It’s the last week of school…a hard time for teaching and if you can get students’ attention and focus (and that’s a big if!), it’s a great time for learning.

A few weeks ago our amazing school librarian hand delivered an amazing picture book to me while I was eating lunch. She explained that it was a “Kim book.” And once I opened the cover and began to read, I knew she was right! At the time I was up to my eyeballs in assessments with my students with teaching time at a premium. I set the book aside–knowing I would find a way to fit it in before the school year ended.

Wildspeak by Sangma Francis is a new book (published in April) that exhilarates in nature, describing wonderful outdoor spaces and then uses invented words to highlight the delight. Today after lunch, once I read the book, students picked out their favorite wildspeak words like sunglitter and rockglisten. On our second read, I only read the wildspeak words…and the first graders were hooked!

We got out our notebooks and picked something in nature to describe. I started with the sky over the ocean and students helped me come up with some wildspeak. Then they started their own. Nature included the baseball field, the forest, and, of course, many descriptions of the beach that lies right outside our school grounds.

Once they had written, I introduced PooPoo Paper. On a recent visit to the San Diego Zoo Safari Park and the opening of the new Elephant Valley, I had picked up some paper made of elephant poop as swag. What better way to engage a first grade writer than to offer paper made of elephant poop? They did pretend disgust at first…and then fascination took over. They wrote their favorite nature description and wildspeak words on the poop paper and then hung them on the white board.

Here’s one:

Vines tremble from banyan trees like water coming out of a teapot.

Sparkle tips

Trembleworm

And a different approach:

Water clear like crystals shimmering on the bottom of the splish splash sea.

Writing for fun, having fun with writing, and still learning during the last week of school! Poop paper and Wildspeak for the win!

How do you keep your students learning when structures and routines begin to fall away?