I LOVE the new book, Ralph Tells a Story  by Abby Hanlon. I ordered it when I heard about it because I can always use new books about kids' writing.  I like to have them handy for minilessons ans small group work. There are lots of books that fit this category but this one is definitely my new favorite.

This book is about writing workshop and poor Ralph who can't think of any ideas.  He spends a long time staring at the blank page, getting drinks of water and asking to go to the restroom.  He just can't think of anything to write.   Of course, as expected, his writer's block is cured but it is cured because he is in the midst of an amazing writing workshop. But the magical thing that ends his writer's block happens during the share session of the workshop--that important time where writers grow.

This is the first time I have seen a book that so perfectly captures the Writers' Workshop.  It captures the joy and the authenticity of this time in a classroom.  It captures the teacher's role and it captures the energy. It captures the conversations and the realities. Somehow in the illustrations, the author/illustrator has captured it all. (The back flap says that she was a classroom teacher, so maybe that's how she captures it so well!

In my opinion, this is a must have. Young children will love it and I am sure it will start great conversations with my upper elementary students too!

And don't forget to check out the end papers!

Poetry Friday: A Passing Hail

A Passing Hail

By James Whitcomb Riley

Let us rest ourselves a bit!

Worry?-- wave your hand to it --

Kiss your finger-tips and smile

It farewell a little while.

Weary of the weary way

We have come from Yesterday,

Let us fret not, instead,

Of the wary way ahead.

Let us pause and catch our breath

On the hither side of death,

While we see the tender shoots

Of the grasses -- not the roots,--

While we yet look down -- not up --

To seek out the buttercup

And the daisy where they wave

O'er the green home of the grave.

Let us launch us smoothly on

The soft billows of the lawn,

And drift out across the main

Of our childish dreams again:

Voyage off, beneath the trees,

O'er the field's enchanted seas,

Where the lilies are our sails,

And our sea-gulls, nightingales:

Where no wilder storm shall beat

Than the wind that waves the wheat,

And no tempest-burst above

The old laughs we used to love:

Lose all troubles -- gain release,

Languor, and exceeding peace,

Cruising idly o'er the vast,

Calm mid-ocean of the Past.

Let us rest ourselves a bit!

Worry? -- Wave your hand to it --

Kiss your finger-tips and smile

It fare well a little while. 

All I can manage this week is a passing hail. If I could pick the place to sit with you and rest ourselves a bit, it might be Winan's Chocolates in German Village. Doesn't get much better than that...unless you are in Belgium, of course!

Renee continues the candy theme with a yummy array of Poetry Friday posts at No Water River.

What Keeps You Going?

Teaching is really hard work.

Not only is it hard, it is relentless. We start most every morning with a meeting, so we better be ready to roll when the students walk in the door. We have short lunch periods (usually accompanied by a duty) and a planning period that is never equal to the amount of work that needs to be done in that time. We spend our days teaching, monitoring, questioning, noticing, grouping, helping, differentiating, showing, telling, encouraging, listening, improvising, answering, documenting...and every now and then we get to sit down for a minute.

So what keeps you going?

For me, it's my recess duty. Fifteen minutes spent outside in the fresh air rejuvenates me. Sure, I'd rather not have the duty, but without that duty, I'd go all day without stepping outside. I love the young naturalists who catch grasshoppers and bring them to show me, and who wonder what kind of bush that is over by the swings that has the red berries on it (Yew -- I looked it up on Google and I'll tell them at recess tomorrow). I love the kickball game when it's going well, and I even love slowly but surely teaching kids in conflict to use their words and talk it out before jumping to conclusions and assigning blame.

What else keeps me going? Reading Elephant and Piggie books with my new-to-the-U.S. ELL student from Saudi Arabia. She's a sponge. She's picking up lots of oral language on her own, but she needs me to (begs me to) sit beside her with Gerald and Piggie so she can echo read with me.

The readers at the other end of the spectrum in my two language arts classes fuel me, too. The ones who have read every Lunch Lady book like they were starving, and the ones who have so much to say after we read Capture the Flag during read aloud.

And I'm energized by my vision of what my language arts classes are going to be like in a few more weeks, when the norms are fully established, the fall diagnostics and assessments are completed, and we really dig in and begin the work of growing readers and writers. We're not there now, but we're going to get there.

What keeps you going?

IT'S MONDAY! WHAT ARE YOU READING?

This week, our class decided to join in the fun of IT'S MONDAY! WHAT ARE YOU READING! on our class blog. Check it out at Learning Together in 4th Grade!

Poetry Friday -- Stars

Flickr Creative Commons photo by Mouser NerdBot

Stars

If you never
venture
into the dark
you'll never know the stars.

Venture
away from human lights:
look up, look well, look far.

Into the dark
go without fear:
the stars wink down at you.

You'll never know the stars
unless
you change your point of view.


© Mary Lee Hahn, 2012

I'm (quite) a few weeks behind on Tricia's Poetry Stretches. This is my trimeric, from the August 20th Stretch.  The pattern is abcd, b_ _, c_ _, d_ _.  I gave myself the further challenge of making it rhyme.

This poem goes out to Orion, my buddy who watches over me August-December when I walk at 5:30 in the morning.

This week, Diane has the Poetry Friday roundup at Random Noodling.

Nonfiction From Around the World

Suryia and Roscoe: The True Story of an Unlikely Friendship

by Bhagavan "Doc" Antle with Thea Feldman

Photographs by Barry Bland

Henry Holt, 2011

The setting of this book is an endangered animal preserve in North Carolina, but Orangutans are found in the wild in only Borneo and Sumatra, so we'll keep it here in our little collection of nonfiction from around the world. 

This book caught my eye at Cover to Cover. I am developing a small collection of books about animals that are unlikely friends. After I opened it and read it, I knew I had to have it. The photography is fantastic, and the story is told in a simple narrative style. This is a book that reluctant nonfiction readers will want to pick up and will be able to read all the way through.

Lighting Our World: A Year of Celebrations

by Catherine Rondina

illustrated by Jacqui Oakley

Kids Can Press, 2012

review copy provided by the publisher

The use of lights in all of the typical winter holidays has always been a unifying way to talk about the celebrations from different cultures.

Now, with Lighting Our World, we have a whole YEAR full of celebrations from many countries and cultures of the world...all of which feature the use of light! From Up Helly Aa in Scotland in January, to Inti Raymi in Cusco, Peru in June, to Guy Fawkes Day in New Zealand in November, this book has light-filled holidays for every month of the year!

Mimi's Village: And How Basic Health Care Transformed It (CitizenKid)

by Katie Smith Milway

illustrated by Eugenie Fernandes

Kids Can Press (CitizenKid), 2012

review copy provided by the publisher

Mimi lives in a village in Kenya where clean water is not easily accessible, mosquitoes carry malaria, and the health clinic is a several-hour walk away. 

After a visit to the clinic when Mimi's sister sickens after drinking some unboiled water from the stream, Mimi suggests to her father that if he builds a clinic, maybe a health worker will come to their village. After a year of work, Mimi's dream comes true.

This narrative nonfiction story, with suggestions for ways kids can help provide simple, but effective resources like bed nets, will inspire budding social activists to make the world a better place for ALL people.

IT'S MONDAY! WHAT ARE YOU READING? --CLASSROOM EDITION

So, I thought it would be more fun to share a few of the books we read in our classroom this week. Every book on this list is a MUST-HAVE, CAN'T-DO-WITHOUT book!

Thanks to Jen and Kellee for hosting IT'S MONDAY! WHAT ARE YOU READING?

In read aloud, we are reading Capture the Flag by Kate Messner. This is the perfect pick for 4th graders. They love the story and are excited about the mystery. We have had fun talking about the characters!  The setting of an airport is perfect.

I launched this week's Writing Workshop with a new picture book that I fell in love with immediately. Laugh-Out-Loud Baby by Tony Johnston is one of my new favorites.  This is the story of a baby who laughs out loud for the firs time The whole family comes to celebrate.  The language is amazing and the illustrations by Stephen Gammell are incredible. This book ranks right up there withThe Relatives Came for me. I loved the author's note at the end of the book that talks about the tradition of celebrating a baby's first laugh. This book was a great book for writing workshop. It is also a great book to read when you need a smile. A definite new favorite!


We also read A Bus Called Heaven by Bob Graham. I love all of his work and this is the newest one of his I've found.  We have been talking about what it means to be a leader and this book invited great conversation about what it meant to be a leader.  I had shown this video clip earlier in the week and talked about leadership around that. This book naturally invited a conversation around what it means to make a difference, to be a leader. It was great talk. I loved what the kids said about being a leader and about making a positive difference.

I also shared another old favorite that I LOVE. All the Places to Love by Patricia Maclachlan is one of my all time favorite picture books and I love it every time I share it with a new group of children.  It is one of those books I could read a million times, no doubt!  The conversations around the book is always a rich one.

And I shared  Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs: As Retold by Mo Willems. We had a great time with this book. They were thrilled to have the new hot-off-the-press book and loved the humor and the way the story was told. And of course, we had fun finding the pigeon. Mo Willems just doesn't let us down--whether we are 5 years old, 10 years old or much much older.

Poetry Friday in the Classroom

For my mini-lesson today in Reading Workshop, I'll project the 5th grade Week 2 poem from
The Poetry Friday Anthology (Common Core ALL GRADES (K-5) e-book) (The Poetry Friday Anthology E-book Series (Grade-by-Grade))
It's a fun poem by Irene Latham in the voice of a backpack. It will get us talking about personification.

And about that talk...I've had great success with what Ellin Keene calls "Open Forum" in her book, Talk About Understanding: Rethinking Classroom Talk to Enhance Comprehension
When we're sitting in a circle (in chairs or on the floor) and I call for an "Open Forum" discussion, it lets the students know that they will "pass the conversational ball" from student to student, rather than every comment going through me. They do not raise their hands to take turns. After the first person speaks, the next person says that person's name, along with a statement of agreement or disagreement, or some other conversational segue. ("Billy, I agree with what you said about your backpack. I had the same thing happen one time...")

During the independent reading time on Poetry Friday, students read poetry alone or with a partner (or two). The goal is for everyone to participate in the oral reading of a poem at the end of the period during share time. Eventually, we will work together to develop a rubric to use for self- and teacher-evaluation of their presentations, but at the beginning, it's all for fun.

Last week, I limited the students to only the books in my poetry collection by Douglas Florian and J. Patrick Lewis, so this week I will choose books by topic -- perhaps only putting out books of nature poetry from which to choose. And, in keeping with the poem in the mini-lesson, we'll keep our eyes peeled for examples of personification the poems we read.

Poetry Friday is fairly informal and definitely a lot of fun. Even if you don't have a large collection of poetry in your classroom library, you can check 20-30 books out of your school or public library and be ready to have fun reading poetry once a week throughout the school year. Infect your class with your enthusiasm for having fun with poetry!

For fun with Poetry Friday on the blogs, go to Katya's blog, Write. Sketch. Repeat. for the Poetry Friday roundup of posts.

BAFFLING AND BIZARRE INVENTIONS by Jim Murphy

Sally Oddi at Cover to Cover shared this new, fun Nonfiction book with me-Baffling & Bizarre Inventions by Jim Murphy.  This book is fun and one that can be revisited over and over.  The book is in a multiple-choice/quiz format. Each page gives the reader an illustration of a bizarre invention, a little piece of information and 4 choices of what the invention is. When you turn the page, you see the correct answer, along with a few paragraphs about the information. This may include the reason for the invention, info on how the invention worked,

The title definitely fits this book. Every time I sit down with it, I open to a random page and am amazed at the invention shared.

This is a fun book and kids will have fun reading it alone or with friends. It would also make a great short read aloud for classrooms.  During those 5 minute times between activities or when lining up for lunch, kids will love making a guess and learning about one of these inventions. It won't take much to get kids hooked on this book

Blogs to Follow

It was a great first week of school and we are ready to start thinking about publishing online. This summer, I thought through the pieces I wanted for my 4th grade writers. I am laughing now because it seemed much more doable in July!  I know it is doable, I just need to take steps in the first six weeks of school and be thoughtful about how we get everything in place.

I want my students to be connected writers AND I also want them to be connected readers.  This week, we'll start doing some online reading. As a shared experience, I want to spend time with students reading blogs and understanding the whole genre of blogging.  I want them to see a variety of blogs, to see what is possible, to learn about commenting, etc.  So, I put out a request on Twitter, asking for classroom blogs that my class might follow. I got a great list from teachers everywhere. I also found some great blogs by kids and/or for kids that I'll add to the collection. I am trying to keep a list for now as I know we'll find some we revisit more often.  Many are just getting started as it is the beginning of the year. Others are older and haven't had new postings for a while. But all of the blogs on this list will help students begin to see the possibilities in blogging. This week will be about immersing ourselves in blogs and what they are about.   It will be about seeing the possibilities open up as we learn from and with people all over the world.

This is the list of blogs I have so far. Thanks to everyone for sharing their blogs with me on Twitter. If you have a classroom blog or student blog you'd like to add, just leave it in the comments. I had a great time pulling this list together--so much to learn from each blog that I visited!

THE SHINY RED APPLE (4th Grade) 

ANNA'S AMAZING LEARNERS (5 year olds in New Zealand)

POTENTIAL AND POSSIBILITIES 

ROOM 17 PINEHILL SCHOOL (New Zealand) 

MRS. YOLLIS'S 3RD GRADE BLOG  (California)

LIL' DOG WHISPERER 

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC KIDS' BLOGS

LAURA'S LIFE (7th Grader, Indiana) 

GLOSONBLOG (Social Media, Blogging and Tech Tips from 14 yo in Malaysia)

HAGAN'S WORLD OF AWESOME  (6 year old in Iowa) 

MRS. DAUB'S DUDES AND DUDETTES(4th Grade Classroom Blog) 

THE HOWLIN' GOOD TIMES OF ROOM 226 (4th Grade Classroom Blog)

CRAYONS AND PENCILS (6th Graders) 

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED KIDS BLOGS 

ABI'S BLOG (9 year old in Beijing) 

AMELIE'S ANIMAL BLOG (5 year old in Australia) 

AVA'S AWESOME BLOG (Australia)

EM'S CANVAS 

CLASSROOM 2 KIDS (Grade 2, British Columbia, Canada) 

LEARNING HUB 3 @ STONEFIELDS SCHOOL (5-8 year olds in New Zealand)

MR. C's CLASS BLOG http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/

MRS. CASSIDY'S CLASSROOM BLOG (Grade 1)

THE SKINNY (5th Grade) 

MISS ALANIZ'S CLASSROOM BLOG (4th Grade) 

GRADE 5/MRS. TERBORG'S CLASS @RIVERSTONE 

20 SOMETHING KIDS AND 1 KOOKY TEACHER (5th Grade, Missouri) 

MRS. FREDERICKSON'S CLASS BLOG (Grade 6) 

...ALWAYS LEARNING...(5th Grade)

ROBINSON'S FABULOUS FIRSTIES