Literacy Speaks Volumes

One of the recommended Common Core Explemplar Texts is Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction by David Macaulay .   Since it is the end of the school year and standardized testing is over, and our school library had a classroom set of the book, I decided to have my seventh graders partner read this text with each other as one of our daily lessons. I had no other plans in mind, other than introducing this interesting YA picture book to my students and give myself a chance to read it myself. I'm so glad that I did. Published in 1973, this award winning book tells the story of a fictional cathedral in France. The story progresses from the idea for the cathedral and goes through its detailed construction to its finished product. This book may sound boring for middle schoolers, but it's anything but boring.  The reluctant readers (mostly boys) were interested in the detailed drawings, while many of the girls loved learning new vocabulary ("flying buttresses"...

Well standardized testing is halfway finished and then there is only three weeks left of school. So, the big question from my students is "Are we going to learn after testing is over?" My snarky response is "How you can be in the same room with such a great teacher as me and not learn?" Of course, that is a rhetorical question~I don't really want to hear what my seventh-graders have to say to that. While I won't tell them so, that is a question that teachers struggle with. What meaningful, but short-lived, lessons can we have in the last few weeks of school before our summer vacation? This year, I'm going to try to get a leg up on Common Core State Standards and teach a historical fiction book: Cathedral: The Story of Its Construction  by David Macauley. This is a short book about the fictional construction of a cathedral in France. The illustrations enhance the text with vocabulary and sentence structures that will challenge even the most reluc...