OIK Tuesday returns

Happy New Year!  All the preparation done, the new recipes, the new table linens, a little extra spent on the better bubbly for the welcome guests--now the feast can begin!

You know the feast I mean:   the New Year celebration of classroom teachers the world round...we prepare, plan to try out some new ideas and approaches, dress things up a bit, splurge a little to get a special new tool...and then they arrive!

This year I have 16 adorables (so far)--a perfect number of kindergarteners, if you don't have an assistant. Oh, they are lovely!  Even my poor sad twin, who has never been apart from her brother and is finding it hard to love school, raises her arms like a ballerina to pose when I take her picture.

Yesterday, as always, we read Swimmy and became Ms. Mordhorst's Mighty Minnows.  In between, Camillah [all names are changed to protect privacy] lost track of her lunchbox.

"Oh, no!" she exclaimed.  I think I left my lunchbox in the Food Court!"

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Oof.  I tried to write a food court poem and composed a draft so bad I can't even post it...I guess the Happy New Year excesses have left me a little hung over!   I resolve to forgive myself.

in January it's so nice

We now resume our regularly scheduled programming...Happy New Year, everyone!

Update from Room 166: 
On January 2 I repeated a most successful lightbulb idea from last year.  Having read a number of books by Leo Lionni, we enjoyed Tillie and the Wall, in which Tillie, the youngest and most curious mouse living near a seemingly boundless wall, wonders what's on the other side.  After several tries, she hits on the idea of digging under it.  She tunnels along and emerges on the other side to find not the fantastical plants and animals she imagined, but regular mice just like herself.  All the same they're delighted to meet her and there is celebration with flags and confetti and a party. 

We talked about the old year and the new year, and how the new year is new but very much the same as the old--and then we "tunneled" under all the tables from 2013 to 2014,  cheering and greeting each other as we emerged on the not-so-different other side.  It's always delightful to celebrate.

On January 6 I opened up my raggedy, yellowed, dogeared big book of Chicken Soup with Rice for the 25th time and took yet another class of children on a foolish and fanciful trip around the year.  Of course we have to sing it, and just in case there is anyone who does not know Carole King's Really Rosie (a scripted, animated and most importantly scored conglomeration of Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library), here is the video we've been watching and moving to on all these days of indoor recess.  Most satisfactory kindergarten poetry, don't you agree?

 

 

I tell you once, I tell you twice,

all seasons of the year are nice

for eating chicken soup

eating chicken soup

eating chicken soup with rice!

(chicken soup, chicken soup with ri-ice)

 

Update from my own personal Writer's Workshop:

With critical help from members of the Poets' Garage (especially Liz Steinglass) and the generous Laura Shovan, I have finally completed a WIP that has been underway for more than five years!  It's a good feeling to have that done, and it was a great luxury to spend hours and hours pulling it together, especially those spent in Seaford, England at The Well Cottage.

 

No, this is not a gorgeous, charming and comfortable B&B offering writers' retreats--but it could be.  It's the new home of my mother-in-law and her partner, and they hosted us for Christmas AND provided poet support services that you couldn't pay enough for elsewhere.  I'm very grateful.

 

Please slip and slide on over to Mainely Write with Donna for this week's Poetry Friday round-up.



OIK Tuesday: sky mice

This week I'm sharing a poem that the Might Minnows discovered, hiding in plain sight, in the Leo Lionni book Frederick. We read it in November, when the change of seasons was unmistakable here in the mid-Atlantic and it was important to think about storing up food--and sunrays, colors and words!--in preparation for the long winter.  This book also served as our first introduction into what it is to be a poet.

I won't post the well-known "Five Little Pumpkins" rhyme that came before this one--it can be found enough places.  But I will point out that our poetry anthology, when completed, deliberately included both simpler poems like "Five Little Pumpkins" and more complex ones like the one below that I titled "Frederick's Sky Mice."  Sometimes we all learned the poem by heart, and sometimes it was enough to hear it over and over again and complete each line as the teacher read it.  When we reviewed our anthologies at the end of the year, some children were surprised to find that they could read this one independently now!

Frederick’s Sky Mice
by Leo Lionni

Who scatters snowflakes? Who melts the ice?
Who spoils the weather? Who makes it nice?
Who grows the four-leaf clovers in June?
Who dims the daylight? Who lights the moon?

Four little field mice who live in the sky.
Four little field mice … like you and I.

One is the Springmouse who turns on the showers.
Then comes the Summermouse who paints in the flowers.
The Fallmouse is next with walnuts and wheat.
And Wintermouse is last … with little cold feet.

Aren’t we lucky the seasons are four?
Think of a year with one less … or one more!

Teachers, go here and here for great resources on Lionni's books, and enjoy the photos of mice visiting the Mighty Minnows!

picturing writing: literacy through art

At NCTE I found myself laughing at myself, because with 700 sessions to choose from, I managed to attend a session that I had already attended last year!  Not so surprising--the concept of "Picturing Writing: Fostering Literacy through Art" is right up my personal alley, and the collage-based approach called "Image-Making Within the Writing Process" is my back door.  Thanks to Beth Olshansky and her teacher colleagues for leading me home (two years in a row).

So, in our new 2.0 Elementary Integrated Curriculum we are supposed, as winter sets in, to be studying plant and animal life cycles, planting seeds and learning about baby animals. (Never mind that all around us dying, darkening, sleeping.)  To tie it all together and to lead us into a poetry project, I chose Leo Lionni's Frederick and Eric Carle's The Tiny Seed, which we have been comparing and contrasting, enacting and evaluating: which parts of this story could really happen?  do Frederick and his family do what real mice do? 

Meanwhile, each child used watercolors to paint 3-6 papers for collage, in the manner of both Carle and Lionni. As the class worked to see what animals, plants and weather their unpredictable painted papers suggested, I learned quite a lot that will help me support the project next time!  (Note to self:  20 collaging kindergarteners at once is too many.)  Still, their collages are very pleasing, often striking, and most importantly, quite individual. 

This week we're placing our collages in front of us and writing poems.  While a couple of the 5-year-olds are able to write their compositions on their own, for most I'm scribing with strategically placed blanks for them to spell juicy words like fish, rain, float and lion.  I cannot wait to share the whole collection with you, but for now I have only two to hand.  Jordan cut 4 shapes from a pinkish-purple paper, arranged them as a fish on a stripy bluish sea paper, and then painstakingly cut and glued maroon and ochre spots from another paper to create a bubbly surface. Here is his poem.

Mighty Minnow
by Jordan

mighty minnow swimming fast
in a deep, deep sea
pinkish-purple spots and dots
do you see any more colors
or anything else on me?

Ezekial is my youngest nearly 6-year-old and My Project for the year. We worked very closely to make the lion he imagined out of a deep muddyish turquoise paper. Here is the poem we negotiated.

Lion
by Ezekial

the blue dad lion
is walking to his wife
the playground is their house
they eat leaves and grass
they climb up the ladders
and they jump!

Extra poet's note: My plan, of course, was to model the collage-to-poem move using my own giraffe-under-sunset collage...but as my colleagues often say, "Kindergarten happened," and I found myself sitting down to write with children without ever having modeled. Guess what? For this class anyway, it has not mattered. Perhaps the other poetry we've been reading (most recently Frederick's "Sky Mice" poem and Douglas Florian's Beast Feast) and all the singing we've done has been enough. Their words sing, too!

Bonus activity:  the children are loving acting out each poem as it's completed. More soon...

OIK Tuesday: guts

Back before Thanksgiving, when I asked the children to list what they were thankful for, I went for variety by specifying some categories:  a person, a food, something in nature, something at school, something you like to play, a part of your body.   Talia suprised me by writing "my intinestinse" (which, unlike the average 5-year-old, she felt confident to spell independently).

Clearly intestines remain of great interest to her.  Having read Frederick all last week, we are looking forward to a visit from real pet mice and listing what we know and what we wonder about mice.  On our KNOW chart, Talia's statement reads, "Mice have intestines."  On our WONDER chart, her question reads, "Do mice have intestines?" She has a sense, very vague, of what intestines are for.  But I think she could use some further information.

I'm working on a mouse intestines poem for Talia--do you have one too?

growing gills

I've been underwater for the last two weeks, thanks to the hurricane of back-to-school details and a pesky need to actually sleep every night.  However, I must be growing gills, because I'm finding time to post.

It has been a fairly fishy week.  I began the year with my new K class with a deeply favorite book, Swimmy by Leo Lionni.  He's just such a good role model, isn't he?  Swimmy stands out from the crowd, takes care of himself, finds wonder in his surroundings even though he's scared and alone, takes a stand and solves a problem--cleverly--and shows bravery and determination as he leads all the little red fish to liberty.  For right now, I'll be the eye, but soon my 19 little ones will begin to lead the way.

Then we sang a tune I used to sing to my children when they were infants in the tub with me:

"Splish, splash, splish;
I am a little fish.
Swimmy, swimmy, swimmy, swimmy,
Splish, splash, splish."

At snacktime (made necessary by a scheduled lunch time of 10:45!), we've been plucking and reading this week's poem from the Poetree:

Fish

Look at them flit
Lickety-split
Wiggling
Swiggling
Swerving
Curving
Hurrying
Scurrying
Chasing
Racing
Whizzing
Whisking
Flying
Frisking
Tearing around
With a leap and a bound
But none of them making the tiniest
tiniest
tiniest
tiniest
tiniest
sound

by Mary Ann Hoberman

This poem reminds Ms. Mordhorst's Mighty Minnows that fish are very quiet indeed, and that the Mighty Minnows can be very quiet when it's called for.  Now before we enter the hall we sing, "Splish, splash, splish; I am a silent fish," and we swim down the hall like one giant silent fish with our hands finning up and down or side to side.

Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect is our "powerless" Poetry Friday host today...hope to surface long enough to see you there!