The Lexicon of Mystery: Reading Work Made Visible

Sometimes, a theme can feel almost contagious in a school as small as ours, drifting from one discipline to another. While learners puzzled over mystery tubes in Science Block, Violet Band readers began their work as detectives across the hall in Literacy, exploring mystery as a literary genre.

The intellectual work of reading mystery is both complex and irresistible. Violet Band’s unit encouraged readers to start by identifying the “crime-solver” and the nature of the mystery itself – a task that’s often less than obvious in the exposition phase of a mystery novel, when a generalized atmosphere of weirdness may appear before an actual conflict emerges. Once an inciting action occurs, the reader begins to act as a detective herself, paying attention to details that might be clues…

literacyLisa ZapalacNovember 11, 2022Long-View Micro Schoolreading, writing, mystery, thinking, strategies

When Reading Level and Maturity Level Don’t Align: How We Think About Our Young, Advanced Readers

Let’s say you’re in fifth grade. You’ve already read all the Harry Potter books three times (okay, you’ve read the first one seven times). You know the entire Percy Jackson series by heart. Your start-of-year reading assessment vaulted you comfortably from level Z to level Z+ on the Fountas and Pinnell reading scale, so you’re now clocking in at a high school reading level, and you keep hearing that you need to read more advanced books. Your older sister (who’s also a Z+ reader) and all her friends are raving about a new young-adult masterpiece that’s won all kinds of awards, but the characters are juniors in high school and they do stuff at a party in the very first chapter that makes you want to drop the book and go straight back to Harry Potter. Where do you turn?

This is a challenge we encounter all the time. At Long-View, 78% of our learners are reading at the Z+ level; this indicates a high school level in terms of both literal and inferential comprehension….

Curating a Diverse Library for Our Learners

Here at Long-View, the members of the Literacy team tend to moonlight as librarians. Whether during the school year on Thursday afternoons, early in the morning, or during the summer months, we are constantly expanding, curating, organizing, and pondering the Long-View library collection. In recent years, Long-View has particularly committed itself to enriching the diversity of the books we offer our learners. While the push for more diverse books—especially for children and teenagers—has become a major initiative across the education and publishing worlds in the United States only relatively recently, it’s much more than a fashionable trend. And it’s much more than an empty gesture towards inclusivity….

Starting the Year Off Strong in Literacy Block

Reading and writing units at Long-View are often intertwined, supporting learners as they develop deep understanding of a particular genre across both domains. For the first two months of the year, learners in Red and Turquoise Bands have working on stretching their understanding of the genre of realistic fiction.

Called “Interpreting Characters,” the reading unit was focused heavily on understanding the central part of a story, the characters. Learners developed ways of thinking about characters and story in order to theorize about their readings…

Reading and Writing Workshop Off to a Great Start

We have had a wonderful start to the year in literacy and are excited by what our readers and writers will accomplish this year. Our literacy block consists of reading and writing, and we use a workshop format to teach both. We stand on the shoulders of the great work of Teachers College Reading and Writing Project out of Columbia University to inspire us and inform our practices. This organization has an amazing research base and a strong focus on helping kids do the work of real readers and real writers…

literacyLisa ZapalacSeptember 10, 2016Long-View Micro Schoolreading, writing, literacy, curriculum