Inda’s Week — January 23 and 24

Third grade – first hour

We began the lesson with a reminder (as Mrs. M) had reminded everyone, that behavior mattered. I took attendance, and then passed out these info cards of great African-Americans. I had picked up the deck in NY over vacation. Everyone was told to look at the picture on one side, then turn the card over and read about their person on the back. Alex commented that the words were hard, so I suggested that they all lists on paper of the words they did not understand. (Some words: prodigious, international, imposing, complexities.) We then spoke about the genre of biography (after reviewing what genre meant), that biography was a category in the genre of non-fiction. The information on the backs of the cards was biographical information, non-fiction, about these people. We talked about some of the people and defined many of the hard words. D.T. was amazing in how he recognized so many of the figures on all the cards – Paul Robeson, L. Hughes, Fr. Douglas, etc etc. Then I prompted the kids to write a paragraph biography about someone whose life they knew well enough to write about. D.H. went frowny and non-cooperative and was sent out of the room. The others worked very well in total quiet. One very cute thing: a few kids modeled their own work after the words on the cards I had passed out. They either folded their paper into a card shape or drew a small rectangle on paper and fitted their paragraphs into that shape – just like an info card. Some really stunning writing.

DT (written in a box shape):

One upon
a time there
lived a boy
named Calvin he
was my best
friend he called
me every day
he wanted to
come over
my house
every day but he died

D:

My Daddy live story is about we go shopping we go to the malls, story, Kmart, me and my daddy did every day. my daddy work at applebees he cook the food.

A:

My stepdad wrok (work) for chruck chiving (truck driving) and I wint with him befr and it was fun. and he chivesudisll (drives a diesel).

A, who has been VERY unresponsive up until now, angry, sullen, withdrawn, had a breakthrough, emotionally, with me. He wrote more today that he ever has before:

Dear Mom
Richard was born on a Mississippi plantation. Richard Wrigh was the son of a farmorker. And he was born on 1908. And I am A. P. [he spelled out his name] and I am in Room for Wrigh. and this is Ms. Schaenen class. She helps me with my wrigh.
from your son
A.P.T.

Amazing!! He copied the words off his card about Richard Wright and then transitioned into his own words, copying the spelling of Wright to use for write. He also drew a picture at the bottom of the page and was very keen on my making a copy for him to take home and show his mother.

From RB, who had asked during writing time out of the blue:
“Ms. Schaenen, what is that box thing you talked about about talking?
“Do you mean Ebonics?”
“Yeah.”
Then she wrote:

Dear Ms. Schaenen

I none [know] Ms. Schaenen for two grades she is my writing teacher she teach us to be writers so that’s why I know Ms. Schaenen. She talt [taught] us English and Ebonix so that why we know how to speak English and Ebonix.

I did the same activity with the second hour kids but introduced the concept of genre/non-fiction/biography first, rather than second, just to see which would work better. Clearly, the second hour kids got the idea better, but it may also be that they simply perform at a higher place than the first hour students. They LOVED looking at the cards and passed them back and forth and sifted through them admiring some, recognizing others. Then we shifted to their own work.

At one point during the writing time, one girl was weeping over her paper. When I went over to console her, she explained that she was writing about having missed her grandpa’s funeral because she had to be in summer school, and the memory was making her cry. I brought over the Kleenex and she continued to write and cry. Again, I got a few all folded up into card shapes just like the official bio-cards I brought in. The writing that this class turned in is unbelievable. I think I may have to type out a bunch of them.

TW:
My mother was born in 1988. And she is 29 years old And her birthday is January the 15, And she work at popeye’s. And she just turned 29, And she has six Kids one of them is 1 year one of them is 3 years old one of them is 4 years old one of them is 5 years old and one of them is 6 years old and one of me is 9 years old and then other one is 11 years old and I Just turned 9 years old in January the 9. And I had fun.

AW:
My biography is My Grandma Henrietta my grandma is a hero to me.

CC:
My grandma died I think my daddy said she got ran over by a car and when I went to her funaral, but I didn’t know that it was a funaral because I was a little girl I was like five or four years old I was wondering why my daddy was crying I went up there it looked like she was smiling and her hands was folded I thought she was just in this bed just smiling folding her hands I was wondering where I was at I was playing around but now I know not to play around at a funeral because that is bad playing around the funaral and the dead at my cousin funaral I didn’t play around because I knew better because I grew older and I was seven years old and now I’m eight years old.

MW (written on a folded up paper like a card, with the words all packed as if typed):

R.T.
She was great at running track. She won three gold medals. But she was
just not good at running she was also good at jumping rope and she won one troffee for that. I been knowing her every scense I was a little baby. In school when she was 17 some girls wanted to go against her in doubledudge and the girls that was turning for the girl that wanted to go against Rhonda she had lost. Then Rhonda won another troffee. Right now Rhonda is 29 and she is still living and she can still run fast and jump doubledudge.

TJ:
My Biography
A.T. June 10, 1971
A. is now 35 years old
She was born in
Missouri she has four
kids and a lovely husband.

AE:
this is a biography about my sister here it goes. My little sister name is ALY She is 4 years old her birthday was September 10. My sister sometimes she is mean But most of the time we get along and play together i love my sister so much. I haven’t got to see her in so long Because we got separated. I have to stay with my grandma and she stays with my mom. She lives in St. Louis. I see her every weekend are i spend the night. Now that I realize she is living with my mom now I don’t have anyone to play with. But my brothers complain about she is recing [wrecking] there stuff up and i believe it because she did the same to me. my sister is white on the outside and black on the inside and people still make fun of her they are not real friends. I just want to see her everyday not every weekend.

I had a private talk with AE about what she meant about “white on the outside, black on the inside,” and she explained that her sister’s father was white, but that she acted black. We talked a little about what this meant, and she said that her sister “sounded black,” in the words she used and the way she acted.

Here’s the piece by SA, the one she wrote while weeping:

TA
He lived from 1926 throw [through] 2006 he died September 16, 2006 I was so sad that day and he is my granddaddy. The day he died was the most terrafing [terrifying] day of my life he might not be important to you but he was important to me and [I] was there on his wake but when his funaral came I was not there I was at school tryin to get an better ejacation I was not there I still remember when he use to give us his pepseys and he use to talk to me and give me ideals for when I was sad and feeling like doing the roung [wrong] thing. He was so important to me it’s like I remember when he would help me Learn about the world I just want him to R.I.P.

******

Second grade – first hour

I had resolved over the break to get our act together, myself and this first hour. It was hard to build up momentum with them last term, first because we kept rearranging the roster to get the group right, second on account of my schedule, which because of various illnesses, the election, and the power outage, got thrown out of whack. And finally because these kids are just less capable of doing work at the level where last year’s second grade was. I am told that their 1st grade classroom was crowded, which explains a lot, but maybe it’s just a generational thing. Anyway, I began this hour by reading a picture book about a man who really helped slaves across the Ohio River in the 19th century. It’s based on a true story, and we did a read aloud/talk aloud about the words (skiff, etc etc) and the concepts. After this I passed the tape recorder around and everyone said their name and what they like to do in their spare time. (Most play various video game. Only one child, a girl, plays with Barbies. After this we used play telephones to make and receive calls to each other. We pretended to be different people, at home and at school – grannies, teenagers, hip hop people, mothers, teachers, and I listened for distinguishing characteristics of what kinds of words, dialect, they used. N. was very good at a standard English when impersonating an older girl: “My Mama told me to make some oatmeal.” J. pretending to be his dad, said, “You lazy. I gotta go.”
We role played for a while and then I asked them to write down the words they had said while pretending to be others. Only one child, L. “got” this: having pretending to be a gangster, he wrote:
“ Man, your going to die I will shoot you kill your self and my dog tonight the police I am a police”

Now, obviously, this is unpleasant and unfortunate dialogue for a second grader to have in his head, but it’s important to note that this child was accurately rendering the words of a character he heard in his head. This is very advanced conceptualizing! The others in the class all wrote ABOUT what they had pretended, from the outside as description, not as dialogue:
“I was a grandma.”
“I was a gangter.”
“I was nobody but I want to be a prinice [princess].”
I will be tracking L. very carefully from now on.

Second grade, second hour

I only have a half hour with these kids. I showed them Mirandy and asked if they remembered what it was about (a little checking for understanding).

One of the kindest, gentlest, sweetest kids, L, said:
“It was about a little girl trying to catch a person who was the wind so she could have him as her date for the party.”
The complete sentences L answers in always amaze me. He is halting, sometimes, through his phrases, as if he has some kind of block between thought and the physical production of speech, but given time, the sentences and thoughts are always complete.
So we talked a bunch about the voices of the characters in Mirandy. We talked and talked some more about Ebonics, and J. got it. (You can tell the ones who get it because they are always amused when I code switch, or when people play “home” or school.” One thing I do is when a child, say C., complains that “he ain’t got no turn yet,” I repeat the words totally neutrally. “You say that you ain’t got no turn?” They look at me because to them it sounds so weird. Then we talk about how to make it sound the way it sounds when I say that same idea. K. L., and J. can make the switches now. I always talk about how smart they are to know two ways of speaking when so many people onjly know one way. Then we did the role playing game with the two telephones. Everyone pretended to be different people and tried to speak like them. We did this the whole rest of our time. It was a good start to the second grade second semester.

Sally’s Entry January 23

Today both my classes were cooperative and ready to write. With the fourth graders, I passed out Pablo Neruda’s poem, “Ode to My Socks.” All of the children were unfamiliar with the word “ode” so I explained it to them.

Since Pablo Neruda is from Chile, I took this opportunity to ask them if they knew where Chile was. Nobody did, so I had them come up and look at the map of the world hanging by the teacher’s desk. This is great map and I’m so glad to have it. When asked, the children were unsure of where North and South America were, and what countries they consisted of, so we reviewed that information.

This ode was printed on three pages with the original being in Spanish next to the English translation. I was delighted that two of the students recognized the foreign language as Spanish. This poem is a bit longer than the ones we normally read and has some advanced vocabulary, but the class navigated their way through quite well.

They then settled down to quiet writing time to write their own odes. Since we spent more time on preliminary discussions today, there was not time for the students to read their work out loud. We will reivse these first drafts next class and then read them out loud.

With the 7th graders, we read Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son.” This class has some excellent readers who are able to read difficult vocabulary well and can speak articulately about the poem’s meaning and its form. We welcomed a new student to the class who is new to Gundlach. She also has good reading and writing skills.

After reading the poem, I asked the students to write a poem like it and said they could write from the point of view of a parent or a child. Here are some examples of their first drafts.

Life for me has been very hard
being in and out of hospitals
going to schools and being picked on
feeling lonely
Life ain’t been no crystal stair

My life has been very painful
Losing my great grandma at the age of five
who was my best friend
Life ain’t been no crystal stair.

My life has been an up and down
situation for me but what I’m proud of
is that I am here I made it through
many obstacles and still achieve many things.

By M

Mother to Son

Son, listen to me
Why can’t life just be
Just an easy breeze
If I put food on the table
Then you should too be able
If I pay the bills
then I keep you warm
so you won’t get ill
So son, just listen to me
that life just can’t be
just an easy breeze.

By A

Mother to Daughter

life to me is a puzzle
everyday you find
another piece and
at the end when
you die you should
have collected all the
pieces to the puzzle
when you’re struggling
pick yourself up and
keep trying until
you succeed at what
you are doing

By A

My child, my life has not
been so great. It feels like
I travelled 2 million stairs.
It feels like I fell from
very high mountains.
It feels like I just got
run over by a car.
My child, my child life
hasn’t been so great.

By D

Future and Past

My grandma always says:

“Why won’t people just
cut they hair? That’s what
we used to do back in
our day. Now all I see
is people with their hair
all twisted up looking like
little worms.”

But she is old and from
the country so she’s used
to the old-fashioned hairstyles
like Bobs and Smiths.

By D

Looking forward to next week in the Room for Writing!

Inda — January 16 with Third Grade

It was incredibly great to get back to school yesterday. The first period third graders came in and we sat in our circle. I kept the chatting to a minimum because I really wanted to create sense of greater focus and industry this semester. Also: this first group really does need seriousness of purpose, I think. The boys who are on the fence with respect to taking themselves seriously (M, D, D, and A) MUST be reminded over and over that their being with me is a privilege that they earn every single day. I hate being so provisional with them, but there is an attitude that creeps in that undermines what I’m trying to do and messes up the experience for the others. I think in a week or to this will go away.

So I passed out my new Genre Sheet. We read the sheet together and talked about the vocabulary on this – the words that were unfamiliar (epistolary, genre, memoir, characterized). We matched various subjects to possible genres. Then I had them choose a subject and then select a genre in which to write about it. A., who is bright (he gets Ebonics/Standard) but behind with respect to fine motor and writing, was hard to draw out, as always. He looks at me blankly and says he “ain’t got nothing to say” or to remember, or to write. He seems to me to be overwhelmed by Life into a kind of numb acceptance of his fate/lot, and to be a hair’s breadth away from just throwing his lot in with those who have been given up on. Back in September he told me that he was proud of “nothing” and that “books are boring.” With loads and loads of close-up eye contact and support and nudging and encouragement, and even with using the tape recorder which actually made him smile and laugh, I got him to write about going out for pizza with his family, playing with the coin-making machine, ordering root beer (a detail I was so happy to elicit, since he had only at first said “soda.”) He wrote exactly this:

I whet to CiCi pizze.
And I Eat 12 pizze.
and I played games to.
On the game I bit a weely.

It’s one of those examples that means more than it appears, since A. has hardly ever put himself in the position of being judged in class. That he wrote at ALL is amazing and a miracle. I hope to keep him engaged week in and week out. I explained to him that he had written a memoir. other kids wrote fiction. Another A., a girl, wrote an interview with herself, writing out all the questions and then answering them one by one.

After being scolded for his misbehavior, D. was angry with me. He chose to write in the personal essay/memoir genre:

“Stupid People”
Stupid people are stupid and smart people are smart if they were mixed together they would have half a brain. I am bad and she is good The teacher thinks she is the nicest girl in the class.

D. said not a word to me the rest of the period after writing this, but frowned and moped.

After writing I had the kids log their work in a Genre Log, which is a chart that has a place for keeping track of the date, the genre chose, and the title of each work. My goal is for each of them to write something in each of the genres by the end of the semester, and of course to really understand what these terms mean because they will have USED them.

With the second period I did the same thing, but because this group is a higher performing batch of kids, we had better results and also time for each of them to record their work on the tape recorder and listen to themselves reading. It was a wonderful hour. The genres chosen included how-to paragraphs, fiction, memoir, a poem, and even an adorable play by A. he used all the appropriate editorial markings, too.

B. who had been in R4W last year, came back today for the first time. He’d been trying to behave all semester after a rought start in the fall, and it was good to have him back. he wrote up a set of game instructions for a game called “Armadillo.”

I ought to mention that this group made up a lot of stories and, when I asked them on tape to explain why and how they came to choose the genre they did – “Tell me about your thinking,” is how I put it — a few of them said that it was because they were studying imagination in the classroom with Mrs. M.

-Inda

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2007!!!

Welcome back, everyone! Room For Writing will be back in business the week of the 15th. We’ll see everyone then.
-Inda