An NCTE Conference Lesson: Have Fun with Students and Meet Common Core Standards Too! by Kaye Hagler

Ever wonder what it takes to increase reading comprehension in the classroom?

Noted author Anthony Horowitz, who spoke recently at the NCTE conference in Chicago, says reading to your students for 20 minutes a day helps tremendously. Practice is the most efficient mode of transportation down the road to improvement, after all.

This premise also applies to improving your students’ writing ability. In Take Five! for Language Arts , putting students' writing skills to practice is easy with playful and thoughtful writing prompts that introduce and reinforce key language skills. These prompts help you make use of the first important minutes of class time while fulfilling the demands of Common Core Standards.

Recently, my students tackled a Take Five! continuation story prompt, “The Tale of the Tweebles”. They read the story of the tiny Tweebles who go through a series of conflicts that ultimately sends the hapless Tweeble family tumbling and tripping along a vast assortment of adventures, and then wrote alliterative stories of their own. Some students chose to grab a thesaurus from the book shelf as a resource aide.

This is one of those prompts that needs no extra prompting for students to share their handiwork; the hands went flying into the air when I asked them to read their stories. Though my students’ tales might have been silly, I noticed the first critical moments of the classroom set the learning environment for the rest of the period, and while the students were having fun, they also hit standards of plot development, particularly conflict resolution, and figurative language. How cool – and easy – is that?

Meeting new challenges with Common Core Standards was one of the key issues expressed by teachers at NCTE’s annual conference.

Despite this concern to meet standards and contend with preparing students for standardized testing, Gordon Korman, author of No More Dead Dogs, felt teachers still “need to lighten up,” an idea echoed by fellow panelist Jon Scieszka (The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, Robot Zot!). “Humor is the most vital way to get kids motivated,” he urged. This three-way panel session also included Alan Sitomer, California’s Teacher of the Year 2007 and author of The Downside of Being Up and Nerd Girls, who felt that “engagement is critical” and that “engagement leads the way to motivation.” All three panelists agreed that humor provides the engagement and motivation factor that will lead the way to successful achievement in the classroom.