KITCHENAID

Kohl's was having a sale and
I wanted a new mixer.
The one I received as a wedding present twenty plus years ago
Could no longer keep up with my baking.
Happy Birthday to me! (from my parents:-)
Everyone had suggestions on what to bake first with the
New red mixer. We decided on cupcakes from
A favorite baking blog
I follow.
Delicious!

Poem #4 -- The Last Day of Spring Break

Reality hits.

Back to work: grading, planning.

The end is in sight.

This haiku goes out to all the teachers who today will drag out the bag of school work they brought home and do at least a little bit of it. It even goes out to those amazing souls who didn't start their vacation until they had everything in place for the first week back. They, too, will have to set their alarm tonight for the first time in a week.

Poem #3 -- Abecedarian Cupcake Lessons

ABECEDARIAN CUPCAKE LESSONS

After

Baking dozens of

Cupcakes this week, I've learned a few Life Lessons:

Delight in the process as much as the product.

Each ingredient is as important as the next.

Forget about the clock,

Go with the flow,

Have fun.

Improvise

Joyously (and cover your mistakes with frosting).

Keep working until the

Last bowl is clean and dry and back on the shelf.

Measure ingredients with precision, but do

Not forget that there are times when

Observation is more

Powerful than

Quantifiable amounts or

Results.

Stop

Tasting the frosting when buttercream becomes

Unremarkable.

Value your

Work enough to make the

eXtra effort worth the time

You put into the project. Be

Zealous, but never a zealot.

cupcakes, photos and poem by Mary Lee Hahn, copyright 2010

Poem #2 -- Learning

photo by: Riviera Fitness Centerpoint, AL

LEARNING CURVE: SPINNING CLASS

Week One:

Fell off the bike.

(You can't coast.

She told us that.

I tried anyway.)

Week Two:

Couldn't keep up.

(My legs burned.

Sweat poured.)

Week Three:

Stayed on the bike.

Stayed with the class.

Went shopping for cycling shorts.

by Mary Lee Hahn, copyright 2010

The rest of the story: didn't buy cycling shorts, but after Week Four can tell a difference in my kick when I swim my mile. The best of the story: did a two-hour ride yesterday on a moving bicycle in the sun under the bright blue April sky along the river. The thrill of classroom learning pales in comparison to the application of learning in the real world.

The Poetry Friday roundup this week is at Book Aunt.

Poem #1 -- Teaching

photo by Creativity+ Timothy K. Hamilton

YOU ARE A TEACHER

You are a teacher

a believer in potential

a guide

a mentor to children of many backgrounds

and diverse cultures.

You lead them

and love them

and you seek to send them

on the most beautiful path they can walk.

Who is guiding you?

by Mary Lee Hahn, copyright 2010

(found poem -- in an ad for Alma Flor Ada's Smiles and Butterflies newsletter)

March Mosaic

March's mosaic features lots of small surprises: a tail and a nose peeking from under birthday wrap, a ladybug walking across the snow, a hawk in the tree across the street, the first spring blooms, geese on a rooftop, tree trunks that look like elephant legs, goldfish in a TV set.

Every month, I've got lots of snapshots and only a few really well-composed, crisply focused photographs. I'm pretty sure that's what it will be like when I roll out April's 30 poems -- there are bound to be some lame clunkers, but I'm hoping for a few I can really be proud of.

Here's the schedule of Poetry Month Events around the Kidlitosphere:

Gregory K. will once again host 30 Poets/30 Days with previously unpublished poems by favorite children's authors.

Tricia Stohr-Hunt will interview 30 children's poets, beginning with Mary Ann Hoberman, the US Children's Poet Laureate. The Poetry Makers list is stellar!

Jone MacCulloch shares Thirty Days, Thirty Students, Thirty Poems: original poems by students. Jone will also again offer the Poetry Postcard Project where original student poems are sent out on decorated postcards. Request yours now.

Jama Rattigan is posting original poems & favorite recipes by some of the Poetry Friday regulars.

At A Wrung Sponge, Andromeda will share a "haiga" (photo and haiku) each day.

Kelly Fineman at Writing and Ruminating will continue the Building a Poetry Collection series she began last year -- selecting a poem a day in a kind of personal Poetry Tag (see Sylvia Vardell's version below) and providing analysis. I call this The University of Kelly Fineman because I learn so much in each post!

Sylvia Vardell will be inviting poets to play Poetry Tag. She will invite poets to "play" along by offering a poem for readers to enjoy, then she will "tag" a poet who shares her/his own poem THAT IS CONNECTED to the previous poem in SOME way—by a theme, word, idea, tone-- and offers a sentence or two explaining that connection. The poets have responded enthusiastically: J. Patrick Lewis, X. J. Kennedy, Rebecca Kai Dotlich, Avis Harley, Lee Bennett Hopkins, Joyce Sidman, and more!

Laura at Author Amok is highlighting the poets laureate of all 50 states this month! Fun Fun!

Laura Salas will post a children's poem per day from a poetry book she loves.

Lee Wind is publishing many new Teen voices during April for National Poetry Month. GLBTQ Teen Poetry.

ORIGINAL POEM-A-DAY CHALLENGE

Checks these blogs daily for new original poems by the following people:

Susan Taylor Brown

Andromeda Jazmon

Jone MacCulloch

Elizabeth Moore

April Halprin Wayland

Liz Scanlon

Blog Vacation

For the first time in four years, we're taking a vacation from the blog during our spring break from school. We're setting aside our day jobs and our joint hobby so that we can:

plan our presentations for WLU and Choice Literacy
do taxes
make 90 90th birthday cupcakes
shop for a new kitchen floor
read
read some more
spend time with friends

work on final paper for library course
breakfast and lunch with friends
plan some summer workshops
read
exercise
put lotion on my face twice a day
shop
get a few rooms clean
try to figure out Evernote

Mary Lee will be back with her Poetry Month Original Poem-a-Day About Teaching Or Learning on April 1, and we'll be both be back to work and to the blog on Monday, April 5.

Poetry Friday -- Cake

three-layer from-scratch chocolate cake by Mary Lee Hahn...so's the photo

From CHOCOLATE CAKE

by Michael Rosen

(the whole poem is here)

...you know how the icing on top
is all shiny and it cracks as you
bite into it,
and there's that other kind of icing in
the middle
and it sticks to your hands and you
can lick your fingers
and lick your lips
oh it's lovely.
yeah.

Anyway,
once we had this chocolate cake for tea
and later I went to bed
but while I was in bed
I found myself waking up
licking my lips
and smiling.
I woke up proper.
'The chocolate cake.'
It was the first thing
I thought of.

I could almost see it
so I thought,
what if I go downstairs
and have a little nibble, yeah?

It was all dark
everyone was in bed
so it must have been really late
but I got out of bed,
crept out of the door

there's always a creaky floorboard, isn't there?

Past Mum and Dad's room,
careful not to tread on bits of broken toys
or bits of Lego
you know what it's like treading on Lego
with your bare feet,

yowwww
shhhhhhh

downstairs
into the kitchen
open the cupboard
and there it is
all shining.

So I take it out of the cupboard
put it on the table
and I see that
there's a few crumbs lying about on the plate,
so I lick my finger and run my finger all over the crumbs
scooping them up
and put them into my mouth.

oooooooommmmmmmmm

nice.

Then
I look again
and on one side where it's been cut,
it's all crumbly.

So I take a knife
I think I'll just tidy that up a bit,
cut off the crumbly bits
scoop them all up
and into the mouth

oooooommm mmmm
nice.

Look at the cake again.

That looks a bit funny now,
one side doesn't match the other
I'll just even it up a bit, eh?

You know the rest, right? Go ahead and admit it, you've straightened up your share of cakes in your life!!! :-)

Today, the first day of spring break, in between reading poetry posts, I'll be baking this cake for a friend's birthday party tonight. The roundup is at The Drift Record this week.

ToonDoo Spaces

My fourth graders have been creating cartoons at school and at home in our password protected ToonDoo Space for several months now. It has given them an alternative way to publish their writing in a "public" space where their classmates can comment on their work. They have made toons about themselves, about their theme, about how to have good sportsmanship in P.E., about their cat, and about books they've read. They've made up stories about ninjas, space travel, the Oscars, superheroes, and the Olympics.

We've had great conversations about Internet safety, commenting etiquette, and appropriate social networking behavior.

Recently, the staff at ToonDoo Spaces asked if my class would create a testimonial for them to run on a loop in their booth at a conference in Singapore. When I pitched the idea to the class, the response was a unanimous "YES!"

Each child created three slides in Keynote, created some toons especially for their slides, and worked to clearly communicate what they like best about ToonDoo. Having an authentic audience outside of our class lifted the level of their work in a way I never would have expected.

My favorite story from our testimonial project is the slide that shows the graph. The student who created it found a slide with a placeholder graph in the masters for the theme he had chosen. He was going to use that slide in his set. "You can't use that slide," I told him. "That's fake data. That doesn't say anything real about ToonDoo. If you want to have a graph, you have to gather some data."

So he did.

He interviewed the class, tallied up his results, went back to the slide with the graph, and with just a little help from me, got it to show his REAL data. How often do we get to hand a child a challenge that perfectly matches their skills and their will to meet or exceed our expectations?

Fun stuff.

Here is a short version of what we sent to our ToonDoo friends:

Artsy-Fartsy

Artsy-Fartsy

by Karla Oceanak

illustrated by Kendra Spanjer

Bailiwick Press, 2009

review copy provided by the publisher

Greg Heffley and Ellie McDoodle, move over -- Aldo Zelnick is here!

Aldo's grandmother, an artist, gives him a sketchbook at the beginning of summer break so he can keep track of all his artsy-fartsy ideas. Aldo does plenty of sketching, but he's also interested in words, thanks to his neighbor (a retired English teacher), Mr. Mot. It's Mr. Mot who gets Aldo started keeping track of all the interesting "A" words he uses, beginning with "artsy-fartsy". There's even a word gallery at the end of the book with all of Aldo's "A" words. Most of the words are defined (except for words like "antidisestablishmentarianism," which he has no idea what it means but likes it because it's so long), and some are illustrated (like the toilet beside "ad nauseum").

In this first book in the series, we meet 10 year-old Aldo's family -- his grandmother the painter, his mother the birder, his father, whose hobby is baking, and his 14 year-old athletic brother. Aldo's best friend Jack is a rock hound. They all live in Colorado.

Aldo and Jack make a fort at the edge of the park near their house, under a big blue spruce whose branches grow almost all the way to the ground. Aldo leaves his notebook in a crook of the branches. When he comes back, he finds drawings in his notebook! Someone has found their fort, found his notebook, and DRAWN IN IT!

Finding the culprit (who strikes again at least once more) is the main story line in ARTSY-FARTSY, but there are plenty of entertaining sub-stories. In one, Aldo, who would rather watch TV and play video games, is forced to play baseball. It starts badly (and humorously) but has a surprising turn in the end.

Aldo is a character I like a lot, and I think kids will like, too. The second book in the series, BOGUS, is due out this spring, and promises to be filled with "more hand-drawn comics, rock-candy B words, and accounts of his everyday adventures." Looks like Aldo's dad's baking will be a key part of the story in BOGUS.