A Year of Reading

Thursday, January 16, 2014

What Feeds My Soul

The birthday cake I made myself last year.
Three layers of chocolately goodness,
with two coffee buttercream layers,
covered in ganache.

Well, yes, there's that.

But that's not what I was thinking of this time. (except I sort of am, now...)

What feeds my soul is Environmental Club.

Here's why:

CHOICE.

I do this club in my own free time, for no pay. It's my choice.
And the activities we do are my choice,
not tied to standards or state tests.
The students who are are in the club are there by choice.
It's a multi-age group, my favorite age group:
4th and 5th graders (some returning members).

We like each other in a way that assessing and grading
will never taint.

Last week and this, we wrote poetry
inspired by the photos I've taken of the club and our activities
so far this year.

For the next month or so, we will focus on birds
as we work up to
The Great Backyard Bird Count.

Then it will be almost March, and time to plan for our garden.

You might think that I'd come home exhausted
after a full day of teaching
and then yet another hour with children
(more children than I have in my homeroom).

Nope.

I come home jazzed up and happy.

My soul runneth over.

Thank goodness for Environmental Club.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Wordless Wednesday

by Hugh MacLeod at gapingvoid.com

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Last Week's TED Talk

You might remember that I recently challenged myself to watch a TED talk every week and take illustrated notes. Here are my notes from last week's video: Susan Cain: The Power of Introverts. Susan Cain wrote Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking

Before I watched the video, I thought about that word power. When I considered my own introversion, power was not a word I would use to describe it. I thought of pain, loneliness, uncertainty and hesitation.

By the end of the video, I was at peace with my introversion.

I saw the truth in what Cain said about introverted leaders -- that they achieve better outcomes because they let employees run with their own ideas rather than always trying to micromanage and put their stamp on everything.

I thought hard about what she says is a prevalent attitude in education that the best students are extroverts. Do I believe this? Does my classroom look like I believe this? In her call to action, Cain made three points that I will take to heart:

Stop the madness for constant group work. Students need privacy, need to experience freedom, and learn to deal with autonomy.
Go to the wilderness. Have revelations. Unplug.
Know yourself. Accept yourself. Play to your own strengths rather than those you perceive society values.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking -- Kindle edition is only $2.99!

Monday, January 13, 2014

It's Monday! What Are You Reading?

It's Monday! What Are You Reading is a meme hosted by Jen of Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee of Unleashing Readers. Visit their blogs to see the round up and discover great new books!

Here are some highlights from my latest reading.

Two Recent Picture Books I've Loved:

Sophie's Squash

Henny (Paula Wiseman Books)

A New Early Reader Series I Discovered

Thanks to CYBILS Finalist Lists:

Urgency Emergency! Big Bad Wolf

New Nonfiction Picture Books I Love:

The Long, Long Journey: The Godwit's Amazing Migration

Eat Like a Bear

Handle With Care: An Unusual Butterfly Journey (Nonfiction - Grades Prek-4)

(I reviewed this one last week on the blog.)

My Latest Adult Read that I Highly Recommend:

Flight Behavior: A Novel

Books We are Enjoying in the Classroom:

Outfoxed

The Thing About Georgie

Friday, January 10, 2014

Poetry Friday -- Recipe

Recipe

The yellowed newspaper clipping
is attached to an index card
with brittle cellophane tape.
"Nov. 1949
Women's Day Kitchen"
is written in faded ink
at the top of the card.

Her canned tomatoes
were from the garden,
mine are from the store.
Her biscuits were made from scratch,
mine are a boxed mix.

She washed up the prep bowls
by hand,
tired after a long day's work.

Some things don't change.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2014

I am participating in Month of Poetry (#MoP) again this year. It is coordinated and led by Australian poet and children's author Kat Apel, a "friend in my head" (never met her in person) from the March Madness 2012 poetry tournament. The discipline of writing a poem a day for at least a semi-public audience is good practice for April. It's a healthy reminder that I have to take what I get in the 20-30 minutes of #nerdlution writing I've promised myself on a daily basis. I wrote this poem while dinner was cooking last night.

The actual recipe is in Mom's recipe box. It's a childhood favorite that I cooked for her while I was home at Christmas. I copied the recipe down (not word for word) to bring a little HOME back home.

Hamburger Cobbler
Nov. 1949 Women's Day Kitchen

1 sm onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
3/4 lb hamburger
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/4 tsp marjoram
1/4 lb sliced cheese
1 (cup) can drained diced tomatoes
2 T worcestershire sauce
3 T ketchup

(ingredients for homemade biscuits)
2 1/4 c Bisquick + 2/3 c milk

Sauté onion and garlic, then add hamburger and seasonings and brown. Spread in a 9x9 baking dish. Put sliced cheese on top, then the tomatoes mixed with worcestershire and ketchup. Put blops of Bisquick on top of the tomato mixture. Bake at 450° for 25 minutes.

Donna, at Mainely Write, is cooking up the Poetry Friday roundup this week.

Thursday, January 09, 2014

History in Graphic Novel Format

Now that I've started thinking about creative "right brain" ways to expand and enrich the ways I am (and my students will be) responding to informational texts (common craft videos, illustrated note-taking), new possibilities keep cropping up everywhere I look:

Why not take a page of text and do an erasure poem with it? Or, as Austin Kleon calls them, a newspaper blackout poem?

How about a ThingLink?

And maybe you could take a complicated historical event, like the Boxer Rebellion in China, and make it a two-part graphic novel that explores both sides of the story.

Boxers & Saints Boxed Set
by Gene Luen Yang, First Second, September, 2013
review copies from the public library

I think it's fair to say that I would never have picked up a history of the Boxer Rebellion to read in my spare time if it hadn't been in graphic novel format. And I think it's fair to say that a historical description of the rebellion/movement would never have given me such a deeply personal glimpse into both sides of the story.

An added bonus was finding this review on GoodReads by FirstSecond, and gaining an even deeper appreciation for the complexity of what Gene Yang created in these two books:

One of the things that makes both Boxers and Saints fascinating is how the author treats religion.

Boxers features a magical realistic element; the Chinese gods (who the characters know mainly through the opera) possess the Boxer rebels and help power their rebellion; when the rebels go to war, they feel that they are taken over by the gods and protected and driven by them. In the book, Gene draws the gods as they are taking over the Boxers and propelling them into battle. The pictures aren't just people saying, 'a god is possessing me!' while nothing is happening -- a god is _there_.

This is clearly meant (through our 21st-century lens) to be magical realism; these gods aren't something that we today are meant to be like, 'drat those gods possessing people and causing rebellions all the time; you'd think they would know better after all these years of being gods and all.'

This is all thrown into question in a fascinating way in Saints, when Gene (a devout Catholic) draws the main character seeing an actual Catholic saint -- Joan of Arc -- and at one point, seeing Jesus. In the same way that the Chinese gods appear on the pages of Boxers, the Catholic saint and deity appear throughout the pages of Saints. Does their more-convincing reality (both in our culture today and in the author's life) throw into question the reality of the Chinese gods? Does this set-down-on-paper reflection of the beliefs of that time, both equally devout -- call into question the veracity of our own beliefs today, and the amount our contemporary culture is influencing what our beliefs are?

The format of the graphic novel has huge possibilities both as a launch-pad for introducing readers to new information (history, science, etc), and as a way for readers to process their learning of informational text.

Wednesday, January 08, 2014

3 New Picture Books!

I picked up 3 great new picture books last week.

Alphablock is going to be my new go-to Baby Gift Book! It was on display at Cover to Cover and it became an instant favorite for me! It is this amazing chunky little alphabet book! The design of this book is amazing as each letter is cut out as a page of its own. The text is predictable and the illustrations are more detailed than I realized at first glance. Really, a pretty perfect book for home and school. The images on the Amazon page will help you see the inside pages.

Outfoxed by Mike Twohy is one that was on my Goodreads "Want to Read" list. I picked it up at Cover to Cover and laughed out loud. I am trying to read more books with humor as they are not always my faves. This one is quite hysterical and I know my students will love it. (Even my daughter, who is 14, laughed when she read it to herself on the way home from the bookstore.)

Fossil is a new wordless book from Bill Thomson, author of one of my favorites--Chalk ! I was happy to see this from him and know that kids will make some connections between the two. This one is similar to Chalk with some important differences. Definitely one I am glad to add to my collection of wordless books.