New book... surprise, surprise!

New book is called Making Revision Matter by Janet Angelillo. I've read her other Writing Workshop book, called A Fresh Approach to Teaching Punctuation. She's got some sterling ideas, mainly focusing in on helping students become more independent in their learning, which I think is the bees knees. Good revision is attached to good reading, and reading like a writer. Thusly, a revision unit may entail reading a mentor author, eg Cynthia Rylant, and viewing how their writing is unique. From this, the students can revise to try out their strategies, such as, alliteration. It reminded me of the old composers of the 16th century, something like that, who would copy famous composers' works to learn the craft. It's not plagarism either, they change the words!

Another new book

It's safe to say, I like reading. Not only that, but it enables me to target the PD that I want, rather than what someone else wants for me. If I don't like it, I can put it down, or skip the offensive bit.

Having said that, I want to tell you about another new book that I want to recommend to y'all. It's called "Young Children Continue to Reinvent Arithmetic 3rd Grade", and it's written by Constance Kamii. She's a researcher of Piaget's ideas. Basically, if I were to trim the ideas down, she's saying that we shouldn't teach algorithms (that is, how you do your sums), as if they were the word of the law. Kids should be able to invent their own ways of working out sums.

I must admit, I thought, what? at first. But, she does give a convincing argument. Children, when left to invent their own ways, usually work from left to right, which is the way the we would read number. However, when using an algorithm, they work from right to left (excluding division). With this seemingly insignificant detail, they tend to lose their understanding of place value, and thus, cannot use the algorithm, or anything to solve the problem.

I can back her ideas up though, having looked at the work of algorithms through my class. They just don't understand it. I am making it my goal to give this constructivist idea a go. More later.

Oh, if you were wondering, Alfie Kohn got me onto this new book. No, not personally. Through reading his book, "The Schools our Children Deserve", another great one. Big eye opener.


On another note, the Developmental Discipline is going well. Of particular note, I've focused on:

• co-operation instead of competition
• better tasks and more enjoyable content instead of rewards
• consequences instead of punishment (difference is not just semantics!)
• group tasks instead of working alone, where possible
• lots of talk
• social skills discussions
• workshop based instruction instead of whole class
• student choice
  

So now, I'm going to add to that, constructivist maths. We'll see how it goes. I think it's going to work!