Karate master comes to Second/Third Grade — February 20/21

It was a special week, this week. Sensei Dave Cloud, a master karate teacher, came to speak to all four of my second and third grade classes. He arranged the chairs just the way he liked – all facing him – and told the amazing and riveting story of his life.
Born in Chicago, he grew up poor. He was around violence and gangs. His mother died of alcoholism when he was three years old. When he was 8, he had his fishing pole stolen by some bigger boys. Soon after he was beaten up by a different bunch of boys. Eventually, fearing that Dave was going to get in serious trouble in Chicago, his father sent him down to St. Louis to live with his grandmother in Webster Groves. He got baptized and started going to church. He also tried out for the football team, and wound up captain by his senior year. We went off to NE Missouri State (now Truman State) on a scholarship. During his sophomore year, though, his father died. His teammates raised the money to send him home for the funeral. Davie came into some inheritance money, which he used to buy a slick car. He got rather into dating and cars, and let his grades slide. This made him eligible for the draft, and he was sent to Vietnam. There is witnessed the death of his best friend (who happened to be white), who jumped from a roof while under the influence of drugs. He saw another friend disappear in a single moment – one second there, the next seconds gone in an explosive puff of smoke. To cope with this distress and horror, he began taking karate lessons from a master teacher who taught in Okinawa, where Dave went on leave. The first lesson was painful and difficult, challenging and terrible. Dave thought he might never return. But he went back the next day, and the next, and credits his teacher (his own sensei)with giving him the gift of dignity, respect, and honor. He earned his black belt in 1968.
Dave returned home after the war and offered free karate lessons in his grandmother’s back yard. This effort received considerable media attention. His grandmother, though, who had not heard of his plans, was upset that she didn’t have enough food on hand to serve everyone who showed up. Eventually, Sensei Cloud returned to school for several degrees. Apart from running his dojo (he has taught more than 10,000 students since 1970), he works at Job Corps and with the police department. His wife, who is Jewish, is a chiropractor. His children are grown. (Although Sensei Cloud spoke of apologizing to his grown son for having yelled at him once when he was a little boy.)

I’m recording all of this because I want to have on record what was generally communicated to the children this week. We will be reflecting for a week or two on all this material – impressions, summaries, implications, and so forth – and I want to have a benchmark for what I recall of the experience they had in fact.

After delivering his narrative, what he called “the story of my life” (in roughly the same version to all the classes), Sensei Cloud had the children and me up from our seats learning a few things about karate – how to make a fist, how to create their own personal space, how to do a push-up on two knuckles, how to window-wipe away a blow, how to turn aside from a frontal attack, how to get out of a grip. With call-and-response techniques, he asked them, “What’s the best kind of a fight?”
“NO FIGHT!, they shouted in reply, echoing his lesson.
Watching the children mesmerized by his tale, I was wondering what they were going to retain even as they were in the process of hearing all this for the first time. There was loads of vocabulary. Just a sample:
gi – the uniform of the person doing karate
sensei – instructor
sye- the dagger-like fishing tool used by the farmers of Okinawa to defend themselves against the samurai
nunchucks (sp?)

Somehow he managed to work in ideas of hygiene, and discipline, and learning from mistakes (his sensei slashed off a piece of Dave’s belt once when he had made a mistake – “I never made that mistake again,” he said).

At the end of the classes Sensei had the children write their names on a piece of paper and answer a few questions in a test-like environment. He tested them on some of the random facts he had sprinkled through his presentation: the year he got his black belt, how many students he had taught, the name of the karate outfit. Then they folded these papers up and we had a drawing on the last day with the last class. I decided to keep the karate bear in the classroom for everyone to remember the visit. All around, the visit was a wonderful experience. I can hardly wait for all the follow-through activities this exposure will stimulate.

-Inda

Sally’s Tuesday, February 20

Ms. Guilfoy’s 4th grade class is going the St. Louis Art Museum for a special program for the next three weeks, so I have just Ms. Warren’s 7th graders for awhile.

Today we read Robert Frost’s poem, “Dust of Snow.” Since it’s so short, I will copy it here:

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I rued.

We read the poem out loud and discussed the rhythm and rhyme scheme which Frost used. The students were able to clearly articulate what they saw going on in the poem. They also noticed how concisely Frost describes emotion in this short space. I asked them to think of a time when their mood was changed in an unexpected way. Here are three of the responses.

Snow Day

It feels so good to ambush
someone in the snow

but then they turn around
and tell your mom.

by J

Big Tree

The tree above
was in my way.
It was like a big glove
in the sky.

No more shade.
I want to feel the sun.
Somebody make this tree lay
before I put my face in the mud.

Somebody come cut this tree
before I go crazy.
I want to feel happy with glee.
Finally they cut it.
Now I can see.

By A

A Part of Me

He did it
he shot that gun
it was one sound
I began to run

I surrender
it changed me
he’s a part of me
I need you to see

I love him
he’s special
the only thing
I was missing

Now all I can
think of this day
is how the sound
changed my ways

By A

Allison’s January/early February

It’s been tough keeping up on the blog when I didn’t have access to it. Now, I seem able to login using Inda’spassword, but wordpress itsself seems slightly unreliable, suddenly quitting most times when I am on it. So… I am going to try to give a concise (though likely long anyway) update.

It’s been wonderful to be back with the kids. I wanted a couple of weeks after the holidays to finish up and reinforce what I was doing before the groups switched. I also took that time to solicit some feedback from the kids about the R4W, myself, and our activities.

JAN. 17 and 18, 2007

My first week back happened to coincide with Muhammad Ali’s birthday. I have made a oncerted effort to not do much for Black History Month this year. Instead, I have been trying to fold African American and black history into my curriculum all year. Last year, I spent about two months on famous African American leaders and on African history, and as I spoke with the kids, what I heard over and over again was that they didn’t think it was fair that they only got one month of history and then everyone forgot again. Well, I totally agreed and decided this year to make that integral to my curriculum instead of just appearing for just one month.

So many of the kids admire professional athletes. If you ask those boys what they want to be when they grow up, especially the younger ones, they want to be rappers or athletes. Well, either is fine with me, but I do want them to see that both still take discipline, intelligence, leadership, and citizenship. So I am trying to profile famous people who have done more than be great athletes. On jan. 17, 1942, Ali (as Clay) was born, so that was a great launching for this semester. The kids know I alwys choose one thing that happened in history, a quote, and a vocab. word to start the day. We discussed what we knew about Ali, and most knew him, but almost no one knew how he had been an activist and their minds were blown when I called him a poet and said that some thinkers believe Ali might have been the genesis of rap.

Because I have six groups, my actual lessons change with each group, based on age, content, and reading/writing level. With each group that week though, we did a lesson themed around comparing and contrasting Ali’s poem from his 1974 Rumble in the Jungle fight in Africa and “If” by Rudyard Kipling. The kids loved the rhythm of Ali and as they read to themselves first, several of them read aloud, exclaiming to one another. With some groups, we compared and contrasted in columns on the blackboard. Others, we simply discussed. Some did it in writing. With the older kids (6th and 7th graders, the 7th graders were also reading “If” with Mrs. Warren), we discussed the idea of fighting– when we should fight, what we should fight for, and the notion of internal struggle versus physical fighting. The older kids wrote about what was worth fighting for. For the 4th and 5th graders, conversation turned to themes of winning and losing. What did the poem tell us about both, and then they wrote about a time they won or lost and what they learned from it.

It was a fun lesson, and a great way to profile a great figure, discuss poetry seriously and with a specific vocab. , and to write about real issues in their lives.

D. M. (Tyson-6th) wrote this about winning (in the context of Ali)
“To win a fight, you have to take a risk of doing something you didn’t do before.”

Very smart young lady.

Here’s a poem B.G. write about winning (Allen 5th)
“It Don’t Matter If You Win Or Lose”

If you lose and
you don’t know what to do.

Just sit back, relax
and get real smooth.

Cause I know you mad
and I would be too.

But, don’t give up just
cause you lost.

Just get back up
and start practicing and losing.

Plus anyway winning
ain’t everything.

JAN. 24 and 25- Ali, continued

The next week, when I saw the kids, we continued on our theme of Ali, Fighting, and Winning and Losing. This week, I did a vocab. exercise with the kids involving the words “courage” and “challenge” and for the older kids, turning those words into “integrity” and “adversity”. We brainstormed on the chalkboard in pairs to come up with definitions, synonyms and examples. K.H. (4th) had some of the best brainstorming, saying a challenge was like a competition and a synonym might be “tournament”. For these lessons, the groups that got the terms immediately did two tasks: one, looked at quotes by Ali and wrote about what they meant (all were about winning and personal challenges), and two, they wrote about a time when they had a challenge or showed courage. The older kids wrote about heroes and integrity.

Writing About Courage
(by B.L.-6th)
…There are a lot of people who talk about me and I don’t say anything and sometimes when them same people say something to me I retalliate. But I really think I should have courage and don’t say anything. My mom always told me that if I act like I’m not listening they will shut up and probably be mad because i don’t respond. That’s why for my life I chose courage [as the most important value].

(by K.H.-4th)
One day my sister and I was walking to school. Every day we have to walk near this alley were about 4 dogs lived. (Those dogs will chase and bark at people for no reason at all.) So while we were walking, we saw one of the dogs look at us. Then start barking. Two ran out of the alley coming near us. My sister start running but I said “No just walk or else it’ll really come at us.” So we walked and the dog just barked again and then went back in the alley.

JAN. 31 and FEB. 1- Jackie Robinson’s Birthday: Values and Jackie’s 9

In a continuation of working great sports figures and African Americans into the deeper fabric of writing, I introduced Jackie Robinson to the kids. Many of the kids knew that he was a baseball player. Ms. Allen’s kids had watched a movie about him at some point and knew a lot of facts. Many girls knew he was the first African American to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. I introduced the concept of Jackie Robinson as a writer and told them about things he had written, speeches he had made. Like Muhammad Ali, Robinson had worked for civil rights and equality, as well as writing down the lessons he had learned for others. The kinds made the connections between the two figures right away and I had them read an excerpt called “Jackie’s 9”. It’s the 9 values that he lived by and thought others should live by. For the younger kids, especially Ms. Guilfoy’s class, much of the vocabulary was hard. The 5th graders and 7th did the best with this lesson.

After reading the two pages of text, we talked as a group about why we need values and which values we thought were most important for Jackie, and which ones we thought were most important in our lives. Most of the kids said teamwork was most important for him, and all provided great answers. Several thought courage was the most important in his life and theirs and they made connections from our Ali work with courage to Jackie Robinson and to their own lives– standing up to bullies, not stealing, not fighting, turning away from kids teasing. In some groups, where we had time, the kids wrote about which value they thought was most important and why.

The 7th graders went a step further and went on to create their own list of values that they live by and explain why or give examples. For them, this was a good tie-back to our work on philosophy and their personal philosophies. They are still continuing to add to their Value Lists each week as we work on other projects. Hopefully, by the end of the year, they will have several nice documents written about what they believe and they will have a better self-awareness of who they are.

Ms. G’s 4th graders were especially terrible. They had no focus or concentration, and I aske them several times what was going on. They had a substitute, which often is the precursor to trouble for me. They were unruly and disruptive, not to mention disrespectful. I talked to them several times, and then finally, I scrapped the lesson on Jackie’s 9 and asked them to just write in their notebooks for the rest of class– about anything they wanted. They started and did okay for a while, but then the talking began again and finally, I brought them back a few minutes early, but not before giving them a speech about the kind of behavior I expected for the next week.

Most Important Values
(by D.C.-5th; new student for R4W)
I think the most important thing is teamwork because without your teammates you will forfit because you do not have a lot of people and the other people will win.

When I was in football I was a safety. Every time the coach told the quarter back not to run the ball. The one time he remember to pass the ball and he passed it to me and we made a touchdown.

(by B.B.-5th; new student for me)
I chose integrity. I choosed integrity because Jackie Robinson had keep his word and did not play baseball for another team and went own wroking and trying to make the world a betterplace and stand up for him self and went own with his life. Jackie Robinson was a great baseball player.

[yeah-- some grammatical issues here, but he was great at giving reasons, and especially great at pulling answers from the text-- which is noteworthy]

FEB. 7 and FEB. 8- Creating Characters, Understanding Motivation, and Writing Great Description

Th transition from Ali and Robinson to creating characters seemed natural to me and I explained it to the kids. We had been thinking about challenges and courage and all really great stories have challenges and problems, and most of our favorite characters show courage in some way– whether they are battling something inside or out. And with the work we did on values, they had some deeper understanding of why we do things as we do, of a set of rules that guides them as well as other people. So we moved on to start working on elements of short story writing. I haven’t done this in years, but I love teaching short stories, and usually break it down into several weeks, moving piece by piece.

For the younger kids, I do characters and short stories with superheroes. I love them, and the kids often project themselves into their superheroes, which is great. They use a lot of creativity, and it’s a good device because they know a lot about superheroes, so it’s easier to discuss motivation, and good description with something that seems familiar. For all the groups on Wed., I had them go up to the boards in pairs and draw a line down the middle of the chalkboard– like we did with “Courage” and “Challenge”. One partner brainstormed about all the superheroes they could think of while the other listed super powers. My Thurss. 4th/5th mixed class did this on paper because there are 12 of them and working on the chalkboards seems like an unruly possibility.

We then had a discussion about superheroes, values, motivation and good description. I set the task before them of creating original superheroes and explained what I meant by “original” and gave examples from some previous Gundlach students. I then handed each student a “superhero checklist” and let them go at it.

Ms. A’s 5th grade did the best and was incredibly engaged, most of them finishing great page-long descriptions. I/V’s 6th/7th mixed class didn’t seem to get the concept of original characters. Most barely got started, and almost all began with an established character name, so we will have to work with more guidance next week. Ms. T’s (now Ms. M’s class) came late by about 15 minutes because they were disorganize in their classroom handing in their homework. When they came in, they would not stop talking. Nothing I tried would get them focused, so I told them just to talk for five minutes, to get it all out, and to not be so disrespectful of my time in the future. They did and then settled a bit, but it was tough getting much out of them. Ms. G’s 4th grade class was also unruly again– twice in a row out of a class that is usually perfect. S. and J. were great and showed they wanted to be there, making me feel badly that the others kept halting our progress. My solution was to tell them that unfortunately we would not be doing brainstorming on the board, nor would they be allowed to choose their own seats or discuss their ideas with one another before writing. I told them unfortunately they would have to re-earn those privileges and show me that they could have certain freedoms and still pay attention to directions, so we’ll see how the next class goes.

Superhero Example by S.S. (5th)

“My Superhero”
My superhero’s name is Mrs. Schooler. Mrs. Schooler wears a blue, yellow, and pink. Her suit has pencils and hearts on them. She has lots of gadgets some are her shoes because they have pencil sharpers on the bottom and she had a watch that shoot out pencils. She also has a gun that shoots out hard erasers that hert. Her car has a giant pencil launcher. Also it matches her suit because it has pencils and hearts on it. One of her arch enemys is Ms. Flunker. She shoots out Fs and the F is a magnet to your brain. Also if it touches you it makes you stupid like her. Mrs. Schooler has powers that made you smart and helps you if you don’t know something.

[Wow... I love it!]

With the 6th and 7th graders on Thursday, instead of doing superheroes, I had them do an adapted version of Joanne’s Character Worksheet that she showed us at a Springboard meeting last year. I wrote random objects on notecards and put them in brown paper bags. Based upon the objects, the kids had to imagine a character and explain why they had these things. The 7th graders did a fantastic job, almost all finishing and many of them clamouring to read to the class. C.R. had a funny horror-genre type character and S. created a character to be his nemesis, which was clever. All of the character descriptions were in depth, and it was interesting, because again, the kids seemed to be projecting their own fears and circumstances on their characters, which is actually fantastic.

7th Grade Characters, explaining why their characters have certain objects…
(by T.G.)
It is an old photograph of him and her dad. The suitcase has clothes in it and so she can go and visit her dad. She is going to take the huge radio because she loves music. She is going to give her dad the vase of flowers that she grew for a gift.

(byR.A)
A drivers license is for my person to get a car anbd have fun. My person wears this baseball hat when she goes to a game. She uses an instrument when she gets mad and starts playing it. She uses a recipe so she knows how to cook. These items are for my person (Marie) can take her mind off of bad things and know that there are other things to go and do instead of getting in trouble.

(by D.P.)
These items are used to express herself about hoe she feel. She likes to listen to her I-pod because she love music. She writes poetry to calm her down. She looks at the trophy that her mother gave her before she passed to make her feel safe and not alone. She wears her baseball cap sometimes when she is walking because she feel left out sometimes. She has a book of poetry, My character is sometimes shy.

JANUARY/ EARLY FEB. SUMMARY AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS

It’s been slow going on blogging and keeping up, as I just switched students in three of my six classes. So I have 36 new faces to remember and understand and learn how to help. A few are familiar from previous years, but most are completely new. The awesome thing is many of these kids are coming in having had Sally last year and they are gung-ho. Others have been excited and asked me if they will learn about black history again, which pleases me. I am in the process of doing evaluations of all my students who have just completed their time with me, and I am also trying to find samples of best work for each.

Even though I continue to do the same topic with all six classes each week, I have to do essentially six different lesson plans per week, based on age and ability, context, and specific skills to be addressed, so that’s challenging. I find myself hitting the mark sometimes and often landing fantastically with one group or another.

From now until spring break, we will work on short stories, bit by bit. And hopefully, we will have some time for them to continue to revise and add to older work. I’m really excited to see where these stories go. Their imaginations are amazing, and so often with me, we do expository writing, so I am happy for them to have a chance to loosen up and use their skills differently, while hopefully seeing that all writing still has a process.

Inda’s February 6 — Third Grade

This week I got dressed in a very colorful outfit – new knit scarf with lots of colors and a purple vest and blue bangle bracelets. I asked the kids what they noticed about me today and they remarked on my colors, naturally. I then explained the today we would be paying attention to images – colors, arts, pictures. I showed them a book about Paul Klee and they admired his work, and learned that he was painting right around the time when people were first using cameras to “take” pictures rather than “make” pictures. We talked about Klee’s saying that his aim was to paint the truth inside of appearances, and what that might mean. I asked them why they thought it was still important for people to paint and draw when cameras could capture the way things looked exactly. A few of the students mentioned right away that painting could express the way a person felt about what they saw, their own thoughts and ideas.

Then I passed out five or six cards to each child showing the work of African-American artists. A few kids asked whether there was anything by Picasso, and mentioned that they had studied Picasso in art class. A few remarked that some of the examples looks like cubist work, and knew what that meant. I asked the children to select their favorite picture from the ones they had in hand and write about why they had chosen it.

DT: I chose this picture because it have Jesus and it haves his angels. Ms. Schaenen told me in the picture that I am writing about She told me the things around the Angels heads are halos. Abviously I leaned a lot about Jesus.

AB: I like them because they look like they are from the beauty shop. It’s made out of oil on paperboard and I think that the women likes that men.

TJ: I chose this picture because it has very different colors and I like colors in picture because they are very, very colorful and I like the way that he made it colorful and the flowers and the faces and fan and hats.

With the first hour students we went on to generate color words on the board. Then I asked them to pick one color and write something about that color. The example I put on the board: Yellow is the warm sunshine on my face after a long day. Blue is the water in my bathtub when I add bubbles.

DT: Red sometimes makes me angry.
DM: Red is the so fun to look at because it is so bright in my face.
A: Yellow is a fun color to me. Blue is a sad color to me. Red is a evil color to me because it look like fire. Purple is a deep fun color and my mom loves purple. Green is to me is a rich color and fun color and one of my favorite colors. Whit is a whated [?] color.
TJ: Green is a very, very, very good color and it is a very good color because the color that because this color was in the story that I just read it in the story I read and it was more colors that was in the story I just read.

Both TJ and TC share a similar kind of cognitive processing – they are easy writers, and can produce lots of words on a page, but there is something circular about their thinking, something repetitive and stream-of-conscious-like, as if they write without looking or thinking back. I have made a note to myself to work with them more closely on revision, getting them in a habit of going back and reading their words aloud to see if they can catch all the circuitous thinking that shows up in the writing. They have things to say and like to say them, which is the first step. I’m trying to figure out how to help them get to another level, though.

DH: He spent the hour out in the hall reading and then he wrote a summary of the book he read. After that he entered in his journal.

The first hour all entered in their journals.

AP: Was furious from the moment he came in. “What I have to do to get suspended?” he wanted to know. But I had him make some sentences out of the magnets on the cabinet, and then transcribe them onto paper. Then he made a castle out of blocks and then drew a picture of the castle. Finally, in his journal, he made up the idea of The Castle of Chaos.

Second hour didn’t generate sentences about colors because they went into greater depth and detail with their paragraphs about the art cards I passed out. Also, these kids wanted to illustrate their paragraphs.

SA: Art For Angels
The picture I’ve chosen is a picture by Lorenzo Scott. He painted a picture with angels flying around I like this picture because it’s talking about god and when you talk about god it makes my heart sing and it makes my heart feel well and I like this picture because the colors in it there are so beautiful and I think if god saw this picture the bells in heaven would ring. I like the picture because it’s about god.

There’s some circularity in this but there is a topic sentence and also a conclusion.

MW wrote about three pictures. She did again that cute thing of folding her paper into the dimensions of the cards and then boxing the entirety of her paragraph into a framed text just like the “real” model. At the top of each paragraph she wrote the name of the picture.
The Sharecropper
I picked this picture because I think that she is a black African American. I think that she is a person that was fighting during the war and it makes me think that she is one of my ancestors. I think this because she is black and I was looking at some pictures of people back in the days and she look like one of them.

Lion in the Desert
I picked this picture because it kind of looks like when there was nothing on land but water and grass and it also kind of make me a little sad because it looks like the lion is there on land alone and that he has nobody to play with.

Zombee Jamboree
I picked this picture because it reminds me of the times when the dinosaurs was living and I also picked this picture because it is very colorful and it has all of the colors in it that I like and by the animals it reminds me of my dog princess and my favorite colors are black brown pink blue and gray and red.

DW: I like the pictur because its in slavery and people that was in it had to work in fields. And now today in 2007 it isn’t like back then.

TW:
Art
I like this artist because she look so beautiful. Also I like her clothes because its my favorite color. And I like the bushes behind her. And I like the roses on there. And I like her red little shoes. And she is so cool. And she look so little. And she look like a baby. And I wonder where she at. And it is so dark where she at. And its kind of black and brown mixed together where she at. I wonder who made them clothes for her. And that Butterfly on that tree looks so beautiful. If you look close up to the tree you will see how it look. And it make me feel so sorry for them. The End.

PJ: I like this picture of the thorn because it look very real and it very fine and I also like this picture because I want to draw myself and I want to make it look real, too, and I want it to look just like it and lovely and pretty and wonderful.
I like this picture of the can fire in the park because they are trying to keep their family warm instead of cold they are trying their best to keep their family warm and safe so they had to make a fire inside of a trash can.
I like this picture of Thanksgiving because they are praying to the lord and they are saying them together and they look happy.

The second hour also wrote in their journals – which mostly have names: Kitty, Martin, Beautiful, Diary.

My daughter fell ill on Wednesday and I couldn’t make it into see second grade. I checked with the teachers about coming in Friday but their schedule is full, they said. So I will see them next week!
-Inda

Sally’s Tuesday, February 6

The seventh graders were a little late today because they had to have a class meeting regarding violent behaviour among the girls. One girl in my class was particularly upset and would not write or read, but she did listen when the other students read their work out loud. I spoke to her on the way out and encouraged her to be more involved in the next class. She has excellent writing skills and I don’t want to see her anger about social issues jeopardize her creative writing.
Today in the 7th grade, we read Norman Jordan’s poem, “When a Woman Gets Blue.” The first line and a refrain throughout the poem is: “No man knows.” I asked the students to give me substitutions for the word, “man.” Some that they came up with were: “sister,” “friend,” “boy,” “girl,” “mother,” “teacher,” “principal,” and “nobody.” Then they wrote their own poems.

No Mother Knows

She don’t understand
understand how I feel
sometimes I feel ill
I just can’t do it
Just can’t deal
deal with all this madness
I know she loves me and I see she cares
But I get sick and tired
tired of looking at a glare
My mother don’t understand
understand my pain

By A

No Baldheaded Person Knows

No baldheaded person knows
Not to talk about anybody when they
don’t have no hair in the front or the back.
No baldheaded person knows
when you don’t want to talk
No baldheaded person knows
when you don’t want to walk
No baldheaded person knows
when you want to throw their
head back and put some of your
hair on their head.
No baldheaded person knows.

By C

Nobody Knows

When I sit in my room all alone
Nobody knows
When I’m lonely and hurt
Nobody knows
When I cry in my shirt
When I try to flirt
Nobody knows
When my heart is filled with sorrow
And my shoe is filled with dirt
Nobody knows
When my hair is nappy
Or it makes them unhappy
Nobody knows
When I get into a rumble
Sometimes it makes me stumble
But nobody knows how I feel
Nobody, nobody knows.

By A

Nobody Knows

How someone feels
when you are blue
Nobody knows
How you look in the inside
How you look
Nobody knows

No Teacher Knows
when you been trying
when you’re suffering
No Teacher

By J

Sally’s Classes: Tuesday January 30

With the 4th graders, we worked on revising the odes that they had written in response to Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to my Socks.” I started off the class reading another fun Neruda ode called, “Ode to the Lemon.”

Here are a few examples of student writing:

Ode To My Ultramarine Bird

Oh little ultramarine bird, u can’t
see me but I can see u flying in the
clear blue sky that is blu as u.
I see u fly. Fly to the sky and
I holler, “Hi, Blue.” So then you’re a
blue bird and I’m a person so when
u fly I holler, “Bye. Fly to the
clear blue sky.”

By C

Ode To My Bike

It’s gold and silver.
It has gold pegs.
It has gold seats.
It has front brakes.
It’s fast.
It can hold three people.
It has 100 spokes.

By B

Ode to My Favorite Things

Ode to my x-stem bike and my play
station 2. My grandmother bought it.
And ode to the gigantic blackbirds
and they are big birds and they are big
birds. They have gigantic wings.

In both classes, the students are picking up on literary techniques used by the the poems’ authors and beginning to incorporate them into their own writing. Quite impressive!

Inda’s Week — January 30 and 31

Third Grade

We paired off into partners, desks facing each other. I asked each child to write down a question that they were interested in posing to their partner. A complicated question, I said, one that would prompt some thought. They wrote down these questions and then passed the sheet to their partner, who wrote his/her reply. Then the sheets were passed back again. They read the replies, then posed either a follow-up question or a whole new question. Once they had several replies to questions, everyone drafted up a paragraph about their partner. We talked about conducting interviews, what kinds of questions were complicated and what kind were simplistic. We talked about beginning questions with the words “why” and “how” as one way of getting interesting information from people.

Some questions included: If you were a boy what would you do? Why do you act funny? Who brings you to school? What do you want to be when you grow up? What is interesting about you? (The answer written in reply to this question: What is interesting about me is I be myself.) What is your life mostly about? Why are you mean to the class? Why do you always bring lunches to school?

One pair of girls got personal, asking each other about who they liked in the class.

The paragraphs written by the children in the second hour turned out quite rich with material.

MW: Her life inspearience is mostly about family because their the most important people in her life. Her favorite color is red because it goes with her skin color. Her favorite subject in school is math because she is very good at it. Her favorite thing to do at home is listen to her cariocky [Karioke] machine. She like writing poems because it help her get out her anger.

SA: MW lifes mostly about her family and getting a good ejacation. MWs favrotie sport is basketball becous her family likes to play it and she’s good at it. She likes to wear araposta [Aeropostale, a brand disines [designs]. Her favorite hairstyle is pixsees [pixies]. And she likes wearing makeup sometimes because she’s getting older. This is the end of M’s life. By SA

By the way, this sentence about pixies lead to a brief conversation about the five kinds of braids a person could wear: plats, pixies, French braids, micros, and two-string twists. The whole class participated in teaching me these things, which we organized under the general concept of “braids.”

Another paragraph:

J wants to be a singer. She is eight years old. Her birthday is 2-13-98. She has a sister and a brother. She loves to come to school. Her favorite tv shows are That’s so Raven and Hannah Montana. her favorite colors are pink, gray, brown, and purple. Her middle name is D. And her favorite food is pizza.

D is bad because he is. D big brother taught him stuff, D said “It means that I’m crazy like my brother” D said “I’m nine years old.” I asked D if he was crazy and he said yes.

One thing to notice here is P’s awareness and use of narrative techniques like quotation marks and dialogue reporting. I think it’s interesting how some students simply create a biography-sounding piece of writing with the information they collected while others, like P, inserted herself and her act of questioning into the final product.

It was a good day all around with third grade. DH spent the hour on the pillow in the hall reading. We have worked out a system that I hope will be sustained, with him reading books at a higher reading level and then writing about them on his own. His behavior in class was just not improving, and I want him to stay engaged. So he signed a contract I wrote and now participates in a kind of independent reading program I’m making up as we go along.

Second Grade

With both classes I put a single word on the board – EGG for the first hour and TREE for the second group. I asked them to copy down this word and then write a word below it that popped into their heads relating to the first word. In this way they generated a list of words on their own. With this list in front of them, they wrote a paragraph that included all the words. It could be silly or straight, I told them.
Some of the words from the first hour deriving from EGG: pancakes, toast, syrup, oatmeal, sweet potatoes, biscuit. I suggested they also think about other ways a person might go with EGG, like shell and chicken. The most focused kids in this class were T, S, and L. M was OK, too. K, too, who asked me, “Can I write ‘once upon a time?” Of course, I said. Some results:

First hour:

K: Title: Sara at the Forest
Once upon a time there was a girl named sara she was in the forest looking for apples to take back home to mak apple pie and take it to her grandmommy house at the mide [middle] of the night and made her some food on the way back home.

T [who never makes a peep in class but is attentive and bright; she wrote two]:
Once upon a time I saw a shell I picked it up with a napthen [napkin] because it was on the ground if I pick it up with my hand I will get garms [germs] and I will get sick.
Once upon A time I saw A Egg and it craked open an it was A chicken. it could not walk it was laying on the ground and I wen’t back home and ate toast. I Put syrup on it. yesterday My mom made bakon. for me.
[T only needs a little instruction about capitalizing the first letter of a sentence and placing a period at the end. Also, with “went” she inserted an apostrophe, maybe thinking that when N and T are next to each other (as they are in isn’t, can’t, won’t, etc) they need to be separated by an apostrophe. She only doesn’t get that the apostrophe takes the place of an elided letter, but her reasoning is equally logical.]

M: Title: Food Cart
I had a egg sandwich today for breakfast befor I went to school. I had a biscuits and I opened it up and put syrup on it I had rice last night for dinner. Two weeks ago I had oatmeal and it was good. I had toast for breakfast this morning. I went to the wing house and I got chicken wings My big sister made waffles for breakfast.

As you can see, this class did great this week. Our best week yet.

Second hour:

This class is totally on the ball. In a half hour they can do what takes the other class a whole hour of concentrated work. Also, the most pleasing, most of them were giggling like crazy AS THEY WROTE! Their ideas and stories tickled their fancy and they could all hardly wait to show me their work.

TB: Once upon a time I saw a owl on the tree. And the owl was to lazy to get up. The branch fell on me when I was walking around it. And the owl put one on me. And the owl was silent when I got back. The owl was so good and me. I said you can go now. Then I said run then he ran. The End.

CB: There’s a tree in old man Jinkens back yard it has brown bark. One branch falls and he has a stroke! It’s a maple tree. It’s a wood tree. Birds move in the tree and he have another stroke! He drove his self to the hospitell and nearly crashed. His doctor name is Mrs. Jinkens.

JM [a HUGE smile on her face as she wrote and I read]: Onespn of time a mouse that live in a tree. The mouse was named milly and milly loved salits [salads]. With grat big juicy tamados. It was millys favorites. Expescly salits with thik ranch. Milly loves to eat it with his wife. The End.

LP: One day a little girl named Inda Schaenen she climbed a tree with a free shirt on. Then she saw some girls one was a black girl and one was a fat girl Inda asked them to play but they were eating chocolate ice cream mixed with strawberry but they were running. the End. by LP Ilustrauted by LP. [a picture of me and the tree]

BG: [who worries and frets about spelling] Today I sow a alien a he was eating strawberries from a tree and he ate them all and wint to the other tree to eat bananas and he ate all and he wint to a magical tree with strawberries, bananas apples oranges and ate it all up and did not leav non for me and he got a wish and wish he was big.

Such wonderful work!!!

I ought to mention, with reference to all the classes, that several kids have been taking advantage of the invitation I wrote in December to write me letters. Every week I get mail from at least two or three or a half dozen children, some not regulars to the Room. I always write them back. I encourage the teachers to let these letters keep on coming. It’s a nice way to feel connected beyond the work we do together, and apart from any classroom dynamics.

–Inda