readers develop their reading abilities, they also develop their writing abilities. As they begin to read different genres, these readers also begin to experiment with writing for different purposes. Evolving readers need teacher support to study the various components of the writing progress in depth. Who are these evolving readers? Evolving readers are best described as readers who have made the transition from learning to read to reading to learn. This stage is critical because it create the pattern for life-long learning. There are many comprehension extension activities that are beneficial ot evolving readers. The expectations for intermediate readers have risen dramatically over the past few years. The Common Core State Standards have increased the rigor required for these readers. These students need support to fully engage with complex texts. Maturing Readers Students need to be exposed to a variety of

What is history? History is the study of the past as it is described in written documents. Events occurring before written history are considered prehistory. It is an umbrella term that relates to past events as well as to memory, discovery, collection, organization, presentation, and interpretation about these events. Scholars who write about history are called historians. History can also refer to the academic discipline which uses a narrative to examine and analyze a sequence of past events, and objectively determine the patterns of cause and effect that determine them. Historians sometimes debate the nature of history and its usefulness by discussing the study of the discipline as an end to itself and as a way of providing perspective on problems of the present.

The Journey is the Reward! You must decide which words are critical for the student to know before reading the text. You have to decide which of those critical words could be connected to students' prior knowledge or learned through context and which would be bridged through direct instruction. Then, you must decide on what strategy to use. Sometimes you have to break it down into several categories. Teaching strategy lessons Suggesting concept connections Exploring multiple meanings Introducing activities that provide repetition and integration into the lesson. What classroom conditions nurture struggling readers and writers? The teacher composes in front of the kids, explicitly modeling her own writing strategies. Students engage in short writing tasks every day. Students write to explore subject matter content. Writing topics are interesting, intriguing, significant, surprising, and discussable. Writing assignments offer students

We have reached the period of westward expansion after looking at the Civil War and then reconstruction. Reconstruction was literally reconstructing the United States after the Civil War. The Civil War ravaged physical, economic, and political aspects of the Confederacy. Before he died, Lincoln had a plan for reconstruction. Lincoln's plan was a lenient one. Lincoln called his plan the ten-percent plan. Under said plan, the government would pardon all confederates except for high-ranking officials and those accused of crimes against prisoners of war, who would swear allegiance to the union. As soon as 10% of these people who had voted took the oath of allegiance, a confederate state could form a new state government and send representatives and senators to Congress. Under this rule, there were four states that moved towards readmission: Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. In the American Old West, trails were used by immigrants from the Eastern United States, be

For most students, finding definitions and writing those words in sentences has had little effect on students' acquisition of new vocabulary. We need strategies that are consistent with research on how we learn new words, connect them to our existing knowledge and retrieve them when we want to use them in reading, writing, and speaking. Teachers need to choose engaging informational texts that are short and interesting. These texts should be in the readability range of 4th to 6th grade and have the specific vocabulary that is to be taught. I recommend that you use Averil Coxhead's High-Incidence word list to determine which words to teach. These words need to be taught at least three times in five days. Start with a short piece of text. To promote deep understanding, instruction has to begin with good conversations about rich topics and ideas. The discussion must be anchored in text to promote literacy and encourage the use of academic vocabulary over conversational

The Saint Valentine's Day Massacre is the name given to the February 14, 1929 murder of seven men of the North Side Irish Gang during the prohibition Era. It resulted from the struggle between the Irish American gang and the South Side Italian gang led by Al Capone. The struggle was to determine who would take control of organized crime in Chicago. Former members of the Egan's Rats gang were suspected of assisting Capone. Lincoln park is a designated community area in North Side, Chicago, Illinois. Lincoln Park is a 1208 acre park along the lakefront of Chicago's North Side facing Lake Michigan. It is Chicago's largest public park. Named after Abraham Lincoln, it stretches for seven miles from Ohio Street on the South to near Ardmore Avenue on the North, just north of the Lake Shore Drive Terminus. The Primary Elements of Powerful Writing Experiences-- Writing for content learning uses writing as a tool for learning subject-area material. Writing about

Peppermint is a hybrid mint--a cross between water mint and spearmint. Indigenous to Europe and the Middle East, the plant is now widespread in cultivation in many regions of the world. It is occasionally found in the wild with its parent species. Peppermint was first described in 1753 by Charles Linnaeus from specimens that had been collected in England; he treated it as a species, but it is now universally agreed to be a hybrid. It is a herbaceous rhizomatous perennial plant. Peppermint generally grows best in moist, shaded locations like stream sides and drainage ditches. young shoots are taken from old stock and dibbled into the ground about 1.5 feet apart. Being a hybrid, it is usually sterile producing no seeds and reproducing only vegetatively. They grow quickly and cover the ground with runners. For the home gardener, it is often grown in containers to restrict rapid spreading. It grows best with a good supply of water, without being water logged, and planted in areas with par

The Prehistory of Australia Human habitation of the Australian continent is estimated to have begun between 42,000 and 48,000 years ago, possibly with the migration of people by land bridges and short sea-crossings from what is now Southeast Asia. These first inhabitants may have been ancestors of modern indigenous Australians. At the time of European settlement in the late 18th century, most indigenous Australians were hunter-gatherers, with a complex oral culture and spiritual values based on reverence for the land and belief in Dreamtime. The Torres Strait Islanders, ethnically Melanesian, were originally horticulturalists and hunter-gatherers. The northern coasts and waters of Australia were visited sporadically by fishermen from Maritime Southeast Asia.