science series IV

In Kindergarten we have been exploring the water cycle as best as we are able at 5 and 6 years old.  We sing a song I never get tired of, "The Wheel of the Water" by Tom Chapin (enjoy a story performance version here at minute 2:25 and a sample of the straight vocal version here), and use that foundational chorus as the anchor for all our discussions of cycles throughout kindergarten:  the wheel of the apple, the wheel of the pumpkin, the wheel of the sunflower/frog/chicken/turtle/human.

We always get that the water flows down ("down, trickle trickle down") and that "clouds rain down; thunder and lightning sound", but the stage of the water cycle at which the sun cooks the water into invisible droplet-filled vapor is still very mysterious.  We do a simple experiment:

1) Soak a paper towel.
2) Hang it with a clothespin somewhere in the room.
3) Go to Art or Music or P.E..
4) Return and retrieve paper towel.  What do you notice?

This experiment is always accompanied by shrieks of surprise, excitement and even shock.  But the answers to "Where did the water go?" are often very magical, despite the many rehearsals of "See the vapors rise; see them cloud the skies"--because we canNOT see the vapors rise, and it's hard to believe that the water is now in the very air of our room, and indeed that water is EVERYWHair.  This year it was concluded that the water vapor went through the little holes in our ceiling tiles to get to the sky, and I could not prove otherwise!

Here's an original that might have been a helpful addition to this week's curriculum, except that we were too busy with "Five Little Pumpkins" and the Spooky Ghost sound /oo/.  Boo to you and Happy Halloween too!
 


Water Becomes You

This water coming into your hands,

it’s old—older than today,

older than you are,

older than the oldest people you know.

This water has been around:

playing over and under the world,

coming up in different wells,

turning through the air into nothing.

This water will make its home in you,

become a part of you,

moving in your very thoughts—

old water welling up in new hands.

HM 2006

all rights reserved 

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

Go knock on Linda's door at TeacherDance--I bet there are lots of poetreats to be had today!

 

science series III

Scientist, poet...poet, scientist.  Opposite ends of the intellectual spectrum, you say? 

Both poets and scientists begin their work with close observation.  Both employ their senses in wide-open, curious ways. Both distinguish themselves by bringing wild creativity to their work. Eve Merriam gently commands young readers who may want to be poets to behave like scientsts.

One way to approach this poem--after it has been savored and enjoyed as a whole tasty mouthful--is to blow it up large and have students develop a "Five Senses" code to label words, lines and phrases according to the sense being engaged.  Do you need a sixth symbol for the sense of imagination? 

Reply to the Question, "How Can You Become a Poet?" || Eve Merriam

take the leaf of a tree
trace its exact shape
the outside edges
and inner lines
memorize the way it is fastened to the twig
(and how the twig arches from the branch)
how it springs forth in April
how it is panoplied in July

by late August
crumple it in your hand
so that you smell its end-of-summer sadness

chew its woody stem

listen to its autumn rattle

watch it as it atomizes in the November air

then in winter
when there is no leaf left

                  invent one

 *************

This poem appears in The Tree That Time Built, edited by Children's Poet Laureate Mary Ann Hoberman (Sourcebooks 2009).


Rake your way on over to Merely Day by Day with Cathy for the Poetry Friday Roundup.

 

science series II

The leaves are falling in earnest now where we are.  I have used this poem with children as young as first grade, emphasizing the cyclical journey of the leaves, the ecological concept of decay. This is a poem that begins in the realm of the obvious and then teaches readers to look beyond, to follow the trail of a thing.

The language is at once simple and exquisitely textured, helping younger readers to access a complex concept and probably some new vocabulary.  I like it also because the last two lines insist on metacognition:  consider the reality of our nature but also the possibility of another.  We see how it is in our world, but how might it be in some other world?

In Hardwood Groves || Robert Frost

The same leaves over and over again!
They fall from giving shade above
To make one texture of faded brown
And fit the earth like a leather glove.

Before the leaves can mount again
To fill the trees with another shade,
They must go down past things coming up,
They must go down into the dark decayed.

They must be pierced by flowers and put
Beneath the feet of dancing flowers.
However it is in some other world,
I know that this is the way in ours.

science series I

In November at the NCTE Convention I'll be participating in a Children's Literature Assembly Master Class called "Poetry Across the Curriculum."  I'll lead a Roundtable discussion about how poetry can support science teaching, while others address math, social studies, art and P.E..  To get myself all geared up and to provide a resource for participants, I'm going to start now on collecting and commenting on some of my favorite science poems.

For this season I love this one, a sensory feast from the queen of close observation, Valerie Worth.

pumpkin | Valerie Worth

After its lid

is cut, the slick

Seeds and stuck

Wet strings

Scooped out,

walls scraped

Dry and white,

Face carved, candle

Fixed and lit,

Light creeps

into the thick

Rind: giving

That dead orange

Vegetable skull

Warm skin, making

A live head

To hold its

Sharp gold grin.

from More Small Poems (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1976)

*********

Besides the festival of hard c and k sounds and the incitement of repeated long and short i's, Valerie gives us wonderful contrasts:  slick and stuck, wet and dry, white and orange, dead and alive.  Also there is the transformation that I hope every child has the hands-on chance to effect, from farm-field vegetable to human artifact (which makes this a social studies poem as well!).  Stop painting and get carving while you talk about change with K-2nd graders.

A nonfiction text to place alongside this poem is the skillfully poetic Pumpkin Circle by George Levenson and Shmuel Thaler (Random House Children's Books, 1999).  It's the best way I know to introduce the concept of plant life cycles to young children.

Join the poetry party this Friday at The Miss Rumphius Effect with Tricia!

OIK Tuesday: signs of fall

 

Today the Mighty Minnows went out for a very short walk, to notice some signs of fall--you know, the regular ordinary things that tell us that the new season is arriving:  changing leaves, acorns, reddening berries. As we stood under an oak tree at the edge of the parking lot, noticing that all the leaves were still green but that acorns were crunching under our feet, I kept up my teacher refrain:

"Leaves turning red is a sign; acorns on the ground are a sign; berries on this bush are a sign..."

 

In great excitement Hector interrupted,"I see a sign too!"  I turned to look at Hector's sign of fall and found him pointing to

After 25 years there are still things I should anticipate--and forget to.

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

Seeing the Signs

I saw an orange leaf
I felt a cool wind
I held a smooth acorn
and felt its bumpy cap

I saw a red berry
I felt the chilly dawn
I held catalpa pods
and heard them rattle-tap

I saw a metal pole
I felt its cold holes
I tried to read this sign
but I'm only five--I can't.

...yet.

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Go read more poetry signs at Writing the World for Kids with Laura the Prolific.

bittersweet twist

To my 6th grader

oh little boy
chubby baby who woke me at 5 every day
who taught me to rise before light
to capture the hour of my best self

oh little boy
bony 1st-grade early bird up at 6 every day
swinging sticks and pecking at order
catching little minutes of your best self

oh bigger boy
wiry twelvish boy grown tall on a diet of
filthy fingernails, outrageous belches,
lengthy detailed days of strategination

oh bigger boy
now, when you must wake at 6 every day
you huff and snorfle, make unrising noises,
fight me for two more hours of sleep

Heidi Mordhorst
DRAFT 2014

arrow to the mark

I saw that this week's host, Renee, featured Lee Bennett Hopkins on Lilian Moore a couple of weeks ago, so I went trawling to remind myself of her work.  In my travels I read that Lilian was the first editor of Scholastic's Arrow Book Club in the 60's--somewhat before my long and delighted relationship with that institution.  (There are still paperbacks on my shelves that I ordered from Arrow--notably an edition of Robin Hood--labeled with my name in terribly inexperienced 3rd-grade cursive. Was there anything better than finally receiving the fresh new books you'd ordered on the newsprint form and awaited for weeks?)


I found my way to this one, a swoon-worthy shaft of perfection that flies to my heart, singing out "Why d'you have to go and make things so complicated?"  Seriously, it's time for me to get back to where I once belonged and write some simple, straightforward rhymes of joy.  Perhaps I'll let Lilian shake me, take me, make me fly....

Go Wind | Lilian Moore

Go wind, blow
Push wind, swoosh.
Shake things
take things
make things
fly.

Ring things
swing things
fling things
high.

Go wind, blow
Push things
wheee.

No, wind, no
not me–
not me.

 ***********
These first weeks of September have been hotter than most of August was where I live.  Today the Mighty Minnows made their second visit out to our special tree, where we steamed and sweated in heavy humidity and worked to draw like scientists, observing textures and colors.

Tree trunk
tree bark
I think I'll park
myself in maple shade.

Tree branch
tree leaf
my rest is brief--
I need some lemonade.

By golly, I believe Lilian's inspiration blew over me indeed!  Enjoy the round-up today at No Water River.  

minnow by minnow

http://blog.canadianmountainholidays.com

When I was still quite a new teacher in East Harlem more than 20 years ago, I accepted the offer of a volunteer for my classroom.  He was an older man, perhaps 55, who had worked all his life running his own HVAC repair business.  Now, having sold it and retired, Sal wanted to try to something he'd always been interested in: teaching.

Sal came to my first-grade class regularly for about six weeks.  He was great with the kids and easy to work with, and everybody loved him.  I don't remember much about Sal's projects in the classroom, but I do remember what he said about why he had realized that teaching wasn't for him after all.

"In my work I've been used to walking into a building, figuring out what's not working, and repairing it.  You leave at the end of the day knowing that you completed the job.  But here in the classroom, the progress can be so slight each day, or maybe you don't see any progress.  There's a lot of waiting, and sometimes you can't tell if you fixed anything at all.  I guess I still need to walk in, see what's broken, and fix it."

That's obviously my paraphrase of Sal's wise assessment of his experience in first grade, and off he went back into his life--but his observation has stuck with me.  I'm not an angler, not a fly-fisher like my friend Mary Lee, but I'm joining her in her Trout of the Day project, and I guess that


what I am good at
is catching little minnows
kiss then throw them back


By this little instaku I mean that here they come swimming--
I reach in, catch them up midstream and plant a little challenge on them, then toss them back in to catch their breath and find their own next level.

And each day--even in this first week of school or maybe especially--I can see growth and change and progress in each child, and those little increments are enough to keep me feeling like I'm doing the right work for me.  I love it when Caty-Jean realizes she's safe and can step right up in the line with confidence.  I notice that Jake is thinking hard about which way his capital J should hook.  I see that Emara is learning to say goodbye to her twin after recess.  And look at Hector planting his finger on his lips and waiting for his turn to tell me everythingeverythingeverything all at once!

In this work, you don't walk in, see what's broken, and fix it.  It's a little more slippery, a little more daily than that.  It goes minnow by minnow.
 
For lots of hefty poetry keepers, Check It Out is the river to fish in today, with our host Jone.

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!"

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

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.

my writing process: hen and ink blog tour

A short while ago I was contacted by an old friend from my year in France--the multitalented Sandra Guy. When Bobbi Katz found out that we would be spending a year in Paris (2007-2008), she offered to put me in touch with Sandra, whom she had known for some time.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Sandra lived pretty much ACROSS THE STREET from our borrowed apartment in Vincennes--we at number 48 Avenue de Paris and Sandra at number 1 or so!  We joked about stretching a rope across the avenue to pulley a basket full of our manuscripts to each other (though mostly we just met in various cafes to critique each others' work).
 
Sandra was inviting me to participate in a blog tour in which writers for children to respond to four questions about their writing process. She lives now in Amsterdam, where she has been training in acupuncture as well as writing; she is represented in part by Erzsi Deak's agency, Hen&Ink Literary Studio. I was also supposed to recruit two more writers to post on their blogs, but my first round of invitations went to sensible people who were clear that they didn't have time just now (or that they'd already participated).  Now that school has started for me, it'll be harder to recruit the next participants, so I'll cross my fingers that someone reading this will want to be next to answer these four questions....


What are you working on now?
In a departure from my usual work for younger readers, I've been busy all summer revising (for the second time!) a poetry manuscript that started out being about how the connections we humans make among ideas are ill-reflected in the way we organize school learning.  It had an alchemy theme that is now morphing into a coming-of-age theme for teens--which makes sense considering that I have a nearly-12 and a 15-year-old transforming themselves before my very eyes!  I also did some haiku work this summer, for my own development--enough to know that maybe me and haiku are not meant to be together.
 
Why is your work different from other work in the same genre? 
I often hear the critique that it's hard to know who the audience for my poetry is. I've realized that when I write a poem "naturally," to get it you have to be a grown-up, but to appreciate it, you have to be a kid.  This limits my audience rather severely (usually to other children's poets). Thus, part of my writing process is to go back and uncomplicate or clarify or decleverize or trim or recast or layer on more, depending on who my reader is supposed to be.

Why do you write what you write?
Brains entertain me.  How people think--and don't think, or have senior moments (at any age) or "brain farts"--fascinates me.  The bareness of their thinking is why I love teaching little children.  In my writing I'm most often trying to convey to other brains a tickle of delight or intrigue that I have experienced in my own.  I'm therefore not so much a storyteller but more of a moment-catcher, and very often the moment I am trying to capture in words is an intellectual episode with a big emotional impact (or occasionally just a good punchline).

Of course, brains don't work in a vacuum.  They need fodder for their delights, intrigues and tickles, and the best brain fodder I know is nature (whence all brains, from human down to ant, arise).  Most often my poems sprout up from an encounter with or in nature, and they tend to be sensory--but cerebral:  "What can it all mean?"  

What is your writing process?
Usually, I hear or see or smell or taste something that sets in motion a chain of possibilities--connections, associations, inventions.  A good example of this is the seed for the title poem of my first book, "Squeeze."  A preschooler I was teaching said the words "lemon heaven"--who knows why now?--and the rhythm of the syllables, the assonance of the vowels, and the surprising concept all tickled my brain and sent me down a short, sweet and sour path to the power of personal choice.

Practically speaking, I have finally learned to write the first draft by hand on the left side of a notebook spread.  This makes it easier to see how the seed sprouted and grew when I more or less immediately redraft it on the right side, fixing things that changed between the first line and the last line in Draft 1.  If I'm lucky, Draft 2 is pretty close to what I wanted to catch, so that when I type it out, later that day or the next, I'm making most of the final tweaks...until I show it to someone and they ask, "But who is this poem for?" (See Question 2 above.)

Then Draft 3 might become 4 or 5 over a week or two, and that's usually enough.  There are a handful of poems that have suffered through 15-20 drafts (and come out better on the other side--or not), and lots of poems that have undergone what you might call "limb transplants"--the spine of the original idea remains, but all the outer structure changes.  This happens most often when I'm trying to fit a poem into a collection and it needs to accomplish some small piece of the arc (or the ark) that it hadn't known it was responsible for.  For this big-picture manuscript drafting, there is no substitute for printing it all out and spreading it all over the floor, just like we did with our notecards when we wrote our first term paper.  Then all the poems can see and hear and feel each other, which can never happen on a screen.

I'm grateful to Sandra for giving me this opportunity (and I learned a lot just now by having to answer what seemed like rather pedestrian questions at first!).  I'm off to nominate a few more writers, and beg forgiveness in this first week of school that I don't have time to add any illustrations.  Kindly use your imaginations!

poetry friday brought to you by..

summer's last fling!  This weekend Duncan and I are making one last visit to the beach and to Funland (above) in Rehoboth.  On Monday I go back to school for a week of preparation for exciting and demanding new beginnings, and (impromptu poem of the moment):

Lo we have looped the year
once again--
whizzedblurringaroundfourseasons
gallop gallop rise and 
herecomes"fall."

Time to
pause.
just
stop.

and notice that summer is not
over.

Still the tomatoes swell and ripen
Still the sun rises hot and bothers
me exquisitely with its brightness
past dinnertime
Still there is time to be still.

May I have the strength to
pause.
just
stop.
and notice even when summer is
over.

HM 2014
all right reserved

This is my Happy New Year, full of resolutions.  Do you have any resolutions for the new school year? We're all on different schedules, of course, but I think for many of us Poetry Friday brings a weekly opportunity to pause.just stop. and notice.

Here's the menu of our noticings this week...there will be a lengthy midday break to allow for boating to The Paradise Grill, so eat hearty so you can last until Happy Hour!

Breakfast Buffet

Steven joins us with big news about his collection Crackles of Speech.  Congratulations, Steven!

I'm so glad Robyn enjoyed my Summer Poem Swap offering--she's posted it at her blog. Thanks, Robyn.

Carol offers us a New York City skyline poem, and is getting ready to unveil her Summer Serenity online gallery.

Karen gives us some of what we need today, by David Budbill.

Diane, another participant in the Summer Poem Swap, is posting all her lovely poetry gifts at Random Noodling.

At Kurious Kitty, Diane concludes her "restaurant week" celebration with an Amy Lowell poem.

Michelle of Today's Little Ditty has a visit from Renee LaTulippe today, doing her Lyrical Language thing.

Bridget Magee expresses the sentiments of many a bitten and itching target with her poem "Mosquitoes Suck," also her celebration of Bad Poetry Day.  : )

Tara joins us with reflections on the news from Ferguson, MO at A Teaching Life.

More on this week's news comes from Jone, who is remembering Robin Williams.

Happy Birthday to Matt's youngest daughter who is ONE today!  He celebrates with a poem for Phoebe at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme.

Violet joins us with an original called "Ant" over at her blog.

Tabatha offers a poem that is "pretty close to a thousand years old."  I thought she meant that figuratively, like an old one from her files--but no, she means it literally!  Find it at The Opposite of Indifference.

Renee at No Water River returns to blogging with poems from J. Patrick Lewis's new book.  Everything is a poem, if you look at it right!

Mary Lee really does have an old poem from her files at A Year of Reading.  It's to her students and it flows!

From Catherine we have an original about freckles!

Carol is also getting ready to hit the ground running at school, and is in with a poetic picture book text at Carol's Corner.

Irene joins us with a look at Janet Wong's Night Garden (one of my favorite books ever)--and her new puppy!

Laura PS is also highlighting J. Pat's work at Teaching Authors--"What a Day."  Sorry for the previously incorrect link!

At The Logonauts, Katie shares a wrap-up of her haiku series with favorite haiku picture books.

Catherine has "I Am Poetry" by Pam Muñoz Ryan at Reading to the Core.  Everything is a poem and I am too.

Anastasia joins us with beach thoughts "On Kiki's Reef" by Carol L. Malnor at Booktalking.

And finally this morning, over at TeacherDance Linda shares two Summer Poem Swap pieces by Tabatha!

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

Happy Hour Specials

First, apologies to Sylvia over at Poetry for Children--I "misplaced" her link this morning.  She has a reading and teaching guide for the novel in verse by Margarita Engle about the opening of the Panama Canal--Silver People.

Little Willow of Bildungsroman has both an interview with YA author Kelly Jensen and a little Emily Dickinson for us--and if you scroll down you'll find a mind-blowing list of the people she has interviewed on her blog!

Janet shares Avis Harley's "Sea stars: saltwater poems" at All About the Books.

At Kelly's blog there's a review of an awesome anthology of poems by 19th century African Americans.

And last for today, McHugh at Free Range Readers offers up a poem from a Naomi Shihab Nye anthology.
**********************************************

Let's raise a glass to all the times we can enjoy being still to notice, and let's wish them to all others whose lives allow these moments less often.

the not-so-subtle signs

Duncan drinking in Italy 2013

I needed a vacation this summer--I mean, seriously needed it.  Those inner teacher resources were painfully depleted by June 16, and I am lucky enough to have nothing required of me this summer--no coursework and no paid work.  I've been sleeping in all the way until 6:30 and going with the flow, just enjoying my kids and my wee garden, the pool and summer produce and reading.

Then, last week, things turned.  I know when I've had enough vacation each summer because suddenly little children become intensely interesting again.  Last summer it happened at an outdoor table around the corner from Piazza San Marco in Venice:  a group of Italian bambini, ages 3-7, were climbing all over a dry fountain in our small, enclosed piazza, and even in a foreign language they were suddenly tremendously more entertaining than the boisterous and traditionally very entertaining European relatives we were with.

This year it happened last week while I sat waiting for my 15-year-old to finish playing a summer league soccer game:  a younger brother, maybe 6, in the bleachers behind me, with his confident, erudite pronouncements about everything under the sun, distracted me easily from both the game and the book I was trying to read.  (It's something about the openness of young children, how nothing is calculated or self-conscious as they try out  positions, ideas and interactions, both physical and intellectual.)

And yet, having enjoyed an ample sufficiency of relaxation, I found myself not quite achieving anything for several days.  I wanted to tackle my long summer Tasks list that has been dutifully syncing across my devices; certainly I kept looking at it; and yet at the end of the day  nothing was cross-offable.  I finally took action.  I sat on Monday with a legal-size sheet of physical paper and a mechanical pencil, and I drew a calendar of my [choke] last three weeks of summer break.  I filled in all the scheduled events, and then I added in all the as-yet-undone projects and...oh my.  Time to Get Down to Business.

On Wednesday I awoke in the dark at 5am (as usual), with just a little tickly anxiety pricking me about things to get done--and it felt good!  Having kicked a really damaging adrenaline habit, it was good to feel like my productive self again, with some focus and a plan in place.  Then I went back to sleep until 6:30.  : )
No need to overdo things for now!  Five-year-olds and school and work and routine and opportunities are on my mind again, but I'll enjoy the less-structured, daydreamy mornings for a little longer.

One of the items of business was to fill out forms for a very nice upshot of having poems in The Poetry Friday Anthology.  A Texas school district is buying the rights to a group of poems for 3rd graders, so that they can post them on a website for easy classroom access (what a great idea, right?).  The remuneration for this extra use of my poem is modest, but it's a thrill for someone whose writing can't be a main income source for now.  Duncan, age 11, saw me working on the permission forms and asked what poem they wanted.  It's a good one for this moment in my summer arc, at the top of the roller coaster between vacation daydreams and the first day of school.

 

                                    Funday, Imaginary 1^st    

Dear Daydream,      

                  

I’m glad you are my secret friend.

When will you tickle my brain again?

You’re welcome in math, in science and art.

Your wondering wandering makes me smart.

Please come to visit and read with me.

Just don’t interrupt when it’s time for P.E.!

Sincerely,

Me

          

            Heidi Mordhorst 2012
                all rights reserved

Duncan read it, laughed and said, "Yeah, that poem is worth fifty bucks!"

You can enjoy more worth-y poems over at Reflections on the Teche with Margaret, today's Poetry Friday host.