Poetry Friday -- Beastly Verse

Beastly Verse
poems by various authors
illustrations by JooHee Yoon
Enchanted Lion Books, 2015
review copy provided by the publisher

Along with 9 lesser known (to me) or anonymous poets, Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash, Wiliam Blake, Hilaire Belloc, Christina Rossetti, D.H. Lawrence, and Walter de la Mare all have poems in this vibrantly illustrated collection of beastly verse.

JooHee Yoon used hand drawing and computer techniques and just three Pantone colors for the illustrations, and each page dances and vibrates with color and creativity. Every four or five pages there is a fun gatefold to open up that completes an illustration, or holds a surprise for the reader.

The spread for Eletelephony has a gatefold with a surprise. Before you open the gatefold, you see a living room scene with a telephone ringing. When you open the gatefold, the elephant has attempted to answer the telephone and is completely tangled in the cord!


Eletelephony
by Laura Elizabeth Richards

Once there was an elephant, 

Who tried to use the telephant— 

No! No! I mean an elephant 

Who tried to use the telephone— 

(Dear me! I am not certain quite 

That even now I’ve got it right.) 

Howe’er it was, he got his trunk 

Entangled in the telephunk; 

The more he tried to get it free, 

The louder buzzed the telephone— 

(I fear I’d better drop the song 

Of elephop and telephony!)

Heidi has the roundup today at My Juicy Little Universe.

Blue Whales

Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem
by Mac Barnett
illustrated by Adam Rex
Hyperion Books, 2009
review copy from my classroom library

I love the sly way this book weaves facts about blue whales into the story of a boy who doesn't clean his room.

"Billy Twitters, clean up your room, or we're buying you a blue whale, " his mother threatens. Billy doesn't take her seriously because he knows "a thing or two about blue whales."

But one day, a whale shows up outside his door and it's his responsibility...

The reader learns plenty of facts about blue whales in the text and the illustrations absolutely communicate the scale of a blue whale in a classroom, on a playground, and next to a school bus.

Billy comes up with a clever solution to both the problem of owning a blue whale AND the problem of cleaning his bedroom!

(Mac Barnett will be at Cover to Cover Bookstore on March 7 from 10:30-12:00!)

The Blue Whale
by Jenni Desmond
Enchanted Lion Books, 2015
review copy provided by the publisher

This book works the same way. "Once upon a time, a child took a book from a shelf and started to read."

You guessed it. It was a book about blue whales.

The words we read are the words the boy is reading in his book about blue whales. But the pictures tell the story of what the boy imagines, how he conceptualizes sizes and distances and amounts, and sometimes what he does between page turns.

These will be two fun books to share with students to learn about blue whales and to invite conversations that compare and contrast the two books.

A Tale of Two Beasts

A Tale of Two Beasts
by Fiona Roberton
Kane Miller, 2015
review copy provided by the publisher

I have a whole collection of books that have two stories that dovetail in the middle. This one is similar, but instead of dovetailing, it has two parts, each told from a different point of view.

In the first part, a little girl discovers a strange beast stuck in a tree in the forest. She rescues it, takes it home, feeds it, dresses it, walks it, and shares it with her friends. The minute she opens the window, the beast runs away. Later that night, when the little girl is lying awake in her bed trying to figure out where she went wrong, the beast comes back.

In part two, a small furry forest animal (maybe a squirrel?) tells the story of being "ambushed by a terrible beast!" This beast ties him up and carries him away to her lair where he is subjected to any number of indignities. Finally, when she opens the window, he is able to escape. Later that night, when he is hanging upside down from a tree in the forest, he realizes that there might be a reason to go back.

Same story, two different points of view. Is there one beast in this story, or are there two? Depends how you look at it!

A fun book for children of any age who are working to understand point of view.

Math Monday

It might not happen so much for primary teachers, but I am humbled on about a weekly basis by students in my 5th grade math class who are smarter than I am.

Case in point, this pizza problem. Do whatever you need to do to enlarge that picture. The work you will see there is flat-out brilliant.

In this problem, a class has won the PTO's pizza party for bringing in the most Boxtops For Education™. Each student gets their own personal pizza and eats a different fraction of the pizza. They eat thirds, fourths, eighths, twelfths, and sixteenths. The challenge was to put the fractions in order from greatest to least to find out which student(s) ate the most pizza, and then find out which table group ate the most pizza.

The pair of students who made this poster demonstrate two different ways to create equivalent fractions with a common denominator of 48: the "Bring to 48" table at the top in the center of the page, and the longer version on the right side of the page. (I didn't teach them either of these methods. They came up with them on their own. Brilliant, right?)

On the left side of the poster, they show their work finding an equivalent fraction for each of the children in the problem. They add each column to find out which table group ate the most, and they put all of the fractions/students in order (below the "Bring to 48" table in the center of the page).

Differentiation is important. While these two were engaged in solving this problem and demonstrating their work on this poster, I was working with a group of students who still can't independently make equivalent fractions in order to add and subtract with an unlike denominator. Others in the class were working on solving the pizza party problem, but they never got to the demonstration stage, or else their demonstrations were not nearly as elegantly organized.

It's Math Monday! Join Mandy at Enjoy and Embrace Learning for the Math Monday link up!

Poetry Friday -- Sky Poem

Poem for the Golden Sky I See Outlining a Web of Winter-Bare Trees and Contrasting the Blue-White Snow-Topped Roofs When I Open My Eyes All Warm and Drowsy After a Nap on a Day Proclaimed to be Too Cold to go to School

I love you.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2015



Linda has the Poetry Friday roundup at TeacherDance this week.

#nf10for10

Nonfiction Picture Book 10 for 10 is...TODAY!

January announcement is here, but I'm sure Twitter is exploding with more current tweets. Gather your 10 favorite nonfiction picture books and share them with the world!

March Book Madness

The Global March Book Madness Tournament starts TODAY!

Article by Tony Keefer here.

Cut to the chase and click here to go to the website for information.

Let the Madness begin!!

Math Monday: Padlet

I have been thinking about how to better share our math thinking as part of our math workshop.  I have played around a bit with Padlet for lots of things. Last week, padlet helped raise our level of share a bit. Kids are used to sharing and responding to math thinking of their classmates.  We use lots of tools to do this but this week, we build a padlet as kids worked.  Finished representations went up on the padlet as kids finished. This is the problem we solved.

Jeffrey buys 5 boxes of oranges. There are 10 oranges in each box.  There are 12 rotten oranges.  How many oranges are there that are not rotten?

Created with Padlet

We have been playing with a variety of tools to share our math learning. So, some students used Google Draw. Others used Pixie. Some used Explain Everything.

I am thinking about the reflection piece of share with my math coach. I think there can be real power in Padlet as a way for kids to reflect on thinking, analyze work and learn new things to try.  The power of this Padlet was in the conversation. Because the Padlet was added to over a 15-20  minute period, kids naturally gathered around the Smartboard noticing things before we formally shared. Then as we shared, there was a power of having all of the representations on one board--in a place that we could see them all at once.

Usually, we can Airplay share one at a time or share a student's thinking from their notebook with a document camera.  Padlet allowed us to see patterns in our work. Kids noticed that with division, most kids were drawing pictures and wondered why that was.  Others noticed different number sentences across work. We could get a close up of one to analyze if we wanted to or we could look at the patterns we saw in our work as a whole.

I am going to work with my coach to build on this and to really think about how to raise the level of the share piece of Math Workshop. Lots of possibilities!

It's Math Monday! Join Mandy at Enjoy and Embrace Learning for the Math Monday link up!

Poetry Friday -- Love

LOVE IS A PLACE

by e.e. cummings

love is a place

& through this place of

love move

(with brightness of peace)

all places

yes is a world

& in this world of

yes live

(skilfully curled)

all worlds

I wish for you this place that is all places, this world that is all worlds. 

I wish for you a love so big that one day cannot contain it. 

 

Cathy has the Poetry Friday Roundup this week at Merely Day by Day.

Before After

Before After
written and illustrated by Anne-Margot Ramstein and Matthias Arégui
Candlewick Press, 2014

Study the cover of this wordless picture book and you'll start to get a sense of what you'll find within: acorn --> oak (before, after), caterpillar --> butterfly, chicken --> egg. But wait. You know that old conundrum about the chicken and the egg? Well, the spread before chicken is on the left and egg is on the right, has egg on the left and chicken on the right! HAH!

So. Basic wordless concept book, eh?

Nope.

There are spreads for deep thinking, like the one with the rocking horse on the left and the rocking chair on the right. (There are several before and after this that ponder time in a variety of ways, actually.) There are some amazing pairs that consider building up and tearing down, culminating in the ultimate combination of such: tearing down rock to build up a sculpture.

There are occasionally full-page spread befores followed by full-page spread afters, just to mix things up design-wise.

There are "characters" who reappear, like the ink that comes after the squid, and the pigeon who gives a feather for a quill pen in the ink, which comes before the typewriter, and then the pigeon comes back as the precursor to airmail (sending the letter the typewriter typed, perhaps?).

There are literary references (3 Pigs and Cinderella) for alert observers.

There are spreads perfect for conversations about cause and effect.

This is not a book I should be trying to review with words. We should be sitting side-by-side in a quiet corner, slowly turning the pages and chatting about all we notice.