Learning from Common Core Standards While Revising CHARLIE'S PLACE

This Vermont home is like the one I picture for Charlie's new friend John.

Yesterday and today have been revision days for one of my books in progress, Charlie's Place -- the third-grader story set at Ben Thresher's Mill in Barnet, Vermont, underway with co-author and teacher Sue Haven Tester. In addition to tightening the story and making the action as clear as possible, I've been following Sue's suggestion to wrestle with making the book's vocabulary more varied and rich. Along with this is the skill of embedding more challenging words in multiple ways in the text, so readers become familiar with their usage in varied context.

Today's adults looking back fondly at Grade 3 may be surprised at the actions that third graders are expected to take as they read new material in school. This is part of what I see as the improvements we're invited to make in teaching, and therefore also in the books we write for the kids to enjoy: The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) are a teacher-led and state-by-state adopted set of goals to work toward, one after another, so that our graduating high school seniors can tackle life at an adult level. So, here's what third graders need to be doing with the story they're reading (in addition to enjoying it!):

Assess.
Critique.
Formulate.
Hypothesize.
Cite evidence.
Develop logical arguments.

Today I took great pleasure in reshaping this paragraph to develop text with more depth, including several ideas that Sue contributed:

Charlie looked way up at that boy’s face and worried. The boy made clown-like faces. He pushed close to John and said more things. John covered his ears. John said No! Charlie got angry. The mean boy was scaring John. Charlie hit the massive boy. Stop! No!

But I also paid attention to this passage, weaving back into the text some special terms I'd introduced earlier:

There was water everywhere, with pieces of wood floating in it. It was too dark to see the turbine or the penstock, but the little bit of light flickered on the moving water. Was Old Ben shining a flashlight while he repaired the turbine? No, nobody could fix things in the cellar with this much water, not even Old Ben. The stairs kept shaking. Now Charlie felt scared. 

And it was also a good day to outline the nonfiction material for the end of the book, where (me being me) I suggested a timeline to organize the information and investigations that readers might add to their experience of the story. 

Have you guessed yet from the way the text paragraphs here are written? Charlie is deaf ... at age eight, in about 1956 in Vermont. Things were very different then. I'm enjoying painting in the details, along with things that haven't changed at all, like the chest-quivering sensation of thunder, the comfort of morning pancakes with Grandma, and the satisfaction that comes from being as brave as possible, in a scary situation. Know what I mean? 

When My Grandson Was 4, and Other Common Core Standards Reflections on Writing

A real papermill, like the ones in the book my grandson read.

... Waiting for supper is short but your stomach rumbles like the mill does. (from Charlie's Place, in second draft)

When I know there's going to be some writing time fitted into my day, I'm elated. I race to get the newspapers for my husband's morning, sing as I swing through kitchen chores, and struggle to stay "on task" for the day's other labors, heading toward the magic hour I've promised myself.

It's "rich vocabulary" day. I'm planning to go through chapter 4 of the first draft of Charlie's Place, the book my teacher-co-author Sue Tester and I are writing for third graders. Sue, a teacher, has already "tested" the chapter with some students, and they're on board -- they've embraced Charlie, with his challenges and his eight-year-old courage. In other words, our plot and character are strong and we're confident in them. So the next step is to test every sentence, looking for how much we can evoke with the words we are choosing. Sue has penciled her suggestions for where we can push the wording to be more precise and to ask more of our future third-grade readers.

And that, to me, is where my own "take" on the Common Core Standards -- that they are daring us writers to lure kids into growth, so they'll be able to reach adult levels by grade 12 -- gives an exhilarating push to what fascinates me, the power of story to reach all of us. I want to make Charlie's Place into the best possible story, and that means endowing it with words that matter.

In fact, as it's now written, the first paragraph of this "chapter book" introduces a word that most third-graders won't yet know. Most adult readers won't know it, either. Penstock. It's an important piece of the out-of-sight machinery of a working river mill, and how Charlie interacts with the way the river water pounds through the penstock tells something important about this boy. And it gets us moving into the mill itself, with its intricate and sometimes dangerous machinery.

Volunteers reconstruct the penstock at Ben's Mill, Barnet, Vermont.

(The penstock is at the heart of this diagram -- looks like a giant wooden screw the way it's drawn.)

This brings me to my grandson Ian, who was only four years old, living in a major city, when he asked me on the phone one day, "Grandma, do you know about paper mills?"

The mill in Charlie's Place is for making items out of wood and metal, and I know it very well, but yes, I also do know about paper mills -- not quite as much, but I've been inside a couple of them. Ian and I had a great conversation about paper mills. At age four, thanks to his teacher and his mom and dad, Ian already knew a lot about how trees become pulp and pulp becomes paper, and what a mill looks like. And he knew there would be REAL paper mills up here in Vermont. His folks and I opted to not take him to a paper mill last summer, because they are incredibly noisy and scary, even for adults. But it's something we'll do later. Meanwhile, what I carry into today's revision is this: At age four, you can be fascinated by complexity and detail, and you can learn the words that go with it.

And then you are rewarded with conversations that are memorable, and images that stay with you. You savor the richness of your experience. And you can do this at age four!! and eight!!! and while you are working on revisions of the book that's meant for those kids, and for the teachers and parents who'll accompany them on their books journeys.

See what I mean about writing time? I am SO ready for this day.

PS -- Interested in how "rich vocabulary" gets introduced? Check out the kids' novel Hope Is a Ferris Wheel by Robin Herrera (my enthusiastic review of it here): There are actual lists of "use-this-word-in-a-sentence" assignments that make up part of the plot. I especially loved the way the trailer-park life of the protagonist makes her wrestle with the word derelict.

Learning the Words: The Common Core Standards and Joyful Writing

"Scaffolding."

It's easy to think of the Common Core State Standards as something "for teachers" and not for the rest of us. The newspaper coverage emphasizing the standards as related to testing, for instance -- and if you're a writer who has finished your official schooling, testing is something you're probably not going to embrace.

On the other hand, there's an aspect of the Common Core that is making my heart leap with excitement. Yes, really. Here it is: As I understand them, the new standards are saying: "By the time students leave high school, they'll be reading and processing information at an adult level."

To me, that makes good sense -- I want the kids coming out of high school and going straight to the workforce to be able to do so as adults, and even more so, I hope that those teens entering college can do it as adults. When I think about the differences among the college students I know, in terms of who is making the most of the opportunity and who is blowing it off, it boils down to exactly this.

When I pair this idea with "scaffolding" -- a term I learned from a reading teacher, at a workshop maybe 20 years ago -- the role of "young adult" fiction in the classroom becomes more complex and interesting. Not only are we giving readers a chance to experience, vicariously, the challenges, fears, and courage of life; we are also helping them rise up, one grade at a time, to being effective and joyful participants in the world of adults. We build a "scaffold" the way house painters or skyscraper builders do, so we can boost readers upward from where they already stand.

How do we do this? Here's my vocab lesson for the day, teaching myself the ways that teachers are now talking about the process, within the Common Core standards, in terms of the writer's own favorite building blocks: words.

Tier 1 words: These words are basic vocabulary or the more common words most children will know. They include high-frequency words and usually are not multiple meaning words.

Tier 2 words: Less familiar, yet useful vocabulary found in written text and shared between the teacher and student in conversation. The Common Core State Standards refers to these as “general academic words.” Sometimes they are referred to as “rich vocabulary.” These words are more precise or subtle forms of familiar words and include multiple meaning words. Instead of walk for example, saunter could be used. These words are found across a variety of domains.

Tier 3 words: CCSS refers to these words as “domain specific;” they are critical to understanding the concepts of the content taught in schools. Generally, they have low frequency use and are limited to specific knowledge domains. Examples would include words such as isotope, peninsula, refinery. They are best learned when teaching specific content lessons, and tend to be more common in informational text. (a nice version, well spelled out, from a commercial website, http://www.learninga-z.com)

We who are writing YA fiction -- whether it's mysteries or "literary" -- are invited by these standards to play with "Tier 2 words," the words that my teaching friends call "rich vocabulary." What a gift! What a delight! These are the words I've used in my poetry, always; now I'm being invited to use them deliberately and with skill, in everything else I'm writing for grades K to 12, and especially for middle grades and young adults.

See why my Writer's Heart is singing?