Poetry Friday -- Trees

LOST AND FOUND

ACT 1

The hawks are whistling.
Every morning I listen,
wonder, imagine.

The nest, constructed
in a pignut hickory,
is hidden and safe.


ACT 2

Hawks in the city
remind us we are not far
from the wild. Ever.

Are they as aware
of me as I am of them?
I capture moments:

Whistling and screeing,
piercing dives through tree branches,
perching on our fence.


ACT 3

Every hope broken --
hickory falls in the storm.
Hawk home is destroyed.

Morning after. Sun.
Mournful hawks call tree to tree,
"Our babies...lost...gone."

I hear, on day two...
three hawks! Three means one survived!
Next day I see four!


ACT 4

Listen -- can you hear
hawks in your neighborhood trees?
Listen with your heart.

Wonder -- they survive:
paramount in the food chain,
tree top predators.

Imagine -- next year

another nest, another success...

perhaps in your oak.

© Mary Lee Hahn, 2012



This "hawku" poem is about hawks. But it couldn't be about hawks if there weren't big trees in our part of the city, as well as plentiful chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits, and possums. So much depends on the natural order of food chains and food webs, plants and animals, birds and insects, clean air and clean water. Let's care for and speak for our tiny corners of the planet. In this way, like a quilt, maybe we can keep the whole thing stitched together. Maybe.

Christie has this week's #fortheloveoftrees - themed Poetry Friday roundup at Wondering and Wandering.

Environmental Activism

Here are four picture books that are just right for comparing and contrasting. Pair these with the Global Climate Strike September 20-27 so that your students can write their own version of this story.

The Promise
by Nicola Davies
illustrated by Laura Carlin
Candlewick Press, 2017


The speaker, who lives in "a city that was mean and hard and ugly," snatches an old lady's bag one dark night. Before the old lady lets go of the bag, she makes the speaker promise they will "plant them."

The promise is kept and the city is transformed. Many transformed cities later, the speaker is mugged, another bag of seeds is stolen, and another promise is extracted.

Don't miss the endpapers on this one!

The Last Tree
by Ingrid Chabbert
illustrated by Guridi
English translation by Kids Can Press, 2017

A boy has heard stories from his father about grass and trees, but he lives in a city where neither exist. He and a friend discover the last tree...and then they find out that condominiums will be built where it is growing. They dig the tree up and replant it where it will be safe.

Another book with great endpapers.

The Digger and the Flower
by Joseph Kuefler
Balzer + Bray, 2018

Little Digger watches the big machines doing their big construction work. But when they threaten to destroy the last flower in the city, Little Digger takes action and saves the flower, which thrives and spreads.

The Green Giant
by Katie Cottle
review copy compliments of Pavilion Children's, 2019

A little girl is staying with her grandpa in the country. In the greenhouse next door, she meets the green giant, who has escaped from the grey city. When she has to leave, the giant gives the girl a handful of seeds, which she plants when she returns. The city is transformed. Perhaps the giant will return some day.

Poetry Friday -- In Mourning

photo via Unsplash

From In Blackwater Woods

by Mary Oliver

To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.

We have had to let go of two more luminaries of poetry this week. I imagine the Poetry Friday roundup will be a somber place as we remember Toni Morrison and Lee Bennett Hopkins. Molly Hogan has the roundup this week at Nix the Comfort Zone. Ironically perfect.

Room on our Rock

Room on our Rock
by Kate and Jol Temple
illustrated by Terri Rose Baynton
Kane Miller Books, 2019

This picture book is a reverso, but a story, not a poem. Read it front to back and feel your heart sink. Then read it back to front and feel your heart soar.

Read from the front, one group of seals refuses to let another group onto their rock. Read the other direction, the first group of seals would never turn another group away.

You can see the implications for classroom discussions about current events/immigration policies and about point of view -- the book's subtitle is "There are two sides to every story."

This is an amazing book. I watched a friend read it today. The look on her face when the magic was revealed was priceless. I can't wait for you to read it, too.

A note from the publisher about purchasing this (or any other Kane Miller or Usborne books):

In 2012. our CEO/Company President made the decision that, in order to support independent booksellers and local communities, we would cease the sale of either Kane Miller or Usborne titles to Amazon. Now any of our titles sold on the site are through third-party vendors, charging whatever they wish. 

Our books are available to order from independent bookstores, including Barnes & Nobles and Indiebound. In addition, consumers/educators/schools/libraries may order through any of the 35,000+ nationwide independent sales consultants of our direct sales decision, Usborne Books & More or online at usbornebooksandmore.com. I’m happy to say that sales of our titles have increased dramatically in the years since this decision was made.

Poetry Friday -- Definitos

Unsplash photo by Torsten Dederichs

You Just Don't Get It

Befuddled and muddled
your noggin's confused

puzzled and troubled
you're coming unglued

mixed up and perplexed
you've been aggravated

your head is unscrewed, you're
addlepated.


©Mary Lee Hahn



This poem is a Definito, "a free verse poem of 8-12 lines (aimed at readers 8-12 years old) that highlights wordplay as it demonstrates the meaning of a less common word, which always ends the poem." (Hmm...I seem to have missed the bit about "free verse." Oh, well. We'll write off my rhymes as meeting the "wordplay" requirement. What good is a rule if it's not bent now and then?) I chose "addlepated" because it was the word of the day for July 29 on my Merriam Webster dictionary app. And it's fun to say, even if it's NOT fun to feel that way!

Heidi, at my juicy little universe, is the inventor of this form and our Poetry Friday Roundup hostess this week. She and her Sunday Poetry Peeps, the Poetry Swaggers, are playing with this form and Heidi invited me to join in since I tried her 2009 challenge with "Phlebotomist."

Classroom Resource: Wordless News (and metaphors found in art)

Wordless News. If you don't subscribe and use this resource in your classroom, now's the time to start. Creator Maria Fabrizio has been away for a few months, busy with a newborn and a toddler, but she's back with an image at least once a week.

The images she creates are perfect for "notice and wonder." I noticed that the shadow was actually hands, and I wondered about the lines, but I didn't notice one key thing about the lines until I read the related article. I hadn't heard about this interactive art installation, so when I read the article, I had a huge WOW! moment. I'm saving this one to share with my students even though it will be old news in a couple of weeks. I want to open their eyes/minds to art as a response to current and historical events.

Earlier this week, at the Columbus Museum of Art, I saw this installation and had another WOW! moment:

What looked like a huge barrel balanced on a rope took on layers of deep meaning when I read the explanation outside the room:

We study the indigenous people of the Americas, including the effects of colonialism. So this image will be a great starting point for those studies, and another example of the way art can help us to think about our world.

Poetry Friday -- What We Save

This is a repost from 2008.

My brother and I just spent three days going through the last of the boxes of Mom and Family back home in Colorado. Among other treasures, we found a stack of clippings Mom had pinned on the bulletin board in the kitchen -- pithy quotes, comics, phone numbers...and this poem, printed from the blog eleven years ago.

*        *        *        *        *

This is a chant for the landscape of my growing up years -- the wide, flat, empty, semi-arid short grass prairie of eastern Colorado. The chant is comprised of images, authors, and, in italics, book titles.



The Solace of Open Places
or
It's Not the End of the Earth, But You Can See it From Here

High, Wide and Lonesome
unbroken sod,
O Pioneers! and
my Uncle Bob.

Great Plains: jackrabbits
antelope and Deere,
wagon ruts, meadowlarks
and tumbleweeds found here.

Kent Haruf, Hal Borland, Ian Frazier,
Gretel Ehrlich, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner.

Eventide, Plainsong
A Sense of Place,
Wolf Willow, My Antonia
Nothing To Do But Stay.

Lark buntings, windmills
towering thunderheads,
grasshoppers, feedlots
the family homestead.

Pioneer Women,
amber waves of grain.
Close my eyes, open a book,
I can go home again.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2008



Margaret has the Poetry Friday Roundup this week at Reflections on the Teche.

Poetry Friday -- Playing With Poetry

I picked up a few poetry toys at nErDCampMI last week.

With Instant Poetry, poetry forms meet multiple choice. You might want to try a nursery rhyme, a poem in the style of William Carlos Williams or Emily Dickinson, an ode, free verse, or more.

 

click image to enlarge

I've been wanting to try writing a sonnet, so I chose the Shakespearean Sonnet (bottom left in the collage above).

Before the Fates (b) cut in this checkout line
Let all who (a) brought some queso dip please stay
And find our (c) kids out back making green slime.
Neither king nor fool (a) returns their lunch tray.
Though time (b) cares not when chickens come to roost,
We hear the (a) band at least will take the stage.

Ok. I'm going to stop there. There are others that have options that string together with more sense. Let's try the Nursery Rhyme (top right).

Mary, Mary, quite contrary
(a) loved sarcastic commentary.

scribble-out poetry (aka blackout poetry) has a lot more poet-ential. This spiral-bound book has 45 bits of text ready for you to modify by scribbling-out the words you don't want with your permanent marker and leaving behind your poem. The text comes in different shapes (see top of collage) and amounts (see bottom of collage). Sources for the text bits include Frankenstein, The Count of Monte Cristo, War and Peace, and Pride and Prejudice, just to name a few. Each page is perforated and includes "to" and "from" lines and the attribution for the original text on the back so that you can gift your poetic creations!

click image to enlarge

I scribbled-out a bit from Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (top right in the collage). This poem goes out to all the teachers who are enjoying their last weeks of living-and-learning-at-a-relaxing-pace.

Great 

fortune 

if you teach.

You contribute to the happiness of

life,

consume the

daily

pleasure of being

a good

instrument.

Scribbled-out by Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Carol, at Carol's Corner, is just one of those teachers for whom this poem was written! She's got the Poetry Friday roundup this week.

Poetry Friday -- 3, 6, 9, 12

Journal Sparks helped me with my poems for this week. I used bits and pieces of ideas from the book. First, I made some watercolor boxes and cut them out when they had dried. Then I randomly chose the numbers 3, 6, 9 and 12. From a list of prompts in the book, I chose four words -- tree, lines, buildings, and cake. I wrote the numbers and the words on little scraps of paper and shuffled them up, then paired each number scrap with a word scrap. The number told me how many words I could use in each poem, and the word became the topic of the poem.

Click on the image to enlarge it.

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Tabatha gave Jone a creative way to compose poems -- a poetry fortune teller! Check out Tabatha's triolet and all of the other Poetry Friday offerings at Jone's Deowriter.

Poetry Friday -- The Choice is Yours

Before

After

Detail

Before

After

Detail

The Choice is Yours

There will always be fences
there will always be walls
keeping out, keeping in
dividing
hiding.

And there will always be beauty
there will always be art
reaching out, seeking within
exciting
inviting.


(draft)
©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019



The photos tell the story of our neighbor's fence built the wrong way out, and my artistic response. Those are polished rocks, slices of rock, geodes, and fossils that our rockhound friends gave me. Murals might be next, who knows?

Tricia has the Poetry Friday roundup today at a blog named after a book that would pair nicely with my post -- The Miss Rumphius Effect.

The Joy of ARCs

MAKERSPACE FUN

Build Your Own Theme Park

by Liz Lunney

Andrews McMeel Publishing, June 2019

I can't tell you how badly my ten year-old self wants to get out the scissors and start building this theme park! Hopefully, I'll have some detail-oriented students who want to work on this during Genius Hour this year! I'll pair it with This is My Dollhouse by Giselle Potter.

#OWNVOICES

Amy Wu and the Perfect Bao

by Kat Zhang

illustrated by Charlene Chua

Aladdin (October 1, 2019)

Even though Amy Wu can do lots of things, making the perfect bao eludes her. Amy and her parents and grandmother are making bao together. Amy's dad preps the dough, while Amy's mom makes the filling. As they work making the bao, the adults always create perfect bao and give Amy advice that doesn't work. Just when all seems lost, Amy realizes that she has been using an adult-sized ball of dough in her kid-sized hands. Once she has a smaller amount of dough to work with, she, too, creates perfect bao -- enough to share with her classmates. There's a recipe included so you can make them, too!

YOU WILL WANT TO READ THIS

Beverly, Right Here

by Kate DiCamillo

Candlewick, September 24, 2019

Now I need to go back and read Raymie Nightingale and Louisiana's Way Home. But I'm pretty sure Beverly will still be my favorite. She and Iola and Elmer and Doris and Charles (and Nod, and the seagull at the back door of the restaurant) have found their way into my heart. Oh, Beverly. How much do I love that you saw into Elmer's heart and cared about what was there and not what you could see on the outside?

This book is so full of all the hard parts about life -- age, loss, death, the amount of crap in convenience stores -- but it is also full of all that makes life meaningful -- art, music, poetry, friendship, believing in and finding the goodness in others.

Poetry Friday -- The Lost Words

The Lost Words

by Robert Macfarlane

illustrated by Jackie Morris

I saw this book in Maria Popova's Brain Pickings newsletter last weekend and immediately reserved a copy from the library. Take a minute to follow the newsletter link. Gorgeous, right? I just picked it up yesterday, and I wasn't at all prepared for the size and heft of the book. It's 15" x 11" and weighs about 3 lbs. Every poem I've read so far is amazing -- I will learn lots from Robert Macfarlane about the art of the acrostic poem. Every illustration is amazing -- begging to be pored over. Yup. I'll probably need to buy my own copy of this book!

The introduction to The Lost Words is what inspired my poem for Karen Boss' challenge at Today's Little Ditty to "write a poem in second person, speaking directly to a kid or kids about something that you think is important for them to know."

"Once upon a time, words began to vanish from the language of children. they disappeared so quietly that at first almost no one noticed -- fading away like water on stone. The words were those that children used to name the natural world around them: acorn, adder, bluebell, bramble, conker -- gone! Fern, heather, kingfisher, otter, raven, willow, wren...all of them gone! The words were becoming lost: no longer vivid in children's voices, no longer alive in their stories."

How can we expect these words to remain in children's language if children spend no time outdoors, or if all the wild places are tamed or removed?

Learn their names:

rocks, trees, flowers, birds, clouds, stars.

Know your home.

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Buffy Silverman has the Poetry Friday roundup this week, and she, too, has written a nature-themed poem for the June TLD challenge!

Good Talk by Mira Jacob

Over the years, we've written about/reviewed lots of graphic novels here at A Year of Reading. When the Cybils were brand new, I chose to judge graphic novels so that I could learn more about the format. Perhaps my love of graphic novels was fueled by a childhood reading diet of comic books.  Stacks and stacks of comic books. (There were also shelves and shelves of books, the Weekly Reader Book Club books, mandatory purchases at the shopping mall bookstores when we drove the 3 hours to Denver, and the regular trips to the local library. But there were also always stacks and stacks of comic books.)

I've tagged 148 books "adult" in Goodreads, and three of them are graphic novels. But get this...all three of them are also memoir. I have no idea what that means. It just made me go, "Hmm..."

This is the most recent adult memoir in graphic novel format that I've read, and I think you should read it, too:

Good Talk: A Memoir in Conversations

by Mira Jacob

One World, March 2019

Mira Jacobs is East Indian and her husband is Jewish. With a combination of drawings and photographs, the book is built around Jacob's conversations with her six year-old biracial son about Michael Jackson, brown and white skin, Trump's election, and police violence. Jacobs also allows readers to "listen in" on her conversations with her own parents, brother, and grandmother about how her family discriminates against her because her skin is a (tragically) dark brown, and with her mother in-law about how people at a party she throws assume Mira's the help because she's not white. There are conversations between Jacobs and her white friend about parenting, and conversations between Jacobs and her husband about dealing with white men who hold all the power without even being aware that they do.

This book, for me, was a window.* Perhaps for you it will be a mirror.* If we're going to repair the race issues that continue to divide our nation, we're going to have to use books like this as sliding glass doors* so that we can have conversations like these not just in our imaginations as we read, but in real life with the people around us -- other adults, our students and children, co-workers, politicians, family members, publishers, etc., etc., etc.

*Dr. Rudine Simms Bishop coined these terms in 1990. "Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange. These windows are also sliding glass doors, and readers have only to walk through in imagination to become part of whatever world has been created and recreated by the author. When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience. Reading, then, becomes a means of self-affirmation, and readers often seek their mirrors in books." (1990, p. ix)

Highlights Symposium, White Fragility and Some Other Things

Last week, Mary Lee and I attended the Highlights Foundation Building Cultural Competency Symposium. It was an incredible 3 days and I can't thank the presenters and the Highlights staff enough. Such an amazing group of people to learn and think with. Thank you Edi Campbell (@crazyquilts), Debbie Reese (@debreese), Laura Jiminez (@booktoss ), Paula Yoo (@PaulaYoo), Renee Watson (@reneewauthor), and Marilisa Jiminez Garcia (@MarilisaJimenez). If you aren't already following each of these women, you should do that now--so much to learn from this amazing group.

The required reading for the book was White Fragility. I had read the book but was glad to have the opportunity to reread it and have conversations with others who had read it. Laura Jiminez did a brilliant job at leading this discussion and talking to others with a facilitator like Laura made the reading experience transformational. If you have not read White Fragility, I'd highly recommend it.

I've been working to read and study issues of equity over the past year. I created this Padlet of resources as I read, adding posts and articles that I knew I'd want to return to--that were important to my learning. I've shared this a few times on Twitter as there are great resources if you are thinking about this and are just not sure where to start.  I love Debby Irving's idea for a 21-Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge--"For 21 days, do one action to further your understanding of power, privilege, oppression and equity."  I would say from my own experience, 21 days is not enough--it is a great starting point but then keep going--I try to read or listen to something each day that builds my understanding in some way. Hopefully this Padlet helps others who are also trying to learn.

Link to Padlet

I bought a Highlights mug while at the Symposium.  I find that if I use a mug from an event, it reminds me of the thinking and work I did while there so the mug is a nice reminder of the thinking that happened at the symposium.  I also ordered this shirt from Laura Jiminez because this work is not so easy and the shirt will remind me of that when I wear it:-) (I ordered a purple v-neck and can't wait until it arrives! Proceeds from this shirt go to Grace Lin's #KidlitWomen and We Need Diverse Books.

Poetry Friday -- An Opportunity to Learn

Photo credit: Karen Kuehn

Hooray for our new Poet Laureate, Joy Harjo, a registered member of the Mvskoke Creek Nation! She is our first Native American Poet Laureate, and now non-Native U.S. citizens have an excellent opportunity for learning.

At this past weekend's Building Cultural Competency symposium at the Highlights Foundation (my brief post about that here), one of the speakers we were most excited to hear was Dr. Debbie Reese, a registered member of the Nambe Pueblo Nation. And, no surprise, she's also very excited that we have a Mvskoke Poet Laureate!

Here's one of my big take-aways from Debbie's talk -- what we casually call "tribes" are actually Sovereign Native Nations, and we should name the nation to which a Native person belongs, rather than generically say Native American. There were thousands of these nations, each distinct in language, location, religion, story, systems of writing, and governance. (Note to self, when I am teaching my fifth graders about forms of government, I need to move beyond Democracy, Monarchy and Dictatorship and include Native governance.) Understanding that Native people belong to sovereign nations is important because the treaties of the past were made between heads of state. (Some references Debbie suggest we explore are Nation to Nation at the Smithsonian, the National Congress of American Indians, and the young people's version of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States, which Debbie revised from Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's adult version, along with Jean Mendoza, and which is set for publication at the end of July.)

One of my favorite poems by Harjo (so far...I'm just digging in...) is For Calling the Spirit Back from Wandering the Earth in Its Human Feet. It begins


Put down that bag of potato chips, that white bread, that bottle

of pop.

Turn off that cellphone, computer, and remote control.

Open the door, then close it behind you.

Take a breath offered by friendly winds. They travel the earth 

gathering essences of plants to clean.

Give it back with gratitude.

If you sing it will give your spirit lift to fly to the stars’ ears and 

back.

Acknowledge this earth who has cared for you since you were a 

dream planting itself precisely within your parents’ desire.

(read the rest here)

Here's some bonus music that celebrates Native culture and language. The first is an adaptation of the Beetles' "Blackbird" sung in Mi'kmaq, an Algonquian language spoken by the Mi'kmaq, the indigenous people of Nova Scotia. This was produced for the 2019 United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages. Here's a CBC post about this production, and a WBUR radio spot featuring Emma Stevens.

"My Unama'ki," sung by the same 17 year-old high school student who sang the above version of "Blackbird," is a love song for the island of Cape Breton written by students and staff at Allison Bernard Memorial High School in Eskasoni, Cape Breton (Unama'ki), Nova Scotia, Canada.

Why stop there? Here are 11 Pop Songs in Indigenous Languages You Need to Listen To, mostly from Latin America, but also Australia and New Zealand. And here's a Peruvian teenager who is trying to save the Quechua language through music. Okay. Enough with the rabbit holes.


I'm sure (I HOPE) there will be lots of posts about our new Poet Laureate in the Poetry Friday roundup this week. I look forward to learning from and with you! Linda has this week's roundup at A Word Edgewise.

Building Cultural Competency

Franki and I spent an amazing weekend at the Highlights Foundation at the Building Cultural Competency Symposium. The required reading was WHITE FRAGILITY by Robin DiAngelo, and processing this text with and without the participants who self-identified as not-white was a huge learning experience. We also listened to and learned from these remarkable speakers:

Edith Campbell who blogs at CrazyQuiltEdi and tweets @crazyquilts

Dr. Debbie Reese who blogs at American Indians in Children's Literature and tweets @debreese

Renée Watson who wrote the Newbery Honor/Coretta Scott King Award-winning PIECING ME TOGETHER and who tweets @reneewauthor

Dr. Marilisa Jiménez García  assistant professor at Lehigh University who specializes in Latino/a literature and culture and who tweets @MarilisaJimenez

Dr. Laura M. Jiménez  who blogs at BookToss, is a professor of preservice teachers at Boston University, and who tweets @booktoss 

 
Paula Yoo  who is an author, journalist and screenwriter and who tweets @PaulaYoo

Check out these blogs and Twitter feeds. Join the conversations. Join the learning.

Poetry Friday -- To the Caterpillar

Photo via Roads End Naturalist

To the Caterpillar

I spotted the yellow dot of your egg on the dill.
Cutting a sprig,
I brought you in.

Daily, your egg darkened as you grew.
What once was a dot
is now the tiny dash of you.

Your life obeys the rules of geometry:
line follows point,
wings bring symmetry.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019



Summer life with Mary Lee means that the innocuous-looking centerpieces on the kitchen table -- one juice glass with sprigs of parsley in it and another with sprigs of dill -- are actually nurseries for three tiny black swallowtail caterpillars. I keep them close so I can monitor their progress...until their frass is visible on the table! I actually saw two of the three emerging from their eggs earlier this week. They are amazing. In only a couple of days, they have doubled in size, going from 2mm to 5mm! (Yes, MILLImeters. They are TEENY tiny little critters...for now.)

Laura Shovan has the Poetry Friday roundup this week. The roundup for July-December is filled, and I send apologies on behalf of Blogger if your comment didn't stick and you were assuming you had a spot. If you got shut out, contact me and we'll prioritize you for next time.

One Pagers

Our final read aloud for the 2018-2019 school year was The Season of Styx Malone by Kekla Magoon. School had already been out for almost a week when the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award winners were announced, so I had to do a private happy dance that Styx Malone was the winner for fiction and poetry!

Back in November of 2018, I had read Jill Yamasawa Fletcher's blog post on the NCTE blog, "The Magic of One-Pagers," and the last week of school seemed like a good time to give one-pagers a low-stakes whirl.

I was drawn to the idea of one-pagers because I'm trying to get rid of all assignments that my students do solely for my eyes and my evaluation. We ran out of time to display these and do a gallery walk so that every student could see what others included and how they approached the requirements, but on a small scale in table groups, there was rich, rich discussion of the book as classmates reminded each other about characters and settings, and as they collaborated to represent the big themes and ideas in the book.

I'm sold. This is a reflection tool I'll use often next school year with read alouds, unpacking poems, processing science and social studies concepts, and...who knows what else?!?

Here's a bit about my process and some peeks at student work.

I had just finished reading Spark, by Sarah Beth Durst, and I used it to make my model. I didn't bother with color since I knew I'd be photocopying it as a reference for my students. I used meaningful shapes (sparks) to hold information, used characters/traits as my border, and only drew one simple line drawing from a really important part of the story. I wanted my model to provide comfort for students who don't see themselves as strong artists.

 

These are the directions I gave my students. Surprisingly, the one they got the most stuck on was #4, personal connections. Over and over I heard, "I don't have any connections to this story." The main characters in Styx Malone are black. Did my students think they didn't have any connections because they were Bengali, Egyptian, Mexican, Iraqi, Chinese, Moroccan, or white? I didn't dig in to the possibility that their lack of connection was racial. I just asked, "You don't have siblings? You've never done anything risky? You never wanted to do something and your parents refused?" Suddenly, connections were found. (It will be interesting to see if this stumbling on connections to characters who look different than the reader comes up with next year's class.)

This reader was thrilled with how neatly and well-organized her work turned out.

Naturally, my most artistic students went all out with their drawings.

Even without drawings, students produced visually pleasing work.

This is one of my favorite details, and an example of the students' deep understanding of the story's big ideas/themes. The picture is from when Caleb and Bobby Gene went against all they knew to be safe and within their family's rules to jump a train with Styx. The theme: "Don't always follow people."

One-pagers are a naturally differentiated activity that provides a way in for ELs and IEP students.

Because it was so close to the end of the school year, I knew if I sent these gems home, they would just get trashed. My students were more than willing to let me have them as examples for next year's class. They also gave me some feedback, letting me know that they wished they would have known they were going to be asked to do this when we started reading the book so they could have kept better track in their readers' notebooks. They loved how often I said, "Sure!" when they asked if they could meet the requirements in a way that differed from my model.

The best ideas come ready to be changed and modified. It will be interesting to see how this idea grows and develops next school year. After they have created a few following my requirements/guidelines, the first thing I'll change is putting them in charge of deciding what information needs to be included.

Do you use one-pagers? What are some of your success stories?

Poetry Friday -- Constellations

summer has arrived

chicory is blooming

bright blue roadside stars

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2019

Summer is well and truly here when the chicory and Queen Anne's Lace bloom. Besides which, we have heard the first crickets, seen the first fireflies, and eaten the first pesto. 

We Poetry Friday peeps also know summer is here when the call goes out for Poetry Friday Roundup Hosts for July - December! Choose your date...they go quickly! 

Michelle Kogan has the roundup today.