EDUO 9224: Bringing Your Literature to Life

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If you are not currently teaching students, there is a non-teaching format for this course.  Please contact the instructor, Ron Kremer rkremer@dominicancaonline.com for details.
Engage your students in literature exploration. Bring literature to life in your classroom by implementing learning experiences that require students to creatively respond to high-quality children’s books. Involve your students in higher-level thinking skills as they find new possibilities or solutions based on inferences and making predictions. This course is most appropriate for teachers of grades three through eight.

This course is designed with the flexibility for teachers to select one (15hrs.), two (30 hrs.), or three (45hrs.) graduate credits/units.


From the Instructor

Become Charlotte and make your own string spider web. Become “Snowflake Bentley” and discover new paper snowflakes and construct your own pinhole camera. Become a member of Swiss Family Robinson and build a toothpick treehouse in a small branch. Become The Little Red Hen and bake your own bread and experiment with yeast… and much more!

Take the title literally! You and I will brainstorm together to create concrete activities that will bring your current reading curriculum to life! Your students will experience what the main characters in the story experience. Your students may be faced with the same problems to solve as the main characters. Your students may also be put in the place of the author and imitate their style to create their own work. (For example, students may learn how Ed Packard creates his Choose Your Own Adventures stories and write one of their own for classmates to explore.)

This is an individualized course. The content will be determined by you. (You may choose to use only content from your current reading curriculum, or choose several literature selections from the extensive appendix included with the course along with several selections from your curriculum, or you may choose to use only the selections in the course appendix.) In consultation with the instructor the two of you will design concrete activities that bring the stories you choose to life.

  • The activities in this course are focused on application and the higher level thinking skills of analysis and synthesis.
  • Students will often be extending a pattern, which involves forming inferences (comprehension) and making predictions (application) which result in an inventive construction (synthesis).
  • In spite of how abstract this seems the activities will usually be concrete in nature, respecting children as learners as described by Piaget.

This course is most appropriate for teachers of kindergarten through middle school who know the importance and value of concrete, hands-on, experience-based learning. The level of difficulty will be determined by the content the teacher chooses to explore with their students.

This course is not limited to the teaching of literature. Upper grade teachers may choose to focus on literature that emphasizes the sciences, history, art, etc.

This course may not be appropriate for teachers of highly abstract, symbolic content.

“Bringing Your Literature to Life” is an unique, individualized opportunity for you to collaborate with a veteran teacher to design an interactive curriculum that fosters higher level thinking skills at the nonthreatening concrete stage of exploration.

Course Overview

Bringing Your Literature to Life is an opportunity for you to brainstorm with the instructor to develop concrete activities for the reading content you teach. The instructor is willing to collaborate with you to design activities for your curriculum that puts the student in the author’s place, or in the main character’s place, bringing literature to life!

Course Objectives:

The teacher will:

  • Develop interactive activities for specific literature selections.
  • Collect materials needed for interactive activities (particularly model building and art
    projects).
  • Locate specific books needed for each literature exploration.
  • Provide opportunities (time and space) for students to engage in concrete explorations.
  • Lead students in open-ended brainstorming sessions.

Course Relation to CCS or other Professional Standards

This course aligns to the standards for: California Common Core State Standards – Reading Standards for Literature K-5.

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Instructor

Ron Kremer

B.A., M.A. in Elementary Education, Elementary mathematics and science emphasis

40 years: General elementary grade teacher, school district staff trainer, and staff developer for California Science Implementation Network.

Author and guest speaker at state level conferences for mathematics. Recognized for exemplary work in the field of education by the Johns Hopkins Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth.

My goal is to convince teachers of the importance of "discovery learning" using open-ended, hands-on explorations.

I like working on projects around the home with my family. I sing tenor in our church choir and volunteer tutor at Shriners Children's Hospital."