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. 

OIK Tuesday: look up for metaphor

Continuing my roundup of the poems that went into my kindergarteners' Poetry Anthologies this past year, here's the classic by Christina Rossetti, which I have also heard set to music.

This poem linked to our weather studies and was the first time we discussed the idea of metaphor.  I showed a photo of white clouds in a blue sky and asked the children, "Where are the sheep?"  They had fun realizing what Rossetti had done with her words and comparing that photo to one of actual sheep on a green hill (blue sky and white clouds on the horizon).


Clouds

White sheep, white sheep,
On a blue hill,
When the wind stops,
You all stand still.

When the wind blows,
You walk away slow.
White sheep, white sheep,
Where do you go?


by Christina Rossetti


If you're a teacher and would like a copy of this poem for illustrating, let me know and I'll send you a not-very-fancy document.

blind, feeling a way

It's three months until we move, but in the spirit of making hay while the sun shines, I've begun casually, nostalgically sorting and packing a few things.  In a pile of books in the parlor I came across a collection of Anne Sexton's poems.  Opening randomly, I read--and burst into tears.

Daisy doesn't care for horses, but she is 13, and I see this moment coming.



Pain for a Daughter // Anne Sexton


Blind with love, my daughter
has cried nightly for horses,
those long necked marchers and churners
that she has mastered, any and all,
reining them in like a circus hand -
the excitable muscles and the ripe neck -
tending, this summer, a pony and a foal.

She who is squeamish to pull
a thorn from the dog’s paw
watched the pony blossom with distemper,
the underside of the jaw swelling
like an enormous grape,
Gritting her teeth with love,
she drained the boil and scoured it
with hydrogen peroxide until pus
ran like milk on the barn floor.

Blind with loss all winter,
in dungarees, a ski jacket, and a hard hat,
she visits the neighbors’ stables,
our acreage not zoned for barns,
they who own the flaming horses
and the swan-necked thoroughbred
that she tugs at and cajoles,
thinking it will burn like a furnace
under her small-hipped English seat.

Blind with pain, she limps home;
The thoroughbred has stood on her foot.
He rested there like a building;
He grew into her foot until they were one.
The marks of the horseshoe printed
into her flesh, the tips of her toes
ripped off like pieces of leather,
three toenails swirled like shells
and left to float in blood in her riding boot.

Blind with fear, she sits on the toilet,
her foot balanced over the washbasin,
her father, hydrogen peroxide in hand,
performing the rites of the cleansing.
She bites on a towel, sucked in breath,
sucked in and arched against the pain,
her eyes glancing off me where
I stand at the door, eyes locked
on the ceiling, eyes of a stranger,
And then she cries…
Oh! My god, Help me!

Where a child would have cried “Mama!”
Where a child would have believed “Mama!”
She bit the towel and called on God,
And I saw her life, stretch out…
I saw her torn in childbirth,
And I saw her, at that moment,
in her own death,
And I knew that she knew.

******************************
Poetry Friday is hosted today by Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference, where she's sharing some of the poems exchanged through the Summer Poem Swap she has organized.  I'm participating and will have at least three to share next Friday--thanks, Tabatha!

Overheard in Kindergarten Poetry Roundup

This summer I'm going to continue my Tuesday OIK posts by sharing all the poems that ended up in the Poetry Anthologies of my kindergarten class this year.  My goal was a new poem every other Friday, and with a total of 15 (including the first song we learned together but not including a few other songs), I did pretty well, if we say that there were 4 quarters x 9 Fridays = 36/2 =18. 

We'll chalk up the missing three to fate.  My colleague Alex is so right when he says "...and then Kindergarten happened." It's a shortcut expression for all the unexpected events and developments that interrupt our careful classroom plans, and one of my goals for next year is to be more welcoming and gracious when Kindergarten Happens!

We started our school year with "Fish" by Mary Ann Hoberman, already posted here, and next worked on color words and some of the five senses by singing a rainbow.  I would have called "Sing a Rainbow" a folk tune--I've heard so many versions over the years--but the copyright is held by Arthur Hamilton for this 1955 song.  Read more here.  Our version goes like this:

Sing a Rainbow

Red and yellow and orange and green,
Purple and pink and blue.
I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow—
You sing a rainbow too.

Listen with your eyes,
Listen with your eyes
To every color you see.
I can sing a rainbow, sing a rainbow—
You sing along with me!

If you're a teacher and you'd like a copy of my colorful and unapologetically unscientific WordArt pocket chart for this song, let me know and I'll send it to you.  There's not much better than hearing a couple of 5-year-olds sweetly singing their way through a literacy center!

a kind, amiable animal

Idly, you understand, idly we had been watching the grassy neighborhood verges for realtors' signs, not taking the idea of moving too seriously, not investing overly because the whole idea of leaving our current house (pictured), of organizing a move, is beyond daunting--although a month ago we impetuously made an offer on one house which thank the stars we didn't get; it wasn't right at all, but we got our feet wet.

And then last Sunday there it was, a house just the right amount of bigger, in a spot neither too close nor too far away, nothing needing to be done to it, full of colors that spoke to us--if not laughingly, as in our current house, then expressively, in a few different languages, and with a garden that reminds us that outdoors is home too.  We let the sellers know by our offer that we could picture ourselves there and they believed us, and now we have bought a house.  Exclamation mark.  We are soaked!

All in the family agree:  we're excited for the new house, its fresh possibilities, but we're sad to leave the old house, which is, after all, a member of the family.



What My House Would Be Like If It Were A Person
Denise Levertov

This person would be an animal.

This animal would be large, at least as large

as a workhorse. It would chew cud, like cows,

having several stomachs.

No one could follow it

into the dense brush to witness

its mating habits. Hidden by fur,

its sex would be hard to determine.

Definitely it would discourage

investigation. But it would be, if not teased,

a kind, amiable animal,

confiding as a chickadee....


Read the rest here, and stop by Paper Tigers for today's Poetry Friday roundup, where Marjorie has picked out a gem of a book to share!

cooling off and catching up

Well, after an unplanned hiatus of some weeks, I'm back, drenched in triumphant relief (I made it through the first full-time year since 1998!) and in summer solstice sweat, proudly sharing a small, cooling moment mined from the piles of folders and composition books and other Stuff from School.

Here is Duncan's haiku, which was in part a 3rd-grade cursive-writing exercise.  Dunc's not so practiced at pacing his cursive yet and ran out of room on the transparency he was writing it on--that's what all the blank space is for.  Hence the nontraditional line breaks, which almost fooled his teacher into thinking it didn't fit the prescribed 5-7-5 syllable pattern. 

Jack-Frost's Reign

Thorny vines reaching
Plants drooping under
Jack-Frost's spell of months
of ice










Here is the rubric by which his work was scored:

"My poem follows the rules of Haiku (3 points)
My haiku describes nature with descriptive words (2 points)
My handwriting is neat (1 point)
My picture describes my poem (1 point)
My poem has a title (1 point)"

 -- for which last Duncan got 0 because he didn't include the title he selected above, resulting in an overall score of 6.5 out of 8 or a B.  I love teachers, and we loved Duncan's teacher, but I always want the rubric, if poetry must have one, to include something like "My poem helped me see the world and use language in new ways, bringing joy to me and my readers."  Self-assessed, of course!

Happy summer to all, and see you over at The Poem Farm, where I discover that Amy is sharing a song written with Barry Lane that captures, more catchily and poignantly, the exact same point that I'm making here about Duncan's "number."  Thanks, Amy and Barry.

Addendum, 8:47am:  Duncan came in as I was playing the song for the third time.  When it finished, he said, "Wow.  Montgomery County Public Schools certainly needs to hear this."

how things fit together

I'm consumed this week in finding a suitable (and yet, shall we say, practical) way to honor a grand achievement:  my parents' upcoming fiftieth anniversary.  In my search for a related poem, just as I was becoming frustrated, I found this.

The Great Order of the Universe

by Christian Bok

The notes say that it was composed in response to the fiftieth anniversary of the Lego patent, in 2008.  I suppose I could wish that the Lego anniversary coincided exactly with my parents' anniversary, but goodness! Isn't it pleasing when things fit together so variably, so neatly, so interlockingly coupled?

playing poetry catch

...or Poetry for All, part two!  I'm home again home again jiggety jig from Boyds Mills, well-fed and with a mind buzzing and exhausted from all the great poetry action.  I'd like to finish my effort to orient some of my fellow conferees in the Kidlitosphere, where I but dabble compared to some of you regular Poetry Friday participants.

We all go to Sylvia Vardell, one of the great children's poetry promoters, for the lowdown (or more like the highup) on what's happening here and abroad and for talk about new voices.  Her blog is Poetry for Children and she has many publications for practitioners and aficionados alike, besides being one-half of the Dynamic Duo Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong, who have ventured fearlessly into e-book publishing in support of poetry for children.  You can always find something inspiring at Amy Ludwig Vanderwater's blogs, the Poem Farm and Sharing Our Notebooks.

Among the participants at the workshop, quite a few of us have useful and interesting blogs or websites where we'll be able to continue to connect.  In the work-and-play spirit of Poetry for All, I share this poem brought to us by new-to-me poet Marjorie Maddox, who served as guest faculty.  We were definitely not left uncoached.

Catch

Two boys uncoached are tossing a poem together,
Overhand, underhand, backhand, sleight of hand, everyhand,
Teasing with attitudes, latitudes, interludes, altitudes,
High, make him fly off the ground for it, low, make him stoop,
Make him scoop it up, make him as-almost-as possible miss it,
Fast, let him sting from it, now, now fool him slowly,
Anything, everything tricky, risky, nonchalant,
Anything under the sun to outwit the prosy,
Over the tree and the long sweet cadence down,
Over his head, make him scramble to pick up the meaning,
And now, like a posy, a pretty one plump in his hands.

Robert Francis

Here are links to all the folks--some already listed in the previous post--at our workshop this week whose  "online presence" is easy to get to.  Pardon if I have missed someone!

Cory Corrado doesn't have her own site or blog, but David Harrison has highlighted her work on his blog, Connecting the Dots.

Julie Hedlund blogs regularly and has some reflections on the welcome (wet) silence we all experienced in Boyds Mills at this post. ...simple, concrete and lovely.

I don't find a blog or website for Bill Johnson, but please enjoy this nice profile of him in a Pennsylvania magazine's round-up of local children's authors!  He gave me one of the nicest gifts of the week--a copy of Rebecca Kai Dotlich's Bella and Bean.  Thanks, Bill.

I enjoyed several conversations with Buffy (I just typed "Buggy"!) Silverman about her science writing in many forms; here's her website and I look forward to reading her poetry collection-in-progress!

Hannah Ruth Wilde uses facebook to connect and can also be found at JacketFlap. 

Cindi Kennaley is available in several different flavors--find your way to a great photo of her with the Spinellis and an atmospheric Boyds Mills poem here!

Jeanne Poland's blog is rich and regular and I'm shocked to realize I've never visited in the whole year I've known her!  Jeanne also has lots of beautiful, interesting things to look at at her Quicksilver Studios site, too.

Rebecca Shoniker's site is full of the same energy she brought to Boyds Mills--enjoy!

I'm sure we'll all help each other find the online places that will support and inspire our writing lives.  Today Katya is rounding up the Poetry Friday posts at Write. Sketch. Repeat.  Hope to see you there!

Overheard in Boyds Mills: Poetry for All!

This Tuesday I come to you from the tiny crossroads of Boyds Mills in Pennsylvania, home of Highlights Magazine founders and now writers' workshop boomtown.  Since building "The Barn," the Highlights Foundation can now host more workshops like the one I'm attending, with more participants.  The Barn is beautiful, convenient and comfortable, and the trend is for workshops to have both multiple leaders--we're enjoying the leadership and modeling of poets David Harrison, Rebecca Kai Dotlich and Eileen Spinelli--and several special guests.

Quite a few fellow participants are recent arrivals to the Kidlitosphere, so I and some other regulars, including Robyn Hood Black (whose newly refurbished blog features lots of info about this and other Founders' Workshops) and Joy Acey, (a daily-poem poster like my new friend Bridget Magee) have been letting them know what a welcoming, generous and supportive community we have here.  The Kidlitosphere site is a place to start, but it appears to be down, so try this Friday's Poetry Friday party hosted by Katya at Write. Sketch. Repeat.  Today she absolutely proves my point about this community! 

Other blogs to visit include A Year of Reading, where Franki covers the library beat and  Mary Lee keeps tabs on the hosting calendar (we all take turns rounding up all the Poetry Friday posts; Irene did it last week and it looks like this).  Steven Withrow up and established PACYA, Poetry Advocates for Children and Young Adults, and the PACYA blog, Poetry at Play, features another participant, Liz Steinglass, interviewing Cynthia Grady, a treat I missed back in April.

More of us have blogs and websites that deserve a mention as we all find each other online, but one of the glories of this retreat is a Bedtime of Your Choice, and I choose now!