Story Pyramid

We need students to not just read accurately, but to also read comprehensively. Filling out story maps, writing summary paragraphs, and answering text questions are all techniques for students to demonstrate understanding of texts, but the next time you are in need of a quick and engaging way for students to show what they know, try a story pyramid. The story pyramid strategy is easily adaptable dependent on grade level, reading level, text genre, or teacher discretion. Below are the directions for the example provided.

Story Pyramid Directions

• line 1 - Use one word to tell who is the main character.
• line 2 - Use two words to describe the character's age or grade level.
• line 3 - Use three words to tell the setting.
• line 4 - Use four words to describe the story's problem.
• line 5 - Use five words to explain an important event.
• line 6 - Use six words to explain a second important event.
• line 7 - Use seven words to explain a last important event.
• line 8 - Use eight words to describe the solution to the problem.

Story Pyramid Examples

Number the Stars
By: Lowis Lowry

Annemarie
10 years
Nazi occupied Copenhagen
Jewish families need safety
Nazi soldiers hunt Jewish families
Ellen pretends to be Annemarie’s sister
Annemarie’s family risk lives to help Jews
Ellen’s family makes a successful escape to Sweden

Thank You, Mr. Falker
By: Patricia Polacco

Trisha

5th grader

Girl struggles to read

Trisha begins to feel dumb

Trisha’s family move to new town

Mr. Falker sees she feels very different

The observant teacher teaches Trisha to read himself

Newbery Medal Award Books

  One of my fondest childhood literacy memories is visiting my elementary school library and discovering the newly awarded books our librarian would highlight. She would place those texts on a book stand on a special shelf of honor. I eagerly anticipated that year’s Texas Bluebonnet Award books or Caldecott Medal books with the most captivating illustrations. However, I kept my eyes peeled for the beautiful gold emblem on the covers of Newbery Medal books, hoping it was a story I would not be able to resist.

        In honor of 100 years of John Newbery Medal recipients, I have highlighted five of my favorites and some of the best known Newbery award winning titles below.

Dear Mr. Henshaw
Winner of the 1984 Newbery Medal, Dear Mr. Henshaw by beloved author, Beverly Cleary, is a story students of all ages can still connect with today. The story’s protagonist, Leigh Botts writes every year to his favorite author, Mr. Henshaw. It is not until Leigh’s parents divorce, and he and his mother move to a new town and school in his 6th grade year that Mr. Henshaw becomes a source of therapy for Leigh. Mr. Henshaw writes Leigh a response letter with questions that make Leigh reflect on his life and family. He suggests that Leigh start writing in a diary to help him become a better writer and to help with his emotions. Leigh’s dream is to become an author, so he frequently writes in his diary, and even writes a story for a young writers yearbook. Leigh spends the book writing between his diary and Mr. Henshaw, working through his frustrations of lunchbox thieves and an absent father. When Leigh wins honorable mention for his young writers piece, he learns that true authors can write imaginary stories or about their real life. He realizes that he just may be okay after all and that loving his family, even during the difficult times, is of utmost importance.
Sarah, Plain and Tall
Patricia MacLachlan’s novel about a “mail order bride,” Sarah, Plain and Tall, received the Newbery Medal in 1986. Widower, Jacob Witting, is raising two young children, Anna and Caleb. Their mother died during childbirth. Jacob decides it is time for a new wife and mother, so he puts an advertisement in the paper for a bride. Sarah Wheaton answers his request, and begins writing letters to the Witting family. Sarah agrees to travel from her home in Maine to live with the Wittings. She learns the lifestyle of midwest farmers, grows attached to the family, and she puts the children’s worries to rest when she decides to stay and marry Jacob. This classic novel is still read in elementary schools today. While the plot’s circumstances may not be relevant in today’s society, Sarah still teaches readers the importance of family and to embrace change and adventure.
Number the Stars
Set in Copenhagen during World War II, Lois Lowry introduces readers to two young friends facing very different experiences with the Nazi soldiers taking over the city. Number the Stars tells of Annemarie and the Johansen family who are the best of friends with Ellen and the Rosen family. The families are learning to adjust to life in the midst of World War II with German soldiers on every street corner. The two families are alike in many ways, except that the Rosen family is of the Jewish faith. They have kept out of trouble until the Rosens learn that Jewish families are being sought out and “relocated” by the Nazis. Annemarie and her family take Ellen in, and she pretends to be part of the family. When circumstances become even more dangerous, Annemarie’s mother takes Annemarie, her younger sister, and Ellen and travels to her brother’s house. Annemarie soon senses things are not as they seem and realizes that her family is helping Jewish families escape to safety. Ellen is reunited with her parents just in time for a secret escape to Sweden. Annemarie has never thought of herself as brave until the Rosen family’s safety is in her young hands. Annemarie finds inner courage to save her best friend’s life in hopes to be reunited with her dear friend when the war is over. The 1990 Newbery Medal novel teaches readers that there is no greater love than being willing to sacrifice oneself for friends.
Shiloh
Two years later, the Newbery Medal was awarded to Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Shiloh in 1992. Animal lovers feel the highest and lowest of emotions as they read about Marty Preston finding a lost beagle pup, whom he names Shiloh. Shiloh actually belongs to a local hunter, Judd Travers. Marty suspects that Judd has abused Shiloh, based on him witnessing how Judd treats his other hunting dogs. Marty’s dad encourages Marty to return Shiloh to his rightful owner, but Shiloh escapes and returns to Marty’s home. Upon this, Marty decides to hide Shiloh to keep and protect him. The secrecy becomes too much for Marty to handle on his own, and his family and Judd become aware of what Marty has been doing. Luckily, Marty comes up with a plan to keep Shiloh as his pet, permanently. This popular story reminds readers to do the right thing even when it is not easy and to treat all living creatures with respect.
The Last Stop on Market Street
A more recent Newbery Medal book is Matt de la Pena’s The Last Stop on Market Street. This award winner from 2016 is also a picture book, unlike the novel winners previously listed. This culturally and socially diverse text tells the story of young CJ and his Nana, as they leave church and take the city bus to Market Street. This is a regular occurance, but today, CJ is questioning why they have to go and is unhappy about the circumstances. Nana shows CJ there is beauty all around him through the different people they meet on the bus. They arrive at their destination - the soup kitchen on Market Street. CJ realizes the beauty in serving the familiar faces at the soup kitchen and is pleased with his and Nana’s Sunday afternoon routine after all. By the end of the story, Nana has reminded readers that there is beauty in undesirable circumstances, while CJ teaches the blessing it is to serve others.
        These fondly remembered and richly written texts are a small sampling of the engaging plot lines awarded the distinguished honor of a Newbery Medal by the Association for Library Service to Children. Visit the association’s website to view all Newbery Medal winners and honored titles. You may be surprised at what childhood favorites of yours are on this list of timeless tales.

References

Cleary, B. (1983). Dear mr. Henshaw. Morrow.

de la Pena, M. (2015). Last stop on market street. Penguin Young Readers Group (USA).

Jdubin. (2022, January 10). John Newbery medal. Association for Library Service to Children
(ALSC). Retrieved February 23, 2022 from https://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/
bookmedia/newbery

Lowry, L. (1989). Number the stars. Houghton Mifflin Co.

MacLachlan, P. (1985). Sarah, plain and tall. HarperCollins Children’s Books.

Naylor, P. R. (1991). Shiloh. Atheneum.

The Culturally Responsive Classroom

Diversity is an important topic culturally and academically in today’s society. Now, more than ever, it is essential and respectful to have a classroom environment that is culturally responsive. As teachers, we must be proactive in our cultural responsiveness and continue our own professional growth to leave the greatest impact on our students.

A culturally responsive classroom begins with the teacher. The teacher must perform a self audit to dig deep inside herself to discover the things that she does not look at or talk about (Rucker, 2019). It is time to stop ignoring student differences and start to embrace them. “Culturally responsive teaching (CRT) attempts to bridge the gap between teacher and student by helping the teacher understand the cultural nuances that may cause a relationship to break down-which ultimately causes student achievement to break down as well (Rucker, 2019). When lessons are made relevant to our students, they become engaged learners. This builds their confidence, widens their viewpoints, and affirms their value (ISTE, 2019). Relationships matter in the classroom, and the teacher must identify who her students are in order to lay the foundation of a welcoming classroom for everyone.         One of the best ways to build a culturally responsive classroom is through the classroom atmosphere and library. A culturally responsive teacher should examine the feel of her classroom. Do students have a voice about where they sit or how they best learn? How do they interact with each other? What books are they reading, and do they have a choice in them? When students see themselves represented in the literature, it is affirming for them (Ball State Immersive Learning, 2019). Multicultural literature is no longer defined as books about people of color or including vocabulary words of another language sprinkled within the text. This literature must be expanded to represent a variety of races, religions, cultures, genders, and socioeconomic status (Young et al., 2020). Education, primarily literature, can be the great human equalizer. It can take students from a limited scope of the world and broaden their cultural knowledge and give them a frame of reference for social interactions, future academic lessons, job interviews, and more (ISTE, 2019).         In the digital age we live in, the teacher has an array of resources at her fingertips to grow her own professional and cultural knowledge. Educational technology is an available, convenient, and universal form of communication and research. Part of a culturally responsive classroom is to form relationships with the whole family of the students.  Students succeed at a greater rate when there is a partnership between the home and school. Technological communication platforms are an ideal way to communicate with those parents and families who may not feel comfortable calling or coming to the school (ISTE, 2019).         Professional development is a key component to retaining highly qualified educators, as well as enhancing an individual’s cultural responsiveness. Collaboration is an important characteristic of professional learning. As teachers, if we are going to encourage student collaboration in our classroom, we need to embrace it for teacher learning too (Shearer et al., 2019). This promotes diverse perspectives, and what better way to grow in our cultural awareness than to have diverse conversations with colleagues of different backgrounds and experiences? Shearer et al. also suggest professional development should be differentiated. The teacher should be learning in the areas where she feels she needs the most growth and support. In a culturally responsive classroom, it is truly about knowing who your students are, so professional development should be centered around YOUR students (2019). In addition to making professional development relevant, informative, and transformative, there needs to be follow up from these sessions. A teacher will be more likely to reflect on and implement ideas presented in professional development settings, if the topic(s) addressed resurface again and are not dismissed upon completion of the training. The fact that professional learning is considered part of a school’s plan for improving sustaining effective instruction rings ever true for that of literacy and cultural awareness.         In conclusion, today’s educators must take a look in the mirror to determine their cultural responsiveness in the classroom. By incorporating a classroom library of diverse, equally representative literature and participating in relevant professional development, collaboration can be promoted and individualism honored in the classroom (ISTE, 2019).

References

Ball State Immersive Learning.(2019, January 9). Reading the wor(l)d critical literacy and
culturally responsive classroom libraries [Video]. Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1g-dx-meVA
ISTE. (2019, October 9). Creating a culturally responsive classroom [Video]. Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VixB5WBiLqE
Rucker, N. W. (2019, December 10). Getting started with culturally responsive teaching.
Edutopia. Retrieved February 9, 2022, from https://www.edutopia.org/article/getting-
started-culturally-responsive-teaching
Shearer, B.A., Carr, D. B. A., & Vogt, M. E. (2019). Reading specialists and literacy coaches
in the real world (4th ed.). Waveland Press, Inc.
Young, T.A., Bryan, G., Jacobs, J.S., & Tunnel, M.O. (2020). Children’s literature, briefly
(7th ed.). Pearson Education, Inc.

 

Digital Literacy Resources

            It is no surprise that we are living in a digital age, and it is important to expose students to printed and digital texts. The literacy world is ever growing with digital resources for readers, and the following are three websites that every reading teacher should keep in his/her reading toolbox.

International Children’s Digital Library

This website is an online library for children all over the world. The mission of this site is to promote diversity and acceptance by providing some of the best children’s literature in the world. Immediately upon connecting to the site, you can click on one of several links to browse the texts available. It is user friendly in that you can peruse titles by language, format, genre, characters, and more. Thousands of books are available to be read directly from the website, and that is highly appealing to students, and this is my favorite feature of the site. I can see this as a beneficial resource to connect to social studies standards, such as cultural celebrations, or used for reading lessons, like variations of favorite fairy tales. This is a valuable resource for teachers or parents to introduce students to a variety of worlds and cultures they might not otherwise ever visit. 

Epic

            The Epic online library is a resource I have used in my classrooms for many years. Students thoroughly enjoy this website and have referred to it as “Netflix for books.” Students can have individual log-ins to the site and browse and favorite their own books; however, without a parent paid subscription, the student free version deactivates at 3:00 pm each day. The site is engaging, and students quickly learn how to navigate its uses. One of my favorite features from Epic is the broad range of genres and topics in the system. Students can search titles from life cycles to biographies, coding to fairy tales, and classic chapter books to social-emotional learning texts. Along with being able to assign texts to students, students have options to choose self read texts or audio books. A word of warning is that students can search and possibly see books on topics that are not age appropriate. One should also be cautious of videos that are on the site and can be found during free searches as well. Overall, this is a great resource for parents to have hundreds of titles in one place for their children, and it is the perfect website for a listening to reading station for teachers in the classroom. 

LibraryThing

            The LibraryThing website is a database of more titles than you could imagine. This is a valuable resource for teachers of all disciplines and grade levels. Teacher resource books, picture books, young adult novels, new publications, and decades old titles are all available in the catalog. Searches for literature can be conducted by title, author, or tag (words associated with a title, such as genre or topic). Connected to each search are reviews, conversations, descriptions, editions, connected texts, and more. Study guides, author pages, and collections can also be accessed. While this may not be a tool to give elementary students free access to, it would be increasingly beneficial to secondary students for research. Teachers and parents alike, have virtually any title available to them at their fingertips to use as they see fit for their students.

These three websites are only a small fraction of the digital resources available to students, teachers, and parents who wish to be immersed in the world of literature. As our digital world expands, so will our technological sources. As long as the goal of these digital tools is to familiarize our students with literacy skills and texts, they are worth our time to explore and share with our young readers.

References

A home for your books. LibraryThing. (n.d.). Retrieved January 31, 2022, from
https://www.librarything.com/home 

Inc., E. C. (n.d.). Instantly access over 40,000 of the best books & videos for Kids on Epic.

Epic. Retrieved January 31, 2022, from https://www.getepic.com/

University of Maryland. (n.d.). ICDL - International Children’s Digital Library. Retrieved
January 31, 2022, from http://en.childrenslibrary.org/