Charlene Klassen Endrizzi

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Responsible Citizens and Workers: Tackling Informational Texts

By Karen Matis with Charlene Klassen Endrizzi

tackling informational texts

One fascinating aspect of the seventh graders’ questions during our conversation after the author Skype was their curiosity regarding specific vocabulary (such as “cesspool” or “costermonger”) used by Hopkinson. I think Dr. Matis’ Word Wall was a great tool for students, allowing them to discuss and learn new words.

Ben Gaul, history preservice teacher

This week we continue our exploration of what it means to be responsible citizens using The Great Trouble, Stolen Dreams, and companion web resources. My two seventh grade classes started our exploration of The Great Trouble with a Word Wall. Like Ben noted, I also see students’ engagement with texts increase if we collectively analyze unfamiliar words. The first word selected to place on our wall was “mudlark,” a term introduced and defined on page one. Readers eagerly contributed to the wall when they came across new vocabulary. To help students connect to words of low practical use but an integral part of understanding The Great Trouble, we acted out new terms or mimicked facial expressions to physically demonstrate a word’s meaning. Continue reading →

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Responsible Citizens and Workers: Nurturing Ethical Viewpoints in Seventh Grade

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi with Karen Matis

examine civic responsibility“Instead of looking with my eyes, I decided to see with my heart.”
(Eel, mudlark in The Great Trouble by Deborah Hopkinson, 2013)

Eel, an adolescent protagonist, along with larger than life teens like Iqbal Masih and Malala Yousafsai from Pakistan, became central figures in a four week exploration of Responsible Citizens and Workers. Overarching questions like “What makes a responsible citizen?” and “What makes a responsible worker?” initiated a collaborative inquiry between Karen’s 45 seventh graders and 12 secondary education minors enrolled in my literacy course. Previous interactions with Deborah Hopkinson led us to contemplate various social justice themes in her books. We set out to create opportunities for middle school readers to explore their place in the world and consider avenues for making meaningful contributions. Eel’s ethical outlook of “see[ing] with my heart” invited adolescents and preservice teachers to examine civic responsibility in their present day lives. Continue reading →

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Israeli Children’s Books: Forming a Bridge Between Cultures?

by Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA

forming a bridge between cultures“I can’t wait to get back to a country where they speak English,” announced my exhausted eleven year old son, while we stood in line at El Al, the Israeli national airline, preparing to board our plane back home from Tel Aviv. This natural human desire to remain within familiar territory is an emotion I frequently experience along with Bryce. Spending days eating none of his favorite foods, navigating multiple hotels and historical sites, missing baseball tournaments… could cause angst for any pre-teen. Nonetheless his statement urges me to continue exploring the learning potential from our family vacation for years to come.
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Israeli Children’s Books: A Parent Perspective Beyond the Holocaust

by Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA

ghetto fighters, a parent perspective beyond the holocaust

 

“I do not want Israelis to be remembered simply for the Holocaust. I want others to understand the richness of our unique 5,000 year old Jewish culture.”

Sima, mother of a recently commissioned nineteen year old Israeli soldier, shared these thoughts as we surveyed a Holocaust exhibit at my college last year. Over time her statement enabled me to re-conceptualize my images of Israel, no longer focused on the World War II genocide but instead aimed toward a more holistic representation.
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Israeli Children’s Books – A Parent Perspective on the PJ Library

by Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA

familylsraeli, a parent perspective on the PJ Library“Mothers and fathers have equal duties to read to their children. My daughter-in-law is a lawyer so she comes home from work very tired. My son, who currently stays at home with the children, reads every day at bedtime to his children. He is very close to them through reading.” –Hadass, a trilingual native of Jerusalem, offered these insights into Israeli parent-child reading habits during our bus ride from Tel Aviv to her hometown.

Across generations and cultures, families create these intimate yet equally intellectual literacy moments with children. The PJ Library, http://www.pjlibrary.org/, is a North American Jewish Family Engagement program designed to perpetuate the parent-child reading tradition. The parallel Israeli version, Sifriyat Pijama, emphasizes the same dual goals of supporting literacy and reaffirming Jewish values. Preschool teachers enrolled in the program receive Jewish literature and music to share with their three to five year old students’ families. One parent must speak Hebrew since all of the books and the Parent Reading Guides at the beginning of each text are written in the official language of Israel.
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Israeli Children’s Books: A Parent Perspective on the Classics

by Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, New Wilmington, PA

“Excellent literature educates… What makes it ‘educational’ is its
deep human content offered in an excellent artistic form.”

-Israeli children’s author, Miriam Roth, 1969.

hebrew cover 3, a parent perspective on the classicsDuring a recent trip to the Middle East, I set out to explore books Israeli parents share with their children. This journey grew out of a cross-cultural research project involving Israeli and American mothers reading to their Kindergarten children. I wanted to understand some of the books my research partner, Vered Vaknin-Nusbaum, plans to share with Jewish, Druze and Muslim families. My book informants included Vered, two colleagues from her college, Hagit and Yehuda, and three other Israelis, Sima, Janet and Britt. In the midst of excursions to various bookstores, these parents regaled me with literacy stories, thus deepening my understanding of the role of children’s books in their family lives.
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Families Matter: Combining Literacy Reflections – Part IV

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

    “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of the world that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange… A window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.” (Rudine Sims Bishop, 1990).

Sharing family stories with children and their families offered eight classroom teachers a window into students’ most powerful literacy environment – their homes. Weekly written conversations in Family Message Journals helped teachers consider the potential for combining home and school literacy communities. In this fourth and final post, I return to our dual goals of valuing families’ life experiences (windows) while also looking outward to the larger world of diverse families (mirrors).
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Families Matter: Reaching Out to Reluctant Parents –- Part III

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

Although celebrating student success comes naturally to teachers, tackling student struggles and facing tensions takes a unique kind of willpower. My first two posts considered the usefulness of journals where students dialogue with family members about family stories. One teacher, Anne, noted, “When families participated through regular correspondence, it sent the message –- Parents valued their child’s work.” Family participation also sends a subtle message to teachers that this family values teachers’ work.

Out of the eight teachers using Family Message Journals, five experienced considerable family response. Three, Alicia, Joanna, and Alisa, struggled with a lack of response from their urban families. This week’s post focuses on how these teachers dealt with the resulting tension and made necessary shifts to their journals. Continue reading →

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Families Matter: Expanding Our Community of Readers –- Part II

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

This week, we journey inside a third grade classroom to explore how Anne, a Westminster College graduate student, started using Family Message Journals in spring. Her goal focused on developing more dynamic home-school partnerships with students’ families. She first sent home monthly newsletters and home surveys to share her beliefs and gain an understanding of her families’ home interactions. Her rural school in western Pennsylvania consists of families from predominantly lower socioeconomic backgrounds with over half of the children receiving free or reduced lunches.

During weekly after school sessions, Anne and a small group of reluctant third grade readers collectively explored six different family story books and wrote about the books in their journals. Following each session children shared the book and journal with a parent, grandparent, or sibling at home, who then wrote a response in the family journal before sending both back to school.
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Families Matter: Family Stories and School Literacy — Part I

By Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, Westminster College, PA

Their story, yours, mine — it’s what we carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them.

– William Carlos Williams

“Reading is life!” Laura began as she outlined her view of reading for a colleague. This succinct declaration from a literacy coach in western Pennsylvania contains marvelous implications for teachers, especially those intent on understanding children’s distinct ways of understanding their world. When teachers value students’ resources developed through family and community life, they use these insights to make well-informed literacy decisions. Thus reading events, evolving not from curricular mandates but our student’s rich life experiences, hold the most relevance for children as readers.

Building on Laura’s expansive view of reading, this month’s four blogs focus on building connections across our students’ home and school literacy lives. Throughout this past school year, classroom teachers, graduate students, student teachers, and I explored Family Message Journals (Wollman-Bonilla, 2000) as one possible avenue for creating conversations between children and families. During several weeks in February and March we focused these weekly written exchanges around children’s books depicting family stories. Our intent was to invite students’ first literacy partners, their families, into our conversations about books.

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