Tag Archives: mentor text

How to Add Some Joy to Teaching

I can be a bit serious. Okay, maybe a lot serious. And sometimes that means that the classroom can seem like all work and no play…and we all know that first graders (and maybe all students) both want and NEED some play to help learning move along.

For some reason, my school decided that again this year our winter holidays (two weeks of no school) would bump right up against Christmas. I’ll be loving the holiday when January gets here, but to be honest, it’s brutal right now. Instead of children who are focused on learning to read and write (and all our other subjects of study), they have visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads! (Or maybe that is just the candy cane overload coursing through their bodies!)

I made a deal with myself as I planned lessons for this week–leave spaces for play, expect silliness and louder than usual volume, smile and laugh more, enjoy the moments.

So…I planned a small writing lesson.

I remembered this wonderful book of poems called The Proper Way to Meet a Hedgehog and Other How To Poems selected by Paul Janeczko and started flipping through. If I had my students write a “how to” something, they would have many choices of topic and could draw on all that they already know. But which poem would work as a useful mentor text to get them started? There are many good choices…but I was looking for something short, a bit whimsical, and an idea that my students might find unexpected. How to Scare Monsters by Rebecca Kai Dotlich was just right! It starts out easy, “Keep a light on, that’s the thing… and turns a bit in the second (of two) stanzas with “Aim for the toe (did you know this?)…

I read it a few times, letting students soak into the language. They noticed the strange notation (parentheses) and were intrigued. We talked about the extra information in there and they definitely picked up on the personal, friendly tone. We brainstormed things we are “experts” at doing, and that list included A LOT of sports! After I wrote a poem in front of them (How to take Photos of Egrets), they opened their notebooks and began their own How To poems.

Students immediately got to their writing (along with plenty of talking) and a number of them included the parentheses in their poems. As they began to finish and read their writing to me, I could feel the smile genuinely creeping onto my face. The poems were fresh and their voices came through loud and clear. Some of the topics were predictable, but some were not…like this one by O:

How to Catch a Rattlesnake

Go to a desert.

Find a hole.

(Maybe it’s a snake hole.)

If it’s a snake hole,

get a good stick.

And do not grab it by the tail,

grab it by the neck.

If you grab it by the tail

they will swing and bite you.

If you grab it by the neck

they will not move

except their tail.

Did you notice the parentheses? I had encouraged students to pick small topics rather than trying to explain a whole game. But, you know, some students want to do what they want to do. But somehow J captured this game in a nutshell. I bet you know what game it is!

How to Play Ball

Get two teams

9 is enough

9 innings

1,2,3 bases and

one home plate in a square.

(One out is three hittable balls

Four balls you can not hit go to 1st base)

A hit

run as fast as you can go

until you are thrown out

or tagged out

You are out.

Three outs is an inning

touch home plate to get a point.

who has the most points wins

if you are tied

overtime.

And who doesn’t love a how to poem about riding a bike? It’s obviously a childhood classic! Here is O’s rendition. (This is a different O–I have many in this year’s class!)

How to Ride a Bike

This is how we ride a bike

without training wheels.

First put your helmet on

and then get on your bike.

And try not to look down

look straight ahead and pedal

and make sure nothing is in front of you.

And that is how you ride a bike

without training wheels.

And a short but sweet one by V who did take my advice and decided not to capture all of gymnastics but to instead focus on a single trick.

How to do a Cartwheel

Start in a lunge

Put your hands on the ground

Then when you put your hands on the ground

Kick your legs up

(One foot up first, then the other)

Land with hands by your ears.

These small poems started this week off with a dose of joy. Students enjoyed writing and reading them, I enjoyed hearing them and rereading them. No one whined that they had nothing to write about, no one got teary with frustration (including me), and we all enjoyed writing and sharing and teaching someone else about our individual expertise.

Reminder to myself: be playful, small can be powerful, enjoy the wonders of childhood and read and write more poems!

So…if you need to add a bit of joy to your teaching or writing life, take a look at How to Scare Monsters and write some how to poems!

Thank You, Earth

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Gratitude and appreciation are essential elements in raising children to be naturalists and environmental stewards. We take care of what we love. Throughout the school year I have made an effort to integrate environmental literature and learning wherever I could across the curriculum. We participated in #writeout with the National Writing Project in October, doing wonder walks and exploring acorns. We made posters and wrote 6 words for the environment, advocating for the Earth. We learned about Ansel Adams and dandelions and made wishes that we hope will disperse like seeds–resilient and gritty–growing where they land, like dandelions themselves, making the Earth a better place. Last week we read Thank You, Earth by April Pulley Sayre, a beautiful book that combines photographs and descriptive language to express appreciation for all that nature has to offer. This became the inspiration for our own letters of gratitude to the Earth in the form of zines.

We made zines earlier in the school year, so it seems like perfect timing to come back full circle especially since students have made so much progress as writers and readers. To push their composition and zine making skills, this time we created a plan before launching into the zine itself. Students planned their front and back covers and the six interior pages before creating the actual zine. They were encouraged to stretch their ideas, adding detail and description for each page.

What I love the most is that students had so many ideas about what they are grateful for in nature. They love trees and clouds and rainbows. Animals (both cute and feisty according to one student), the ocean, and flowers were prevalent topics. Pollinators and water, and of course, constellations also were featured. In each of their zines, I can see traces of my teaching…about writing and art and the environment. Here’s a student reading her zine.

I am hopeful that these young students will grow up to be advocates for our planet, for healthy environments for everyone, for sustainable practices and clean energy. Finding spaces for students to learn about the challenges we face on our planet, about the importance of conservation, and about ways to stand up and voice both their appreciation and their concerns for the future are important and easily combined with the reading, writing, science, and art that are already the typical parts of school curriculum when you plan carefully.

Students’ notes of gratitude to the Earth will be on display for Open House next week, spreading their appreciation and awe of the natural world to their families and others who peek into our classroom. How might you construct and spread your message of gratitude to the Earth? I am looking forward to hearing your ideas.

I Need to Live Near the Beach: NPM23 Day 29

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Today as I wandered, looking for inspiration for a poem for day 29, I turned to the Moving Writers blog and found this post by Brett Vogelsinger, which led me to the poem I Need to Live Near a Creek that became my mentor text for today. I knew I wanted to write from this photo that I took today on a walk at the beach–the curlew flying out of the frame of my photo as I clicked the shutter.

I Need to Live Near a Beach

because

seabirds fly

somersaulting

on briny breezes

lifting my mood

with their wings

Pocket Poems: NPM23 Day 25

16 Words: NPM23 Day 24

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I love short form poetry, especially when working with young children. Today we read 16 Words: William Carlos Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow” by Lisa Rogers and learned about a poem made up of a mere 16 words. When my first grade students studied the text of the poem, they immediately noticed that there were four stanzas (awareness built of studying a poem each week). They also noticed that each stanza contained four words (how had I missed that detail?). They noticed the lack of capitalization and punctuation (“he broke the rules!”), something we have noticed with other poets and other poems.

Of course, we had to try our own 16-word poetry. And in a mere five minutes, students expressed their ideas following Williams’ text as their mentor. Here’s a few examples from 6 and 7 year old poets:

Horses

outside the stable

inside

a field of grass

waits in the sun

for horses to run

by A

A Bee Poem

buzzing in the

breeze

is a little

bee

sipping nectar from

flowers

to make yummy

honey

by G

Feelings

white blue and

red

sad and mad

happy

calm purple and

green

pink exciting brown

down

by C

And one by a student who is my unexpected poet–if I say the word poem, his entire body lights up…and he can’t wait to hear the poems and write his own!

The Yellow Bee

i sing with trees

i flew with clouds

i feel the breeze

i saw the earth

by R

And mine, composed while writing with my class, inspired by looking out the window of my classroom.

Yellow Sunflowers

outside the classroom

door

yellow sunflowers sway

dancing

in the sea

breeze

children writing poems

inside

A Wonder Walk

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First graders are naturally filled with wonder. It doesn’t take much to get them to look closely, to pay attention to details that many others miss.

Our school has the most amazing librarian. Last week I asked her about a book–a book I know I own, but cannot find in my classroom. And she not only found me a copy of that book, but she also suggested another that was new to me…and just what I needed today when I found it in my mailbox.

#writeout is a collaboration between the National Writing Project and the National Park Service that urges all of us to get outside and find inspiration in whatever nature is around us. We started #writeout yesterday with time in the school garden. Students learned about weeds, donned child-sized gardening gloves, and dug and pulled and delighted in seeing roots break free of the dry soil.

Today we read Wonder Walkers, that book our school librarian left in my mailbox. It was perfect for setting the stage for a wonder walk, time on our school grounds looking for interesting things (think leaves, seed pods, sticks, etc.) from nature that we collected using our collection tool (shout out to Little Pine Learners). Before we headed out we talked about what items we could collect and what we should not (living bugs, picking flowers and plants)–and students were excited to get started.

They looked carefully and their collectors began to fill. Some were exuberant and filled their spaces quickly, crowding dried roots and pine droppings with sticks and crunchy leaves. Others were more selective, leaving more spaces between the items collected. A child with sharp eyes found a dandelion puff that didn’t have to be picked, truly a treasure that her classmates envied!

Before we headed back into the classroom, I gathered students close and encouraged them to hold out the collectors so they could see each other’s collections and also so I could take a few pictures.

Once back in the classroom, students used their iPads to take a photo of their collector for future use. Then we settled to read another book. An old favorite, Weeds Find a Way by Cindy Jenson-Elliott, is a wonderful mentor text for students to use as a structure or frame for their writing. I loved the gasp when students realized that this book was non-fiction, yet so accessible with beautiful illustrations. They also remembered their experience with weeds from yesterday and the conversation with the garden teacher about how weeds are not “bad,” they are just not the plants you want in a particular space.

After comments and observations about the book, we tried on using the Weeds find a way… frame with objects from our collectors. “A red leaf finds a way to swish and swoosh through the air,” was one example that got us started.

We ended the day by starting a Zine to showcase our nature items through writing and drawing. We used a single sheet of copy paper to fold a small booklet (with a single cut and no tape or staples) that will soon become tiny treasures worthy of #writeout. More about that in another post!

Quirky: NPM22 Day 11

Things I Know by Heart: NPM22 Day 2

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Imagine my surprise this morning when the post by Ethical ELA was hosted by friend and colleague Emily Yamasaki! I was immediately drawn into both the mentor poem, things I have memorized by Maria Giesbrecht and Emily’s poem, Things I Know. I dove deeply into the cool pool of poems that emerged from Emily’s provocation, reading and feeling, admiring and analyzing as I began to think about my own writing for this second day of National Poetry Month.

Things I Know by Heart
The sleek curve of the egret’s neck
in the tidepool at low tide
The smells of love that fill our home
emanating from the kitchen
The silence of his last breath
matching the empty space in our family
My daily commute, etched in the recesses of my mind,
requiring no conscious thought
My childhood phone number
but not my passwords–they continue to elude me
The sweetness of little boys
now into the second generation
Fear of fire, seared into my memory
brought back by ashes that rain down like snowflakes
Fog’s gray blanket
an indicator that spring has arrived
Each of the traffic spots on the 5 between our house and theirs
no matter how long it takes, every trip is worth it
Sunset’s fiery sky painting
celebrating endings and promising new beginnings
@kd0602

Chasing a Snail: NPM22 Day 1

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It’s April! And it’s the first day of National Poetry Month. I don’t profess to be a great poet–but I am able to share my love of words and poetry with my students–especially when I do the things I ask them to do.

So even though this is not a teaching day for me and even though Spring Break begins tomorrow and I won’t see my students until April 11th, I will write a poem each day. I know that I will be better able to coach and guide them if I am doing the poetry writing I want them to try.

I plan to use Eve Merriam’s Peeling an Orange with them when we get back to school after Spring Break, so why not experiment with it as a mentor text today? One of the techniques I notice in this poem is her use of the contrasting words carelessly and meticulously. So, since photos tend to inspire my writing, I took a peek through my camera roll and spotted this one of a snail from a neighborhood walk earlier this week. And here is the poem it inspired:

Chasing a Snail

Hurrying

all feet and shadow

risking the horrifying crunch

or moving in slowly

my phone a wall

as the telescoping antennae

stretch and reach

each centimeter forward

marked with a telltale spot

of drying slime

like invisible ink

in a race against

time and dryness

Taking Our Photos Further: SOL22 Day 16

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Back on Monday I wrote about my students and their foray into the garden to explore some photography techniques. We’ve been continuing our project, first by carefully examining each photo, noticing the technique used to take the photo, and then selecting their 3 favorites…one from each technique. Those three photos were then edited. I showed them two main function of the native iPad editing tool: how to crop and/or turn a photo and then had them use a filter to change their photo from color to black and white. (After all, we are studying Ansel Adams!)

Today, the choices got more difficult. They had to select their one favorite of the three edited photos to use as their inspiration for writing some captions–in the form of equations. One of my fellow slicers did a lovely photo essay (I wish I did a better job of keeping track of the blogs I read and leave comments for) where she used Amy Krouse Rosenthal’s This Plus That: Life’s Little Equations as her caption format. I knew this would be an excellent format for my young writers–and after reading and discussing what we noticed in Amy’s book, these 6 and 7 year olds set off to write their own–inspired by their black and white photos.

Here’s a few to share with you (along with the photo inspiration)…please keep in mind that these are first draft efforts!

I absolutely love B’s buckets–there is something perfect about the light and dark of them. Here’s one of his captions (he was quite pleased by this effort!):

Our warm weather obviously had an impact on A:

Only a few students risked subtraction, I love R’s sentiment!:

You’ve got to love the first grade angles! Here’s H’s view:

This unusual view of sweet peas inspired C’s caption:

In addition to the photography lesson, the actual photos, and the captions, students used technology to edit and also learned to upload photos to Google Drive, share them with me, and absolutely loved getting to choose from three different black and white filters.

And here is my own–I had to join in the fun!

Smooth stumps + tiny black ants = squirmy kids

Maybe you’ll want to head outside and give this a try! Be sure to share if you do!