A brain dump. That’s what Barbara asked us to do as part of the #verselove poetry prompt for today. And I don’t think I followed the rules at all. Maybe my poem isn’t a poem at all or maybe it is an 100 word prose poem or even a manifesto in the making. Whatever it is, it was fun to write. There might be some more there there.
Teachers and Unicorns
They tell me I’m a unicorn. A serious person who believes that learning should be fun–should be real. Experiences immersive: audio, visual, tactile, numerical, connected. Classroom walls don’t contain learning. A serious person who believes that play is essential. For children in and out of school and for adults too. That reading and writing and math and science are all opportunities for play and playfulness. School is a place for making–friends, memories, art, poems… Where processes are more important than products and where kids matter. I’m a teaching unicorn who’s serious about the joy of learning. We need more unicorns.
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!)
In a couple of spare moments between parent-teacher conferences today this email heading caught my eye: Significance of the Seemingly Ordinary. It was a Daily Good article, which always begin with a quote. Here was the one from today:
As I read through the teaser paragraph I became even more intrigued. It describes a movie where the character takes a photograph of the store across the street every morning at 8 o”clock. He has 4000 photos meticulously labeled and mounted in albums. Photos that are the same…and not the same. When he shows them to a blocked writer, the writer flips through the photos quickly, not knowing what to say, says, “They’re all the same.” The photographer replies to him, “You’ll never get it if you don’t slow down, my friend.” You can read more of the story here.
I found myself connecting on two different levels. The photographer in me is intrigued. Why take the same photo every day? But then again, I do find myself taking the same photos over and over again. Maybe the light is different, or the angles…or even my mood. I frequently take photos of this iconic palm tree–here’s a small sampling of my many photos of this one tree.
“One has to be in the same place every day, watch the dawn from the same house, hear the same birds awake each morning, to realize how inexhaustibly rich and different is sameness.”
The experience of taking the same photo over and over echoes what it means to be a teacher. Each day is filled with sameness. I greet the same faces, the same small humans for nearly a year. And yet, no two days are the same. At my best, I take hundreds of mental photos of my students every day as I strive to pay attention to the nuances of their individual learning processes. I need to know them–when the sun is shining, when the fog hides their features, in a tight close up, as the sun sets.
To be a teacher is to learn to appreciate the richness and difference of sameness. And as I navigate the sometimes groundhog’s day-ness of parent-teacher conferences I find myself thinking about sameness in a different way. During each conference I am taking stock of those thousands of mental images, knowing that supporting learners (and their parents) is in the small moments. It’s in the slowing down even when the world keeps urging us to speed up. When I got behind in my conference schedule today I was tempted to cut things short, to “catch up.” But the conversations were meaningful, adding new images to my store of mental photos of my students, their families, and their learning and I know I’ll be perusing them in the weeks to come.
And now I think I’ll be looking back over my photographs to see what else I can learn–from them and about myself.
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.
My alarm rang early on a Saturday. Today was our San Diego Area Writing Project Spring Conference! Before I got out of my cozy, warm bed I checked the weather app on my phone. Drizzle. Drizzle is not really rain, right? I decided against dressing for rain and opted for my Vans tennies and some black almost dressy pants to go with my cute sweater top. (I would have to open the conference, but I also had to walk a good bit to get from the parking structure to the conference venue on the UCSD campus.
About 5 minutes before I was planning to head out, I looked out the door and changed my mind. That was NOT drizzle–even by Southern CA standards, that is called rain! I rushed back to my bedroom, kicked off the Vans, changed into jeans with skinny legs so that I could pull on my cowboy boots–the dressier footwear option for rainy conditions–and then headed out the door wearing my raincoat with my umbrella in my bag.
With windshield wipers on high, I braved the slick freeway and low visibility, and as I approached the university, the weather began to clear. The ground was wet and puddly as I walked from the parking garage, but the sky had cleared a bit and it wasn’t even drizzling.
It’s hard to get up on a rainy Saturday morning to attend professional development–even when it is self-selected. But I knew once I arrived that the energy of the participants and presenters would carry me through. And I was right. Our morning keynote by our own Christine Kane focused on the value of conversation, how the best conversations reveal things about ourselves both to those we are conversing with and to ourselves as well. She referenced David Brook’s newest book, How to Know a Person, and shared some of his advice about being a “loud listener.” She also reminded us of the Chinese symbol for listening which includes the eyes (to see), the ears (to hear), the mind (to think), undivided attention (to focus), and the heart (to feel).
Screenshot
What a perfect set up for being conference participants! The three sessions I attended were excellent! Even with 35 years of teaching under my belt, I felt inspired and motivated by gems of wisdom and practice shared by the presenters. I enjoyed my interactions with fellow participants and left the conferences knowing it was a morning well spent.
My drive back home included one surprise rain shower along the way, but as I headed off the freeway toward my house, the sky was bluing and the sun was shining. As I stepped out of my car into the driveway I was greeted by tiny yellow suns sprouting right out of the driveway cracks. Dandelions! I couldn’t resist kneeling down to capture their light and glow. Nothing like a bit of sunshine on a rainy day!
I have a love/hate relationship with technology in my teaching life. I love the possibilities that technology offers and hate dealing with the glitches, the learning curve, and the challenges of keeping my students on task with more creative tasks. When I moved to first grade after the pandemic, I left the creative use of technology mostly behind and instead depended on those practice apps as my primary use of technology in the classroom.
I’ve been starting to feel like my students need opportunities to be creators using technology instead of consumers of content that others have made. So with a bit of a nudge from my sister, I started thinking about a digital storytelling project where my students would create Public Service Announcements (PSAs) for things around our campus that were either going well or need more attention.
We spent time earlier this month studying stories and breaking them down to three main parts: the beginning where the context is set, the problem (or the danger as one student described it), and the solution. They took a wonderful wordless story, Flashlight by Lizi Boyd, condensing it to three drawings that told the major story elements. They wrote their own stories based on a character drawing from our fifth grade penpals including those same three story parts. At this point, I was ready to embark on the digital storytelling project.
So…this week we learned about three photography techniques: bird’s eye view (a perspective from above), bug’s eye view (getting low and looking up), and the rule of thirds (where the focal part of the photograph is positioned in a particular third of the frame). We studied some examples and then headed outside to try on these techniques by going on a photography scavenger hunt. The first graders in my class loved this activity and clearly began to understand the three different techniques. While not all the photos are stunning examples of photography, they are gaining experience with the camera on their iPads and making intentional choices about the photographs they take. Here’s a few first grade examples.
The next day we brainstormed things that our school does well and things that need more attention. We know that our school is quite good at composting and that students need reminders to eat their snack and lunch before running onto the playground to play. We ultimately came up with eight different topics. After students listed their top three topics to work on, I put them into teams so they could help each other to tackle the topic selected. Student then drew the three photographs they would take on campus to create a story of change…a public service announcement.
I was nervous this morning. Would they be able to take photos that would work in their PSA stories? Could they use each other as actors in the photos they envisioned? How would they handle the openness of this task? Would they be distracted and tempted to mess around instead of focusing on the photos?
After a little bit of in-class modeling, we all headed out with iPads in hand. I love it when students surprise me with their creativity and focus…and that was definitely what happened today. Students supported each other, posing and directing. They checked their photos to make sure faces were not visible (one of my requirements), and they all got their 3 photos taken. I loved watching the cooperation and teamwork and was thrilled that I didn’t have to referee any problems. I saw students who are often followers in the classroom take the lead in this creative pursuit and shy students step up to let others know exactly what they needed for their photos. When we returned to the classroom, we spent a few minutes back in teams giving each student a chance to show their photos to each other and tell their story based on the photos.
On Monday we will be learning iMovie and transforming these three still photos into a short video PSA, complete with voiceovers. Wish me luck! My fingers are crossed that our photos will turn into wonderful video PSAs!
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!
Yeah, I’m that person. The one who is quick to point out that purpose and audience matters in writing. I also know that the realities of the classroom often means that purpose and audience can both end up being contrived as we strive to provide real world writing opportunities AND work in all the other demands of teaching writing.
So this year when a colleague asked if I wanted to have my students be penpals with her fifth graders, I was quick to say yes. I like the idea of starting out early in the school year so we can ensure that our students can participate in several exchanges. We’re hopeful that as we progress in this penpal process that we can arrange to have our students meet in person as well.
I’ve had students participate in penpal projects in years past. And I have positive memories from the experiences. The challenge is always finding the “just right” partner to make sure that the exchange of letters happens with some regularity. And of course, you have to keep up the energy and excitement for yourself to make sure you make space in the school day to get those letters written.
This year I offered to have my students write first. With first graders early in the school year, I wanted to make sure they started off from a place of abundance. Even before knowing who our penpals were, we created postcards illustrating things we loved. As they crafted their artwork, they were also thinking about their favorite activities giving them something to say in their postcards.
To make things a bit easier for my young writers, we used lined 5×8 cards to write our messages.
My students easily and eagerly completed their postcards, wondering just who their penpal would be. I realize that fewer and fewer people exchange non-electronic communication…I love that students are getting this opportunity!
I sent the postcards through district mail to our other school where they were delivered to the fifth graders. My colleague shared a cute video with me featuring her students and their excitement at receiving the postcards. It was hard to wait for them to write back.
But last Friday, it seemed that it was worth the wait! I distributed the letters written by the fifth graders. They had typed their letters, integrating a letter format lesson, and included a selfie inserted in the document. The letters were warm and welcoming. The fifth graders commented on the first graders interests, shared their memories from first grade, told the first graders something about themselves, and asked a question or two.
Our classroom hummed with energy. Students helped each other read their letters, compared photos, wondered about games they weren’t familiar with, and generally reveled in receiving a letter. We then took a few minutes to talk about how to respond to a letter and then they set off to write.
My students wrote and wrote. They chatted as they worked, encouraging each other, sharing spellings of more challenging words, asking for help from me from time to time…”How do you spell Seattle Seahawks?” “Does eclipse have a c or a k?” It was the first time this school year where we truly felt the phenomenon of flow when writing. Every one of my students was engaged, stretching themselves as writers, sharing their interests and inquiring about the interests of their penpals. They kept on writing…for more than half an hour on a Friday before lunch.
We finished the letters today, adding a drawing just for fun. I read through them all, marveling at students’ efforts and the high level of readability of these handwritten notes. I plan to send the letters off to the fifth graders by the end of the week.
There is power in the penpal. I can’t wait to see how this written exchange grows during the course of the school year! (Below are a few more of the postcards we sent to the fifth graders)
Thinking Through My Lens 