a glimmer of hope

Well after much frustration and longing to engage our girls in some meaningful discussion, I think we enjoyed some mild success and satisfaction. We started out today discussing with the girls our true purpose and the expectations we have for book club and what we are hoping to see from them as learners. We lectured as they munched away on their cuties (our signature book club snack :) and even showed them blooms taxonomy to challenge them to use higher order thinking skills.

Before any type of whole group activity as we have done in the past, we had the girls go straight to their book groups. Kim and I had pre-selected passages to read aloud and images to look at that pertained to their books. We decided to try reading aloud which is something we hadn't done before. I personally worked with the group "The Misfits", a group of seven girls, and read the section of the book titled "Popularity versus Principles". This is a pivotal section in the book where the group decides to run for student body president and debate whether they even have a chance at competing against "popularity"

The kids took turns reading while we paused to discuss vocabulary and key points. Our conversation ensued over popularity versus principles. Who did they think would win an election? Why do those people tend to win votes? Well you know it was definitely teacher guided with so many shy girls and

But we have a long ways to go...

Things the kids said-popularity will win

Why-because thats just the way it is--this is something to go off from

I had fun yesterday!

This is a blog that will hold ruminations and rants of Kim and Alana, two wanna-be (certified and employable!) teachers with bigger-than-public-education dreams. We have invited 4th and 5th graders (who turned out to all be girls) to join a voluntary after-school Book Club once a week. Our hopes are for the girls to begin discussing books in more critical ways, moving beyond surface understandings and into more analytical and evaluative higher order thinking. We want to have some juicy conversations and enjoy some books!

I felt a change happening, just a smidge; hopefully heightened expectations will hold heightened results.

It felt right to tell the girls what we were hoping for from book club, what our motivation was for them. We explained our situation, about being in the Masters program and needing to do a project; we told them they were it! We brought some Bloom's Taxonomy visuals (they were called "A Blooming Orange" and we eat oranges every week for snack). Alana was reading off some of the verbs in the "Understand" section, particularly predict, explain, compare, and she asked the girls if they had heard these words before. They were all like, "Yeeeaahh, in class," in a communal moan-y way. We explained we wanted them to go beyond that and be intellectual and smart with their words, because we know they have smart thoughts already, just not really a place to share them. Some of the words we highlighted in the visual were create, choose, decide, design, solve, show, investigate. We told them these were how we wanted them to come to Book Club, planning to go beyong