Teacher Text Time: Teacher Picks for Biographies and Informational Texts

Welcome to the first edition of Teacher Text Time! From time to time, I will be compiling a list of my personal favorite titles in my classroom or series my students and I have come to love. Today's list are my picks for biographies and/or informational texts. Do you have a favorite informational text author or series?  If so, please feel free to share in the comments!

Baker, Courtney. 2001. Let's Read About Martin Luther King, Jr. Illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright and Ying-Hwa         Hu. Scholastic.

Berger, Melvin and Gilda. 2010. True or False Rocks & Minerals. Scholastic.

Cole, Joanna. 1994. The Magic School Bus In the Time of the Dinosaurs. Illustrated by Bruce Degen. Scholastic.

Fritz, Jean. 1987. Shh! We're Writing the Constitution. Illustrated by Tomie dePaola. Scholastic.

Gibbons, Gail. 1992. Recycle! Little, Brown and Company.

Gilliland, Ben. 2012. 100 People Who Made History. Illustrated by Philip Parker. Dorling Kindersley Limited

Goldsmith, Mike. 2011. Amazing Space Q&A. Dorling Kindersley Limited.

Krull, Kathleen. 2013. What Was the March on Washington? Illustrated by Tim Tomkinson. Scholastic.

Pallotta, Jerry. 2017. Who Would Win? Jaguar vs. Skunk. Illustrated by Rob Bolster. Scholastic.

Roop, Connie and Peter. 2003. Let's Fly, Wilbur and Orville! Scholastic.

Roop, Connie and Peter. 2007. Tales of Famous Americans. Illustrated by Charlie Powell. Scholastic.

Roop, Connie and Peter. 2010. Tales of Famous Heroes. Illustrated by Rebecca Zomcheck. Scholastic.

Roop, Connie and Peter. 2012. Tales of Famous Animals. Illustrated by Zachary Pullen. Scholastic.

Satterfield, Kathryn Hoffman. 2005. Benjamin Franklin: A Man of Many Talents. Time Inc.

Simon, Seymour. 1992. Our Solar System. Scholastic.

Schreiber, Anne. 2010. National Geographic Kids: Pandas. National Geographic Society.

Be sure to check out more informational text titles from these publishers, authors, and series:

• Adler, David (children's book biography author)
• Bishop, Nic (author and photographer of animal books)
• Cole, Joanna (author of The Magic School Bus series)
• DK Publishing
• Gibbons, Gail (author of informational picture books for kids)
• National Geographic Kids
• Scholastic Chapter Book Biography series
• Scholastic First Biographies series
• Scholastic True or False series
• Simon, Seymour (author of natural science books)
• St. George, Judith (author of presidential books)
• Time for Kids Biographies series
• Who Was/What Was series (Scholastic)
• Who Would Win? series (Scholastic)

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

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/