Webwatch: Teach the Books You Love

Posted on June 22, 2015 by TDWolsey

Guest post by Literacy Beat friend Susan Lenski at Portland State University

Teach the Books You Love (http://ttbyl.net) is a free online database of books for grades 5 through 12 that are aligned to the CCSS. With many states and districts adopting the Common Core State Standards, it’s becoming harder to teach the books that you love, or books that are not a part of the public school canon. Many school districts only want teachers to teach with books recommended by the Common Core, and often they require in-depth analysis and alignment to teach anything else. Ttbyl.net is a collection of books that have all been aligned with the Common Core. All of the books have qualitative and quantitative text complexity measures listed, along with summaries, rationale for teaching, suggested CCSS, and even some teacher resources. Teachers can then match books to the needs of their students and come up with vibrant new ideas for their curriculum, and justify it to their administration.

TTBYL

Teach the Books You Love

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Filed under: children's literature, Common Core, web watch | Tagged: , | 1 Comment »

Social Media Quizzes and Differentiation

Posted on June 7, 2015 by TDWolsey

by Thomas DeVere Wolsey

In previous posts, we explored how social media quizzes can assist with differentiation by interest. Social media quizzes may also be used to differentiate by ability to some extent.  This reblogged and adapted post from Teaching the Language Arts provides one example.

Social media quizzes  can help students take control of their own differentiation through interests or by ability (knowledge).

Lesson planning Jedi

Are you a lesson-planning Jedi?

Now you can have fun taking this social media quiz to gauge your lesson-planning skills. It will test your knowledge of how to create literacy-based lesson plans, as explained in Chapter 4 of Teaching the Language Arts: Forward Thinking in Today’s Classrooms.

Filed under: differentiation | Tagged: | Leave a comment »

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