Voila-Seven CCSS Activities You Can Do Now

Hi everyone-

This is it—we're devoting all of our October posts to the Common Core State Standards. I guarantee that each of us has a different take on this subject, but of course it’s no big surprise that we like CCSS.  We like it a lot.  What else would you expect, since teachers at every grade level get to revel in some of the (ahem) most excellent nonfiction books available, right? (Hint: say yes…)  So how can teachers and students have a blast with these books and learn everything worth learning at the same time? I’m thinking that a few suggestions are in order.

As it turns out, we should be able to make this easy for everyone today because I recently got a lucky break. I've had the chance to add some outstanding classroom projects to my website, and they're directly tied into every possible aspect of CCSS. They were created by a true Common Core aficionado named Dr. Rose Reissman, who really knows her stuff when it comes to fun activities that instill the love of learning into just about anything. So............

Below is a link to a set of six incredible projects geared directly toward the book Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem.

 

Here you’ll find step-by-step directions for these six activities: Help kids write, stage, and perform a play that tells the tale; Create a great dictionary of strange words and terms related to the Witch Trials; Play a cool game called Which Witch Perspective Rings True?; Go Back to the Future to re-write the shameful events of 1692 using 21^st Century values; Treat the book as a framework for writing a scary ballad or and Edgar Allen Poe style poem about it; Or have a 21’st Century Mock Trial Do-Over of the Witch Trials.  You can access these activities directly by going here:

http://www.rosalynschanzer.com/pdfDocuments/CCSSWitchesActivities.pdf

 

 And here’s the link to a great Alphabet Book project that ties into Witches! and two other books to boot: George vs. George: The American Revolution as Seen from Both Sides and What Darwin Saw: The Journey that Changed the World. 

As an extra added attraction, this is an excellent project for all kinds of additional nonfiction books, and it works well for a broad age range too.  Here’s the link:

http://www.rosalynschanzer.com/pdfDocuments/AlphabetActivity.pdf

To make your lives even easier, these activities are filled with details and print-outs (which means they’re too long to display directly in this blog, so check the links).Tie-ins to professional CCSS lingo are presented in spades for each activity.

 More to follow....if you try out any of these projects, I’d love to hear what happens.

WHAT KIDS CAN DO

This weekend I got a truly amazing package in the mail. It was jam-packed with 20 stories written by third graders, and they weren’t just any old stories either. Each one was eye-popping, unique, full of surprises, AND 100% TRUE; in short, the type of tales kids can hold onto for the rest of their lives.  So what’s the story behind these stories?

Back in the end of March, I did a live video conference with these budding authors via a Library of Congress grant.  Designed to get kids excited about using primary source material, the grant is linked directly to the CCSS.

 

As an example of the incredible stories you can uncover by exploring such sources, we had a wonderful time exploring the action-packed journals of Lewis and Clark from one of my books and also figuring out what other primary source material I used to make the pictures as accurate (and as much fun) as possible.

After that, we discussed several cool ways kids can write their own nonfiction stories by using primary sources, and one of my suggestions was for each kid to interview an older member of their family about their own adventures a long time ago.  We talked about methods news reporters use to ask hard questions, not just easy ones. (I said that their families would love to be interviewed this way.)  And I introduced them to my infamous “meat and salt” method of writing non-fiction, in which the meat = the facts (names, dates, places, etc.) and the salt = all the unusual or surprising or funny big and little things that bring a story to life and make you want to read more.

These are some very lucky kids.  They happen to have an outstanding Pennsylvania teacher named Amy Musone, and after our talk, she decided that the family interviews were worth pursuing.  With Skype support from Sue Sheffer, a retired teacher working with Amy and her class via a grant from the Library of Congress, the kids got on a roll and started brainstorming.  They decided which family members they wanted to interview and why, and each student focused on a particular time in that person’s life.

The results knocked everyone’s socks off, including Amy’s. So at the end of May, their school held a big after-school Celebration of Family Stories, replete with refreshments no less.  Family members from all over came to hear the students read their tales, and they laughed, cried and were simply captivated.  

Every story is compelling, to say the least. There are tales about bombing Nagasaki, playing the ancient game of Pac Man, taking knitting classes in Ecuadorian schools, blowing up an abandoned building with a tank, scrubbing floors in Marine barracks with a toothbrush and saluting every time you wanted a drink of water, and what life is like without technology.   It’s impossible to know which story to put first, but here are a few tiny abridged excerpts written by third graders in their own words—mere hints about the whole shebang.  Check 'em out:

                  ADVENTURES

“dad was such a dare devil that he went car surfing with his friends. His friend tried to throw him off!, but my dad was good at staying on.  He only fell off a couple of times! ...my dad thinks cliff jumping is the most fun stunt because he loves the rush of falling through the air!”  (the author includes lots more stunts his dad’s mom didn’t know about plus a photo of Christopher Reeve as Superman.)

“My brave, amazing Uncle was in the Army….he and his team had to go through this confidence course….there was a building that was 40’ tall and they had to repel down the building.  The 40’ tall building would sway.  My Uncle said this was the most scariest time for him in the Army….[now] My Uncle is looking forward to becoming a Fire Chief. [He] is a wonderful Uncle because he risks hi life for others and everyday helps somebody that needs help.”

         SOME COOL GROSS STUFF

“During the first year of medical school, my mom had to dissect a human body.  It was a smelly task and after they were done for the day, they would be smelly too.  Something that she thought was pretty funny was the comments that people would say and the funny faces they would make when they would smell the anatomy students.”

            AND LOTS OF HISTORY

“When my Great Grandma was a little girl…she felt sad because when a white person threw a rock at a black person, a black person couldn’t throw a rock back…..She went to the March on Washington in 1963. The Civil Rights Leaders talked about how it wasn’t right how African Americans were being treated.  In the South, police had dogs bite African Americans….” 

“There was the time in China when all people no matter you are men, women, or kids, would wear blue shirts and pants. My dad was born during this time in 1978 with no brothers or sisters…..at that time there were not much toys so they would go out and play in the nature.  My dad and his friend would catch tadpoles and watch them grow up…They…would feed their tadpoles leftover rice….He didn’t have any black and white TV until he was 10.  He had his first small single door refrigerator at 12 years old.” 

“Back in the year 1904, the war between Russia and Japan began.  In addition my great great great grandpa was born.  Even though he lived in Russia he didn’t like it very much.  There was a massive war going on.  This meant that once he was old enough, he would be forced to be in the Russian army…It was then that he decided to save enough money to buy a ticket and move to the United States…..” (and his further adventures once he arrived) “I hope that one day I will follow in the footsteps of my great great great grandpa and be as courageous as [he] was (except that I’d like to play football too)."

“My grandma just turned 79 years old. Abuela used to sow tobacco plants on the farm she grew up on….Abuela’s ancestors are a mix of African slaves, Spaniards from Spain and Taino Indians, the first inhabitants of Puerto Rico. Abuela’s education lasted only until the 4^th grade because Abuela had to work on the farm... They traveled on horseback…and there was no technology….it was a beautiful place, surrounded by palm trees, mountainsides and the songs of frogs.” And this:  “Back when my grandma was a child all she was allowed to wear were dresses and skirts, no pants or shorts which sounds TERRIBLE to me.”

You gotta love these kids (and their school too), right? Now every one of them is an author, a researcher, an historian, and an open-minded, creative thinker who's learning to use his or her noggin to uncover the facts.  

My First Book, Actually

When I speak at conferences and schools, I sometimes hold up my first published book from 1972 to show how much children's books have changed over time. But that really wasn't my first book. My entire eighth grade class of 24 authored a book way back in 1954 called "Shark Point and High Point." The title referred to our home towns, Tiburon, which means 'shark' in Spanish, and Belvedere, loosely translated into Italian/French as a 'high point' commanding a beautiful view. Our teacher, Miss Wilson, felt that this group of 24 students, could accomplish the goal of researching, writing, and illustrating a an accurate and valuable local history, and that's what we did.

In the process, we learned so many skills--how to research newspaper archives, carry out informative interviews, evaluate historic documents, write collaboratively, and so much more. Our history has become a landmark document, and creating it enriched and changed our lives.


When I look at one of my precious copies of our classic, I think about how different such a document would look today, with Google maps, color photos, actual book binding, professional type. We had to hand type, then mimeograph our pages; hand draw the maps, and hand assemble the pages into binders by collating as we each circled around a big table, picking up the pages one by one to create a single volume. I don't know our final "print run," but I imagine it must have been more than 100 copies. Each copy was created for a specific member of a family. I now own three or four of them, my own plus those of my late grandfather (shown here) and sister, and perhaps another that's in a storage box somewhere.

Creating this book taught us all so much we never would have learned otherwise, and I wonder how many young people today could be blessed with such an opportunity. I doubt many public school teachers could pull it off--modern concerns about tight budgets, law suits, teaching to the test, and so forth, keep such precious, creative, and priceless experiences out of the reach of most American children these days. Our book was revised by other Reed School eighth graders in 1958 and 1970, but to my knowledge not more recently. I just hope that any students today who are able to participate in special projects like this realize how fortunate they are. I am still grateful.