Mentor Texts for Launching Writers' Notebooks

Launching Writers' Workshop is one of my favorite things about the beginning of a new school year.  The possibilities are endless and giving kids time and choice for writing is (I believe) one of the best things we can do for them as learners. I've had a stack of tried and true books that I go to at the start of the year--books that serve as mentors for anyone starting a writer's notebook.

Some of my favorites include:

• Marshfield Dreams: When I Was a Kid by Ralph Fletcher
• Knucklehead by Jon Scieszka
• A Writer's Notebook: Unlocking the Writer Within You by Ralph Fletcher
• Hey World, Here I Am by Jean Little
• Amelia's Notebook by Marissa Moss

In our notebook writing this time of year, we are learning to live our lives as writers,  try new things, play as writers and attempt things that might make our writing better.This year, I am excited to add a few new mentor texts to my collection. I've already used several of these with my 5th graders and they seem like. perfect additions.

Comics Confidential: Thirteen Graphic Novelists Talk Story, Craft and Life Outside the Box is a newish book that is filled with insights from several graphic novelists. Each interview shares insights into not only the writing lives of these authors but also tips about craft. There are samples to demonstrate these things.  I find that there isn't a lot out there for kids who are playing around with comics/graphic novels (in and out of their notebooks) so this is a great place to help them think more deeply when they are creating these,

Another new collection from writers is Our Story Begins:Your Favorite Authors and Illustrators Share Fun, Inspiring and Occasionally Ridiculous Things they Wrote and Drew as Kids. This book shares stories from several popular children's authors --stories about some of their earliest writing.  Again many include great samples,

Last week, I shared Olivia Van Ledtje (@Livbits) latest blog post-- #ForCharLove --a letter to her younger sister's Kindergarten teacher.  This was a great piece with love and voice. It was a great mentor for kids to think about ways to write about people close to them.  I paired this with Not Enough Emilys in Hey World, Here I Am,  I am so glad that Liv is blogging--I find that sharing writing from same-age peers is so powerful for both message and craft.

Amy Vanderwater's Sharing Our Notebooks site is growing and is packed with so many great ideas for notebook writing.  The section we have visited most often is the "Try This!-Notebooking Ideas" section that is packed with things for writers to try. We've used a few of these as mini lessons and they are very accessible to kids.

And I was SOOO happy to see a new edition of Lois Lowry's Looking Back: A Book of Memories earlier this month. I LOVED this book when I read it years ago and this new edition has even more insights from Lois Lowry. It is packed with short pieces and memories that can be read as part of the whole book or independently.

And even though we have to wait a few more months for Colby Sharp's upcoming The Creativity Project: No Rules, Anything Goes, Awesometastic Storybuilding, I know this is one I'll add to my stack of great mentors for young writers. (I'd suggest pre-ordering this one now:-)

We'll definitely read these books and learn from them as writers throughout the year but they are especially helpful as we launch our workshop as a new community of writers.

Early-in-the-Year Messages About Learning

There is no rushing the first few weeks of the school year. No matter how much I'd love to be in Week 8 right now with routines set and thoughtful conversations happening every day, I know that you can't rush community building. As hard as it is to establish routines, there is nothing like these first few weeks of school--getting to know students, watching them get to know each other,  and listening in on these beginning conversations.

I can never quite pinpoint exactly how things evolve in the classroom--how kids get from where they are at the beginning of the year to where they are at the end of the year.  I don't really have a set of lesson plans that helps to build talk early in the year.  I don't really believe in those "First 20 Day" planning guides. But I am very intentional about my planning and try to be responsive to each new group of students.  Each group comes in with different expectations as learners and I usually take my cue from them on where to do.  By May, I am always so amazed by my students' thinking and growth but they are not as comfortable talking and sharing early in the year so I spend a lot of time planning things that give them important messages and experiences about learning.

The thing is, lots of these things don't happen in Reading Workshop. In Read Aloud and in minilessons, we are learning to have conversations around books. But it seems to be that it is the conversations that we are having during other times in the day that also help build the conversations we have as readers.  In a self-contained classroom, nothing stands alone.  Somehow, conversations in reading are possible because we spend time throughout each day thinking about learning and thinking and talking.  The conversations overlap and talk starts to get better each day in the classroom in all areas.

Learning Happens Everywhere and in Many Different Ways

For the last few years, we've watched Caine's Arcade on the first day of school to talk about Caine as a learner.  I want my kids to know that learning happens in lots of ways and that lots of learning will happen in and out of school. I want them to know that the kind of learning Caine shares in his story will be valued in our classroom. Some years we've created a chart or had a conversation discussing the ways Caine is a learner or how we know Caine is a learner.

We Learn When We Think Together

We mention in our book the idea of Thinking Partners.  A board in the front of our classroom has a heading "Who Are You Thinking With Today?". Below are 2 sets of individual photos of the students in our class.  I use this to quickly assign partners for various things when needed. Early in the year we talk about how you learn different things when you think with different people.  We've done partner talk in all areas learning how to turn and talk, sit "knee-to-knee, eye-to-eye", keep a conversation going for a short amount of time, etc.

Thinking and Talking about Our Own Learning (and others' learning) Helps Us Grow

I invite adults in the school to come in and share their lives as readers with us during the first several weeks of school.  This helps students learn about others which in turn helps them reflect on their own reading.  As they learn about different readers and see connections and differences, they begin to ask questions and learn to talk about reading habits and behaviors in new ways.

Mrs. Phifer, our reading teacher, sharing things about her life as a reader last week in our classroom.

A Learning Community Gives Feedback to Help Other's Grow

Austin's Butterfly is one of my favorite clips to show early in the year.  I think the idea of specific feedback and supporting each other as we all learn and grow is fascinating to students as they watch this clip.

Austin's Butterfly: Building Excellence in Student Work from EL Education on Vimeo.

Our Brain Grows

This year, I shared one of Jo Boaler's videos on Youcubed. "Four Boosting Math Messages from Jo and Her Students" invited powerful conversations about the brain, making mistakes, and other myths about learning (math and beyond).

We Learn When We Are in the Role of Teacher AND When We Are in the Role of Learner

In our classroom, we have Wonder Workshop daily. This is the way I make sense of Genius Hour and Makerspace ideas and bring them together to give kids a time each day to take total charge of their learning.To kick off Wonder Workshop, each child shares something they love or are good at with classmates.  This is an informal presentation done at tables with small groups.  This joyful time helps us get to know each others' interests and also helps everyone discover things they may want to learn or try during Wonder Workshop. By the end of the week, we'll have 23 new things are possibilities for Wonder Workshop. And we'll have experienced the power of learning from each other over and over again.

We talk about being an active participant in a session and this is easy for them to do and understand when they are in both roles. We don't do a typical presentation--instead kids teach at a table to an audience of 3-5 kids several times until all kids rotate through. This keeps kids engaged and gives kids lots of experiences as both a teacher and and audience. We reflect on our roles each day and we also discover what we appreciated about the ways different people taught and learned. This conversation will carry on throughout the year.

We Can Learn from Others Through Technology

I made it a point to share resources from online sources so kids know quickly that we learn from lots of people and technology allows that. (They know this of course, but I want them to know that this will happen lots in our classroom.)  I also want them to know that there are people out there who create things to share to TEACH others. (This will be good when they learn to research and it also serves as an invitation to create resources for others online.)

We've learned from Ruth Ayres (A Peek Inside My Writer's Notebook), Jess Keating (Write With Jess Keating), Amy Vanderwater (Sharing Our Notebooks) and Mr. Stadel at Estimation 180. The variety of videos, blog posts, activities created for learning all show that there are so many ways to learn from others.

None of these things can stand alone but together they work magic when it comes to evolving messages about what it means to be a learning community.

Poetry Friday -- Beginning...again

Photo by Mary Lee Hahn

A Teacher Turns the Calendar Page From July to August

It's the same feeling you get

just after you've nudged the sled 

over the shoulder 

of the hill.

Movement becomes momentum

and quickly shifts 

to catapulting and careening.

You relinquish control

and hold on 

for the ride.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2013

Next week is the official start of school in our district -- teachers on Monday, students on Wednesday.

And so we begin...again.

Julianne has the roundup at To Read To Write To Be.

Poetry Friday -- Unharvested

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Gilly Walker

In this last weekend before school starts back up, I will be spending lots of time planning. I think I'm finally to the point in my career where I won't worry about accounting for every single moment of every day. I have learned to appreciate what Robert Frost describes here:

Unharvested
by Robert Frost

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady's fan.
For there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

Catherine has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Reading to the Core.

I May Never Actually Fancy Up This Chart

These are our Lessons From Cup Stacking, and they have turned out to be such important big ideas that I find myself referring back to this chart on a daily basis, at some point or another.

I keep saying that I'm going to fancy this chart up when I get time, but I actually like its organic roughness so much that I might never get the time! Maybe I'll give it a title, but that might be all.

The cup stacking challenge was given to "tribes" on the first day. They had a stack of six styrofoam cups and the only tool they could use to make a pyramid was a rubber band that had four strings tied to it. They couldn't touch the cups. They couldn't touch the rubber band. They could only touch the strings.

After every group was successful, we talked about what had happened.

The group that finished first automatically gave themselves a new challenge. We decided that would be the right thing to do ANY time you finished early.

We talked about how to handle disagreements. There were lots of strategies: go with the majority, try everybody's idea, really listen to each other, and talk it out calmly. If only our world leaders would keep these strategies handy!

We talked about the importance of struggle, and when struggle is a good thing. I assured them that I am here to make sure that their struggles don't overwhelm them.

We listed lots of different ways to name "keep trying."

They have the option to modify a task I give them. In this case, one group chose a new place to work, but we talked about other ways they could modify a task, but still do what they were being asked to do. That might mean they do things in a different order, use different materials, or accomplish the same outcome in a way I haven't even thought of. I want my students to be active participants, always thinking of the best way...for them. And, of course, I have the option to intervene and modify their task for them. I had to do that for the last group to finish. They were so close and they knocked one of their last cups down. I picked it up and put it back so they could put the last cup in place. For the geography challenge, I asked for "focus groups," but the IS was in to support a few kids, so I allowed for a homogenous group of four instead of a mixed group of 3. This point is helping me model flexibility.

We ended with some general big ideas for group work in our classroom: BE DEPENDABLE, use TEAMWORK, and have FUN! I assured them that even though I planned to challenge them to work really hard this year, I would always do my best to try to make the work fun!

10 for 10 -- Picture Books for the First Weeks of School

I've used the same set of picture books (including these books about names) to start the school year for several years now. It's not a bad set, in fact, it's a GREAT set, but I challenged myself to pick 10 different picture books to start this new year in a new position, and to think about what I'll be saying to my students (through these books) about my hopes for them, and for our year together.

1. Choose kind.
Little Bird by Germano Zullo

2. Make friends, not enemies.
Enemy Pie (Reading Rainbow book) by Derek Munson

3. Be faithful to your friends.
Otis by Loren Long

4. Work hard to solve your problems...but don't forget to think about what your solution might do to others.
Stuck by Oliver Jeffers

5. Live in this moment. Be present.
You're Finally Here! by Mélanie Watt

6. Be yourself. No matter what.
Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed by Mo Willems

7. Be persistent. Believe in yourself. Follow your dreams.
Learning to Fly by Sebastian Meschenmoser

8. Know yourself. Be yourself. Follow your dreams. (And a special note to myself: make sure your "dance academy" has room for everyone.)
Brontorina by James Howe

9. Make memories, because memories make stories.
Roxaboxen by Alice McLerran

10. The world around us is amazing, awe-inspiring, and diverse. It is there for us to notice, learn about, and appreciate.
The Beetle Book by Steve Jenkins

Thank you to Cathy, at Reflect & Refine: Building a Learning Community, and Mandy, at Enjoy and Embrace Learning for sponsoring this 10 for 10 Picture Book event for the third year. Be sure you hide your credit cards and then go look at all the fabulous lists!