OIK Tuesday: hand-ear coordination

This afternoon the Mighty Minnows and I spent a lot of time considering our five senses, and there was a fantastic unexpected development when we closed our eyes and used our noses to smell the aromatic Mr. Sketch marker I grabbed.  It happened to be light green, which smells like mint.  Bertrand thought it was toothpaste, Karina thought it smelled like bubblegum, and Janie surprised me by naming it peppermint right away (or maybe not, since her family is Thai). 

As we discussed minty things, I realized that I could walk them right out into our lovelier-all-the-time school courtyard where parent volunteers have planted a Sensory Garden full of herbs.  We danced to High Five's "Five Senses" song and then we lined up and went--the real deal, only two minutes away! (Go Outdoor Education Committee.)

Cora had suggested basil when I asked if anyone knew what plant those minty smells and flavors came from, so first we all sniffed a leaf of basil.  I was happy to find a great clump of flowering mint, so that everyone (all 16--am I lucky, or what?) could have a sprig to crush and sniff and nibble and take home.  On the way back to the classroom we became the Minty Minnows instead of the Mighty Minnows. : )

Later, after the bus riders departed, the rest of us were singing requests--classics like "Twinkle Twinkle" and of course "Santa Claus is Coming to Town."  Tonya had already taught us the sign language version of The Itsy Bitsy Spider, so I wasn't too surprised when Suzee made this announcement:

"I can sing the Alphabet Song in silent language."

*******************

Listen with Your Eyes

Secret clutched in a closed fist:
If you wait one pinky moment
Letting sounds slide towards your thumb,
Eventually they perch like birds on a fence,
Nesting two together on a quiet egg
Till the egg cracks and a beak of song breaks through

panda down the rabbit hole

Huh.  There are not a lot of panda poems out there, I find.  I just felt like I wanted to continue on from Tuesday's post, so I went searching and found a whole panda-poem competition for children (and isn't that post and blog such an illuminating look at all the English-language literature there is outside the US of A?)

I also found this, courtesy of the Poetry Foundation website.  It makes me feel both unsettled and roundly content, to be so in on all the "jokes."


And as in Alice | Mary Jo Bang

Alice cannot be in the poem, she says, because
She's only a metaphor for childhood7
And a poem is a metaphor already
So we'd only have a metaphor

Inside a metaphor. Do you see?
They all nod. They see. Except for the girl
With her head in the rabbit hole. From this vantage,
Her bum looks like the flattened backside

Of  a black and white panda. She actually has one
In the crook of  her arm.
Of course it's stuffed and not living.
Who would dare hold a real bear so near the outer ear?

She's wondering what possible harm might come to her
If  she fell all the way down the dark she's looking through.
Would strange creatures sing songs
Where odd syllables came to a sibilant end at the end.

Perhaps the sounds would be a form of  light  hissing.
Like when a walrus blows air
Through two fractured front teeth. Perhaps it would
Take the form of a snake. But if a snake, it would need a tree.

Could she grow one from seed? Could one make a cat?
Make it sit on a branch and fade away again
The moment you told it that the rude noise it was hearing was rational thought
With an axe beating on the forest door.


Poetry Friday is hosted today by Katya at Write. Sketch. Repeat. Perhaps we'll be surprised by another panda poem!

OIK Tuesday: feed the panda

As I marched the Minnows from the playground up the back steps to our room last Friday, we passed a rather large, not-too-shabby stuffed panda in a red holiday scarf lying in the grass.  It was strange to have it appear there, but stranger that some other classes had walked right by without rescuing it.  So we carried it inside, brushed off the grass clippings, and put him in a chair at the little round table in Pretend Play, which is currently outfitted with yer standard home-corner furniture and a selection of healthy plastic fruits and vegetables plus bread and rice.

Later I noticed that the children playing there had given him a plate of vegetables and rice.  "Oh, interesting!" I said.  "You're feeding the panda some rice.  Does anyone know where real pandas live?"

Several well-educated 5-year-olds answered "China!"  "People eat a lot of rice in China.  And does anyone know what real pandas eat?"

"I know!" said Merrilee.   "They eat boobam!"

******************************
I got interested in a poetic form called the trimeric from this post by Steven Withrow at crackles of speech.  He got inspired by a Poetry Stretch at the Miss Rumphius blog.  I decided to make my trimeric rhyme, and something makes me feel it's important to come back to the first line in the last line of the 4th stanza. 

Welcome, Stranger

We found a lonely panda on the playground.
We’ll keep him till he finds his way home.
For now he’s living in Pretend Play.
Tomorrow it will be his birthday.

We’ll keep him till he finds his way home.
We couldn’t leave him out there all night!
Will somebody claim him? They might.

For now he’s living in Pretend Play.
Real pandas live in China or the zoo.
We’re feeding him boobam I mean bamboo.

Tomorrow it will be his birthday!
We think he’s turning three or maybe four.
He doesn’t seem so lonely anymore.

~ Heidi Mordhorst 2012

seize the day

It's Poetry Friday here in the Kidlitosphere, Poetry Friday in my classroom, and I dream of a day when it will be Poetry Friday in every classroom across the country.   The new Poetry Friday Anthology, conceived and published by Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell, takes us one step closer to that happy circumstance.  Today I'm doing my part to bring it about by posting to my whole school about the availability of this resource for bringing poetry into the classroom every week.

Why poetry?  Among a mass of benefits, poetry
*reinforces phonemic awareness
*provides oral language practice and
*develops metaphorical thinking.

If that ain't enough for you, the new Common Core Standards place a stronger emphasis on poetry experience, enjoyment and study--so we're SUPPOSED to be doing poetry on a regular basis.  The Poetry Friday Anthology is just one source of good poetry with tips for bringing it to life in the classroom, but it's dear to my heart:  it contains the work of lots of folks I know and love as my poetry peers (and two of my own poems as well).

This morning, if I weren't obligated to choose a poem concretely connected to the actual red female betta living in room 166 (Mary Ann Hoberman's "Fish"), and if I were teaching older kids with a better sense of time, I might be using this first poem in the Anthology.  I include three stanzas, but to get all four, you'll need your own copy of The Poetry Friday Anthology!

The Most Glad-to-See Day of the Year | Allan Wolf

My favorite, special, most glad-to-see day,
the day I consider the best.
The day when I really get carried away.
The top day all year!  Can you guess?

....................
It's not a one-timer.  My day never ends.
It's the first, second, middle and last.
It is here, holy cow!  It is new. It is now.
It is not in the future or past.

I'll give you the answer:  my day is...Today!
There's no waiting in line. There is no long delay.
What yesterday was and tomorrow will be,
Today's the most wonderful day for me.

The Poetry Friday round-up is hosted by Sylvia Vardell herself today at her blog Poetry for Children. Go for a dip, a dunk or a dive into Friday's pool of poetry!

OIK Tuesday: Is 200 a big number or a small number?

It's Day 2 of the new school year and Post 200 on this blog.  I realize that both these numbers are rather paltry relative to the overall number of school days I have taught (oh my, do the math:  24 years x roughly 180 days + camps and tutoring and a whole year of student teaching + 2 = 4502) and relative to the number of posts some of my favorite bloggers manage (daily! imagine!).

But Day 2 of a new year of school is an Important Day, a day on which you find out if you taught those children anything memorable on the first day of school, a day on which you test your initial hypotheses about each child's style and substance, strengths and weaknesses.  I had kind of a hairy first day yesterday (might have something to do with spending it in a classroom with a heat index of 90*), so I was really glad to find that, from their point of view, there were good reasons to come back today. 

It's hard work, though:  today I Overheard in Kindergarten the following exchange (at the end of a long and busy afternoon):

Arden:  "Do we come to school again tomorrow?"
Me:  "Yes, we have five days of school in a row this week."
Bertrand:  "My big brother told me that school goes on forever!"

And Post 200 is nothing to sniff at either, I reckon--that makes practically forever!  If I blog to record what's happening in the life of my mind and to stay in touch with a poetry-loving, kid-friendly community, then my usual two-posts-a-week is working.  This is where I build the box, where I construct a container however many cubits long and wide I need, not according to anyone else's specifications.  I use this box to contain my strings and chains and clouds of ideas that stretch and link and bounce and accumulate--kind of like the Large Hadron Collider, that 27-mile tunnel under Switzerland that the physicists use to crash particle beams together--only my LHC is seriously low-tech, a lot more like the Ark.

Thanks for coming on board!

Poetry Friday power-up!

The Poetry Friday Anthology:

Poems for the School Year

with Connections to the Common Core

compiled by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong

Pomelo Books 2012 -- official release date September 1

This supremely practical anthology, which will be available in both soft-cover book and e-book versions, is the latest feat of  magic worked by that Daring Duo of Poetry, Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong.

It contains 218 new poems by 75 of the best poets now writing for children, but unlike other quality anthologies of literary poetry, this one is organized with the busy classroom teacher in mind (and I should know).  In other words, it's the best of educational and literary publishing all rolled into one lively package!

It includes 36 poems for each grade level K-5, which is one for each week of a standard 180-day school year.  Even better, the poems have been organized according to broad themes that repeat for each grade level, so that in Week 1, all grade levels enjoy a "School" poem, in Week 18 every kid K-5 gets a "Human Body" poem, and in Week 29 there are poems about...poetry!  There are heartfelt and serious poems under themes like "A Kinder Place" and "Families," and hootingly playful poems under "Stuff We Love" and "Nonsense."  By the end of the school year, when kids have had lots of poetry experience, the themes are related to poetic devices such as "Metaphor and Simile" and "Personification," addressed at accessible levels.   

For the few teachers who are truly poetry-phobic, this anthology is a gift.  It says, "Take a few minutes just one day a week to make poetry your focus...we'll help you do it right, do it in community, and enjoy all the rewards!"  To support the less confident, each poem comes with 5 quick tips for sharing, teaching, enjoying:

*a hook for introducing the poem,

*a developmentally appropriate way for students to join in reading and speaking the poem,

*ideas for discussion and teachable moments,

*and finally, a connection to another poem in the anthology or another poetry book to explore.

Of course, many more teachers will be doing as I'll do, dipping in here and there to select poems not by week but by theme, and looking beyond my own grade level to find other gems that I'll bring into our curriculum through content connections, writing and performance.   I'll be highlighting some of my favorites in coming posts, and you can bet that those of us contributors who also participate in Poetry Friday in the Kidlitosphere will be sharing more tips and tricks and on their blogs, too!

10 for 10: Picture Books for a New Year

I'm posting from my classroom today, where my efforts to move into a new classroom before the teachers' preservice week starts have been washed out by a flood.  Everything I did yesterday to lay out rugs and arrange furniture is now undone, and my precious carpet is filthy and soaking.  What can a teacher do but make a quick list of 10 classic picture books she couldn't live without?  The classicness of these titles perhaps shows my age, and I'll be taking a cue from Mary Lee in trying to find 10 newer books to add to my Class Favorites rack.


In chronological order as I'll use them this year:

1. Swimmy by Leo Lionni
2. Goldilocks and the Three Bears, many versions
3. Pumpkin Circle by George Levenson
4. Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss
5. Frederick by Leo Lionni
6. Mattland by Hazel Hutchins and Gail Herbert
7. The Tree That Time Built, edited by Mary Ann Hoberman
(okay, technically not picture book, but so rich I think of it as illustrated!)
8. Piggy in the Puddle by Charlotte Pomeranz
9.  The Little Red Hen, many versions
10.  Hazel's Amazing Mother by Rosemary Wells

I hope to voyage around the 10 For 10 Picture Book lists of others.  The round-up today is hosted nutritiously by Violet Nesdoly!

OIK Tuesday: a little hot soup for you

I've been away on vacation WITHOUT my computer (gasp!) but have returned to continue my series featuring the poems--and songs--that became part of my kindergarten class's Poetry Anthology last year.  We began 2012 with an introduction to the months of the year, and what better way to do that than with Chicken Soup with Rice?  Authored and illustrated by Maurice Sendak (RIP) and part of his Nutshell Library, this and other poems were later set to music by Carole King, and were in their turn animated as part of the Really Rosie movie.  Here's another of our favorites in this group of whimsies, "Alligators All Around":

For the class, I made copies of all twelve verses of Chicken Soup with Rice and each child selected their favorite one to illustrate for their anthology.  Here's August:

In August it will be so hot
I will become a cooking pot,
Cooking soup, of course--why not?
Cooking once,
Cooking twice,
Cooking chicken soup with rice!

Long ago in a first-grade class in East Harlem, we turned this song into a performance, with kids acting out each little scene and everybody chanting the names of the months in order in between verses.  Those kids left first grade knowing the months of the year for sure!  If you're a teacher and would like a copy of the sheets I made--nothing fancy--for Chicken Soup with Rice, let me know in the comments and I'll send it to you.

Poems from Montreal on Friday!

OIK Tuesday: winter in July

This past Sunday Daisy and her youth group held a Winter in July fundraiser for a Habitat for Humanity project in our community.  They made and sold snowcones, iced cocoa and gingerbread house cookies, and there were little origami present boxes that were sold for amounts ranging from $5 to $100.  You bought a present and then looked inside to see what item you had provided for the building project.  We bought a box of nails and sod for a front lawn.

So I'm in the mood for gingerbread (often: see additional post here), which coincidentally is the next poem from the last year's Mighty Minnows kindergarten poetry anthology.  It's an "Anonymous" type rhyme that we incorporated into our puppet show retelling of The Gingerbread Man story on the last day before winter break.


Making Gingerbread Men

Stir a bowl of gingerbread,
Smooth and spicy brown.
Roll it with a rolling pin,
Sideways, up and down.
With a cookie cutter
Make some little men.
Put them in the oven,
Till half past ten!


It makes a nice nursery-rhyme complement to the previous more complex Frederick poem and to the upcoming beginning-of-the-new-year selection.  The children memorized it easily, and ate the gingerbread men we baked even more easily!

have a _____ day

I'm late to Poetry Friday this week, but I've been trawling and organizing my computer files and finding a few forgotten treasures, and here's one worth sharing.

Teachers will be familiar with cloze procedure,  "a technique in which words are deleted from a passage presented to students, who insert words as they read to complete and construct meaning from the text."  The term "cloze" was introduced in 1953 by Wilson Taylor, who derived it from the Gestalt psychology principle of "closure," which holds that our minds tend to complete patterns and perceive figures even when part of the information is missing.  It's used as an exercise or assessment for determining how well readers use ________ clues in language.  (The missing word there is context.)

Before kids can complete a cloze activity, they must of course understand what the blanks are all about.  A couple of weeks into the school year I start introducing blanks into the Morning Message (which includes information about our plans for the day).  Figuring out what to write in the blanks becomes part of the Reading Leader's job.

Enjoy Lou Lipsitz's poem below, and see how important it is to teach the little ones to read the blank out loud:  "Have a BLANK day"?

How else will they know they have work to do, filling in that blank with one of the choices, or choosing something of their own to put in the blank, or "yielding, ...swallowing hard, breathing more deeply," when the blank fills itself in before they're ready?


Have a ____ Day  |  Lou Lipsitz


Have a nice day. Have a memorable day.
Have (however unlikely) a life-changing day.
Have a day of soaking rain and lightning.
Have a confused day thinking about fate.

Have a day of wholes.
Have a day of poorly marked,
unrecognizable wholes you
cannot fathom.
Have a ferocious day, a bleak
unbearable day. Have a
riotously unproductive day;
a grim jaw-clenched, Clint Eastwood vengeful
law enforcement day.
Have a day of raging, hair-yanking
jealousy and meanness. Have a day
of almost grasping
how whole you are; a finely tuned,
empty day.

Have a nice day of walking and circling;
a day of stalking and hunting,
of planting strange seeds and wandering in the woods.
Have a day of endearing nonsense,
of hopelessly combing your hair,
a day of yielding, of swallowing
hard, breathing more deeply,
a day of fondness for beetles
and macabre spectacles, or irreverence
about anything you want, of just
sitting and wondering.
Have a day of wondering if it's
going to help, or if it just doesn't matter;
a day of dark winds
and torrents flowing though the valley,
of diving into cool water
and gasping for breath,
a day of sudden hunger for communion.

Have a day where the crusts you each
were given are lost and you stumble
with your fellows
searching endlessly together.

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!

bedecked with text

I love summer.  Is it because I'm a hot-weather person with a penchant for peaches, or is it because at this time of year I can luxuriate in the literacy activities that form the core of my being?  I love school-times too, but there are so many constraints on what I can read and write then.  Still, something is shifting, and not just because I'm not working (working for The Man, that is, whoever he may be).

I know because this week I've been reading not one but TWO works of contemporary adult fiction.  I mean actually reading my way through them, not just carrying a book to the pool and in the car and to the beach but reading the same second chapter over and over again without making progress (this was the fate of both Loving Frank last year and The Elegance of the Hedgehog the year before).  I seem to be able suddenly to give myself up to a book like I used to, in the days when I lived mainly to get back to any of the several books I was reading at any given time.

[Around about Monday Daisy asked, "What are you reading now, Mommy?"  "Upstairs I'm reading An American Wife and downstairs I'm reading Room."  "Good for you!" she exclaimed, as though I'd happened upon a uncommon but to-be-recommended practice.  "I do that but my friends don't get it."  Little does she know that I invented that practice, not she, but that was back when.....when I was 13 too.  : )]

This is what else I have had the wide-open pleasure to encounter this week, in the random sort of order which is appropriate to the season:

*The Silver Chair, aloud to Duncan (C.S. Lewis)
*What Color is Your Smoothie?  (Britt Allen Brandon; goes with my new hyperpowered blender)
*my own poems and those of my fabulous new critique group
*An American Wife (Curtis Sittenfeld; having the slightly creepy effect of making me like Dubya)
*Room (Emma Donoghue; finished on Tuesday night and best thing I have read since I can remember)
*IKEA, Crate & Barrel and other online furniture catalogs with my "New House Notebook" alongside
*Chapter 3 of my other critique partner's entertaining middle grade novel
*online documents regarding some shady dealings between our County Executive and our school system on the conversion of an organic farm occupying school land to privately owned soccer fields
*Narrative Magazine (thinking of entering poetry contest)
*Time magazine articles from March and April on The Next 10 Big Ideas and the 100 Most Influential People in the World
*and finally, this poem, which had a similar effect on me to last week's offering.  Its power links to that poem, to Room, and to the process of saying a long goodbye to rooms full of the evidence of younger childhoods.  (That said, only last week Duncan and his friends bedecked themselves with marker lipstick and eyeshadow, dug out wigs and sparkly handbags and videoed themselves acting out a visiting-Santa-at-the-mall skit.  Brave rainbow hearts indeed.)  My dad forwarded it to me.

Bedecked // Victoria Redel (apologies; the formatting is not right, I'm sure)


Tell me it’s wrong the scarlet nails my son sports or the toy

store rings he clusters four jewels to each finger.

He’s bedecked. I see the other mothers looking at the star

choker, the rhinestone strand he fastens over a sock.

Sometimes I help him find sparkle clip-ons when he says

sticker earrings look too fake.


Tell me I should teach him it’s wrong to love the glitter that a

boy’s only a boy who’d love a truck with a remote that revs,

battery slamming into corners or Hot Wheels loop-de-looping

off tracks into the tub.


Then tell me it’s fine—really—maybe even a good thing—a boy

who’s got some girl to him,

and I’m right for the days he wears a pink shirt on the seesaw in

the park.


Tell me what you need to tell me but keep far away from my son

who still loves a beautiful thing not for what it means—

this way or that—but for the way facets set off prisms and

prisms spin up everywhere

and from his own jeweled body he’s cast rainbows—made every

shining true color.


Now try to tell me—man or woman—your heart was ever once

that brave.


Among other places, this poem is published in an anthology called 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, edited by Billy Collins.  May we be so brave as he.  The round-up today is with Jone at Check It Out.