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Laurie Ann Thompson

education

TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE resources for teachers and #GIVEAWAY!

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Educator's Guide cover

It is with great excite­ment and grat­i­tude that I give you this list of amaz­ing edu­ca­tion­al resources that won­der­ful edu­ca­tors and design­ers have com­piled to go along with TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE: IT’S ALIVE! and, hope­ful­ly, make it easier–and more fun–for teach­ers or librar­i­ans to put to use in the classroom!

Educator's Guide for teachersFirst up is the Edu­ca­tor’s Guide to Sup­port Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­a­cy, writ­ten by amaz­ing 5th grade teacher Melis­sa Guer­rette, M.Ed., NBCT. This guide is chock full of tips teach­ers can use to teach stu­dents how to eval­u­ate sources and fact-check any mate­ri­als they may encounter, whether they are read­ing the sto­ries from TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE or just about any­thing else.
It includes a print­able Fact or Fic­tion note-tak­ing work­sheet teach­ers can use to help read­ers ana­lyze a text to deter­mine if it is true or false and record evi­dence of their think­ing process­es along the way.
It also has a list of the Com­mon Core State Stan­dards sup­port­ed by the activ­i­ties in the guide, AND an impres­sive col­lec­tion of addi­tion­al resources for teach­ers of infor­ma­tion lit­er­a­cy concepts.
Down­load the PDF of the guide HERE.

TTL Stem Game for teachersBut wait, there’s more! Award­ing-win­ning Library Media Spe­cial­ist and STEM Coor­di­na­tor Suzanne Cost­ner part­nered with Curi­ous City DPW to cre­ate a STEM Card Game and com­pan­ion research activ­i­ties. “As a school librar­i­an with a pas­sion for STEM top­ics, I saw this book as an oppor­tu­ni­ty both to explore inter­est­ing sto­ries and to devel­op cru­cial infor­ma­tion lit­er­a­cy skills,” says Suzanne. Using sci­en­tif­ic top­ics pulled from the book’s side­bars, they cre­at­ed a 52-card card deck that teach­ers can print out for their class­room. In Round 1, Play­er 1 reads a state­ment to Play­er 2 from a card. Play­er 2 decides whether the state­ment is a “Truth” or a “Lie.” In Round 2, play­ers choose a research top­ic from their amassed cards and make three game cards of their own – two truths and one lie on their cho­sen top­ic. In Round 3, play­ers try to out­wit each oth­er with the game cards they have cre­at­ed. Each new game in the class­room grows the game deck with new STEM material!
Down­load the PDF of the Truth or Lie? STEM Card Game HERE.
Suzanne and Curi­ous City DPW also put togeth­er the Two Truths and a Lie: What’s Your Source?, which pro­vides teach­ers with links for stu­dents to explore for top­ic val­i­da­tion and gives them the chance to com­pare and cross-check the infor­ma­tion before mak­ing their final deci­sion on whether the sto­ries in TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE: IT’S ALIVE! are fact or fic­tion; Two Truths and a Lie: Reach­ing for Resources, which pro­vides edu­ca­tors with links con­nect­ed with the book’s chap­ters to build infor­ma­tion lit­er­a­cy lessons upon, and the Two Truths and a Lie: Ratio­nale, Cur­ricu­lum Con­nec­tions & Grad­ing Rubric.

To go along with all of this excite­ment, for a lim­it­ed time Curi­ous City DPW is host­ing a GIVEAWAY! Read all about it and ENTER HERE, but hur­ry! Win­ners will be announced Decem­ber 5, 2017!

I’m super excit­ed about how these might spur class­room dis­cus­sions around STEM top­ics and infor­ma­tion lit­er­a­cy. If you use either of them with stu­dents, please let me know! I’d love to hear about how teach­ers are putting into prac­tice and any sug­ges­tions for how it could be improved. And, of course, pic­tures would be fantastic!

Changemakers in the classroom

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I’ve been huge­ly grat­i­fied by the respons­es I’ve got­ten from teach­ers around the coun­try about using BE A CHANGEMAKER: HOW TO START SOMETHING THAT MATTERS in their class­rooms. The very first of these was a love­ly 8th-grade ELA teacher from a pri­vate Catholic school in Louisiana. She reached out to me before the book was even released, and let me tell you, her enthu­si­asm was a much-appre­ci­at­ed sooth­ing balm for all of my pre-release jitters!
She is using the book for her stu­dents’ “20% projects,” an idea adapt­ed from the cor­po­rate world where com­pa­nies allow employ­ees to spend 20% of their time work­ing on a pet project that inter­ests them. They’ll be using the books through­out the school year to choose self-direct­ed projects and bring them to life. Isn’t that excit­ing? I sure think so!

8th graders in class 1 with their new books
8th graders in class 1 with their new books

As part of her cur­ricu­lum, she was able to pur­chase a copy of the book for each and every one of the stu­dents, and she even got them per­son­al­ized! It was a huge pile of books for me to sign, and such an incred­i­ble hon­or for me to write each stu­den­t’s name in his or her own book.
8th graders in class 1 with their new books
8th graders in class 2 with their new books

These pic­tures are from the day she hand­ed the books out to all of the stu­dents. I hope you enjoy see­ing them as much as I do!
The stu­dents also watched a video I made for them to help kick off their project. I post­ed about that video ear­li­er this week. Check it out here if you missed it.
I can’t wait to hear about these stu­dents’ ideas and fol­low their progress through­out the school year. I’ll post updates here as I get them so you can fol­low along, too.
I love hear­ing about young peo­ple using the book, whether on their own or through a class or oth­er orga­ni­za­tion, so if you’re using (or think­ing about using) BE A CHANGEMAKER on your own or with your stu­dents, scouts, chil­dren, youth group, etc., please let me know! My email address is at the bot­tom of this page, or you can reach out on my Face­book author page or on Twit­ter.

Teaching Social Issues in Elementary School

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In my most recent issue of Social Stud­ies and the Young Learn­er (Vol­ume 23, Num­ber 4, March/April 2011) from the Nation­al Coun­cil for the Social Stud­ies, there’s a brief arti­cle enti­tled “The Uncom­pro­mised Cur­ricu­lum: Videos of Teach­ers Teach­ing Social Jus­tice Issues,” by Deb­bie Sonu. Deb­bie talks a bit about how dif­fi­cult it for today’s teach­ers to include social jus­tice lessons despite nar­row, test-focused cur­ricu­lums. She took videos of three of these deter­mined teach­ers in action, and they are noth­ing short of inspiring.
Watch the videos here.
These are class­rooms I would’ve loved to be in as a child (heck, I’d love to be in them now!), and you can see how engaged the kids are with the dif­fer­ent top­ics. What I love most about all three of these approach­es is the respect each of the teach­ers has for her stu­dents. In the first, the teacher tells her fifth graders that it’s okay to let their dis­cus­sions wan­der where they will and not stick to the pre­pared ques­tion list. In the sec­ond, the teacher tells her first graders they are not ask­ing first grade ques­tions, they are ask­ing col­lege ques­tions. And in the third, the teacher asserts that all children–gifted or not–have the abil­i­ty, and in fact the need, to dis­cuss these kinds of issues.
Kudos to these teach­ers, and to Deb­bie Sonu for shar­ing them with us!

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