Category Archives: Connected Learning

Thinking about Poetry

Over at The Nerdy Book Club, Cindy has invited readers to share their favorite poets or poems.

I love poetry…especially in the classroom. Each week in our classroom we study a poem, noticing what the poet is doing and paying attention to the images it creates in our minds. We read it aloud and notice how the words feel in our mouths. Individual students read and together we read chorally.

Later in the week, we revisit our poem and create an illustration that captures our understanding of the poem. We glue our poem and illustration into a composition book we call our poetry anthology. By the end of the school year, students have read, studied, and illustrated more than 30 poems…over the course of the three years they spend in our multiage classroom, they have close to 100 poems collected and illustrated to take home and treasure.

One of my favorite poets to share with my young students is Valerie Worth. I love her short poems. They are accessible to children. And I love that she writes about ordinary things. But these are not simple poems…they are full of imagery, word play, and figurative language.

One of my favorites is Safety Pin.

safety pin

Valerie Worth

Closed, it sleeps On its side Quietly,
The silver Image

Of some Small fish;

Opened, it snaps Its tail out
Like a thin Shrimp,

and looks
At the sharp Point with a Surprised eye.

What poets and poetry do you love?

A Writing Kind of Day

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Today was a writing kind of day.

On Friday we began celebrating the National Day on Writing with a field trip and a puzzle piece that I wrote about here.

But today was the cherry on top of the writing sundae.

Our morning began with a version of a chalk talk. My teaching partner taped white butcher paper to the wall ball court and posted a few questions for students at our school to respond to: How do you use writing to connect? Where do you like to write? and Who are your favorite authors or what are you favorite books?

With markers in hand, our students started writing.

They wrote about places they love to write: writing on couches, on the beach, and in libraries. They love Shel Silverstein, Beverly Cleary, Roald Dahl, and J.K. Rowling. They write letters, texts, emails, books, notes and more.

They wrote and wrote and wrote. And when they weren’t writing, they were reading the writing of their classmates on the wall.

Our school-wide puzzle was also on display in the wall ball court today.

And students enjoyed reading what other classes at our school wrote for their puzzle piece (and finding their own and reading it again!).

And then we went on with our regular classroom activities…and more writing! Our students have been drafting a just-for-fun piece of writing about an animal of their choice. And they were applying what they have been learning about using figurative language (similes), specific and interesting verbs, and sensory imagery (sound, movement) to write a “moment” featuring their animal. Today they took some time to give their writing a “check up” (you know like the doctor does to make sure you are healthy). They reread their writing and looked for the features mentioned above…and then went back to their writing to make it even better.

And the best part of the day was that these writers enjoyed writing, sharing writing about their writing on Twitter, and even revising their writing…because they are writers. And today was all about writing.

Photo-Inquiry…Art, Science, and Writing

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I’ve been taking pictures every day for more than a year now. Some days it’s a struggle, other days it’s pretty easy. But one of my favorite things about being a photographer (albeit, amateur) is that it makes me pay attention…and ask lots of questions.

Yesterday I was up in our local mountains enjoying all that fall brings…colors and pumpkins and apples…on a warm fall day. As I was photographing some beautiful leaves turning orange and red and yellow, I noticed this beautiful pine tree.

Looking closely, I was fascinated by the texture of the bark on the tree. And an even closer look revealed all these tiny holes…with many filled with acorns or other nuts.

That observation set off a million questions…how does this happen, what animal does it? Does it hurt the tree? Is it squirrels? And then I noticed this nearby fence post.

So it’s not only about trees…it’s about wood. I noticed the nearby utility pole also had holes and nuts.

With all these questions running through my head, we continued our adventure and I continued to look for interesting subjects for my photography. A while later, at the edge of a little pumpkin patch I looked up and saw a beautiful blue bird with red markings high up on a utility pole. I thought it might be some kind of jay, but my husband was quick to point out that it was tapping the pole…a woodpecker!

We watched closely, listening to the persistent tapping as it pecked into the top of the pole. I attempted several photographs…but one thing the iphone camera is not good at is long distance photos! Here’s an attempt.

If you look closely you can see a tiny silhouette at the top the pole. As I watched I started to make connections to the pine tree and fence post I had photographed earlier. These holes with the acorns in them were the work of an acorn woodpecker! A little internet search today led me to this information:

The group will guard their territory, and will often have a single tree in which they store their acorns; known as a granary. A single granary may contain tens of thousands of acorns. The acorns themselves are placed individually into a hole drilled into the tree. Acorn Woodpeckers also feed on insects (including aerial flycatching), sap, and fruits.

I love that photography always ends up teaching me interesting things about nature and about the world. It makes me pay attention, notice details, and ask questions. It makes me curious…and makes me wonder…a perfect tool for inquiry! And as I write this on the National Day on Writing, I get to share my photography and learning with you! #write2connect in action!

How do you write to connect? What do you learn from the activities you love?

San Diego Fall: The Hue of You

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Living in a place like San Diego, seasons are all about subtlety. Rather than piles of fluffy white snow or icy winds in winter, we have chilly mornings and nights and mostly sunny, cool days. Spring is our rainy season (note: 10 inches of rain per year is our maximum!), the nights and mornings are a bit warmer than winter and most days are cool and sunny–although late spring brings the dreaded “May Gray,” that marine layer that pushes the sun away from the coast. Summer in San Diego starts slowly. June is characterized by “June Gloom” (just like May Gray), with the sun appearing for a cameo in the late afternoon before the fog rolls in again. And fall in San Diego is gorgeous! It’s warm and sunny, often well into November and even December. But it can also be scary with dry Santa Ana winds that whip up the fire danger in our arid, desert-like climate.

Today we decided to trek up to a local mountain town about an hour east of my house in celebration of fall. Julian is known for fall…filled with apple pies, apple cider, and other iconic fall features. But those vivid red and orange and yellow leaves that shout fall in other regions, whisper fall in San Diego. And even in Julian where San Diegans go for fall, the autumn hues are subtle.

And they’re positioned between the greens and browns and reds of the pines and manzanitas and California live oaks that are native to the region.

And then there are the iconic fall images we know so well…pumpkins, scarecrows, apples.

So, the hues of you for me as a San Diegan in fall are a rich, but subdued, palette of oranges, yellows, greens, browns, and reds. And I can feel them and smell them and taste them as much as I can see them. Warm and dry and spicy…and yummy. Like this apple dumpling I had today.

What hues evoke fall for you?

Write2Connect!

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People all over the nation are celebrating the power of writing this week and next. October 20th is the National Day on Writing…and with it falling on a Sunday, there are even more days to celebrate writing.

We’ve planned for multiple parts to our celebration of writing…in our classroom, at our school, in our district…and beyond. And with the theme, write2connect, we’ve focused on how writing connects.

In our district every class has worked to create a puzzle piece highlighting student writing…that interconnects with the other puzzle pieces to create a collage of writing at each school site. For our pieces (we have two since our class has two teachers and twice as many students) each student has a puzzle piece that interconnects to create the larger puzzle piece. In their individual puzzle piece each student answers the question, how does writing connect us? They included answers like writing letters to grandparents, sending emails, writing books and notes, and connecting with teachers in their Homework Writer’s Notebooks.

Our school-wide puzzle will be unveiled on Monday…stay tuned!

Today we also physically connected with older students at our other school to write together. Nearly 100 students in grades one through five spent the morning playing with writing. Using the Common Core text types as broad categories, they explored writing about the same topic in three different ways. This whirlwind of writing was such fun…and successful. Students wrote an amazing amount–and such variety, they wrote about soccer and horses and books and clubs and so much more. In our last few minutes at the end of our allotted time, a few students read their writing aloud while the others guessed whether the writing was primarily narrative, informational, or opinion in nature.

I love watching writers at work! They were so focused and engaged as they scribbled ideas into their writer’s notebooks. They all wrote and wrote and wrote…and we didn’t have nearly enough time to hear all who wanted to share!

And we have more in store on Monday! We will be participating in a large-scale “chalk talk” posted in our wall ball courts…and admiring our puzzles of connected writing. We also plan to initiate our class twitter account and share some of the amazing and thoughtful ideas students are writing! Check out the #write2connect hashtag on twitter!

How are you celebrating the National Day on Writing?

Experiencing the Underbelly

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I often write about the benefits of being a connected educator. Today I experienced a bit of the underbelly.

As I do everyday, I spent my morning teaching students. We sang, discussed, explored some new math strategies, wrote and shared. From the time school started until lunch, I didn’t have time to email or post or tweet. But apparently my twitter account did…

When I looked at my phone at lunchtime I noticed a number of twitter alerts and text messages visible on the lock screen. Texts from my son and my nephew warning me that I’d been hacked alongside DM (direct message) notices from people I don’t know (even virtually) recommending web links to me–and one from a friend asking if I had been hacked. I had a few twitter mentions from some virtual friends suggesting I change my password because they were getting DMs from me. A peek at my email showed some more messages from people I know recommending that I change my password–they too were getting DMs from me.

I also got an email from Twitter telling me my password had been reset. Apparently my account had been quite busy while I was otherwise occupied with my teaching!

So I spent some time resetting my password, and then responding to my friends and family to let them know that I appreciated their advice and warning. I also noticed that I wasn’t the only one victimized by Twitter spamming today. Here are a couple of other tweets pointing out the problem.

I don’t like that my account was hacked or that it looked like I was sending out annoying messages to my Twitter community. But I also know that this goes with the territory. Being a connected educator means that I have to deal with the hassles of technology and social media as well as reap the benefits of it.

I appreciate that my Twitter community remains cool and matter of fact even when faced with annoying and sometimes confusing security breaches…and they help me know how to act when I experience these same issues.

And in spite of the problems, I remain a connected educator.

Learning to Code

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It seems perfect that this month that includes the National Day on Writing and Connected Educators’ Month is also the time when we have ventured into teaching coding to our students (and ourselves). My teaching partner and I talked about doing this last year during our 1:1 iPad pilot…but were thwarted by the fact that Scratch requires flash and won’t work on our iPads. We had even thought about it the year before, that but 30 minutes of computer time per week just didn’t seem adequate.

So to push myself to realize this goal of coding with my students, I have been telling people that I want to do this. I know myself enough to know that if I don’t make my goals public, somehow it is easier to push them aside when they feel “hard.” And In our school district this year we have a new Educational Technology teacher. A credentialed teacher who was hired specifically to help teachers integrate technology into their teaching–in addition to the tech people in our district who help when our technology isn’t working. I mentioned our desire to teach our students to code in an introductory meeting with the Ed Tech teacher before school began…and he was interested and excited about the prospect.

And so last week he ventured into our classroom at a perfect time to talk…and pinned me down on getting started with coding. He would come in and get students started–using the Beebot I had purchased at the end of the summer and the Hopscotch app he had learned about.

I love the way the simple, mechanical Beebot illustrates the basics of programming. And I love that it also demonstrates how easy it is to have mistakes in your code, and the need to problem solve and “debug” through repeated trials and iteration. My students were quick to understand the basics and very interested in the Beebot. First graders could easily explain their thinking–and could figure out where they had made mistakes (older kids could too, and made mistakes too!).

After exploring how to make Beebot move, we turned to our iPads and opened Hopscotch. Similar to Scratch, Hopscotch uses interlocking blocks to make the characters move. After trying a few moves in common and learning to make their character spin, we set students loose to explore the possibilities.

And they began to “write” their own code! We gave students the opportunity to share cool things they had figured out with all of us…and promised that we would give them more time to explore this app and create more code.

I don’t know any more about coding at this point than my students do, so we will continue to learn together. And I think I am as excited about learning to code as they are. I’m glad our Ed Tech teacher pushed us to set a date to start to work on coding with our students…and I’m glad he was there to get us started. His checking in on our progress will also be an incentive to continue this with our students. I have tons more to learn…but who better to learn it with than our students?

Celebrating 100 Posts!

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I never would have believed when I started this blog way back in July that I would get to 100 posts…and except for one day a week or so ago, all those posts were consecutive days! So to celebrate, here are some thoughts on the value of blogging…and writing every day. (And a silly picture of a balloon I saw at the grocery store)

1. Writing every day gives me authenticity as a writer. I’m not just talking about the value of writing–I am “walking the walk” of a writer. As my friend Janis stated in her blog post yesterday,

We must write when we are inspired, and we must write when we are not. We need to feel the joy and the pain of the process in order to understand what our students experience.

I work through my own blocks and figure out ways to find topics to write about and put words on the page. I am also more aware of the writing of others and notice how they put words together.

2. As a blogger, I have joined a community of other writers. I would never have believed that I would have 99 followers to my blog…most of whom I have never met. And yet these new friends encourage my writing and my photography by their mere presence. And I’ve come to realize that people read my blog even when they don’t make their presence known. I get little hints now and then from an unexpected reader and I realize again that my audience stretches beyond me.

3. Blogging has taught me the value of commenting on other people’s blog posts. I have definitely been guilty of reading blog post after blog post…and never commenting. As a blogger myself, I know that comments can push my thinking and increase my motivation to write. I now take the time to comment on a regular basis and I read blogs differently–always looking for the ways bloggers make connections and create energy around their posts.

4. Blogging pushes me as a writer and as a photographer. My photography inspires my writing and my writing inspires my photography. Both practices encourage me to look closely at my world and pay attention to the little things. And both have become regular practices in my life…habits! (The good kind!)

5. Blogging connects me. I am producing content on the web as well as consuming content. I am more connected to other educators…all over the world, and more conscious of sharing ideas and resources. I join in with challenges that other bloggers post, linking my blog posts to theirs…and inspiring some different kinds of writing that I might not undertake on my own. I continue to look for ways to connect, to learn from others, and to share with others. That is the heart of being a connected educator.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect. I am celebrating my 100th blog post in the middle of Connected Educator’s month!

Are you thinking about blogging? Start small…and keep at it. I’d love to know what you find valuable about blogging.

Planting Seeds

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We planted seeds today…in the garden and in our writer’s notebooks. There are many garden metaphors about learning and students–especially at the elementary level and as I watched my students today, I can understand why.

The beet seeds were small and for some of my students, hard to hang onto. Some seeds slipped to the ground, blending in with the earth. Those students needed another seed to plant in our garden bed. Other students delighted in the tiny seeds and noticed every detail. They were able to keep track and carefully nestled the seed into the soil.

During our writing lesson a bit later, I noticed that some of my students took the lesson on similes and easily “planted” their ideas in their writer’s notebooks. A few stretched even further and played with language and the technique of simile to create fresh and interesting images. Others had dropped their “seeds” and needed some extra support to “plant” a seed or two in their notebooks.

In the garden, after planting our seeds, students carefully watered the soil to create an environment to support the seeds’ germination. They managed the heavy watering cans and negotiated turn taking as fledgeling gardeners.

In the classroom, we left our writing seeds to germinate too after carefully sowing them in our notebooks. Time was short and ideas were flowing…students can’t wait to come back to share their writing and extend their ideas. This is an environment ripe for more writing tomorrow! Today we used Stubborn as a Mule and Other Silly Similes by Nancy Loewen to “prime the pump” and get us thinking about similes and how we might use them in our writing.

We planted beets, peas, arugula, spinach, beans, kale, and sunflowers today. As our gardening teacher reminded the kids, we plant all the time because we want to eat all the time. And as writers and learners, we need to write and play with language and writing so our ideas and stamina and capacity for writing and learning will also grow. We celebrate the National Day on Writing in October each year as a reminder of the importance of writing in our lives and learning. But just as we don’t only plant our gardens in October, we can’t just plant our writing in October. We have to write all year long, in lots of ways for lots of reasons to nurture our writing…and our writers so they too will grow strong and tall.

How do you nurture writers and learners? What seeds did you plant today?

Good Morning

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When I saw the Weekly Photo Challenge on the Daily Post this week I realized that even though I am a morning person, I don’t take many photos in the morning. So the prompt, Good Morning, has made me think about that.

Saturday, because I was at a conference at UC Davis, I stopped by our favorite bagel shop right next to the Starbucks for a quick and carry breakfast. And while I was waiting for my order I noticed the beauty of the donuts in the case near the cash register. That shiny chocolate was tempting…I resisted the donut, but did take a photo!

I also took a photo of the sun through the fall trees…and then played with it in one of my photo editing apps.

Earlier in the week I spent some time with my son and daughter-in-law and stayed in this funky little hotel. I took this photo as I headed to check out in the morning.

I like the hint of light over the top of the hills in the distance. And then at my son’s apartment I noticed the tools in his shower. Why don’t I have a pad of waterproof paper and a pencil hanging in my shower for those soothing water-induced inspirations in the morning?