Slice of Life -- Hemming

One of the jobs on Mom's to-do list for me last week was to hem a couple of pairs of pants for her.

I should back up to say that my mom was a Master Seamstress in her day, trained under the iron rule of her mother, who was a Home-Ec teacher. (Raise your hand if you even know what Home-Ec is...yeah, I thought so...) When Mom started to teach me to sew, we nearly came to blows. She is a perfectionist. I am a generalist. But she cared enough that I learn to sew that she bought me sewing lessons from a teacher who was a little less like her and a little more like me. I became a functional seamstress.

Teaching Lesson #1 -- If you are not the right teacher for a student, have the humility to find the teacher who can best teach that learner.

After we got the pants measured and pinned, I went to work. I wanted to do a really good job. I wanted to make Mom proud that I'm at least a functional seamstress, and maybe just a little better than that. But I was having problems. The legs of the pants were tapered at the bottom, so the hemming was turning out bunchy. Since I wanted to do a really good job, I asked for help.

Learning Lesson #1 -- If it's not turning out the way you want it to, have the humility to ask for help.

I didn't even have the question out of my mouth before Mom knew what the problem was: the tapering. She came and showed me that if I switched the pins from horizontal to the hem to perpendicular to the hem my work would lay flatter. Then she confirmed my suspicion that it would help to take bigger stitches. Then she left me to it.

Teaching Lesson #2 -- Give just enough help to get the learning going again and then get out of the way.

Hemming the second pair of pants when smoothly. I didn't have to cut any off, the fabric was more considerate, and I was back in the groove of hand-hemming. My stitches were quick and even.

Learning Lesson #2 -- Just because one task is frustrating doesn't mean that every task like that is going to be frustrating. Don't give up. Persevere when things get hard...but also remember to enjoy the feeling when things go smoothly.

Teaching and learning...and hemming pants. Good stuff.

Did You Know? A Fun New Informational Book Series

Last week, we went on an annual trip to IKEA and Joseph Beth Bookstore.  It is a fun way to get our heads back into school and to pick up some new books.  This year, I discovered a new informational book series for young readers-the Did You Know? series by Laura Lyn DiSiena and Hanna Eliot. It will be perfect for 3rd grade and I think younger and older students would like it too.

The first book I read was Hippos Can't Swim: and other fun facts (Did You Know?) .  Kids LOVE facts. Isolated facts that are just fun to know.  I worry a bit about this because so many kids read nonfiction and just collect facts without going further.  This series of books is full of facts. I usually avoid books like that as there are enough out there. But this series is different.  The facts are more than just a sentence fact. They are embedded in an explanation and connected to other facts in ways that build some understanding.  For kids who are used to reading facts only, this is a great series to push them a little bit and to see how facts fit into bigger ideas and understandings.

These are great books for kids who need a bit of support reading nonfiction. I can see using them as read alouds or in small groups. But I think for all kids, these will be great reads for independent reading and kids will be able to read them cover to cover. The illustrations are fun with adorable animals doing crazy things everywhere. I think these illustrations will be great for kids who avoid nonfiction because they have a limited definition of what it can be.  These don't look like your typical nonfiction book.

Right now, I think there are 3 books in the series. But 4 more are due out over the next several months.  Woohooo!

Poetry Friday -- You Are There

You Are There
by Erica Jong


You are there.
You have always been
there.
Even when you thought
you were climbing
you had already arrived.
Even when you were
breathing hard,
you were at rest.
Even then it was clear
you were there.

Not in our nature
to know what
is journey and what
arrival.
Even if we knew
we would not admit.
Even if we lived
we would think
we were just
germinating.

To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.

June and July have been travel months of for me: Indiana, Hocking Hills, Michigan, Colorado, and next up, Vermont. I like Erica Jong's answer to the question, "Where am I?" 

As Back to School ads and sales rev up and I feel like I should be thinking even more about the upcoming school year than I already am (no school nightmares yet, though...knock wood), I will hold onto that last stanza.

Sylvia and Janet have the Poetry Friday Roundup this week at Poetry For Children. 

Small Art

Anybody who's been around me or this blog for very long probably knows that I am a huge fan of Hugh MacLeod (gapingvoid.com). I get a cartoon a day in my email very weekday and many of them are archived in a "comics" folder on my computer desktop. My business cards feature MacLeod's art.

My admiration for Hugh MacLeod continues to grow. This week, I was doodling around in Twitter, waiting for the timer to go off so I could move the hose from one part of the dry spot in mom's lawn to another, when I found this article he wrote: In Praise of Small Art. Go ahead and read it. It's a short article.

In some ways, it seems to me that Education (capital E) can be equated to Big Art. What we do in our classrooms when we close our doors is Small Art.

And the more I think about it, many of the classroom practices that are the most powerful are also Small Art: read aloud , Poetry Friday, 15 Minutes on Friday, reading/writing conferences, minilessons .

Small Art was at the heart of the poem I shared last Friday for Poetry Friday, and -- how far will this train of thought lead me? -- poetry is definitely a Small Art.

Today, right now, is Small Art. My life, constructed of these small installations, is Big Art, and to make the Big Art as beautiful as possible, each bit of Small Art needs to be well-crafted and intentional. Praise-worthy.

Here's to Small Art!

Go make some.

Readers Front and Center by Dorothy Barnhouse

Readers Front & Center: Helping All Students Engage with Complex Text by Dorothy Barnhouse
     Stenhouse, 2014

This is a book about LISTENING.

"We can't teach people if we don't know them and we can't know them if we don't listen to them." p.4

Dorothy Barnhouse takes Lucy Calkins' three components of a writing conference -- "research, decide, teach" -- applies them to reading conferences, and puts each phase under the microscope.

RESEARCH (chapter 1)
In the research phase, Barnhouse describes how we listen to a child read a small bit of text. Rather than focusing on issues of fluency, we focus on each student as a reader, listening to what they have to say and asking questions to understand what's behind their thinking. In this phase, we also refrain from probing to see if they "got it" or can retell the plot. We are listening to what students say about their thinking with an eye toward what we will teach about the way texts work, not just fixing some small misunderstanding in that particular text. "...correcting is not teaching. Correcting is small. It's about one word, one sentence, one text. Teaching is bigger. It attempts to take that moment and contextualize it." p.22

Questions we might ask (with a "tone of curiosity rather than interrogation") in this phase of a conference (p.24-25):

What's going on here?
What made you think that?
Where did you get that information?
How do you know?

DECIDE (chapter 2)
In the introduction to this chapter (p.28), Barnhouse writes, "...how does one decide what to teach?" and my marginal note reads, "Indeed!" The sections of this chapter are "Reading with Vision," "Reading with Agency" (I love how Peter Johnston's work informs Barnhouse's thinking!), "Reading with a Flexible Mindset," "Teaching with Vision: Noticing the How Not Just the What," "Teaching Readers to be Problem Solvers," "Setting Texts Up as Problems to be Solved," "Learning from Errors," and "Building Identities as Thinkers and Learners." This is the chapter that will change the way I conference with students. This is the chapter that lifts my eyes up from the text the student is reading and helps me to remember to keep my eyes (and my teaching decisions) on the way ALL texts work. This is the chapter will help me frame all conversations about texts around the way readers solve different aspects of the puzzle that texts provide. This is the chapter that will keep me grounded in Carol Dweck's "growth mindset."

TEACH (chapters 3-6)
These will be chapters to which I will return often for ideas about how to move students as individuals and in groups to texts of greater and greater complexity. The ways Barnhouse diagrams student thinking will give me new ways to capture the essence of a conference. And even though she gives a shout-out to Cathy Mere on the topic of using Evernote to track conferences, I'm going to try Google Docs this year. Or just stick with my tried-and-true clipboard and not obsess about record-keeping. (I'll update you about my record-keeping again once the school year is underway.)

The most important take-away from these chapters on teaching (for me) would be a deconstruction of the title of the book:

READERS Front and Center (it's about the reader, not the text):
Helping ALL Students (because it's about students, there will always be a text a little more complex than the one they are reading into which we can help them to grow)
ENGAGE (such a smart verb choice, because we want active involvement with authentic purpose)
with COMPLEX TEXT (which is a student-driven moving target, not a list in a program or even the exemplar texts in the CCSS).

Sophie Scott Goes South by Alison Lester

Thanks to Joellen McCarthy (@imalwayslearning), I now know about this fabulous book Sophie Scott Goes South by Alison Lester.  Joellen is one of those people that mentions one great book every time I see her. And it is always a FABULOUS book that I have never heard of.

Sophie Scott Goes South is a book about a girl who gets to travel to Antarctica with her father, who is  the captain of the ship that takes a group there.  The book is about a fictitious character (Sophie Scott) but is based on Alison Lester's journey to the Antarctic.

The book reads like Sophie's journal.  It is filled with her writing and drawings. And since  this is based on the author's trip, there are lots of real photos throughout the book that show what Sophie is doing and seeing. The photos are incredible as the reader actually gets to see the real Antarctica.

I don't know much about Antarctica. I actually didn't even know I was interested in it. But some of the facts and information in this book are fascinating!  One of the most fascinating things I learned was that scientists leave underwater microphones in the ocean for years so they can analyze whales sounds. Who knew? I had lots of WOW moments and lots of wonderings when I read this book. I imagine kids will too.

This book has so many possibilities. It is a longer picture book, maybe one that would take longer than one sitting to read. It would make a great read aloud and I am always looking for great informational texts to read aloud.  The visuals really add to the text so that is one thing to study.  The text can definitely be used as a mentor text in writing. It is perfect for middle grade kids.

So happy to know about this book!  Fabulous!

How to Outrun a Crocodile When Your Shoes are Untied

I read How to Outrun a Crocodile When Your Shoes Are Untied (My Life Is a Zoo) by Jess Keating before #nerdcampmi (one of my favorite days of the year-have I mentioned that?).  I had heard about the book on Twitter and thought it sounded like a great middle grade novel. Then I saw that Jess would be at #nerdcampmi so I definitely wanted to read it before #nerdcampmi in case I had a chance to meet her.

The book is fabulous! It is about a girl named Ana who is dealing with typical middle school problems.  She deals with cute boys, mean girls, school struggles and parents who are sometimes embarrassing.  This is the story of a preteen/teen girl who is beginning to figure out who she is.

Her story is unique in that her parents are zoologists so she lives at the zoo while her mom works on a research project. It is perfect because the story is both funny and serious.  There were lots of laugh-out-loud parts, but there were also real issues of middle grade and middle school kids. It seems to be the perfect combination.

Ana is a character you care about quickly and I was glad to see that this was the first book in a series. She is likable and vulnerable. She is trying to figure out how to fit in and how to be herself.  She is dealing with lots of different relationships and juggling lots of things as middle schoolers do.

And this book happens in the zoo. I found this part fascinating. I am not a zoo person. I go, but it is not my favorite place. However, we do live right near the Columbus Zoo, one of the best zoos in the world from what I can tell. The amazing Jack Hanna lives in our town. And I am a big fan of Jack Hanna. So it was fascinating to me to read some behind-the-scenes zoo stuff. I want to pay closer attention-next time I am at the zoo-to the work going on and those buildings that seem to be empty.  The fun of this book is that author Jess Keating used to be a zoologist. So that part of her story made the zoo part of this far more interesting. Love how she took that and brought it to her life as a writer! I love that she is a zoologist/children's author. (Her website has a great feature called #KeatingCreature which shares some great creature info and is lots of fun!)

I don't see this as a book I'd put in a 3rd grade classroom --it seems more perfect for 5th and 6th grade. Maybe even the end of 4th. I had several kids in mind when I read this book--kids who were ready for a tiny bit of romance, kids who like to read about real kids in real life, without the sadness that goes along with some middle grade fiction.  I had kids in mind who liked to laugh a little bit when they read but they like humor embedded in real life stories of great characters.

This is really a perfect middle grade novel for upper middle grades. I sometimes worry that our kids are reading all things sad. (And I love a good, sad book.) My youngest daughter is also a fan of sad books. But I know she has said to me more than once during middle school--I want to read a good book, but not one where someone dies or that I'll cry. Our middle grade kids want stories about kids like them, going through every day preteen stuff, figuring out the world around them. This is that book.

I can't wait til the next in this series comes out (January 2015) and I am definitely holding onto this one for a few 5th graders I know this fall.

Our #TeamShortcut photo. See, we aren't even tired at the end!  Jess is on the left, dressed as Beekle!)

(On a side note, I did meet Jess Keating at #nerdcampmi.  We decided early on that for the #nerdrun, we would be part of #TeamSaunter. We had no desire to win, but thought we would support camp by taking part and celebrating some book characters. So a group of us did just that. Well, it was great to walk with Jess and to turn #TeamSaunter into #TeamShortcut. It was great to have some time to chat and to make some new friends.   Jess is a great author --one that I am happy to have had the chance to meet! Can't wait to read more of her books! And to maybe Hack that #nerdrun map again:-)

Poetry Friday -- War Some of the Time

Found on the website Indexed

War Some of the Time
by Charles Bukowski


when you write a poem it
needn't be intense
it
can be nice and
easy
and you shouldn't necessarily
be
concerned only with things like anger or
love or need;
at any moment the
greatest accomplishment might be to simply
get
up and tap the handle
on that leaking toilet;
I've
done that twice now while typing
this
and now the toilet is
quiet.
to
solve simple problems: that's
the most
satisfying thing, it
gives you a chance and it
gives everything else a chance
too.

we were made to accomplish the easy
things
and made to live through the things
hard.

Now that Franki got me (and apparently most of the rest of her social network) started with the daily news digest theSkimm, I finally feel like I know a bit about what's going on in the world. Unfortunately, most of what's going on in the world seems to be war, now that the World Cup is over. Depressing. I'm with Bukowski. Wiggling the toilet handle or making the perfectly browned piece of toast -- the little things in life -- are keeping me grounded and positive.

Tabatha has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at The Opposite of Indifference.

A Book for All Writers

The Night Gardener
by Jonathan Auxier
Harry N. Abrams, 2014
review copy from the public library, but I will want this one for my classroom library


This is a creepy Victorian tale of two orphans who find themselves working in an English manor house that is overrun by an ominous tree and visited at night by a mysterious spirit-man.

At the heart of the book, however, and what makes it a "book for all writers" is STORY and storytelling. Molly holds her brother Kip's world together with storytelling. Stories give them hope and help them deal with the uncertainties of life. Molly uses stories as currency, keys, and salve.

"I think I figured it out." She sniffed, looking up at the stars. "Hester asked me what the difference between a story and a lie was. At the time, I told her that a story helps folks. 'Helps 'em do what?' she asked. Well I think I know the answer. A story helps folks face the world, even when it frightens 'em. And a lie does the opposite. It helps you hide." 

Here's to more good stories, like this one. Here's to the writing that will bring them to life.

A Book for All Readers

I Kill the Mockingbird
by Paul Acampora
Roaring Brook Press, 2014
review copy from the public library, but I'll be buying a copy so I can transfer all my dog-eared pages



We rarely review YA books, but exceptions can be made.

This is a book for book lovers.

Three good friends on the brink of high school hatch a fake conspiracy to ensure that everyone will actually read their summer reading assignment -- To Kill a Mockingbird.

There's a romance subplot, a cancer subplot, and a poke-mild-fun-at-Catholics subplot. There are literary allusions to children's literature right and left (the three good friends are, and have always been Readers).

Oh, and there's a teaching subplot. Mr. Nowak, Fat Bob, has these words of wisdom before he dies of a massive coronary:

"It's not enough to know what all the words mean," he continued. "A good reader starts to see what an enritre book is trying to say. And then a good reader will have something to say in return. If you're reading well," he told us, "you're having a conversation." 

I raised my hand. "A conversation with who?"

"With the characters in the book," said Mr. Nowak. "With the author. With friends and fellow readers. A book connects you to the universe like a cell phone connects you to the Internet."

Mr. Nowak's the one who inspires the three culprits who hatch the I Kill the Mockingbird plan. And in the end,

"All the teachers are talking about it...If you're a teacher, you dream about having students who will try to change the world someday because of something you do or say in the classroom."

Indeed.