Short and to the point, ROMAN Reading gives readers the five tools they need to understand sophisticated books, and presents them in a way that is easy to remember:

R: Read the book/story all the way through once.

O: Outline the major events or elements of the book.

M: Mark the book.

A: Ask the right questions.

N: Name your experience.

In this expanded practice edition of ROMAN Reading, students get the chance to apply their new skills immediately with stories by some of the world’s greatest writers:

• “The Bet” by Anton Chekhov
• “God Sees the Truth But Waits” by Leo Tolstoy
• “The Happy Prince” by Oscar Wilde
• “How Much Land Does a Man Need” by Leo Tolstoy
• A Christmas Carol (unabridged) by Charles Dickens

Each story includes a checklist so readers can work their way through the five different skills and keep track of their progress.

ROMAN Reading is ideal for classrooms or home schools, as each section could be taught as a single lesson, and the entire book could be used for a multi-week introduction to how to read literature. The included stories offer thought-provoking issues and themes that make for lively discussions.

I’ve used the information in this book for many years, and I’ve seen the difference it can make in teen readers. ROMAN Reading also includes my own reading list of great books, collated from thirteen other “great books” lists.

Try ROMAN Reading today, and help the young men and women in your life begin their journey to becoming literate, skilled readers.

If you’re interested in reviewing ROMAN Reading, let me know and I’d be happy to provide you with an electronic copy.

Robo-Bee uses context clues to help students choose the correct word from other similar choices:

Reviewing Homophones

Jumble Kids is similar to the newspaper puzzle:

Just Like in the Newspaper

Enjoy!

But for you rebels out there who subservisely sneak diagramming into your curriculum between studying for state and national tests, here are some resources from the Diagramming Sentences page at the Guide to Grammar and Writing sponsored by the Capital Community College Foundation:

• First, this quote by Gertrude Stein: “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.”
• Second, this PowerPoint presentation on the basics of diagramming.
• Third, two pages of examples of basic and advanced diagrams:
  • Basic diagramming
  • Advanced diagramming
• Fourth, the totally cool diagrams of both the Pledge of Allegiance and the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. (Thanks to Boing Boing)

And finally, this tribute to diagramming from Investor’s Business Daily, October 17, 2000:

When Joseph R. Mallon Jr. bumps up against a complex problem, he thinks back to a lesson he learned in high school from the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception.

The Philadelphia-area school’s Catholic nuns taught him the art of diagramming a sentence. Once all the parts of speech lined up, Mallon pulled clarity from the chaos. It’s a process he uses today to tackle tough issues as chief executive and chairman of Measurement Specialties Inc.

“Sit down quietly. Take (the issue) apart into its component parts. Make sure all the components fit together well. They’ve got to be well chosen, fit together and make sense. There are few (business) problems that can’t be solved that way, as dire as it might seem,” Mallon said. “Sentence diagramming is one of the best analytical techniques I ever learned.”

Books:

• Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen
  
• Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day by Gina Trapani
• The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play by Neil Fiore

Websites:

• 43 Folders – The best personal productivity site on the net. Be sure to see the following articles: Inbox Zero; Getting Started with “Getting Things Done”; A Year of Getting Things Done
• Lifehacker – Another essential site for organizational tips
• Teaching Smarter – Organizational tips designed specifically for teachers.  Read some of her techniques and sample chapters from her books.

Each week National Public Radio airs 3-minute personal essays written by ordinary people and occasionally by more famous personalities. The essays express the authors’ deeply held beliefs, and their reasons for believing. As the website states, “This I Believe is an international project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values that guide their daily lives.”

Recent essays have included the following statements of belief:

• “I believe that each and every human being on this planet is tied to every other human being on this planet in one way or another.”
• “I believe that we as individuals, nations, and as groups of any size in between are ultimately capable of compassion and care for those with whom we do not identify.”
• “I believe in giving blood.”
• “I believe that the best kind of grief for the dead is gratitude.”

This I Believe, Inc. encourages everyone to contribute to the project, and provides teachers with a curriculum for helping students write their own 300-500 word essays. The essays can be submitted directly to the This I Believe website, and essays that are selected to be recorded for radio earn the author $200.

My own students are currently in the middle of writing their own essays. We began the unit last week by looking at the difference between personal narratives and personal essays. I played a few This I Believe recordings and contrasted them with a personal narrative included in the curriculum unit.

The students were then given various belief statements to agree or disagree with, and they had to tell a personal story about why they held that belief. This week students will write their essays, and next week we will submit them to This I Believe and record them for our Called 2 B Saints podcast.

The students are discovering that it’s pretty easy to name a belief, but what’s not so easy is explaining why they have a particular belief. One of the challenges of teaching a unit like this is to keep it from evolving into a persuasive paper where every student tries to convince the class that their belief is right and everyone else is wrong. That’s not really the purpose of the project.

The goal project “is not to persuade Americans to agree on the same beliefs. Rather, they hope to encourage people to begin the much more difficult task of developing respect for beliefs different from their own.”

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s a challenge to help teenagers retain their own values and beliefs in the face of so many differing statements.  Too often, teenagers think they have to abandon their personal beliefs in order to get along with others.  Or, out of a well-intentioned desire to be accepting and tolerant, teens will often say that everyone is right, regardless of the fact that beliefs contradict each other.

The This I Believe unit can help students clarify their own beliefs while at the same time learn to respect the beliefs of others.  If you choose to teach a unit like this, it’s a good idea to be ready to talk about how to “agree to disagree,” something that more adults could learn to do.

But the teacher’s main job in a curriculum like this is mostly to get out of the way so students can write.

I’ll let you know when the students have finished writing their essays so you can read them and listen to them on Called2BSaints.com.

• Lit2Go has the entire poem available as an mp3 download, and the site also includes the full text of the poem in pdf format.
• Librivox also has a free unabridged recording of the entire poem.
• Be sure to check out Rocketbook’s video study guide for Beowulf.
• Fellow blogger Dana Huff has written a Beowulf Study Guide (pdf) for Penguin Classics.
• The University of Nevada, Reno has a nice page of Resources for the Study of Beowulf.
• If you’d like to show your students how Beowulf might have been originally performed, check out Benjamin Bagby’s performance of the poem in its original language.
• You might also find the Sparknotes for Beowulf helpful.

Also, be sure to check out Beowulf: A New Verse Translation translated by Nobel-prize winner Seamus Heaney .

The videos are great for independent learners and homeschooling parents and students. For teachers, the videos can act as enrichment for gifted students that are ready to strike out on their own, or as remediation for students who are struggling with these titles in your classroom.

Of course, these videos carry the same caveat as Cliff’s Notes: they are no substitution for reading the actual works themselves, and they provide only a limited interpretation. The ideal is to read the book oneself and work through interpreting the book’s meaning on one’s own. Still, these videos can help those who are still learning how to interpret literature, or who need a little more background to help them on their literary quest.

• The Classic Tales: B.J. Harrison narrates weekly classic tales by Poe, de Maupassant, Kipling, Hawthorne, and others. Harrison has a soothing, mysterious voice, and his stories are a pleasure to listen to.
• A Way with Words: This fun, informative podcast for word lovers is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.
• NPR Books: Reviews and authors interviews from National Public Radio.
• KCRW’s Bookworm: Michael Silverblatt’s author interviews include such renowned writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Alice Sebold and Michael Ondaatje.
• The New Yorker–Fiction: “A monthly reading and conversation with the New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman.”

And here’s a sampling of other podcasts that are on my iPod right now:

• The Bob Dylan Podcast: Patti Smith hosts this Legacy Recordings podcast which discusses the life and influence of Bob Dylan. Short and sweet.
• Acoustic Long Island: If you love acoustic music as much as I do, subscribe to this fantastic podcast featuring some great musicians.
• The Busted Halo Show: Fr. DaveDwyer hosts a fun, entertaining show on Sirius Satellite radio, and his podcast highlights some its best moments.
• The Dave Ramsey Show: Excellent financial advice.
• Many SQPN podcasts: I subscribe to many, many SQPN podcasts, and I love every one of them. My favorites are the Daily Breakfast with Fr. Roderick and The Saintcast with Paul Camarata.
• And, of course, the new podcast by my English students, Called 2 B Saints.

The layout is simple, the resources are endless.  The guide is divided into 15 different areas:

• Bibliographies: A lists of holocaust-related literature sorted by genre and grade level
• Documents: Primary source materials such as official Nazi party statements and Nuremberg trial addresses.
  
• Galleries: Archival and contemporary camp photographs, and other relevant images
• Glossary: Including sound samples of word pronunciations
• Maps: Political maps and layouts of specific camps
• Movies: First-hand survivor stories and much more, including a short archival clip of Kristallnacht
• Museums: Information and links to various holocaust museums around the world
• Music: Relevant sound files like Kol Nidre and Shalom Alechem
• Plays: Educational plays with a holocaust theme, including links to online plays
• Quizzes: Interactive online quizzes
• Software: CD-ROM resources for teachers and students
• Videography: A comprehensive list of holocaust-related films, sorted by title or subject
• Virtual Reality Movies: Panoramic views of concentration camps
• Web Search: Holocaust-related search engines and directories
• Web Sites: A collection of high-quality links sorted into several categories

A Teacher’s Guide to the Holocaust is another fantastic web resource from the same organization that hosts Lit 2 Go.  Highly recommended.

There are other sites that offer free mp3s of public domain books (such as Librivox and Ejunto), but what sets Lit2Go apart are the educational materials that go with each title.

Take, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey for instance. The main page offers a brief summary of the book and links to each chapter. Clicking on a chapter link takes you to a new page where you have the opportunity to download the chapter’s mp3, read the text online, or download the chapter as a pdf file. In addition, each chapter page gives the reading level, genre, country of origin, themes and reading strategies. It also includes support material, which is usually an open-ended question that could be used to start a discussion or lead to a writing assignment.

All of the recordings I sampled seemed professionally done, if sometimes a bit stiff, and many of the titles are available through iTunes. Authors include the usual suspects: Jane Austen, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Lewis Carroll, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Brothers Grimm, Rudyard Kipling, Edgar Allen Poe, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

There were a few surprises, however–authors and titles I didn’t expect to see: James Baldwin’s The Story of Siegfried, James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, George MacDonald’s The Light Princess, and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto.

All in all, Lit 2 Go is a superb literature resource for teachers and students. I’ll be visiting it often and telling my students about it in class this week.