Poetry Friday -- Walt Whitman

Unsplash photo by Echo Grid

First this:

Poetry Ruined My Life

From the essay: 

I still have the Leaves of Grass that dad gave me for Christmas in ninth grade. “Whitman loved much that you love—beauty, openness, honesty, freedom, nature. Inside here is his “Song of the Open Road.” You are entering your open road years. Demand much of them; give them fully of yourself and you will have come to terms with being.”

Then, this:

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (INCIDENTAL COMICS)


And some more Walt Whitman on Zen Pencils, just for good measure.



Irene has the Poetry Friday Roundup at Live Your Poem.

Making Comics with Bitstrips

Near the end of the school year, I introduced my students to Bitstrips. "Introduced" means I showed them where to find all the tools, gave them the login code and got out of the way.

After spending a ton of time creating their avatars, they got down to the (funny) business of making comics. You can imagine that with an available background of a bathroom, there were plenty of cartoons that would appeal mostly to a 10 year-old sense of humor. What surprised me the most were the comics that captured a moment in our classroom

or a moment in their lives

or something completely random that shows they were playing with the tools and wound up making something that made some kind of sense!

Every year, I have students who read graphic novels and want to make their own in writing workshop. I've never had success supporting these students because of the limitations of students to draw their own stories, the limitations of the digital tools I had tried in the past, and the lack of an accessible mentor text for beginning graphic novelists.

I think this coming year might be the year of the student-created graphic novel. Instead of renewing the three subscriptions to magazines no students in my classroom have read for the past two years, I am going to pay for a subscription to Bitstrips (digital tool -- √).

And I'm going to share this book (mentor text -- √) with my writers as a graphic novel/comic strip mentor text:

G-Man: Learning to Fly

by Chris Giarrusso

Image Comics, 2012

The book starts with a longer story, but the ones I really want to share with/study with my students are the 1-2 page "Comic Bits" and the two-panel "Mean Brother/Idiot Bother" strips. Every budding Kazu Kibuishi has to start somewhere, right?

Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking

Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking
A Toon Book
by Philippe Coudray
Candlewick/Toon Books, 2011
review copy provided by the publisher



I love Toon Books. Their catch-phrase is "TOON BOOKS: Bringing new readers to the pleasure of COMICS!"

Benjamin Bear is identified as a Level Two: "easy-to-read comics for beginning readers." However, the sophistication of the humor makes it a fun book for readers of all ages and all levels.

Each page is a story. A short story, but a complete story, with a beginning, middle and end. They are funny stories -- almost sight gags, since there is so little text. One of my favorites is a three-panel story, "The Biggest Fish." Bear says to Rabbit, "A shark takes up as much room as a whale." In the next panel, Rabbit asks, "How?" In the bottom panel (2/3 of the page) Bear and Rabbit stand at the shore looking down into the ocean, where all the fish have retreated to the edges of the panel, leaving a whale-sized empty space around a shark. Another favorite is "The Maze." Bear gets lost in a maze, but luckily, he has an apple with him. If you're wondering, "How could an apple help him?" you have a sense of the quirky humor in these stories. (Sorry. You'll have to read it to find out how the apple gets him out of the maze. Make your prediction. Then go get the book!)

Because they are single-page stories, this book would make a great mentor text for kids working with Comic Life or the Comic Book app to create their own single-page stories. Courdray uses a variety of panel sizes and combinations in each of his comics, and it would benefit young writers to study his panel choices and think hard about why he made his choices.


Also reviewed at No Flying, No Tights: A Graphic Novel Review Website

The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung-Fu Cavemen From the Future

The Adventures of Ook and Gluk: Kung Fu Cavemen From the Future
The second graphic novel by George Beard and Harold Hutchins,
the creators of CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS (aka Dav Pilkey)
Scholastic (Blue Sky Press), 2010
Review copy purchased with my very own money.

I'm sorry to have to tell the Newbery Committee this, but I'm afraid that while this book will never even be considered for the Newbery Medal, it is likely to be the most popular book in my fourth grade classroom in the first weeks of school.

As a public service to all nervous teachers, parents, librarians and grandparents, I have read this book cover to cover and I pronounce it to be hysterically funny.  Laugh out loud funny. I also would like to assure the above audiences that I do not believe that the spelling mistakes that George and Harold make in their comics will in any way cause children's brains to rot and impair their ability to learn to spell correctly or write coherently. If the children who read this book don't know that there are misspelled words, they'll still be able to understand and enjoy the story. If the children who read this book DO know that there are misspelled words, well, hooray that they can recognize the misspellings. They'll still be able to understand and enjoy the story.

And while we're on the subject of spelling, phonics, and understanding a story, Pilkey totally rewards his readers for sounding out long (but not hard) words. One character is named Chief Goppernopper.  He is variously referred to as Chief Grasshopper, Gobstopper, and Gumwrapper (to name a few).  Pilkey goes off on extended riffs of rhyming with Gluk's name (rhymes with duck, stuck, truck...) and Ook's name (rhymes with duke, spook, kook...).

There are kid-level allusions to popular culture: the whole section where they learn Kung Fu in the future hearkens back to Karate Kid, and there are chapter title pages that are Star Wars and Jurassic Park take-offs.  There are puns, like on Flip-o-rama #8:  "Mechasaurus Wrecks!" (Tyrannosaurus Rex?) where the robot dinosaurs destroy a tower. There are, as in the Captain Underpants books, billboards that get their meaning changed, in this case when they are zapped by futuristic ray guns in a chase scene. For example, "I went to BOB'S POOLS to buy my pool! Now I dive in my pool, swim under the waves, and wear a BIG smile!!!" becomes "I went POO poo in my underwear".  Besides the potty humor, there is a decent amount of barf humor. Kid humor. Spot-on kid humor.

Find out more at Dav Pilkey's website, and at the Scholastic website. But most of all, don't be afraid of this book.

Fun Finds

Fruity Cocktails Count As Health Food, Study Finds. "The study did not address whether adding a little cocktail umbrella enhanced the effects." Monica has a fun piece of fiction (I hope?) inspired by a quote in the New York Times. You can make your own comics at Make Belief Comix, and at ToonDoo. If you make your comic at ToonDoo, you can share it with the world on your blog! Voila!