Category Archives: teaching

Saturated

In our classroom we like to give students lots of ways to process information. They listen, they speak, they sketch, they observe, they write, they read, they move, they sing, they paint…

They are saturated with learning experiences. Today we painted. But it was just a part of a series of experiences to help students look closely, notice details, and then learn to sketch roundness by using curved lines and shading with their sketch pencils. They started with pumpkins harvested from our school garden. They moved to tomatoes, also harvested in the garden. They studied Vincent Van Gogh and learned about the concept of still life. They arranged their own still life composition and photographed it using their iPads. They used the photo as a guide for sketching their unique composition–and also learned some techniques for showing the overlapping of the fruits and vegetables. And then today they tried the same techniques using watercolor paints.

These six, seven, and eight year olds saturated their compositions with the brilliant colors of fall based on their experiences with the actual objects.

In this photo you can see the gorgeous sketch (that the student made earlier this week) that guided this careful painting. Saturating students in a variety of experiences related to a topic allows for deeper and more meaningful learning. This learning is not just about art–although the art is beautiful–it’s also science and history and math and reading and writing…and so much more.

And conveniently, this week’s Weekly Photo Challenge is saturated. It talks about color…but there is so much more to saturation than color, in my opinion!

How do you saturate yourself and your students in learning experiences?

The Action of Stillness: Still Life

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Today’s daily prompt at The Daily Post is stillness. In our classroom we’ve begun to work on sketching techniques that help artists capture roundness. All this in preparation for sketching a still life of the fall bounty from the school garden. Last week we sketched pumpkins. Today…tomatoes!

So here is the action of a child working to capture the stillness and roundness of a tomato just picked from the school garden.

How do you capture stillness?

Mentor Text: September Is…

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As a teacher of writing, I see mentor text everywhere. It exists in expected places–like well-written children’s literature and in less traditional places like Youtube videos, blog posts, and even billboards and advertisements. The tricky part about using mentor text to support writers is finding the right mentor text to use in the situation at hand. With that in mind, sharing our successes with mentor texts is a great way to help each other as we make our own classroom selections. The 113 Mentor Texts Challenge over at SDAWP Voices attempts to do just that–create a collection of mentor texts that educators from all levels and all over are using.

Early in the school year in addition to doing some sentence level work, we also like to use mentor text to support students’ generation of whole text. After examining a number of texts we had for consideration, we decided last week to go with a poem to support our young writers. Bobbi Katz wrote this poem called September Is that describes some qualities of the beginning of school that are easy for students to relate to.

September Is

September is

when yellow pencils

in brand new eraser hats

bravely wait on perfect points–

ready to march across miles of lines

in empty notebooks–

and

September is

when a piece of chalk

skates across the board–

swirling and looping–

until it spells your new teacher’s

name.

Bobbi Katz

As we studied this piece as a class, students noticed that the pencils were described like people…with hats and ready to march. (They do know that is called personification) They noticed the use of swirling and looping to further describe the skating of the chalk. They noticed that Bobbi Katz didn’t just make a list of things in school, she picked two and then went into more detail about each of them.

As students got ready to use September Is as a mentor text for their own writing, we also talked about other ideas besides September as a focus for the writing. They were thinking about Fall Is and School Is as other possibilities.

Students began to generate ideas on that first day and then set their writing aside. The following day we asked a couple of volunteers to share their work in progress as we noticed what they were doing well. Students definitely were including interesting verbs and expanded descriptions. We all then went back to work…even those who thought they were done…to consider stronger words, to add more description and detail.

And here are a couple of student-generated drafts.

“E” — a first grader — wrote this:

Fall Is

Fall is Halloween when ghosts glide through the night sky and when leaves glide off the trees.

“S” — a third grader –wrote this:

Fall Is

Fall is…

when the reddish-brown leaves are too tired of hanging hopelessly on the weak branches so they twirl and spin in the air before they carefully float right on to the cold grassy land full of new seedlings that are going to grow in the summer.

Fall is also when you scoop all of the white tear-shaped seeds out of the big round orange pumpkin and carve a face for the spooky night when ghosts haunt the night sky and children in costumes are running about trick-or-treating and scaring everybody.

I feel like my students captured fall in their writing and that Bobbi Katz supported their ideas. They were able to use her basic structure and let her strong words and images guide them to their own compelling compositions. That’s the power of mentor text!

Engagement, Learning, and Technology

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How do we, as teachers, use technology in ways that improve opportunities for student learning in our classrooms? Now in our second year with 1:1 iPads, this question is always on our minds. My teaching partner and I are always thinking about ways to increase student engagement and participation in all aspects of the classroom–in line with our beliefs that engagement and participation play an important role in learning. Sometimes those ideas involve our iPads–and somethings they don’t, we are always considering student learning rather than iPad use as the goal. Paula over at Amplifying Minds wrote earlier today about the role technology should or could play in enabling learning.

This week we experimented with using the app educreations as a tool during our morning calendar time to encourage more interaction and participation. My immediate observation is that more students can share their mathematical equation generation since the white board feature allows students and teachers to see many more attempts than were available orally. And the novelty factor is certainly at work–students are interested in using the iPad, so there is more immediate engagement. I do realize we could do a similar process using our actual handheld white boards and markers–messier, but similar.

I’m also seeing students use different aspects of the educreations app for their equation generation–the typing feature, the writing feature, a variety of colors… (And it’s way less messy than the markers!) I feel like this is just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities, and I suspect that students will show us more ways to use this tool.

And an added bonus was reported back to me…a guest teacher who worked for my teaching partner on Wednesday using this new tool in our classroom implemented this strategy in another classroom later this week. She was quite excited about the success and engagement the students experienced, and proud of her own ability to implement a new strategy with the students.

Sometimes it take a new tool, like the 1:1 iPads to push our thinking about ways to modify our own teaching strategies…to move out of comfort zones and try new ways of working with and engaging students. I don’t have any illusions that this particular strategy being a ground-breaking innovation in learning, but even small steps can improve the learning experience for students. We just have to keep moving forward…and be open to experimentation and listen to student ideas about innovation as well!

How are you supporting and enhancing student learning in your classroom?

Building Rhythms

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As we enter the fourth week of school, I can feel the rhythm settling in. It’s not the dulling thrum of never-changing routine, but the strong heartbeat of a community in progress. You might think that because two thirds of our students remain the same each year, that the beginning of the year would be seamless. But in fact, we feel the transition even with so much remaining the same.

Each year students take on a new role in the classroom. Those veteran third graders, who have already spent two years in the classroom with us, are figuring out just how to be a classroom and school leader. They are considering how to provide support to their younger classmates while still maintaining their emerging “cool” image…not an easy balancing act! Second graders, who used to be those “little kids,” are wrestling with stepping up to the demands of the being in the middle–no longer needing as much support, and yet grappling with no longer being the youngest. And our brand new first graders have spent the last several weeks trying to figure out what it means to be a part of our multiage class. A place with a history–a legacy of shared learning that pops up regularly, and they feel left out of. They are learning to work with others, to accept help from their older peers, and to risk adding their contributions to our classroom learning.

This week feels like the turning point. We are feeling like a cohesive community learning together. Students are taking risks, supporting each other, and settling in…with the calm hum of learning-in-progress filling the room.

I can feel the rhythm building and soon the melody will come into focus. I look forward to our voices blending and harmonizing as we grow together.

I love these moments of teaching.

Birds on a Wire: Connections and Interconnections

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I often ask my students to make connections. Connections between books we read. Connections between things that happen at school and at home. Connections between our math lessons and our social studies lessons. And I find myself constantly making connections.

A couple of weeks ago our garden teacher introduced the word interconnected along with the word ecosystem. His emphasis was that the garden is an ecosystem where the plants and animals…all the living things are interconnected. When something happens to one, there is an impact on the others.

This morning in the New York Times Magazine I read an article about emotional intelligence and its impact on student learning and success. While the article debated methods of providing instruction in emotional intelligence, it had me thinking about the microcosm of the classroom and other communities of practice in my life. Our actions and attitudes impact those around us–whether we intend it or not.

When I arrived at the beach this afternoon for a short walk, I noticed a whole line of birds on a power wire. I felt compelled to capture this image with my camera–even knowing that my iPhone is not the best tool for capturing images at a distance. I walked as close as I could get and snapped the birds from a few different angles.

In some ways these birds remind me of the idea of interconnections. Some fly into an open space on the wire, others fly off. They are all sharing the same space, with the movement of one impacting all the birds in some way.

Like the birds on the wire, each student in the classroom has an impact on the others. We are both interconnected and interdependent. As a result, as teachers it is important to consider students’ emotional well-being and help them learn to handle conflict, stress, frustration, and disappointment. These skills are not in our Common Core Standards and are not tested on annual standardized testing measures. But they matter…to all of us.

I don’t have convincing data-based evidence that attention to students’ emotional needs will result in successful, well-adjusted adults–but I know it can’t hurt. Students who learn to build consensus in group work can carry that skill beyond the classroom. When conflicts can be resolved with words and compromise rather than fists and tears, we all benefit. Students who have strategies and tools to manage difficult situations will be better equipped to deal with the obstacles that life deals them.

In the garden, in my classroom…and on the wire, interconnectedness means our actions and decisions impact those around us. And in our increasingly connected global society, we are all birds on a wire.

What do you do to support your own emotional well-being? How do you help build the interpersonal skills of the young people in your life?

Inside

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These are my representation for today’s Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside

Our students made masks out of natural items they found around the school. I always love what goes on inside the minds and imaginations of children. You should read their stories that were inspired by the masks they made!!!

Looking Beneath the Surface

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I suspect my neighbors thought I was crazy as I crawled around the lawn in my skirt when I got home from work today. I had spotted some new mushrooms growing this morning and noticed that one had a hole where you can see through to the inside.

After unloading my work bag and feeding my cats, I attached the macro lens to my iphone and set out to get a closer look at the underside of the mushrooms. One had been kicked over and lay with the underside exposed. It was already turning brown on the exposed texture that is in such contrast to the smooth outside surface.

And then I got down on my hands and knees to look through the hole along the edge of the mushroom top. I peered through first with my eye…and then with the lens of my camera trying to capture the interesting layers I spied beneath the surface.

These mushrooms remind me that what I see on the surface doesn’t always capture the complexity of what lies beneath. My classroom is like that too. There is so much about each of my students that isn’t visible unless I take the time to bend down and look carefully beneath the surface. And sometimes I need a special tool, like my macro lens, to bring those interesting layers into focus. Sometimes that tool is those informal conversations that I have with the students near me as we walk in lines. Other times it is the opportunity to listen into a discussion a small group is having about a math concept or a story we have read. Oftentimes it is through my students’ writing that I learn the most. Their stories reveal their interests and their experiences…and show me what they know about reading and writing and science and sometimes even math and social studies. Looking at a piece of student writing is like looking at the underside of a mushroom. When you take the time to get beyond the surface, there are layers and layers that unfold and reveal new information that helps me know my students and helps me help them learn.

What have you learned from a student lately?