Margin Notes

CRAFT STUDIO: WHEN WOMEN WERE DRAGONS BY KELLY BARNHILL

Nov
28

What I was reading:

Kelly Barnhill’s When Women Were Dragons is a novel that tells the story of young Alex whose mother and aunt were part in the “mass dragoning” event of 1955. During this event, over 600,000 women turned into dragons. Alex then must help raise her young cousin, Beatrice. The book was named as one of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2022.

In the first chapter of the book, I was struck by the following passage:

“It was the very end of July when I met the dragon, on an oppressively hot and humid afternoon. One of those days when thunderstorms linger just at the edge of the sky, hulking in raggedy murmurs for hours, waiting to bring in their whirlwinds of opposites—making the light dark, howling at silences, and wringing all the wetness out of the air like a great, soaked sponge. At this moment, though, the storm had not yet hit, and the whole world simply waited. The air was so damp and warm that it was nearly solid. My scalp sweated into my braids, and my smocked dress had become crinkled with my grubby handprints.

I remember the staccato barking of a neighborhood dog.

I remember the far-off rumble of a revving engine. This was likely my aunt, fixing yet another neighbor’s car. My aunt was a mechanic, and people said she had magic hands. She could take any broken machine and make it live again.

I remember the strange, electric hum of cicadas calling to one another from tree to tree to tree.

I remember the floating motes of dust and pollen hanging in the air, glinting in the slant of light.

I remember a series of sounds from my neighbor’s backyard. A man’s roar. A woman’s scream. A panicked gasping. A scrabble and a thud. And then, a quiet, awestruck Oh!”

What Moves I Notice the Author Making:

  • Barnhill starts the first paragraph by stating the memory, then describing the weather with lots of great figurative language. 
  • The next several paragraphs repeat the phrase “I remember”
  • Each paragraph is describing either a visual or auditory memory. 
  • The first paragraph is quite long, with all the subsequent paragraphs being very short. 
  • The last paragraph ends with a series of short punchy sentences “A man’s roar. A woman’s scream. A panicked gasping. A scrabble and a thud.” 

Possibilities for Writers:

  • Writers could write their own memory using this format:

    First paragraph starts with the memory and then a description of the weather on the day (or it could be other sensory details). The subsequent short paragraphs start with “I remember” and then describe a visual or auditory detail. 

    I remember _________________.

    I remember _________________.

    I remember the _______________.

    I remember the ______________.

    I remember a ________________.

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GUEST WRITER SUMMER GRANT RECOMMENDS MIDNIGHT AT THE HOUDINI BY DELILAH S. DAWSON

Nov
26

“We think we know what’s possible, but the role of the magician is to prove otherwise.”

If you’re looking for an eerie, yet magical tale that mixes intrigue with a sense of wonder, Midnight at the Houdini just may be for you. The author, Delilah S. Dawson, shares the story of a 16 year old named Anna, who finds herself in a strange and unique hotel called the Houdini. Once the clock strikes midnight though, she will be trapped there forever, unless she can unveil the hotel’s biggest secrets on time.

If you are a fan of Alice in Wonderland, imagine that iconic story but in a hotel: it’s a place full of secrets where Anna is drawn deeper into its magic corridors. As she tries to uncover the truth behind the hotel and its strange inhabitants, the story unfolds with many twists and turns. As she encounters the residents of the hotel, she discovers their own stories, motivations, and secrets, which leads to chilling revelations.

Dawson’s writing captures the story’s lush and whimsical atmosphere, and brings a sense of uneasiness you can’t help but feel throughout the story. She has a talent for building magical, yet unsettling environments.  From the moment Anna steps into the Houdini, readers are drawn into a rich and atmospheric world where reality bends. This book is more than just a fantasy novel. It explores deeper themes such as identity, freedom, and the human desire for control. The main character’s journey becomes a journey of self-discovery. I personally adored every page of this book simply because the author was able to take a complex idea of a magic hotel and make it an enjoyable experience for the reader. I could clearly picture the setting and atmosphere of the scenes. It was almost like I created a movie in my head as I was reading through it. I did not want it to end.

Summer Grant is a UNB student in the 10-month Education Program and is slowly making her way towards obtaining her teaching license. Once she achieves her goal, she hopes to teach in Montreal city. She loves crocheting, napping, cuddling with her cats, and movies. After a long day, you will find Summer hanging out with nature.

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FROM RESEARCH TO THE CLASSROOM: FACILITATING GROWTH IN COMPREHENSION

Nov
21

Struggle Is Not a Bad Word: Misconceptions and Recommendations About Readers Struggling with Difficult Texts by Sarah M. Lupo, John Z. Strong, and Kristin Conradi Smith (Journal of Adult & Adolescent Literacy, 2018)

“Instead of using the label ‘struggling reader,’ we focus on the conditions under which readers might be less successful and how to support them when reading difficult texts (Frankel & Brooks, 2010). It is important that teachers take time to assess their students’ strengths and needs in order to provide appropriate texts and supports. The types of texts that teachers use with their students is an issue of equity: Teachers must provide a text diet rich with difficult texts to adolescents, including those who may struggle when reading them, to ensure equitable literacy instruction for all. (Hiebert, 2017: Tatum, 1999).

Summary

In this article, Lupo, Strong, and Conradi Smith review research and professional literature to address the long-held belief that assigning readers easy texts that they can read fluently is the best way to facilitate growth in comprehension. Limiting readers to easier text—shorter texts with shorter sentences and fewer rare words—negatively impacts their vocabulary and comprehension development. Instead, readers need practice reading difficult texts, with support, to improve their comprehension.

The researchers identify four misconceptions about reading difficult texts and offer an evidence-based recommendation for each one:

Misconception 1: A High Lexile Ensures That a Text is Hard to Read

The Lexile Framework is commonly used as a measure of text difficulty despite questions about its validity. Readability measures often exclude important aspects of what makes a text difficult, including the readers’ familiarity with the topic and vocabulary, the concreteness of ideas, the cohesiveness of the text, and the formality of the language.

Recommendation 1: Consider What Makes a Text Difficult

Understanding how a text may challenge readers is essential for designing the supports necessary for all readers to comprehend the text. Consider:

  1. the vocabulary difficulty
  2. the knowledge demands
  3. the difficulty of concepts or themes

Misconception 2: Readers Are More Engaged and Can Learn More from Easier Versions of Texts

Providing easier versions of texts has not been proven to improve learning and comprehension.

Recommendation 2: Motivate Readers Through Choice, Collaborative Learning, and Leveraging Knowledge

Increase motivation by:

  1. allowing students to choose the texts they read
  2. providing opportunities for talking about texts
  3. connecting texts to students’ existing funds of knowledge and building new background knowledge

Misconception 3: Reading Easier Texts Leads to Greater Gains

When students experience a steady diet of easy texts, their comprehension growth is diminished by less exposure to rich vocabulary and syntax as well as fewer words overall.

Recommendation 3: Provide More Opportunities for Students to Read

Increase students’ volume of reading by:

  1. providing a text diet that includes a variety of texts, both easier and more challenging
  2. developing readers’ agency to persist through texts that challenge them
  3. take a thematic approach with a focus on creating connections within and across texts

Misconception 4: Some Readers Cannot Read Complex Texts

As a result of this misconception, readers identified as struggling experience less comprehension instruction and less discussion about texts.

Recommendation 4: Scaffold Students’ Reading of Quality Texts

This requires a shift in thinking:

  1. from differentiating text levels to differentiating instructional supports
  2. from over-relying on reading aloud as a support for readers to providing time and scaffolds for them to read independently

Conclusion

Rather than assigning easier texts, teachers can consider the needs and motivations of readers and plan instruction that makes a wide range of interesting texts accessible to all readers.

Takeaways For the Classroom

  • Use assessments to get to know readers—who they are, what they can do, and the next steps for them to grow.
  • Instead of relying on Lexiles and other readability measures, examine texts to identify the aspects that will challenge readers: vocabulary, knowledge demands, and concepts or themes.
  • Incorporate choice whenever possible.
  • Engage readers in discussion about text to enhance their comprehension.
  • Activate prior knowledge with strategies such as quickwrites and anticipation guides.
  • Develop background knowledge with shorter multimodal texts on related topics (videos, images, songs, podcasts, TEDTalks, etc.).
  • Create text sets to support engagement, comprehension, vocabulary, and knowledge. Use the combination of texts and instructional supports to scaffold students’ comprehension of challenging text.
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LIFEBOAT 5 BY SUSAN HOOD

Nov
19

In Lifeboat 5, author Susan Hood takes readers on a harrowing journey through World War II, blending historical fact with the emotional resilience of youth. The story follows 15-year-old Bess Walder, who, during the chaos of Nazi bombings in East London, persuades her parents to evacuate her and her younger brother, Louis, to Canada.

On board the ship promised to deliver them to safety, Bess meets Beth Cummings, another evacuee, whose friendship becomes crucial as their journey takes a devastating turn. On the fifth day at sea, disaster strikes when a German U-boat torpedoes their ship. Bess and Beth are separated from Louis and find themselves clinging to life in a capsized lifeboat, enduring the unimaginable hardship in the Atlantic Ocean.

The choice to narrate in verse adds a unique depth to Bess’s experiences, using short lines that echo the urgency and turmoil of war. Readers will find themselves immersed in the story, feeling the weight of her journey as she searches for her brother.

Inspired by real events and individuals, Lifeboat 5 illuminates the harrowing realities of while celebrating themes of perseverance and courage. It is a story not just of survival but also a reminder of the bonds that sustain us in our darkest hours, so although it is written for middle level readers others can surely relate to it as well.

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TRY THIS TOMORROW: LESSONS LEARNED

Nov
14

As a fan of Ted Lasso, I enjoyed this Forbes series on what we can learn about leadership from season one, season two, and season three. Written by an executive coach, the articles highlight the strengths and successes of Lasso’s unique leadership style incorporating examples from across the season. Highlighting lessons learned is a terrific structure for students to add to their repertoire of options for responding to their self-selected independent reading. When we pull out lessons we have learned from reading/viewing/listening to a text, we are:

  • synthesizing and summarizing thinking
  • interpreting relationships between ideas to draw conclusions
  • organizing and categorizing ideas from various places in the text
  • selecting insightful textual details that support responses demonstrate understanding

These are also fun options for a text set that students can use as mentor texts for their own lessons learned reading responses:

10 Feminist Lessons We Learned from The Baby-Sitters Club

10 Life Lessons we’ve all learned from Anne Shirley

What Star Trek taught me about life

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Hobbits

 

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WHEN THE WORLD TIPS OVER BY JANDY NELSON

Nov
12

The Fall siblings, Dizzy, Miles, and Wynton, have been raised by their mother, Bernadette, a chef and restaurant owner, ever since their father left without explanation years ago.

Twelve-year-old Dizzy is the first of the siblings to encounter the rainbow-haired girl. After a betrayal by her ex-best friend and now class bully, Dizzy runs away from school and directly into the path of an 18-wheeler. After she is miraculously pushed to safety, Dizzy catches a glimpse of rainbow curls.

Next Miles, 17, discovers the rainbow-haired girl sleeping in her truck parked on his Uncle Clive’s property. She takes Miles for a ride, and he finds himself telling her things about his family and his life that he has never shared with anyone before, including the fact that despite being known as “Perfect Miles” by his brother and sister, he hasn’t attended school in two weeks.

Finally, 19-year-old Wynton, a violinist, meets the rainbow-haired girl while staggering home after a disappointing gig. When he recognizes her as Cassidy, a girl he knew at 13, he’s hit by a car.

While Wynton lies in a coma, Cassidy shares her story with him. As her connections with each sibling are revealed, the tangled histories of past loves, losses, betrayals, and rivalries begin to surface.

As the details of the past emerge, Miles embarks on an unexpected road trip with a mysterious stranger, unearthing difficult family truths. The question is whether these revelations will lead to healing or drive the Fall family further apart.

Set in Northern California’s wine country, When the World Tips Over is a sweeping family saga told from multiple perspectives, weaving together timelines and plotlines with elements of magic. The novel incorporates a wide range of texts—newspaper clippings, diaries, unsent letters, notes, and emails—while exploring themes of identity, forgiveness, and the power of shared history. For readers who enjoy stories where the past and present collide in unexpected ways, this novel is a must-read.

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CRAFT STUDIO: HE CLEANS

Nov
07

What I Was Reading:

I found this excerpt from He Cleans, the upcoming novel by Valeria Gordeev (translated by Imogen Taylor) in the New Writing section of Granta. If you aren’t familiar with Granta, you can learn more here. It is an excellent source for contemporary fiction, essays, memoir, interviews, and writing about art and photography. Some content is for subscribers only but there are texts in every issue that are available for free.

The opening sentences of He Cleans captured my attention immediately:

He cleans. Cleans the sink, cleans the plughole, takes out the sink strainer and cleans the underside. He takes the strainer apart, lifting the rubber washer and removing the foul ring of dirt that oozes out at the edge. He also cleans the washer, spraying it with vinegar cleaner and dabbing it on both sides with kitchen paper (he made the vinegar cleaner himself out of vinegar concentrate, distilled water and a few drops of Japanese mint oil – the mint oil is his trademark). Then he screws the parts together again and stands there for a moment, the impeccably clean sink strainer sparkling in his hand, polished to a shine. The overflow holes are next: five vertical slots at the top of the sink, only a few millimetres wide, designed to prevent flooding. The sink is rarely filled to this point, so a lot of mouldering dirt builds up undisturbed behind these slots. If he had the choice, he’d use a stainless-steel cleaner. As well as cleaning the sink this weekend, he’d decided to polish all the stainless-steel surfaces in and out of the kitchen – to clean them, care for them, make them as good as new, using the cleaning agent that is no ordinary cleaning agent but more like a polish (it’s astonishing how seldom and sloppily household objects and surfaces are cleaned when they’re made of stainless steel). All through his seminar this morning he was going through the flat in his mind for possible objects, pots and pans, casings, door handles, but someone – his mother – must have knocked the bottle over, spilling the contents all over the cupboard under the sink. She must, he supposes, have taken the bottle out, opened it, sniffed at it sceptically and then failed to replace the lid properly. This laziness when it comes to screwing on lids! It would be a blessing for humanity if people could learn to screw them on properly, but no – unscrewing lids is just about within their power but screwing them back on is beyond them. The result: a hardened puddle that has spread to every corner of the cupboard, sticking the cloths and sponges together and coating the bottoms of all the other bottles of special cleaning agent. A mess. Now the rinsed containers are drying on a clean tea towel, and later, when the cupboard under the sink is dry – he took the opportunity to give it a thorough clean, together with the filthy U-bend (the ew-bend) that hangs down into the cupboard, easy to take apart but tricky to put together again (it was clogged with clumps of hair and globs of slime and should have been done years ago; the surfaces get the odd once-over, while the hellhound is left to lurk in the drain), and as for these frayed, greying cloths, cut out of old clothes (he recognises a pair of underpants, his childhood pyjamas) who, in this century, still cuts clothes into rags to make cleaning cloths? – later, when the gleaming, fresh-smelling cupboard is dry, the bottles of cleaning agent will go back in.

What Moves I Notice the Author Making:

  • We are immediately dropped into this scene without any context. As we read, we learn that the unnamed “he” is an expert and fastidious cleaner.
  • These sentences are only the first few of a very long paragraph. They exemplify the style and craft of the entire piece: a wide variety of sentence lengths, structures, beginnings, and endings using a range of punctuation for different purposes. This passage would be a terrific addition to a sentence or punctuation craft inquiry or mini-lesson.
  • There are several examples of fragment sentences used for effect (This laziness when it comes to screwing on lids!).
  • You could easily incorporate this series of sentences into a fluency mini-lesson that invites students to describe how the punctuation guides their reading expression.
  • The aspect that stands out most to me in this passage is the use of parenthetical phrases set off between brackets or dashes. This gives me the impression that this extremely detailed play-by-play is being interrupted with background information that provide an additional layer of insight. The final sentence in this passage contains a very long parenthetical phrase between two dashes within which there are two additional parentheticals set off by brackets.

Possibilities for Writers:

  • Notice and name other interesting craft moves in this passage.
  • Look for patterns in sentence variety and discuss how they contribute to the flow of this passage.
  • Explore the types of punctuation and their unique purposes in the sentence.
  • Reflect on how the punctuation impacts the way you read it. Watch for interesting pacing strategies in other texts you read.
  • Try out Gordeev’s technique of incorporating parentheticals to provide additional details for the reader.
  • Look for examples of parenthetical phrases, set off by commas, brackets, or dashes, in your independent reading. Consider their purpose ad effect.
  • Revise a draft in your writer’s notebook by incorporating some of the craft moves you notice in this excerpt.

 

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GUEST WRITER LEAH FRIESEN RECOMMENDS LOUDER THAN HUNGER BY JOHN

Nov
05

Jake is a middle schooler who loves rollerblading, musicals, and his Grandma. He’s got a big, beautiful heart which gives love away like the free samples at Walt’s Food Center… But he doesn’t eat the free samples anymore, and he punishes his body with strict exercise. The voice that’s taken up residence inside his head since he was bullied in grade 7 tells him he’s repulsive and that he’s not worth love or even a pretzel. As Jake shrinks, his problems grow. Something seems to be amiss with his grandma, and his mom who was always a distant raincloud of depression is suddenly starting to suspect something’s wrong with him. Plus, his hair is beginning to fall out…

Based loosely on the author’s lived experiences, Louder than Hunger addresses eating disorders, bullying, anxiety, and depression with thoughtful vulnerability. Perhaps most importantly for junior high readers, this book encourages readers to be themselves, because that’s what they – and the world – need most. Written in the style of free-form poetry, this book can be read in a day and last for a lifetime. As somebody who dealt with bullying and a negative inner voice in grade 7, I would have found understanding and help in this novel. The story sweeps you along with its sophisticated yet simply executed prose until you can hardly believe you’ve read 300 pages and cried twice. You know your students best, but I’d wager that most middle school classrooms would be a better place for having Louder than Hunger on the shelf.

Leah Friesen is a future teacher passionate about helping others find and grow their passions. Her other passions include painting, reading, and being among trees.

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