Excerpt from Foundations - Classroom Library Setup

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large pieces of paper, either pads of chart paper or rolls of butcher paper. You won’t regret investing in a good quality easel.

Your artists will need a good supply of thick black markers, colored pencils, crayons and colored markers.

Colored pencils and crayons make the best art, and this is no small point in the overall pedagogical approach described in this book. I also provide the artists with white paper, scissors, and tape, so that they can cut white paper to cover up any mistakes, tape it down, and re-draw over it.

Actors’ Stools: I highly suggest stools for your actors. I learned this from Ben Slavic, and it really transformed my relationship with my actors, whom I had previously allowed to wander about the classroom, which often meant that they stole the show, as free-range actors tend to do, being natural hams and entertainers, as the best student actors are.

Sitting the actors on stools keeps them at a good height and “anchors” them so they are less likely to become distractions. What you want is actors sitting above their peers during a story, but below you.

Big Paper: You will need a good supply of large-format paper.

Chart paper like the kind you use to make presentations is ideal. However, some chart paper is quite expensive. Amazon sells packs of four 50-sheet pads (200 sheets total) for around $50.00. The brand is TOPS Standard Easel Pads. This paper is not very thick and your artists will need to use a sheet behind the paper as a blotter, but it is the most economical chart paper I have found. Rolls of butcher paper from the school bulletin board cart can also be used, and are perhaps best in terms of value. You will use this paper to make calendars for each class and for the class artists to draw the class’s characters and illustrate their stories for the day.

Your Classroom Library You will, in most cases, not begin free-choice reading until later in the year. With students who have not done independent reading in previous years, you might not begin free-choice reading for several months, but you can begin working on your classroom library now. Below, you will find some ideas for sources of reading material to provision your shelves.

The most personalized and comprehensible, and certainly the least expensive, way to build a class library is to collect the written versions of the stories you create with your students during the Shared Writing portion of the daily lesson framework, explained in detail later in this book. Doing this quickly builds a collection of easy-reading texts that are very familiar, as students wrote them with you. You can include photos of the artists’ work alongside the text to support student comprehension, and/or have your students illustrate the texts.

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Kaitlin Leppert with a collection of Write & Discuss.

Towards the end of the year, you can collect all of the stories that you have created over the course of the year in one book. It can be a fun project (that also happens to provide a lot of comprehensible input) to have students illustrate the stories for future classes to read.

Another free source of reading material is the texts from the end-of-the-year Story Book Project, described in End of Year Option 3. If you have upper-level

A book project

classes, they could go ahead and start stocking your library with books to prepare for your first-year students’ free choice reading, which tends to begin in December, or January. If you want to enlist your advanced students’ help, you are advised to read the explanation of this project earlier in the term.

Here are some other sources of reading material, some free and some not.

(1) E-Lit App (About $250) Full disclosure. I made this app. But it is, quite honestly, the most visually-scaffolded, compelling reading collection, especially for beginners, that I have ever seen. It is comprised of the types of leveled texts I wish had existed when I was teaching Reading Intervention. In my intervention classes, many of my students who needed reading material that was three to five grade levels below their chronological ages were bored stiff by the “baby books” that I could find for them. This app was a long time coming, and it is the fruit of many, many reading conferences with students who just cannot ever seem to find a text they like, because they have experienced such limited success with reading so far in their schooling. Supporting teachers to build a love of reading is the purpose in setting up this app. It’s been a lot of work, but when I hear back from students who are enjoying the texts, it’s worth it.

(2) Reading A to Z (About $120) This is a subscription that allows you to print short leveled readers (in French and Spanish) that go from A to Z. At first, I use levels A to D and put out higher levels as the year goes on.

(3) Comprehensible Periodicals (Prices vary from FREE to around $50 per term, on Teachers Pay Teachers) Mundo en Tus Manos by Martina Bex or Le Petit Journal Francophone by Cécile Lainé offer subscriptions to digital newsletters on current events, written for language learners. Martina Bex also produces a free literary magazine of student writing, Revista Literal, which you can print from her website.

(4) Class-Created Comics (Free) Making comics from previous stories and discussions is an excellent sub lesson plan, if your guest teacher does not speak your language. See the Appendices for a template.

(5) One-Page Wonders (Free) Jonathan Elliot, aka Profe Elote, has created a database of over 75 short nonfiction articles, in various languages, created by teachers to respond to their students’ interests. You can easily find his blog, by Googling “Profe Elote.”

(6) Scholastic magazines (About $80 for 10 subscriptions) Scholastic magazines are visually appealing and available in German, French, and Spanish. You can build up a nice collection of back issues over the years.

(7) Online Comic Library (Free) Mike Peto has assembled a printable library of student-created comics which you can find on his blog, by Googling his name and “comic library.” This example is by Brett Chonko.

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Assembling a Varied Collection My suggestion for how many texts to include in your collection, to begin free-choice reading, is to have at least three to five titles per student, so that everyone can have a good selection. So, if your largest class is 34 students, you will want at least 34 x 3, or 102 titles. These do not all need to cost you any funds. In fact, by following the suggestions above, you should be able to acquire quite a bit of reading material for the price of printing them and binding them in folders.

You will want to assemble material from the widest variety of sources as possible, about as many topics as possible. You will want a mix of genres: fiction, nonfiction, graphics, current events, poetry, etc. You will also want to offer high, medium, and low reading levels, to differentiate and provide your students with varying levels of challenge. You might also mix in culturally-authentic texts, such as children’s books, infographics, magazine articles, maps, menus, brochures, and other realia.

As you begin to provision your classroom with reading material, you will discover many sources of material created by teacher-authors writing short, leveled texts for language learners. Some are available for free download, and others are available for purchase. Among the growing selection of texts, created by proficiency-oriented language teachers, you are sure to find some titles that will delight and captivate you and your students.

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A Note on Anti-Bias, Anti-Racist Reading The texts that we place on our shelves speak volumes to our students about what we value, and so it is important to be intentional when developing your classroom library, and choose texts that communicate the values you want to uphold and uplift, and eliminate texts that communicate harmful, damaging, or erroneous messages. We want to be sure that our collections represent voices from diverse authors, about diverse characters, and that they portray these cultures, places, and people in a diversity of ways: positive, strong, joyful, committed, uplifting, inspiring, outraged, passionate…and, above all, real and human and true.

For this reason, I urge you to seek out, to the maximum extent possible, authors writing about their own lived experience, and not authors who are imagining how it would be to live a different person’s experience.

It bears special consideration to examine books written by authors about characters and groups whose identities they do not share. You will want to give a close eye to how “outsider authors” portray people and groups whose identities have been (and, in all likelihood, still are) negatively racialized and/or who have been harmed, marginalized, and/or exploited by the dominant culture.

This work is of high importance, as all students - no matter who they are, where they come from, whom they love, or how they identify themselves, benefit from the empathy that reading so readily develops. And, of course, it is absolutely critical that our students whose identities are too often missing or misrepresented in the dominant culture have more encounters with texts that reflect their identities back in a real, true, affirming way.

You are encouraged to check out the “Reading Diversity Lite” Checklist, available for free use and distribution from Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance).

Another excellent resource is the Language Learner Literature Advisory Board, or LLLAB, whose mission, according to Esmeralda Mora, a Founding Director, is to “provide well rounded feedback to help you evaluate possible materials for your classroom library as it pertains to race, ethnicity, cultures, social class, gender, sexual orientation, gender expression, age, religion, family structure, neurodiversity, abilities, and experiences.” The board is composed of a group of diverse members who are well advanced in their fields, and whose personal and Page 30

career backgrounds comprise experiences that enrich their work with a wide array of perspectives. The LLAB can provide you with trustworthy information to help dismantle social inequalities by developing and curating culturally-sustaining reading material. They are committed to (un)learning and welcome feedback and suggestions for honoring and validating everyone’s identities, experiences, and realities.

Setting Up the Classroom to Support Student Jobs The Human Resources Manual, included in the Appendices, lists student jobs that can support your students in working as “class employees.” I do not pay the students who take on jobs with candy or other commonly accepted forms of classroom currency. This can hinder their internal motivation and can upset the overall well-being of the community. You want the students to take the jobs for the pleasure of their peers’ recognition and for the satisfaction of serving their community. This helps to ensure that you have the right student in the right job - a student who is motivated by the execution of the job’s duties and the desire to serve.

The student jobs can support your instruction with tasks such as creating visual aids and readings, and working in general to assure the smooth functioning of your instruction on a mechanical level. They can also support the day-to-day functioning of your classroom, performing such tasks as passing out pencil and paper for quizzes, welcoming visitors, and monitoring hall passes. They are your classroom support team. Ideally, everyone has some small part to play in the class on either of these job teams. Basically, the more students that are employed in some way to support the class, the better for you.

I strongly suggest that you set up the jobs so that students keep their jobs for the entire year, until they resign or get fired. The Human Resources Department - two responsible, kind student leaders - does the hiring, training, re-training, issuing warnings, firing, and replacing the student employees. I also highly recommend that you do not try to fill positions all at once, but add them as needed, as happens in the business world. If you assign a huge batch of random jobs willy-nilly before the job is needed, and before you know you students well enough to place them in jobs that they are naturally well-suited for, personality-wise, you do not allow time to reflect on which students would best perform at a certain job before filling that position, you will find that later on you wish you had done so.

Every student, no matter what their personality or level of maturity and selfcontrol, is suited for some kind of useful employment that can empower them to hold a valued responsibility for the smooth operation of class. However, in some cases, we cannot see our students’ talents when we first meet them.

Therefore, when we hold off on assigning the jobs, we get into a stance of looking for students’ talents, even if they are hidden under attitudes or behaviors that we might not immediately see as assets. In the Human Resources Manual, included in the Appendices, you will find detailed job descriptions and training guidelines for each student job. Below are some recommendations for setting up the classroom to support some key jobs.

Student Jobs List Page 31