Another book review? Is it even allowable to write three slices that double as book reviews?
But I simply couldn’t resist. I’ve been following Grant Snider for a while on Instagram/X and I am constantly inspired by his comic writing (for lack of a better term). Somehow he has a knack for simplifying complex ideas into 4 panels or 9 panels where the combination of images and words slices through and hits me right in the heart.
I preordered Poetry Comics, knowing that I needed to have this book not on my Kindle, not from the library, but right in my hands. Ironically, my school librarian got a copy last week and put it in my box a week before my preorder arrived today. I’ve been savoring each page, connecting both as an adult and as a teacher.
I know I will be having my students study a few of these poems and try their own hand at crafting their own poetry comic. There are so many great choices it’s making it hard for me to choose. Here’s one I am considering.
I can’t wait to see what my students will create as they explore poetry comics! How about you? Will you try to craft a poetry comic as we head into National Poetry Month?
Even if you don’t, I highly recommend Grant Snider’s Poetry Comics. There’s plenty to love in this deceptively simple volume.
I love to take photos–and I take and post photos daily and have more more than 12 years. Some days and weeks I find myself in the doldrums where it seems like I have taken that same photo again and again. Sometimes the photo I see with my eyes just doesn’t come out of my camera no matter how hard I try.
What I love about photography is that it forces me to slow down and pay attention to the moment. I find myself paying attention to shadows, textures, colors, the interplay of light and dark…and then I notice sounds and smells and find myself wanting to run my fingers over a surface that looks bumpy or smooth or somehow different that I expect.
I came across this Mary Oliver poem the other day while scrolling my Instagram…and kept returning to it until finally I just took a screen shot so I could reread it over and over and over again.
Screenshot
In some ways this poem expresses how I feel about taking photos. Through my camera my aim is to be that rich lens of attention that allows me to take in the world, learning along the way. Breathing in and breathing out, slowing down, taking time, and looking with all my senses as I capture an aspect of my experience with a click of the shutter.
If you want to know when it’s spring, don’t bother with a calendar, just walk into my first grade classroom. The energy is palpable. Those babies that entered the classroom at the end of last summer are growing into knowledgeable and sassy almost second graders. They are readers and writers and fact collectors extraordinaire (although fact-checking is not yet in their realm of expertise). So what do you do at the end of conference week when it feels like the classroom is fitting like last year’s t-shirt–way too tight? Head out to the garden…with iPads in hand!
We’d been out in the garden with our notebooks earlier in the week–observing carefully in the spirit of Jane Goodall. So on Friday I asked students to go back to the place where they observed earlier in the week and find three photos to take. I reminded them of the photography techniques we had learned and set them loose to explore. There was the insect on the screen that first caught students’ attention. The lizard almost created a need for crowd control as these little paparazzi swarmed the cold-blooded sunbathers against the brick wall. They photographed strawberries, broccoli, fruit tree flowers, aloe, and who knows what else.
Yesterday, we studied the poem, Things to do if you are Rain by Elaine Magliaro. We noticed her action words (polka-dot sidewalks, freckle windowpanes…) and did not miss the metaphor of the rain tap dancing on the rooftop. After choosing one of their photos as the subject, they set off to write their own Things to do… poems. And since it’s mid March, I asked them to include three things in their poems: action, a comparison, and some metaphorical thinking.
We ran out of time…which I should say was intentional planning on my part. It wasn’t, but I am reminded of the value of time away from a draft if you want the young writer to really take another look and make the piece better. Using my poem as an example, we read it carefully, looking for the action, the comparison, and the metaphorical thinking. Then they went back to their drafts to finish them and to make them better. And they did.
O took one of those infamous lizard photos and wrote a short but sweet piece.
Things to do if you are a Lizard
Climb up walls like a snake.
Climb up on a sun on a bright green stem.
Run fast, fast, fast, fast!
Grow back your tail.
G found a flower in one of the garden beds, stretching a bit further with her words.
Things to do if you are a Flower
Reach for the sun
get picked into a bouquet
Blossom in spring
Be in a wedding and shine like the sun
Enjoy your life
Share life and health and happiness
Shine like the bright yellow sun
Tap dance in the breeze like a bird’s chirp is music
Send invitations to animals far and wide
to pollinate and see you bloom into
the prettiest flower
F is one of those quick-to-get-done students and thought he had finished yesterday. Today’s mini lesson was the perfect nudge to get him to push himself a bit further–although there’s still some room for growth.
Things to do if you are a Strawberry
Be red and shiny.
Let yourself grow!
Don’t let bugs eat you!
Have a big family that lives on a big bush.
Your petals help you grow and get washed by the rain.
The strawberries are like red poinsettia flowers.
Red strawberries shine like rubies.
Red roses are like ripe strawberries.
And of course, I had to get in on the fun!
Things to do if you are a Yellow Broccoli Flower
Shoot towards the bright blue sky
Soak up the sun in your bright yellow flowers
Sway in the breeze like you’re dancing the tango
Send invitations to the pollinators: Party at Broccoli’s house–all are welcome
Shed your petals and become part of a child’s healthy dinner
As I finish this post, the spring equinox announces that spring has sprung. Welcome Spring! (Although the first graders have been feeling your presence all month!)
I got a text from a colleague last night with a photo of Amanda Gorman’s new book, Something, Someday. In the text she said it reminded her of the project I had done with my students creating iMovie PSAs about something that needed attention at our school. (You can read more about it here and here.)
So this morning as I headed back to the classroom with my students like ducklings behind me, she saw me, darted into her classroom and came out with the book in her hand.
After taking attendance, I did a quick read of the book while my students were doing some math practice. Yes! This is definitely a perfect book for the project we had done. It is all about making change, finding solutions, working together, and the power of small actions to add up to big change. And in the moment, I rearranged my teaching day in a way that allowed me to read it to my students.
Earlier in the week we read The Watcher: Jane Goodall’s Life with the Chimps by Jeanette Winter, learning about her lifelong work to protect wildlife and our planet. We talked about how both Jane Goodall and Amanda Gorman are living activists working to care for our planet.
Today we also studied the poem, Things to do if you are RAIN by Elaine Magliaro, noticing all the ways she described what rain does…”Polka dot sidewalks. Freckle Windowpanes. … Tap dance on the roof. …” Little did my students know that this would soon become a mentor text for a collaborative poem inspired by the books we’ve read and this poem!
As we got ready to write I asked students for a topic for a Things to do poem. (I had an idea in my back pocket, but hands shot up right away.). O suggested, Things to do if the World is Filled with Problems. Okay–a much heavier topic than I had in mind, but not surprising given our recent project and the books we’ve been reading.
So we did some brainstorming, focusing on the list like qualities of Magliaro’s poem. It took some work getting to some ideas to start and end the poem. And who doesn’t love the student who says, I have some metaphorical thinking to add, and says, “Treat the world like a rainbow.” Okay. So here’s what we came up with:
Things to do if the World is filled with Problems
by Room 3 First Graders
Don’t Give up!
Solve it! Fix it!
We can do this together.
Clean up trash. Don’t pollute.
Put the balls away. Sit up straight.
Water plants. Don’t waste water.
Be kind to your old grandfather
AND everyone else.
Eat your snack. Share with others. Include everyone.
Mondays can be hard, but I have a colleague who calls out an alliterative daily mantra to everyone she sees. “Magical Monday,” she calls as she passes my classroom before school started this morning. “Magical Monday,” I call back.
Mondays don’t always feel magical, but today felt different. I headed out for recess duty with the sun shining on my shoulders. As I walked out onto the playground one of my first grade students ran up with an envelope in her hand. “Mrs. Douillard,” she said, “I wrote a poem for you!”
In our class we study a poem every week, write poetry with some regularity, and delight in metaphorical thinking. Words matter. They help us express ourselves, understand our world, and communicate with others. I love it when students take our learning outside the classroom walls and write for their own purposes.
My student pulled her poem out of the envelope to show me. “Will you read it to me?” I asked. And she proceeded to read:
Sea Sound
A sea sound is a heart broken.
A sea sound is birth from your heart.
Sea sound is you hearing waves dancing.
This is my poem
When I asked what inspired her to write, she responded, “It was the waves dancing.” She told me I could keep the poem and off she went to play with her friends before the school bell rang.
Last week we returned to school after our two-week winter break. The first graders in my class were eager to talk, telling each other about all the things that had happened while they were apart. Knowing that students would be chatty, I planned lessons that would allow interaction and conversation on our first day back in class.
I’d been thinking about having students craft a collaborative poem for a while now. We’ve been studying poems and writing some of our own all school year, but still, it seemed that the time was ripe for something more. I began our lesson with Kwame Alexander’s delightful picture book, How to Write a Poem, illustrated brilliantly by Melissa Sweet. We read and noticed first, with students intrigued by the use of collage, the lyrical language, and colorful images. Before I began reading, I had asked my students what they knew about metaphorical thinking. What? That was their response. So after reading and talking about the book, we went back through the book so I could point out examples of metaphor…and just about then, my principal walked in. She comes in from time to time, pulls up a chair and sits and listens. She doesn’t interact and her poker face is nearly unreadable. I just went on with the lesson, feeling students pulled in as we talked about words falling from the sky like rain. We imagined ourselves outside, heads tipped, tongues out, ready to catch those words. As we became the metaphors we were studying, we talked about how metaphor lets us use ideas from our imaginations to make our writing become more clear…and more fun! When my principal left, I still had my students full attention as they grappled with this abstract idea of metaphorical thinking.
Now, we needed to try it on for ourselves. I decided on having students create a collaborative poem by having each student contribute one line to a “winter is…” poem. So I asked them, how might you use metaphorical thinking to describe what winter is? The first responses had them leaning back on what they already knew. Winter is cold, winter is when trees lose their leaves. In some ways, this was the perfect next step. We talked about how those are facts about winter…now we needed to think about how to make comparisons that were surprising. When one of my students got to snow was white cotton candy, I knew we were heading in the right direction! I had them try a few “winter is…” lines, and just when they were running out of steam, I pulled out the colorful sticky note sentence strips for each student to write their favorite “winter is…” line on. I could feel the motivation lift and even my most reluctant student eagerly chose a color and started writing his line (although there were none written in the notebook at this point). Once they had written, they stuck their post it on the white board.
I wasn’t quite sure where we were at this point. I let the post its sit over night and pulled them off the next morning with the intention of typing up their lines to form a poem. As I typed I divided the ideas into 3-line stanzas, that seemed to help give the poem shape. I was pleasantly surprised when the ideas seemed to come together into a poem that I felt we could all appreciate.
Winter Is…
Winter is white puffy cotton candy
A time for snowflakes that look like crystals
When snow foxes dig holes to keep their cubs warm
Winter is a cold hug in your heart
The wind at the beach
Time for hot chocolate
Winter is snowflakes blowing
Clouds melting
A freezing tree giving words to my pencil to write down
Winter is a snowflake full of thoughts
A snowflake falling down as fast a rocket
Pine trees covered with snow
Winter is a cold place to relax and slide your pencil to write down your mind
Snow soft and crunchy like people walking on the snow
Full of puffy snow like white cotton candy
Winter is a frozen lake waiting for spring
Holidays in your mind
A snow of thoughts flying through the air
Winter is a chilly place where it snows
Winter is so fun because you can play
Winter is a time for joy!
By Room 3 First Graders
1-8-24
I can see where students were inspired by their classmates and where some students are still not quite there when it comes to moving away from facts as they craft a line about winter, but I am pleased with this as a starting point. And even better, my principal saw me eating lunch on Wednesday and commented on the book and lesson–in a very positive way. She loved that I was introducing metaphorical thinking to first graders.
But honestly, the real payoff started to emerge in small moments as the week went on. My students started to point out metaphorical thinking throughout the school day, and in their own speech. On Tuesday, we returned to the book, Kiyoshi’s Walk by Mark Karlins as we embarked on writing 3-line poems about the cardinals we had created in the style of Charley Harper the day before.
As I read the Haiku in Kiyoshi’s Walk, they pointed out the metaphors…a pile of oranges described as a “hill of orange suns.” Again, not every student is yet ready to employ metaphor effectively…yet, but the seeds are planted. So we wrote 3-line poems on Tuesday (I try not to have these poems be about syllable counts–trying instead to focus on ideas and word choice) and then on Wednesday, I asked students to go back to their poems and improve them by changing a word or two or adding another detail (revision!). Here’s a student who was clearly influenced by Eto’s poem in Kiyoshi’s Walk.
Cardinals
Champ 1964 St. Louis Wins
Cardinals fly to win
Trophy of suns
By J
When J read the poem to me, he pointed out that since trophies are golden, they are shiny like golden suns–something he changed from his first draft the day before. And I know, clearly his mind was on the St. Louis Cardinals (a favorite team) rather than on the bird we crafted the day before. But the win is in the poem–three lines, metaphor, revision…and pride in writing! I’ll take it! Another student wrote this to describe his cardinal.
The Red Cardinal
The red poinsettia feathers
keep me warm
and they fill the forest with love
By F
And there were also more subtle attempts like this.
Flying in the Wind
I see that cardinal
flying in the tree
just like the wind
By O
What I see is students experimenting, playing with ideas, playing with words…and growing as writers and poets (as well as readers and thinkers). I love that something as deceptively simple as reading How to Write a Poem resulted in our writing community learning together, composing together, and risking trying on some new techniques together. I am reminded once again of the power of poetry…so yes, I will continue to say, “More poetry please.”
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!
It’s October 20th…and that means it’s the National Day on Writing! We started our day by talking about the reasons we write during our morning meeting. It warms my heart that most of my students mentioned either that writing is fun or one of our recent writing activities (writing letters or making zines) as their reasons for writing. I do feel like we are building a wonderful writing community in our first grade classroom. It’s a place to take risks, a place to express ourselves, and a place to build our knowledge and skills related to writing.
So after recess today, I read my students Kiyoshi’s Walk by Mark Karlin. In this lovely story, Kiyoshi is asking his grandpa where poems come from. On each stop along the walk, Eto (Kiyoshi’s grandpa) writes a short three-line poem about something they see, hear, imagine, or feel…each adding to Kiyoshi’s understanding of where poems come from. At the end, Kiyoshi asks his grandfather if he can write a poem…and writes a beautiful three-line composition for his grandfather. While technically the poems in this book are Haiku, I talked about them as three-line poems rather than engage in syllable counts for my students today.
With this as inspiration, we grabbed our sketchbooks and headed out on our own walk, ending up in our school garden where we wrote our own three-line poems inspired by our walk and our time writing in the garden.
These first graders wrote as many three-lines poems as they could during the time we were in the garden. They wrote about the fog that wafted across the playground, the rollie pollies that they love to rescue from the sidewalks, ladybugs, passion fruit, the sky, tomatoes, potatoes, and so much more.
When we returned to the classroom, writers shared a few of their compositions and then picked their favorite to copy onto another sheet of paper and illustrate. While their poems are still developing, they are beginning to get the idea that there are many different reasons and inspirations for writing. Here are a couple:
I See a Butterfly by C
A butterfly flying
In the garden with yellow wings
Pollinating the garden flowers.
The Blowing Fog by M
The fog is blowing
The rollie pollies are crawling
The flowers are blooming.
I also know that being outdoors is a powerful motivation for writing for the first graders I teach. Changing our writing venue, writing in a sketchbook rather than a notebook, and writing under the influence of nature all keep writing fresh and novel. And my writing with them also matters. I hope they are learning that writing is not just for school, but that it is a lifetime pursuit that can serve many different purposes.
And I know that I don’t need #writeout or the National Day on Writing to keep writing at the forefront of the classroom–but it’s fun to know that there are educators all over taking their students outdoors, playfully approaching writing tasks, and making writing something students love…for so many different reasons.
So I leave this post with the NDOW question, Why do you write?
We study a poem each week in my first grade class and this week’s poem was Choose a Color by Jacqueline Sweeney. The first lines are… If I were brown I’d be cattail or turtle deep burrowed in mud… In our study we notice, we discuss, and we illustrate the poem. Today, we went a step further and. used the poem as a mentor text for our own writing.
Although my students didn’t know it at the time, I primed the pump earlier this week by posing the question, if you were orange, what thing in nature would you be? And then as they picked the thing (garibaldi–our state saltwater fish, a tiger, a fox…) I encouraged them to stretch out their idea…what is the thing (animal, plant, form) doing? And then today as part of our morning meeting I posed the question again, this time asking about yellow. So by the time we were ready to write after our snack recess, students had ideas galore! I asked them to include at least 3-5 colors in their own nature-inspired color poem.
Today is our minimum day, so time was limited. Students wrote and then used their crayons to illustrate. While we didn’t have time to go outside for our #writeout effort, we let our love of nature and color inspire our writing.
Here’s a few examples (typed by me for reading ease):
Choose a Color by M
If I were turquoise I’d be the cool ocean rising onto the shore. If red fire blazing in a forest. If yellow the sun blazing down to earth.
Colors that I Know by V
If I was blue I would be rivers floating by.
If I was purple, violets in spring.
If pink I would be a flamingo.
If green I would be grass swaying in the wind.
One of my more reluctant writers is now picking up the pencil and getting started. I noticed he was writing short–just picking a color and saying the thing. I quickly went over to get him to stretch past…but I could see him starting to shut down. I leaned in close and learned that he couldn’t do it because there wasn’t room…and he didn’t wait to erase. It was the perfect time to teach him a tool. I showed him how he could use a symbol to show that he needed to continue on another page. Lucky for him, he had written on the right hand page, leaving the left side open for those additions. This felt like a bit of a breakthrough teaching moment!
Colors of Earth by J
If red fire to be hot.
If yellow sun to be high in the sky.
If violet the sea to be big as a lot.
If brown wood as campfire wood.
And then there is my Star Wars aficionado who can turn any writing invitation into a themed piece that is Star Wars from start to finish. He checked in with me…does it have to be nature? I reminded him that we were in the midst of #writeout and so were sticking to a nature theme. Here’s how he made it his own!
Colors that are not Primary by O
If light blue I would be a pterodactyl hunting. for food.
If I’d be black I would be stegosaurus drinking water.
If I’d be green I would be sabertooth tiger running from a volcano.
It’s such fun to watch my first graders grow as writers, learning to add details and stretch out their compositions, and to find their own writing voices. And what better writing invitation than #writeout?
Thinking Through My Lens 