Category: Literacy

8/23/2021

Wonderful Words!

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Shrinking the vocabulary gap across the socioeconomic spectrum.

It is well documented that children in lower economic status homes typically have a much smaller vocabulary than children from more affluent homes. (Check out links to some of those articles below.) This smaller vocabulary puts them at a significant disadvantage. We want to close the "word gap!" We introduce and practice a wide range of words in our videos, livestreams, and lessons. We support vocabulary acquisition though multiple pathways and strategies based in best practice so that ALL students have a chance to learn and apply new words.

When a child is deprived of food, there is public outrage because child hunger is correctly identified as a moral and economic issue that moves people to action. The vocabulary gap should be viewed with the same urgency as child malnutrition.
-Psychology Today

We provide vocabulary lists with both adult and child-friendly definitions. We also supply word wall cards for every mission and whenever appropriate provide graphic supports to help students find the words they are seeking. Where ever your students fall along the reading and vocabulary continuum, we provide an entry point!

Download word cards and vocabulary lists!

This approach works! I love this story from a teacher. As one of her kindergarten students was walking with his parent to the family car after school, this child stopped in his tracks and picked up a shard of plastic. He held it up and examined it carefully as he verbalized his thinking. "This looks like a broken tail light, but I notice that the color and pattern is different than the tail light on our car. The phenotype doesn't match!" The astonished parent related this tale to the teacher who revealed that phenotype was a Go2Science vocabulary word for the current mission. She went on to provide the definition for the parent.

Vocabulary lists and word wall cards are available for every mission! Log into your Go2Science account and navigate to the premission page on the mission of your choice. Below the tip box, on the right side of the page, you'll find links for that mission's vocabulary list and word wall cards.

By presenting all students with some unfamiliar words, everyone has the opportunity to learn and make new connections. Other terms may be familiar but used in unfamiliar ways.

Learning is not just about recall, but application in new and novel settings. This student certainly did that! PLUS, he is learning how to learn and increasing the size of his vocabulary. As it turns out, sometimes size DOES matter.

phenotype
Kid-friendly definition: It is the way an animal or plant looks - its shape, colors, patterns and textures. It can also include the way it acts.
Adult definition: It is the composite of an organism's observable physical appearance and behavior. A phenotype results from genetic and environmental factors.

For more info check out these links:
SES differences in language processing skill and vocabulary are evident at 18 months (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3582035/)

Early Learning and School Readiness: Can Early Intervention Make a Difference?
(https://muse.jhu.edu/article/173860/summary)

Tackling the "Vocabulary Gap" Between Rich and Poor Children
(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-athletes-way/201402/tackling-the-vocabulary-gap-between-rich-and-poor-children)

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9/25/2019

Week 3: Comic Tips

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Literacy tips for this week's comic!

This week Data Dog uses his Photon Collar to make a hard light copy and brings something amazing back to the house! What would your students bring to class if they had a Photon Collar? I wish I could hear THAT discussion!

PreK: Focus on feelings!

Read my face! PreK children are often learning to read non-verbal communication including facial cues! Try this game with your students. Hide your face behind a scarf, large book, or other barrier. Make an expression (happy sad, surprised, angry, etc.) then reveal your face to the class. Can they describe your face? How do people usually feel when they make a face like you did? Now try it with the comic. Find the faces, then discuss how the character probably feels.
Inferring Feelings Take the activity to the next level and ask students to share their thinking about WHY each character might have that expression. Why do students think the characters feel a certain way? Relate this back to their own experience. Ask them to look at your face again. Can they tell how you are probably feeling? Why do they think you feel that way?

Kindergarten: Focus on medial sounds.

Oh My! Vowels can be tricky!!! While most kindergarten students are focusing on learning short vowel sounds, they are likely already noticing that vowels do not always make the same sounds. Take the letter "o" in panel 2, for example. We have the sound effects woof, zop, and cooo. The "o" is doing something different in each word. Cooo has a long oo sound like zoom and boosh! Woof has a short oo sound as in book. Zop is a short o word like dog. Challenge students to make up a fun name for the two double o sounds (such as "spooky oo" and "cookie oo") then challenge them to find all the double o words and sort them!
Middle Sound Mix Up This week we have the sounds effects zop and zup. Create a short vowel die using a foam or wooden cube or design one on tinker cad! Roll the die and practice saying the short vowel sound revealed. Then try substituting the vowel in zop to create new sound effects! You can do this for many beginning and ending consonants. My favorite team is /b/ _ /g/ as it makes a real word you can show or act out each time. Word of warning test out new teams first so you don't end up with something you'd rather your students NOT say.

Grades 1 and 2: Focus on multiple modalities.

Partner Reading Since the comics have multiple reading levels in a single document they are an ideal text for cross level or even cross grade reading buddies. We often pair students of a similar ability for partner reading but try pairing students with vastly different reading levels on occasion too.
Choral Reading Having larger groups read simultaneously helps all readers but especially struggling readers and ELL students. You can create a group reader's theater situation so that part of the class reads a specific character. The key is to keep it fun and mix it up.
Re-Reading Finally, give students the opportunity to interact with the same text multiple ways over the course of the week: in a guided reading group, with a partner of a similar and different ability, as part of a choral reading activity, and independently. This is known as Fluency Oriented Reading Instruction (FORI) and can yield some great results!

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9/11/2019

Week 1: Tigers Comic Tips

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Tips for reading instruction using our comic!

Wether you are working with pre-readers, emergent readers, or more fluent readers our comics can help support instruction! Read on for grade level specific tips for using this week's comic. Of course, you have readers of many levels in your room so the grade levels are just a general guide.

PreK: Focus on distinguishing between pictures and words.

Read the Pictures! Before you read the comic to your students, have them read it to you! Encourage students to "read" the pictures to tell a story. What do they think is happening?
Where are the Words? Give students a highlighter and one of the uncolored comic pages. Challenge them to only color the places they see words! Your speedy finishers might enjoy coloring the rest of the page with colored pencils giving you some time to support students who need help with this task.

Kindergarten: Focus on letters and sounds in the sound effects.

Read it Again! Challenge students to find panels where they see two sound effects that repeat such as "wag, wag " in the panel above. The teacher touches and reads the first word, then students "read" the repeated word when the teacher touches it. Panel nine provides a nice challenge with "ap, op, op, ap, op, op!"
Smart Guesses One important reading strategy is using context cues! Some of the sound effects are tricky to read on their own, but when the picture is considered it gets much easier! Challenge your students to guess the sound effect you touch after only giving them the beginning sound. You might say, "What's this word near Curiosity Cat? It starts with /p/ and she sure looks happy that Beth is petting her! What's your smart guess?" Chances are students will guess "purrr" with ease. Try it for "grrrr" and "sniff" too!
Special Sound Effects Let students know that some sound effects will be used again and again. Whenever Curiosity Cat uses her Omni Glasses they'll see "pip." When Data Dog runs fast they'll see "zoom" and when he stops they'll see "pop." Be on the look out for these words next time!

Grade 1: Focus on speech bubbles and reading sound effects.

Word Warm-up! This time of year many first graders need a review of some basic reading skills. Many of our sound effects are CVC words. Before jumping into reading the whole comic, challenge students to read all the sound effects aloud. Make it fun! No reading robots here, what do you think "nom, nom" should really sound like?
Who Said That? Four characters have speech and thought bubbles this week. Make four teams for a choral reading activity. When you touch Beth's speech bubble, "Team Beth" can read what she said. This works best with mixed ability teams so strong readers can support their peers for success! As the teacher, YOU get to read the text panels and be the narrator!

Grade 2: Focus on text panels and bigger words.

What Word? Prior to reading, ask students to scan the comic for words that look tricky! Words like Thailand, Pleistocene (ply-stuh-seen) and superpowers might look daunting at first. Take a moment and ask students what reading strategies they might use to read these tricky words. Do the parenthetical pronunciation guides help? Can they break the word into smaller parts? Unpacking the tricky words ahead of time makes the subsequent reading more fun and fluent!
Punctuation Power! Challenge students to color code end punctuation. You can do this on a printed or projected comic. Try making all the periods red like a stop sign. Ask your students to decide what other colors to use. Commas might be yellow as a reminder to slow down. Could question marks be a mysterious green or blue? Perhaps purple feels exciting and will be your class color for exclamation points! Students are more likely to read with expression after coding the punctuation. :-)

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8/29/2019

Comic Genius

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Connecting with reluctant readers...
Why my brother made me do it!

My brother, Eric, and I got along famously as children. It might have been because we were so very different. We each had our own ways to shine. I was artistic, a strong reader, and nurturing. He was athletic, mechanically inclined, and outgoing. If it involved going fast, he was all in! Sitting still to read was not his strong suit.

Two book series, however, were a game changer for him: the Choose Your Own Adventure series and the TinTin Comics. Each of his favorites has shaped an element of Go2Science but I'm going to focus on the latter for now.

The Adventures of TinTin somehow worked its magic on my high energy brother. The comic book format just hooked him! I've often reflected on this in my professional career. What is it about comics that reluctant readers love? I can't claim to have done quality research on this and I have no studies to site, but I do have 25 years of watching children become readers. These observations have led me to some thoughts:

Comics are fun to look at! Children can engage with them even if reading is hard. They create a risk-free way to engage with a story without having to actually be a fluent reader. Ironically, this increased time with text often leads children to want to read. Maybe just a sound effect at first; but eventually the story draws them in and they start attending to text.
Comics are flexible! If you are a young reader, reading from top to bottom, left to right, page by page can be constraining. While comics follow this convention they also allow kids to pick and choose. They can loop back and re-read. They can read in layers. It's for this reason, I think comics have value for all emergent readers as a sort of training for the type of reading we do online or environmentally.
Comics are fast! There is less of a commitment involved in starting to look at a comic than opening up a chapter book or even a picture book. The story is broken down into bite-size pieces. Think of each frame or even each speech bubble as a micro goal. A student has a sense of accomplishment for reading any part. This sets up a positive feedback loop that seems to draw kids in and keep them there.

If I had to fill out a behavior inventory on my brother as a child, I would certainly have checked off "acts as if driven by a motor." Yet when he got a new TinTin comic his body stilled and he dove in for hours at a time. In some ways it should not surprise me that now his whole life revolves around books. He has a book distribution company and delights in matching books to readers!

We designed our comic to be engaging to an extremely wide range of readers. Early Emergent or pre-readers can read the pictures and decode the sound effects. Emergent readers can focus on the speech bubbles. Readers that are more fluent can access the text boxes and synthesize the whole frame. As an educator, you are freed from having to assign certain levels to certain children as everyone has an access point and every student can get the "cool book." Our new artist, Ben Matsuya, has given the comic an incredible look and feel. PLUS, he's done a great job attending to all the scientific details Curtis includes.

We provide the comic in three formats. Many teachers print them as there is nothing quite like the physical act of turning a page. Other teachers push out pdfs to student devices to save on paper and ink. You can project the comic from the web page or download the three format pdf. You or your students can also cut and assemble a little book for each week's installment. Other teachers prefer to print each frame to make a big book. You can also print the full nine panel image that shows the whole week's installment on a single page.

This year we are also providing the full fame per page in an uncolored version so your students can color their own big book if they wish. While the days of spending hours of the school day coloring are long past, sometimes there is still a time and place for such a soothing activity.

We'll post an installment each week while the mission is live. In the days of binge watching, this is an opportunity for students to wait with anticipation for the next part of the adventure. We'll also share tips for integrating the comic into instruction.

Our comics are available to users for each mission on the website. Ben's art will be featured on all the comics we roll out this year.

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Wonderful Words!

Shrinking the vocabulary gap across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Download word cards and vocabulary lists!

Week 3: Comic Tips

Literacy tips for this week's comic!

Week 1: Tigers Comic Tips

Tips for reading instruction using our comic!

Comic Genius

Connecting with reluctant readers...
Why my brother made me do it!

Meet Beth and Curtis!

Archives

Categories

Wonderful Words!

Shrinking the vocabulary gap across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Download word cards and vocabulary lists!

Week 3: Comic Tips

Literacy tips for this week's comic!

Week 1: Tigers Comic Tips

Tips for reading instruction using our comic!

Comic Genius

Connecting with reluctant readers...Why my brother made me do it!

Meet Beth and Curtis!

Archives

Categories

Connecting with reluctant readers...
Why my brother made me do it!