Session #2 Instructional Ideas and Inspiration from Authors T.A. Barron, Judy Blume... and Your Students!

You may want to listen first to the authors' podcast for this session

"The Authors Riff on Judy Blume, Brian Selznick, Suzanne Collins, T.A. Barron and MORE" (click above)

Please allow a few seconds for the recording to start playing)

Please read  review/reflect on Chapters 1 and 2 of Teaching with Author Websites and then read Chapters 3 and 4 for this session.

Chapter 3) Reading Through Writing: Rich Language Arts and Social Studies Learning with T.A.  Barron

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Chapter 4) Want to Explore the components of an Author Site With Judy Blume as Your Guide?

Please post your reactions and ideas to the chapters as a “comment” below. The following  questions and activities are from Dr. Rose Reissman, and will help steep you in the book’s content and potential to help enrich instruction – Try these with your students or perhaps  predict how they would work in your classroom. Feel free to post ideas about how you would change or add to them.  Specific examples of websites and website elements and their content (relating to the questions below) are good things to post, too.

1. Challenge students to find no fewer than two websites or web references to an author, have them compare and contrast them.  Ask them which reference ranks number one and why.  Challenge them to suggest ways to improve each site for a target peer or adult audience.
2. Have students create a when-they-were-our –age-or-babies bulletin board, or online gallery of author pictures and favorites/childhood activities.  It will be fun for them to find out how what the authors did when they were young, anticipated some of their themes, titles, interests or plots as an adult.
3. Challenge students to create map and interactive game pages /activities for favorite authors using the TA Barron Site or Seussville as an inspiring web resource.
4. The games and maps provided on  author websites  can vary in complexity, but they introduce a necessary geographic literacy and historical region dimension to reading.  Ultimately, we want student to design their own author sites and  can include their own maps and games. They can also design timeline and Venn Diagram plus DBQ exercises for author sites.  Even if teachers do not have sophisticated technology equipment, they can post the games online as digital photos and do them on a classroom site for an Author Expo.
5. Students can be challenged to check out sites for procedurals- making them Procedural Site Detectives- give them a few days to search the web for author sites as teams, looking for recipes, suggestions about writing, ways to make art or artifacts or to construct a map or continue a story- any form of procedural step by step or instructional  details on site.
6. Students can make TWO site connections in an expo or bulletin display or Power Point between a specific author site (for a social studies author) and the events /history that inspired the site, plus perhaps incorporate those connections into a POWER POINT- PIN POINTING SS author and event connections.