The First Six Days of School

(Disclaimer: I am a looping teacher. One of the joys of the second year of the loop is that there is a weave of connectedness to everything that happens in our classroom right from the start.)

The first book I read aloud this year was DOOBY DOOBY MOO by Doreen Cronin. Last year we read Click Clack Moo, Giggle Giggle Quack, Duck for President, Diary of a Worm, and Diary of a Spider, so predictions and connections were numerous and were rich with background knowledge about the farm, the farmer, and the duck. The kids loved how Cronin uses asterisk footnotes that sound just like the fine print in real life.

The asterisk footnotes led me to read WOLVES by Emily Gravett next. (Yes, this is the one I stole out of Franki's pile at Cover to Cover.) I won't spoil it for you, but the end of this book is similar in tone and style to Cronin's asterisk footnotes. My students were touchingly distressed by the first ending, and laughed hysterically at the sarcasm of the second ending. 10 years old and already so jaded!

After two picture books, I was ready for a novel, and we jumped right into GOSSAMER by Lois Lowry. I say "jumped right into" because we usually spend time doing what readers do when they choose a new book -- studying the cover, reading the blurbs on the back and on the flaps of the cover, thinking about all we might know about the author's other books. All I told them was that they should expect to be confused, but that one of the main characters was also confused and would be asking lots of the questions they would have. As I read the first 10 pages or so, we stopped often, trying to piece together the clues about who these creatures are and what they are doing. The way Lowry writes with such authority about these imaginary (??or are they real??) dream givers reminded us of the way one of the students in our class wrote about the alien cultures in the lunar system that she invented last year.

I'm still making my way through Katie Wood Ray's STUDY DRIVEN, but I have read enough to know that our first study in writing workshop will be of the interesting things punctuation can do in our writing. (Ray writes about such a study in a first grade class. Why re-invent the wheel, eh?) It seemed natural to use Cronin's asterisks as the example that would send some students off to gather other anchor texts for our study. They went right to Cronin's other books, so it looks like we'll be doing a combination study of how Cronin uses punctuation, and, oh, yeah, how a few other writers use it, too.

I tabbed this important statement in Ray's STUDY DRIVEN: "When students are just writing on their own in writing workshops, they must learn to answer this essential question, 'What have you read that is like what you are trying to make?' " As we reviewed what a writer needs to think about when planning a piece, one student offered up, "You need to know what you're going to make." (goosebumps) So as I circulated around the room and asked students what they had read that they thought their writing might be like, one student said she was planning to make a story that would be like DOOBY DOOBY MOO, set on a farm, with a farmer and some farm animals for the characters. Two boys have attempted to write humor in the style of CAPTAIN UNDERPANTS, but I'm going to send them back to Pilkey's books for more study. Their funniest joke so far is the one about the Barbies vs. Barneys: The Ultimate Battle video game that is rated M for Mature. The rest of the humor is gratuitous bathroom humor. Maybe they need to get some peer reviewers to look at their work, too. I could be way off on the bathroom humor.

Enough for tonight. I have to go make lunches for the week and then fall into bed and hope to get enough rest to tackle our first, full, five-days-in-a-row week of school, which will include both the unveiling of our science museum and curriculum night.

Poetry Friday!

I decided to feature two of my favorite professional books for teachers this week. If any of you know me, you know I am talking about Georgia Heard's books, FOR THE GOOD OF EARTH AND SUN: TEACHING POETRY and AWAKENING THE HEART: EXPLORING POETRY IN ELEMENTARY AND MIDDLE SCHOOL. Neither are new books, but they are books that I go back to every year to think about poetry teaching. I am a big fan of Georgia Heard's work. She is amazing and has helped so many teachers to teach poetry well. I used to dread the idea of getting kids to write poetry. But, after discovering FOR THE GOOD OF EARTH AND SUN years ago, we have a great time reading, writing and thinking about poems. She is a poet and teacher and her strategies for teaching poetry help kids (and teachers) to love the genre of poetry and to learn to write it well. I have found that studying poetry and language the way that Georgia Heard teaches us to, helps students improve their writing across genres. Georgia Heard is a poet who has also written several poetry books for kids, such as CREATURES OF EARTH, SEA, AND SKY, THIS PLACE I KNOW: POEMS OF COMFORT, and SONG OF MYSELF: AN ANTHOLOGY OF POEMS AND ART.

"Comments are the Lifeblood of Blogs"

I couldn't agree with Graham Wegner more.

Doug at Borderland shares some tips for organizing and tracking your comments...a little beyond my skill level right now, but maybe not yours...

Links for Teachers

I updated our generic and quirky "Links" section on the sidebar to (hopefully) be more useful to teachers who read here. Any other favorites you'd like us to consider?

archy and mehitabel

From the Don Marquis website: "Archy is a cockroach with the soul of a poet, and Mehitabel is an alley cat with a celebrated past -- she claims she was Cleopatra in a previous life. Together, cockroach and cat are the foundation of one of the most engaging collections of light poetry to come out of the twentieth century."


the lesson of the moth

By Don Marquis, in "archy and mehitabel," 1927


i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

Happy Blogday!

We got tagged by A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy for BlogDay 2006. It sounds like fun, so here goes:

Happy BlogDay 2006! Here's how you can participate:

1. Find five new blogs that you find interesting.

2. Notify the five bloggers that you're recommending them on BlogDay 2006.

3. Write a BlogDay post today with a short description of each blog, and a link back to each one.

4. Add a BlogDay 2006 Technorati tag and/or link back to the Technorati BlogDay 2006 page.

5. Link to the BlogDay website.

So here are my five blog choices:

a wrung sponge She's thoughtful and funny, takes great pictures, and is a home-grown one-woman environmental movement.

Lowry Updates Lois Lowry is one of my favorite children's authors, and finding her blog made my day! In between the release of her books, I can still enjoy her fine writing (and smile at the antics of Alfie).

blog of proximal development Here is a PhD candidate whose thesis is on the use of blogging communities in education. Our school district's Framework for Learning stands on the shoulders of Vygotsky's "Zones of proximal development" and as a beginning blogger, I have palpably felt the edges of my ZPDs as I build my skills!

Perpetual Thursday She has the MOST AMAZING yearly reading lists. I aspire to be as widely read as she is, and as organized in my list-making. She's also the one who turned me on to Library Thing.

GottaBook He hooked me with his Ogden Nash-esque poem about Pluto's demotion. I haven't even scratched the surface of his Fibs, Oddaptations, and Poems. Fun reading here!

More On Summer Reading Lists

There seems to be more going on with the Summer Reading Requirements this summer. I read at Fuse #8 about a school district that suspended 519 students on the first day of school for not completing their Summer Reading and assignment. They were happy because this was down almost 50% from last year's suspensions.

The interesting thing was --of the 519 students, all but about 93 came back the next day with their reading assignments completed. So, do we really think those kids went home and in one day completed a summer's worth of reading?

I did a bit of investigating and found the school district's website. They have a good goal. There is big research out there that supports the idea that kids need to read in the summer. I totally agree with that. So, this district had signs all over town, reminding kids of their Summer Reading. So, from what I read, if a chid went to a local restaurant, there might be a sign reminding them that they had to read over the summer.

The teachers seemed to be very smart about this assignment. From the lists and assignments I found, they really worked hard to help kids have choice in what they read, inviting them to read books on the list or to find their own. They also gave choice within the project. Although the district announced that the assignment should be turned in on the first day of school and would count as a big test grade, the teachers created good lists and thoughtful projects.

I think where we are going wrong with all of these summer reading lists is in the message to students that you have to "work" in the summer too. It can't be good to have kids thinking that they "have to" read and that reading is "work". Instead, as teachers and administrators, we should help kids discover the amazing experience that reading is, so that they use the summer to catch up on the books that they have been dying to read. I would think a good goal would be for kids to get excited about an event like the 48 hour book challenge sponsored by the brilliant Mother Reader. How many of us were extremely excited about the idea of giving 48 hours to ONLY reading? This is the kind of reader I think we want to come out of our schools. Imagine if our high schoolers were reading for 48 hours, writing about their reading, to a real audience, as they went. Maybe if we spent our time helping kids find the right books so they become readers during the school year, maybe if instead of assignments, kids could meet over the summer to discuss and share the great books they found, we could keep kids reading over the summer AND help them become lifelong readers.

I think so often, we are trying to get kids to "prove" that they read. In my lifetime, I have turned in book reports on books I hadn't read that scored higher grades than reports on books I had read. It is easy to "fake" these assignments that are designed to "prove" that you read. What messages are we giving our children if they think reading is such an awful thing that we are going to check to see whether or not they really did it?

I found a science museum in my basement

It was in a box labeled "School--Treasures." Inside was the snake skin and snake eggs (hatched, thankfully), the star fish, the sand dollars, the fossils, the skulls and bones, the flamingo feathers, and lots of other artifacts of nature that I've collected (and been given) over the years. A science museum, waiting to happen!

Each of my 5th graders will choose an item from the "Treasures" box and will be charged with writing the informational blurb that will explain it to a visitor to our museum. This will take research (non-fiction reading benchmark), writing (all benchmarks of the writing standard), and scientific habits of mind (scientific inquiry benchmark). Valid content--cha-ching!

It will be months before the art teacher has a display ready for the shelves along the windows in the commons, so we'll have the space we need. Logistics--cha-ching!

In Friday's USA TODAY there was an article about museums that are creating podcast audio tours of their exhibits. We can create a podcast of our museum in GarageBand. Integration of technology--cha-ching!

One model that we will use for our writing will come from online virtual science museums. (The Smithsonian's 150th Traveling Exhibition, and the Field Museum's Sue at The Field Museum are two that I think will give us good writing models.)

But I'd also like to use children's books that model the kind of writing we will do to briefly explain the items in the museum. I think EYEWITNESS books will work well. They have the overview in the top left corner, and each item on the page has a short, explanatory caption.

Do you know any other children's books that would be a good model for our science museum writing, OR books about going to a museum (science or otherwise)? I would appreciate your input!

Great New Nonfiction Picture Books

I just found 2 great, brand-new, nonfiction picture books! The first one is a great one about estimation. It is called GREAT ESTIMATIONS (get it?) and it is by Bruce Goldstone. It has great, colorful photographs and invites kids to estimate something on each page. I like a lot of things about this book. First of all, the cover is inviting. Who wouldn't want to pick it up? Secondly, it really teaches kids how to estimate well. It teaches readers the difference between a random guess and a good estimate. It shows them a strategy and then gives them a photo to practice on. It also includes hints to help you out if you still need help. The photos are very fun. The reader gets to estimate lots of things (macaroni, Cheerios, doll shoes, rabbits). It feels a bit like the "I Spy" books because it is so eye-catching and interactive. You can spend lots of time on each of the pages. Love this one! GREAT ESTIMATIONS 

The other book is called EXTREME ANIMALS: THE TOUGHEST CREATURES ON EARTH by Nicola Davies. This book is a fun book about animals that have adapted to extreme conditions. The book is a great size (small) and the illustrations are fun and comical. Lots of great information for readers about animals and their environments. The book is organized in stand-alone pages so kids can read about one animal at a time if they don't want to read it from cover to cover. I think this is a great nonfiction book for middle and upper elementary kids. It is packed with pretty cool info! (If you get this one, make sure to take off the cover and look at the illustrations underneath. The endpages are pretty fun too!)

Poetry Friday--Aunt Eweginia

As I was getting the classroom ready for school, I came across one of my favorite poetry books and had to reread some of the poems. The play on language is fun throughout the book. It is called WOOL GATHERING: A SHEEP FAMILY REUNION by Lisa Wheeler. Below is one of my favorite poems from the book. Enjoy! Aunt Eweginia Eweginia is a Ewesful Ewe. Just wait, Ewe'll see what she can do. She'll knit Ewe scarves, she'll knit Ewe gloves. There's nothing more Eweginia loves, than knitting white wool Eweniforms or woolen socks to keep Ewe warm. Ewe mustn't watch Ewe see, that's rude. Eweginia knits till she is nude. By Lisa Wheeler By the way, speaking of Poetry Friday, I wanted to share something we do in our classroom every Friday--called "Poetry Friday" actually. I wanted kids to have time to relax and enjoy poetry with friends in the same way that we often enjoy donuts and coffee in the teachers' lounge on Fridays. So, we have Poetry Friday for the first 15-20 minutes at the beginning of the day on Fridays. Parents sign up to bring in a breakfast snack and drink (donuts and juice, muffins and milk, fruit, etc.) Kids come in, grab a snack and have fun with poetry--sitting around reading poetry with friends. I have done this for 2 years and kids quickly come to love poetry when they have this time to eat good food, and enjoy great poetry with their friends. I have about 100-200 poetry books in the classroom so they always find new poems to read. And when you eat donuts while you are reading poetry, you equate the two and begin to love poetry! (the Pavlov effect)