Some years ago, a friend of mine who is a kindergarten teacher told me the story of setting up a dramatic play area in her classroom. She decided the theme of the area for the first month would be a shoe store. The teacher threw herself into preparing the area for the children -- she borrowed real foot-measuring tools from a local shoe store, got shelves from another outlet, and even had twenty boxes of old shoes, in a variety of sizes, neatly displayed.

During the first play period, the teacher told students they could do whatever they wanted in the play area. A large group eagerly congregated around the shelves and decided they would throw a pretend birthday party for a friend. They upended the foot-measuring device to use it as a cake stand and began to make greeting cards out of the shoe order forms laid out for their use.

Their teacher gently, and then not so gently, began to nudge them toward other possibilities for the play area, with prompts like, "Gee, look at all these shoes! What else could you do here besides have a birthday party?" The kids blithely ignored her. After the birthday girl blew out the candles on the imaginary cake, each child one by one gave her a present to open. Not surprisingly, every present turned out to be a box of old shoes.

Sometimes our best-laid plans have surprising results, no matter the age of the learners in our care. What was your most unexpected result of a well-planned activity this year? How did it change your teaching or work with colleagues?

This week we've got some resources for working with English language learners, as well as a video on some surprising learning from a reading synthesis activity. Enjoy!

Brenda Power

Editor, Choice Literacy

www.choiceliteracy.com

***Free for All***

We're moving into that freaky time of year budget-wise where schools are pinching pennies in some areas and scrambling to spend allocated funds in others. If you have a small pool of leftover grant funds targeting English language learners and literacy, you might find Ruth Shagoury's booklist of children's literature titles that support phonemic awareness in young English language learners helpful:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/321.cfm

The Northwest Regional Educational Lab has published a tipsheet for volunteers who will be working with English language learners. Just below the boxed tips on the web is a helpful list of links to government and non-profit websites dedicated to supporting ELLs:

http://www.nwrel.org/learns/resources/ell/index.html

If you're working with young ELL learners in your school, Ruth Shagoury and Andie Cunningham are offering a two-day workshop this summer on literacy with young English language learners, designed to help participants lead workshops in their own districts after the event. You can access registration information at this link:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/264.cfm

***For Members Only***

Many teachers find late spring is a good time to tackle a study of synthesis, one of the most complex reading strategies to teach. But how do you begin with young learners? Andie Cunningham uses the "bull's-eye" written response developed by Debbie Miller, along with a "waves" alternative which provides a choice to students. This five-minute video includes Andie's explanation of the task, as well as her conference with Anna, a young Vietnamese student. We've also included bull's-eye and waves templates if you want to try out the activity with your own students:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/327.cfm

The "New Teacher Conversations" group closes out the year with a "Roadblocks and Supports" reflective activity. This is an activity that can be easily adapted for study groups looking at almost any topic, and it's the first in our new three-part series on closure activities for professional development programs:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/328.cfm

If you've been following our CAFE series with The Sisters, you're probably interested in how they organize their student records. This five-minute video summarizes the contents of their conferring notebook, and includes templates for all the recordkeeping forms. There is good advice on the video for reorganizing any notebook as you do a "spring cleaning" of your records, regardless of the assessment program you are using:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/333.cfm

That's all for this week!