Posts Tagged teachers

From the Classroom – Building Knowledge with Text Sets

By on December 23, 2024   /   For Teachers, From the Classroom  

Welcome to one of our newest features – From the Classroom – sharing tips and tricks for integrating a love of middle grade books and authors into your classroom. This month we are looking at using text sets to build knowledge.

What are Text Sets?

A text set is a collection of sources that support a common theme, issue, or topic. This can include fiction of all types (books, short stories, picture books, etc.), non-fiction titles, poetry, images, newspaper articles, songs, interviews, and other primary and secondary sources. The goal is to move from a textbook or one text only classroom to a multi-text classroom where the focus becomes studying concepts more in-depth to help build knowledge rather than the content of just one text. This always reminds me of the “if you liked this book, you would enjoy reading this book” lists and infographics you might see at the library or online, but instead the goal is to be deliberate about helping our students become mini-experts on a topic!

Mary Ann Cappiello and Erika Thulin Dawes recommend the following steps to build text sets:

  • Start with the content – What do the students need to know/what concept do you need to teach? It’s great to have a middle grade text serve as your anchor for the text set.
  • Build the text set – Find all sorts of material that will support the concept you will be teaching.
  • Organize the texts – What will you read first? Second? At the same time? Why?
  • Responding to the Text  – What will you have the students do before/during/after reading?

A great place to start is with your standards to figure out what topics or concepts to teach and what students should know and be able to do with these topics and concepts.

Sample Text Sets

Below are a fiction and a non-fiction text set for any middle grade classroom.

Fiction

Studying fictional characters in class? Why not change it up and study villains instead of the usual boring, goody two-shoes heroes! Think of all the conversations you could have about villain character motivations, villain character’s impacting the plot, irony, and more. You could probably build a villain text set around anything, but since it’s the holiday season, I thought a great picture book tie-in would be How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Use that in conjunction with a clip of Scar’s song “Be prepared” from the Lion King and examine the lyrics, specifically. Finally, read any great middle grade novel with a great villain (I chose Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer), and you have a high-interest text set about villains!

cover of How the grinch stole christmas by Dr. Suess

 

cover of artemis fowl by eoin colfer

Non-Fiction

I recently picked up Dan Sasuweh Jone’s latest Stealing Little Moon: The Legacy of the American Boarding Schools. What’s great about middle grade non-fiction books is they come complete with a well-researched bibliography which are perfect for creating text sets. Taking from this bibliography, a great text set could include reading portions if not all of the book, examining a picture of a student before and after they entered a school, and reading a newspaper article about the federal government’s response.

cover of Stealing little moon by Dan Sasuweh Jones

Main Text

picture of Hastiin To-Haali before he entered school and then tom torlino after being in schol

Picture of Hastiin To-Haali before entering school and as Tom Torlino after being in school

picture of chemawa cemetery in Oregon

Article: Interior Department leaders decry traumatic legacy of federal boarding schools for Native American children by Rob Manning

Don’t forget to check out the National Park Service’s amazing article for teaching ideas (complete with standards, objectives, and activities) about this topic!

Bonus: Need help with students who might not be reading at grade level? Check out the Middle School TopicReads at TextProject.org

Where to Start?

Take a look at some of the many books recommended here on the Mixed Up Files and then start finding other texts, resources, poetry, images, and primary and secondary sources to support your topic and standards.

In the comments, share your favorite text sets you already use in the classroom or are thinking about using in the future!

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STEM Tuesday– Cryptography (Math)/Spy Science– Writing Tips & Resources

By on December 17, 2024   /   Cryptography/Spy Science, STEM Tuesday  

 

noun: cryptology

  1. the study of codes, or the art of writing and solving them.

As an advocate for STE(A)M, I want to connect cryptology to the arts. It may seem an unlikely connection, but there are many examples of hidden messages in literature, music, and visual art. I give examples below and include an art activity and a link to an article that gives examples of contemporary hidden messages.

Literature

For older readers, there is the classic THE DAVINCI CODE by Dan Brown. Many of you may have wondered (I sure did) how much was real and how much made up. But this post isn’t about the novel but using it as an example of code in literature. Middle grade writers like Blue Balliett and Ellen Raskin incorporate puzzles to solve and provide clues for an alert reader. I enjoy stories about secret messages and clues and it adds another level of mental activity to the reading.

Music

Music has provided opportunities as well for secret meanings. I’ve included classical examples here. And one of my favorite musical examples is in the Alfred Hitchcock film “The Lady Vanishes.” Miss Froy disappears but not before she entrusts Iris and Gilbert with a musical phrase that passes a secret message to the Foreign Office.

From the online article Musical Cryptography: Hiding Messages in the Music! (link below) from PuzzleNation Blog.

 This sort of musical wordplay appears in compositions by Ravel, Debussy, and Shostakovich among others. Johann Sebastian Bach did this often enough that the succession of notes B-A-C-H is now called a Bach motif.

The composer Dmitri Shostakovich lived under a very repressive regime in Russia. He included passages in his compositions that “critiqued” the government. However the members of the government didn’t know enough about music to see that. This was dangerous because penalties for speaking against the government were severe.

Visual art/graphic design

For an activity this month, I am looking at Secret Messages in a way we see every day. The opportunities to be a spy are few these days, but knowing how to spot messages coming to you is a good skill. According to John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, Cryptology is the study of the codes and ciphers used to create secret writing. We usually think of spies and stories, but there is “secret writing” all over.

For instance, in the article 36 Hidden Messages in Company Logos You See All the Time, by Kelly Kuehn (link below) you can see how people are influenced without even realizing they are being influenced. Check out the article for other examples.

You may have thought the dot over the “i” was used to give the logo a pop of color, but it’s actually part of a hidden—and creative—message. The red dot is actually a bowl of salsa. The two T’s are people, and the yellow triangle in between them is a chip. It’s supposed to represent people coming together to share a tasty snack of chips and salsa.

Once you know that this is common, you can find examples of hidden messages all over.

When I was teaching graphic design in at university, I had the students make 50 (yes, 50) small logo sketches, known as thumbnails, with their initials. We used tracing paper and pencil and it was about ideas, not perfection. Then we could discuss the merits of some of the individual ideas and use them to move on to a more polished design. You can, of course, make fewer sketches – how many you need to get the idea you like.

There are two aspects to consider. One is the visual part. Is it attractive? Colorful? Compact? Attention getting?

The second aspect is the underlying meaning. Does it respond to the personality of the designer? And – does it say more than an initial quick glance would reveal? Here is where the hidden meaning comes in. This requires higher level thinking to manipulate the space to include a secret message.

It helps to have a plan.

  1. What is the overall spirit of the logo? Some possible answers are serious, playful, sporty, mysterious. Write it down to remind yourself.
  2. What is the secret message? Your answer to #1 might be sporty so somewhere there could be the shape of say, a soccer ball or a running shoe. Can you incorporate it into the design so that it isn’t immediately apparent, but is easily recognizable? There are many books on logo design, both how-to and the best-of.
  3. Try to make the final drawing clean and in black and white.

Yes, a challenge. Sometimes it helps to work with a partner or a team, the way a professional design studio would work.

After settling on an idea, then make a Very Clean drawing.  The drawings can be scanned (at 300dpi) as jpgs or pngs, for use on such documents as school assignments. For younger grades, a rubber stamp or stickers are fun for embellishments.

Have fun with your secret message logo!

 

Margo Lemieux is professor emerita at Lasell University and spent time in October doing plein air painting in cranberry bogs.

 

Hiding Messages in Music

Musical Cryptography: Hiding Messages in the Music!

 

More musical messages

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/musical-cryptography-codes?mc_cid=82ccbfcf25&mc_eid=d3196740af

 

Cryptology definition

https://cty.jhu.edu/programs/on-campus/courses/cryptology-code

 

Company Logos You See All the Time, by Kelly Kuehn

https://www.rd.com/list/secret-messages-company-logos/

 

 

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STEM Tuesday– Cryptography (Math)/Spy Science– In the Classroom

By on December 10, 2024   /   Cryptography/Spy Science, STEM Tuesday  

In my former career, I worked with communications and communication security (which included cryptography). It is a topic that will always be near and dear to my heart. This month, I read the following books:

 

How to Be an International Spy book

How to Be an International Spy by Andy Briggs

This book covers lots of different topics associated with being a spy. The science around it all ranges from psychology to quantum physics. It includes lots of practice activities to help you fully engage in the topic.

 

Top Secret Science Book

Top Secret Science: Projects You’re Not Supposed to Know About by Jennifer Swanson

If you’re looking more for the history of secret projects, this is the book for you. It looks at a variety of programs that were run in secret.

 

Can You Crack the Code book

Can You Crack the Code? by Ella Schwartz and Lily Williams

If your goal is to learn how to create and crack secret codes, you might want to check out this book. It does a great job of covering the major cryptography methods. There are lots of secret codes to practice with, too.

 

 

Rather than making up activities to go along with these books, I want to share some of the fabulous resources that are already out there that would pair well with this month’s theme.

Check out “The Farm”

The CIA may be a secretive organization, but they’ve got an online presence. There are stories, games, activities, and other things for young readers to explore on their CIA Spy Kids site: https://www.cia.gov/spy-kids/games

They’ve also developed lesson plans for teachers: https://www.cia.gov/spy-kids/parents-teachers

Delve into Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity ensures that electronic devices are protected from criminal or unauthorized use. There are lots of career opportunities in cybersecurity, so it’s a great topic to learn more about.

The University of Texas at San Antonio’s Center for Infrastructure Assurance & Security (a.k.a. UTSA CIAS) has lots of resources for teachers and students on their website. Their activities cover grades K through 12. Here’s their main page: https://cias.utsa.edu/k-12

Their Cyber Games are found here: https://cias.utsa.edu/k-12/cybersecurity-games

Microsoft and Minecraft teamed together to provide resources for teaching cybersecurity, too. Check that out here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/education/blog/2023/10/elevate-cybersecurity-expertise-with-microsoft-and-minecraft-education

Learn About Public Key Encryption

Public Key Encryption is used to secure many different types of transactions on the internet, from email to online store payments. This video from PBS NOVA labs does a great job of explaining at a high level how public key encryption works: https://youtu.be/5xI4IJbHDiM?si=mM6cZJdTDUjeqVOs

NOVA Labs also has a cybersecurity game online: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/labs/lab/cyber – there is an educator guide to go along with it.

Cryptography in History

Pretty much all the books this month talk about the long history of secret-keeping (and cryptography to help with that). Here are some web sites that explore cryptography in history.

“The Secret Code of Lewis and Clark” activity: https://lewisandclarktrail.com/legacy/secretcode.htm

“Cryptology in the American Revolution” videos from NSA’s National Cryptologic Museum:
https://youtu.be/0smfiPWSHCQ?si=0ATj8hRevfpze0vo
https://youtu.be/WXEX7xFIz9E?si=AWh8GF4B7yD1Uo35

The National Cryptologic Museum also has videos on Steganography, Ciphers, or Visual Signaling during the American Revolution. For these and other videos, check out this playlist: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWvkfYC3snpVYffYpKwjsbxwDO9IaNli7&si=3mYvmWEirAtp035P

More Resources

There are lots of cryptography and spy-related museums and websites out there to explore. Here are a few more you might want to check out.

The Spy Museum in Washington, DC: https://www.spymuseum.org – if you can’t get there in person, they also have some resources and activities online. They even have a podcast and a YouTube channel.

In the New York City area, there is the Washington Spy Trail. This includes a series of historic sites on Long Island that are associated with George Washington’s circle of spies during the Revolutionary War. If you’re lucky, you can tour some sites in person. If not, you can learn about some of it online: https://washingtonspytrail.com

You can learn more about American Civil War spies online: https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/spies.htm – each spy is associated with at least one National Park.


Janet Slingerland has written more than 20 books for children. Her book History’s Forgotten War Stories – https://www.12storylibrary.com/non-fiction/hidden-history/forgotten-war-stories-history – includes secrets and spies. To find out more about Janet and her books, check out her website – http://janetsbooks.com

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