Good things, when short, are twice as good.

Baltasar Gracian

"Louella" is a rollicking honky tonk tune sung by Texas blues artist Marcia Ball. I always crank up the car stereo and smile when I hear her drawl out these words to introduce the song:

One day at a domino game in Austin, Texas, somebody opened up a good old Christian songbook. And written in the margin of one of the songs in an old-fashioned hand in pencil was, "Why in the devil would you want to tell Louella everything you know?"

Think what a master class those 47 words are in the power of short text. There are so many literary devices and reading strategies you could teach with that brief passage - foreshadowing, the importance of details, voice, sense of place, background knowledge...

Short text has always been the great equalizer in reading and writing workshops. Brief passages of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry can be read by a class together in just a few minutes, or read aloud so that even students who struggle with decoding have the same access to the text as their classmates. Short texts build classroom community, because the passages shared over time become anchors or touchstones for learning that can be returned to again and again.

This week we've got a simple staff development activity to help teachers build curricular connections between short texts found in the newspaper and learning in content areas. Plus a link to a wonderful new book on short text that is posted in full on the net. And more as always - Enjoy!

Brenda Power

Editor, Choice Literacy

www.choiceliteracy.com

Free for All

In "Finding the Hook," Ruth Shagoury helps teachers in a professional development workshop discover the versatility of the daily newspaper as a source for short text:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/public/528.cfm

Folks, here is a great deal - the entire text of Kimberly Campbell's new book Less is More: Using Short Text to Differentiate Instruction is posted online by Stenhouse Publishers for a limited time. You can browse chapters on using short text from many genres, including poetry and graphic novels:

http://tinyurl.com/yugemo

If you are looking for short text online, Project Gutenberg is the best source for public domain text you can search, copy, and paste for use in classrooms:

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Franki Sibberson's Writers in Transition DVD workshop kit has tools that can help you as you design lessons with short text for your classroom. The kit includes 95 minutes of video footage from classroom minilessons, templates, small groups, and individual conferences. The CD workshop guide includes 40 full-color pages of templates, guiding questions, and supplemental readings. You can preview footage from the DVD at this link:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/products/item12.cfm

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Katie Doherty finds surveys of student reading habits and preferences are really useful in the winter, after she knows her students and they've settled into a routine. In this article, she shares a sample reading survey she's adapted from Nancie Atwell's work to use with her 6th graders:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/534.cfm

We all know that spelling instruction works best when it happens in authentic learning contexts. Katie DiCesare takes on the challenge of developing a one-page assessment tool to analyze the spelling needs and abilities of each of her 1st graders. This is the first in a series, as Katie takes us through the use of the tool in her workshop over the next few weeks:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/529.cfm

A goal of many young readers is to graduate from picture books to "big fat chapter books." In this video conference with seven-year-old Elyse, Joan Moser demonstrates how the goal of chapter book reading can be used in conferences as a catalyst for the development of reading skills like summarizing:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/535.cfm

From the Choice Literacy Archives, Franki Sibberson pulls out just a couple pages of text from the public domain book The Secret Garden in this video of a whole-class lesson and paired reading activity on character development. We've included a link to a copy of the book on the web if you'd like to try the activity yourself:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/391.cfm

Finally, a hearty welcome to our newest site license members from New Brunswick, Canada; Orlando, Florida; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Lebanon, Oregon; Princeton, New Jersey; and Comstock Park, Michigan; as well as our renewing site licensees in Gillette, Wyoming. If you're new to the site and wondering where to begin in exploring our 400 features and videos, the Annotated Archives are often a good place to start:

http://www.choiceliteracy.com/members/department27.cfm

That's all for this week!