Do You Carrot All For Me?

Today we read a poem by Anonymous called “Do you carrot all for me?” in which there is, in a short space, a lot of word play with homophones. One of my fifth grade students described it well when he said, “The names of the vegetables are covering up what is being said.” I then passed out some carrots and celery sticks and we analyzed them using the five senses. After the students had made a list of their observations, I asked them to write either a poem or a paragraph using their five senses and referring to their sensations in applying the five senses to the vegetables. Here’s what L came up with:

Celery Senses

So smooth so grapey so greeny and stripey
so good and rooty, but it’s a veggie fest
so sweet and lovely and carrying a healthy
green giant with long legs and bouncey flippers
it’s a song, an opera —

I got celery, celery, celery
on my table, table, table,
you will like it like it like it
when you taste it taste it taste it
because celery is so good
you can eat it when you’re sick
sing it when you chomp
cheer it when you eat!

No One Knows

This week with Mr. M’s fifth graders, we read Norman Jordan’s poem, “No Woman Knows.” We discussed why this poem is so powerful emotionally. We recognized how the repetition of the line, “no woman knows,” moves us through the poem and gives it qualities of music and the blues. I asked the students to substitute another word for “woman” and to make a poem in imitation of this. Here are some examples:

No Shrink Knows
By L

No shrink knows when you’re quiet and sad and lonely.
No shrink knows when you have issues and problems
and are tired and stressed out.
No shrink knows when you’re not in the mood
for shouty, loudy talking and walking, like stomping and
bumping like elephant feet and mind-breaking news
that you have another person inside of you, like,
you’re gentle, then the other person inside of you is mental,
but you’re gentle.
No shrink knows at all.
No shrink knows at all, at all.
It’s like a song.
No shrink knows.
No shrink knows.

No One Knows
By C

No one knows that I know how
to drive. First, I get in, start
putting on my seat belt, then I
start it up. Next, I put it in drive.
Last, I back it up and start driving.
I drive during the morning.
I also don’t drive very slow.
I drive kinda slow.
No one knows I’m ten years old.

No Husband Knows
By J

No husband knows
when a woman is buying groceries.
No husband knows
when a woman has a broken heart.
No husband knows
when a woman is having surgery.
No husband knows
when a woman is sad.

Room For Whispering

Fourth Grade

I had very bad laryngitis this week and came in whispering. I wrote on the board:

“Hi! I have a very sore throat. I have to whisper, the doctor said. Sooo…
will you please help me out? You are going to be writing today. I would like you each ot write something in the genre of…..”

In the first hour we voted, but kids really wanted to write “like Aikeen did,” which was a play. So they broke into 2 groups and began drafting plays collaboratively. I didn’t really speak at all, so I didn’t specify whether to work singly or in groups. They all just split into groups naturally – one all boys, one larger and mostly girls.

It really was amazing and enlightening to me how little I had to say, even in a whisper. Every so often one of the class leaders would say, “Shut up, don’t y’all hear Ms. Schaenen voice about to go out?” After that it sort of turned into an experiment. I whispered to people to say things loudly on my behalf if I needed something said. Otherwise I wrote on the board, or used gesture. I also went around the room watching and listening, every so often scribbling something on a small yellow piece of paper from a pad which I’d tear off and pass to someone. They’d read aloud the advice or suggestion, nod, and do what I asked.

The boys’ group asked me if they could write something with gangsters. I whispered, “Nothing violent,” and M said, “Ms. Schaenen, there ain’t gonna be no shootin or nothin.” After writing a few lines they stood up and acted it out (M: “Lessee how it’s turnin out”) and then sat down and continued writing.

Over in the (mostly) girl’s group, there was discussion about word choice – P asked, “Should it be girl or lady or a woman?” They also worked hard negotiating so that every character had at least 2 lines to say.

The boys’s play was a long scene involving an argument over which was a better part of town, east side, west side, or south side. There was a cop, and a hauling off to jail sequence, and a small trial.

The mostly girls’s group wrote a complicated play about relationships – who “fell deeply in love” with whom, who intervened, whose relationship worked out and whose did not. There was also a maid who worked for a lady who then quit because she was sick of being a maid. (A maid with agency, with agency defined as the ability to identify and implement alternatives!)

Second hour was more mixed. Some kids wrote simply what they wanted to write. K wanted/needed to write out a long complicated story about guns/shooting (which was fiction, he said). I let him because he so rarely seems engaged in school, so easily distracted, that it seemed right. For once I saw him concentrating on details. In a one-on-one conversation he explained his “real life” experience with a drive-by. A., sniffling and coughing with a cold, wrote about his policeman-cousin’s terrible experience of having been shot on the job. J. wrote steadily, and I gave him a journal. I think I can hook him with loads of time to write on his own. R and Z, the two girls, worked together giggling,

Second/Third Grades

Both classes came in and got right to work studying shells and describing them in detail—look, shape, texture, feel, size….
I encouraged them to think about comparing the shells size-wise to a known object so a reader could really envision the size. “A car is small compared to a building,” I whispered. “A car is big compared to a bug. You need to say more than just ‘the shell is small.’” Then they could draw the shell.

Second grade examples of these comparisons:
“My shells size is like a pinky.”
“It is the size of a quarter.”
“The size is like my ear.”
“It is the size of my thumb.”
“It is very small like a peanut.”
“It is the size of an eraser.”

After writing up one they could trade and switch shells. J. in third grade made a line on his page and marked it in numbered increments – then he laid his shell along this “ruler” to see how big it was. This seemed like instinctive scientific thinking to me. He wanted an objective measurement. So I praised his effort and passed out rulers to people who wanted to measure that was instead of making verbal comparisons.

A third grade example by T:

“It has lots of colors. It is a middle size. It has pink, brown, and other colors. It has dots and marks. It is kind a shape like a heart. It is bumpy. It is like glass. It has hard edges and the middle is smooth. The inside is 5 inches. It is not big or little. It is also white. They have lines. They get bigger and bigger. But when you raise it it is little. They are white and you can still see them. It has yellow on it. It looks like it is broke. It has light and dark brown. It has a peach color. It has a print of another shell. It looked like some sea animal could live in it. It is a little rusty and crusty. It also has a little print of a shell on it. It is pretty. I like how it look. It has holes in it. It has a little scratch. It has deep lines. It looks real. I think it is real.”

I find this description very moving. This girl is hardly one of the higher achievers in the class. She often seems “behind” what we’re up to. But here she simply sat still and studied this one shell for more than a half hour, writing and writing and seeing and thinking. Again, this felt like a science moment as much as a writing moment – the doing of observation and recording in a focused, undistracted way. I could talk to her about varying the sentences, of course, the structure of all those “It is” one after the other. But I just need to mention how easy it would be to tap the observational strengths of all these students in the cause of making sense of the natural world. There is a lot of analogical thinking in those size comparisons, for example. For some reason, her last sentences–“It looks real. I think it is real” — break my heart. She has inferred from all the observation that this shell is real. She has not assumed anything beforehand, evidently. I had said they were sea shells, but for all she knew they might have been fake.

-Inda

Bats, Opossums and Butterflies

Today with Mr. M’s Fifth graders, we read Theodore Roethke’s poem, “The Bat.” We talked about comparing animals to humans and humans to animals. I asked the students if they could become an animal, what would it be? Then I asked them to write about something from an animal’s point of view.

C wrote this two-part poem.

1. The Raccoon

I am a little raccoon that lives in the forest.
I go around looking for food.
I attack my prey for food.
I sleep during the evening.
I’m awake during the night.
I am a little raccoon.

2. The Opossum

I met the raccoon at night.
He tried to attack me, but I got away.
The raccoon got mad and ran.
Now I can eat my delicious mangoes.

Here’s one by L.

If I Were a Butterfly

If I were a butterfly I would go in beautiful gardens.
I would also fly my way to the heavens of the sky.
If it was night I would glow in pink and yellow wings.
I gaze at the sky as I fly up and visit Orion
and the great dog and all of the constellations,
my lace dipped and sipped in honey juice.

Words, Genre, and Poetry

THURSDAYS

To continue with our “building blocks” theme, we have been reviewing the fundamentals of writing. Most of this has been done through brainstorming, listing, and games– to get them to think about the things we do and realize the “why” of some of the conventions. In recent weeks, thinking about what was punctuation versus what was a symbol got them to think about how we actually use punctuation, and likewise, why it is actually important.

Last week we began to break down poetry. We read three short poems (one each by Robert Frost, Gwendolynn Brooks, and Langston Hughes). Everyone really liked the Brooks poem “We Real Cool”. It’s short and has a nice rhthym. Some missed the meaning, so after we read each aloud, we went back and discussed what we noticed (line length, punctuation, tone). Tone was very easy for everyone to get, and then we broke down words they didn’t know so we could discuss meaning. After all that, everyone set out in groups to answer the question: What is poetry? They were to think of what it looks like, sounds like, and is about. I asked them to make lists or write a short answer in pairs, but this exercise was about thinking. As they did this, I walked around with “regular” writing and we compared and contrasted what poetry actually looked like on the page.

In Ms. P’s 5th grade class, several students began to see that poetry is often capitalized at the beginning of each line. Some noticed that you didn’t have to have the whole sentence on the line. Some saw that all writing still used punctuation, even if it wasn’t used the same. Many observed that poetry is for feelings, especially sadness and love– moreso than other writing, they decided poetry was the appropriate place for this.

We also began last week with a short lesson on the Mexican holiday of Day of the Dead. Students were then prompted to write for 5 minutes about someone who had passed away, about Halloween, or about anything they chose. Many of the 5th graders said it made them too sad to think of those who had passed away (but every student had lost one or more family member in their short lives), though in looking over their writing, many did use the time to reflect on death.

J. began that way, but her writing turned in another direction. In the 5 minutes, she write the most, covering a whole side of paper.

” It is good to write about people who is dead or alive. But writing is just my thing to do. Cause if I have not a thing to do I will start to write. Then I like to write because we have to write to do a lot of things. Writting (sic) is good for me because I just love to write. If I get in trouble at school I will write a letter. If I make my mom or daddy, or granny mad i will write I will write a whole book if I want to. But I love to do anything that have something to do with writting I will do it. Like I got B in writting. Writting is my favorit.”

It’s nice to see a student realize how much she loves writing– enough to tell me– without having any prompt to do so. J. has some trouble with spelling and punctuation, and she gets in trouble quite a bit in her regular classroom (or did last year, anyway), but she has never been anything but great for me. It’s that kind of relationship and necessity that I wish they could all realize.

In the sixth grade group, during their freewrite, K. wrote the following which shows such a great natural voice.

“Last night on October 31, 2007 I went trick-or-treating. I was a cat, my sister was a mermaid, and my other sister was a cat like me. Do you know those orange pumpkins with the black handle? I had two things full of them. Whoa! That’s a lot of candy. We didn’t get home until 10:30 pm. We had lots of fun. I can’t wait until next Halloween.”

This week, we’ll continue to read some poems, picking out more conventions of poetry, and then the students will begin work on their own poems.

TUESDAYS

2nd Grade + 3,4,5 Special Ed
This really is such a fun group. They are so willing to help one another and work hard. It’s difficult to find things we can all do because each student is at such a different place, and they have different learning issues. The nice thing is, if something is ahead of someone else, they really work to help each other. It’s beautiful to watch such cooperation without any prompting or prodding.

Today, we finished work on our Alphabet Posters. It was a great way to begin thinking about words, because they were forced to think of words in relation to themselves. The past few weeks showed me what a great speller R. is, how well T. (boy) helps others, and that S.R. (2nd) thinks all week about what we are doing. They truthfully seem to enjoy coming. Today D. (girl) drew me a picture and told me, “Thanks for taking the time to teach me things”. I have also gleamed that T. (girl) has a lot of problems reading, and I am not even convinced she can really read at all. She does a lot of guessing and gets frustrated when I slow her down and ask her to sound things out with me. She cannot easily identify letters or associate sounds with letters, so it makes it a bit tough with her at times. I also saw a new student from Ms. V. today– B. He jumped right into it with help from T. (boy) and began thinking up lots of words that began with a B. He was also the only one to consult a dictionary and start looking up words to add. S.R. took a different tactic and copied every word on a poster in the room beginning with an S., and then he came and asked me what each one meant (symbol, setting, and sermon were three examples).

It’s really building blocks with these kids, but each seems to get something needed out of it. If nothing else, it allows them time to think in a different manner and be more creative, which hopefully is stimulating enough. Next week, we are going to move onto sentences. This will be very tricky for some, but hopefully fun.

BIOGRAPHY PROJECT (Tues)
With this group, we have tackled the idea of genre, compared and contrasted, and now we moved on to deal with biography itself. I began by passing out a biography book to each of them and asking them to take a few things, flip through and see whatthey noticed. Then we began brainstorming as a group:

-What is biography? How do we classify them?
-Who do we read biographies about?
-What do the people in biographies have in common?

After some great answers and examples– they were shouting out great African American thinkers and leaders and people whom they admire, we discovered that most biography subjects are important, have great acheivements, are inspirational, and are unique in some way. We discussed what made us all different and the same as people and why it was important to understand others’ lives. They got it. I then split them into pairs and challenged them to ask each other questions to find out what makes them each unique. I gave no other advice to begin.

S. cleverly asked me if we were practicing for when I bring guests in, and I said yes. D. and J. began asking some great questions. A. and C. understood immediately how to get to the heart of the matter and wrote great, long paragraphs about one another. Periodically, I would give them lines of questioning for prompts– what were they great at, where had they been that others hadn’t, did they do things others thought were strange or weird, what made them proud of themselves.

C. and A. wrote each other’s short bios in chronological order and included great details (“When he was 3 his daddy gave him a sip of wine…”, “When he was eleven he got shot in the face with a Roman Candle.”) No favorite colors here.

In the last ten minutes, we did a quick journal responding to the question, “What do you think your life will be like in ten years?”

D.’s response:
” My life will be perfect because you know when you go throw (sic) hard times it gets better. I’m going to college. I want to grow up and be an artist and be like other artists.
I think the world will change and be better after years and years. My life will be what I always wanted. “

I hope she gets there, and maybe someday, someone will write a biography about her.

Week 6, Schaenen-Delving and Dabbling in Data

Fourth Grade

A day of messing around with data!
The whole idea was to present the students with printouts of conversations we had had last January, when they were in third grade. I had transcribed some of our brief interviews about genre. I asked them to read through the transcript and see what they noticed about the way we interacted, and what they said. Then I captured THOSE conversations on tape. So here we were reading, writing, thinking, speaking, and reflecting—all based on a longitudinal involvement made possible by Springboard/Room For Writing, and the way this program is committed to the long haul. Most of the children didn’t really remember that day at all, but were amused to read back through their own words. They got a kick out of the idea of pseudonyms, and protecting their privacy. Some new names: Angel Heaven, Strawberry.

More conversational talk about genre, which remains difficult and tricky to master. I MUST learn to phrase my questions simply and clearly before I can expect unmuddled replies. After fifteen minutes or so of confused and confusing answers that did not place genre in the conceptually right place as a catch-all for forms, but rather as ONE OF the forms, we finally landed on a kind of call-and-response format that wound up drilling the following Q and As.

Q: What are genres?
A: Genres are different forms of writing.
Q: Such as?
A: Such as fiction, non-fiction, drama, biography, etc etc.

Every person went through this three or four times, as well as in chorus as a class. I guess sometimes there is a place for simply making phrases lodge in heads in whatever way works. Finally I instructed them to compose raps (a kind of poetry) that contained the information above about genres. Some worked alone, some in groups. Some did include the info on genres, and some did not, and even the ones that did sometimes lost the clarity of our definition.

Genre
My name is M I go to school
I go to school to learn my rules
First it’s genre then it’s poetry
Then fiction and all sorts of sports
You want to learn more
Just come to Gunlach School
There’s no problem
With learning more rules.

Now this is a high-performing student, but even here you can see that “genre” is grammatically equated with “poetry.” (First genre, then poetry, then the others.) Does M realize that genre is the conceptual umbrella? I’ll have to double check.

By contrast, here’s a very clear example by someone who seems to “get it.”

By D:

You know genres are different forms of writing
I don’t know why you think I’m lying
But I’m speaking the truth
I can even tell you in a phone booth.

You know genres are different forms of writing
And I don’t know even know why
Why you think I’m lying
I’m speaking the truth like a busone |?|
I can tell you in a phone booth.
I’m about to tell you some right now
It’s interviews intructions autobiography
Here go my last word and gone be
Drama.

D is a quiet reserved boy, new to the school and the class this year, and VERY bright and natural with words. He performed his rap at the end of class in a very quiet voice. Based on this work I can see he seems to get the relationship between genre and examples of genres.

Of course, the upside of rap composition is that it got even the least engaged person sitting still and concetrating with amazing focus – writing, then sitting and tapping out beats, then rubbing his ear, then writing another line, in total control of his actions and intentions. Alas that his rap made no mention at all about genres! The kids took turns providing each other with complicated, interesting beats (fists beating sharply on chairs in a syncopated series punctuated by snaps) during the performing time. It was illuminating for me to hear how their “beat talk” sounded:

D to J: “What kind of beat you want?”
J: “I don’t want no beat. I don’t want no one messin up my beat.”
M after reviewing a classmate’s rap: “You ain’t got no kind of genre in that.”

Second Grade

This group REALLY wanted to finish the dream catchers we started with Rosemary a few weeks ago. I had been putting it off, honestly because we had all been a little boggled by the pattern of threading the yarn and the dream catchers weren’t coming out right, exactly, or at least “right” according to the model. Also, I never wanted to lose class time. But then I figured that this shouldn’t be one of those things I simply “let go” because it was inconvenient for me, and that I ought to figure out some way to find the literacy in “crafting dream catchers that aren’t working out just right.” At the very least, all the natural conversation that happens around working together, following instructions, and listening would be nice. Plus silly things get said in these less formal situations, which lets me see how verbally witty second graders can be. For example, I was helping one student, threading yarn from one hole to the next, and the large container of beads was in the middle of the table. My hands were all occupied, so I simply said, “Bead me,” to the student, opening my hand. She laughed, and others did too, when they realized that I meant for her to put a bead in my hand. Soon I heard the others saying “bead me,” to each other, and eventually, “Feather me,” when it was time to dig out the feather from the ziplock. Luckily, they were mostly all happy with dream catchers that mostly looked not at all like the model. Then they colored them in. As people got through, I plopped down on the bean bag and read one of my favorite picture books of all time that always comes in handy in writing class – SOMETHING FROM NOTHING. This book is about a little boy who is given a blanket at birth. It gets old and dirty, and gets pruned into a vest, then a tie, then a hanky, then a button. At every step, when his mother says it’s “time to throw it out,” the boy’s grandfather salvages something from the ruins and makes a smaller thing, (The scraps fall through the floor and get used by a mouse family.) Eventually he loses the button and the whole family gives up. “You can’t make something from nothing,” his pessimist, nay-saying mother says. But the boy is in school by then, and realizes that indeed he can! “There’s just enough material here to make a wonderful story,” he says. A triumph of mind over matter!

Third Grade

We began in a seated circle with our arms crossed and clasping hands. We passed squeezes in each direction and then in both directions at the same time. Just a little community building, because this group can be difficult to manage. Also, they tend to be mean to R.

Then I passed out the laminated B&W Richard Avedon photos of various characters. I asked them to observe closely the images, and try to write about what they noticed. Who did these people seem to be? What did they seem to be feeling? What did they make you feel? At first they worked in groups but then I split everyone up because they were all too unruly.

JM on William Burroughs, a portrait of him in anguish:

Old, wrinkled, he looks like he is in pain. He writes poems. He looks poor, looks like he need some help. He look like he is a mean person. He look like something has gone wrong. His eyes are shut closed. He look like a cave man, He looks muddy and hurt.

KH on an angry-looking Latino gangster-type young man:

I think he just an actor that is trying to performance in front of people. He is poor, don’t have money, new shoes, car, clothes, food, drinks, no tub, toothbrush, he probably sad, middle of nowhere, trying to keep safe with the gun, nappy hair, stinky, dirty. He probably don’t know how old he is. He has a pack of cigarettes, he lost in the forest, he doesn’t have a wife, he probably has a landlord that kicked them out, his kids probably dissed him, his mom adopted him from the adoption, he came out of jail he got ran over by a car he has old not funny jokes stinky breath fall out a window if someone tells him to do it.

JC on the same guy:

I think he’s a model. And I think he’s poor no shoes no milk no socks no tee shirts and house. He dirty he got a necklace on and he got a gun in his back pocket. And he don’t have no soap no tun he stink…And I think he feels dangerous.

One thing I think is interesting here is that these two writers (they started in a group together) saw the genuine article of the person in this portrait and at first assumed that there was a level of performance or shamming in the role/persona. Which may be true, in the sense that Avedon has clearly set up a shot. Is this person the person he seems? Do very young children (these third graders) see an image like this and assume that the figure is contrived to look the way they look BEFORE they go on to reflect on what he may really be? How is their perception of an image of a person shaped by this cultural moment, in which some stars design themselves to “look” dangerous and intimidating.

Finally, L on a photo of Kareem Abdul Jabaar when he was still Lou Al Cinder, standing in team uniform on a urban basketball court with a ball on his hip. He looks proud, serious, defiant, dignified:

It makes me want to jump off a bridge because he might be a basketball thief.
I think he might kill people. He might be a great basket ball player. He might live in a two-story house. He might be a policeman. He might be a amazing basketball player. He might be poor. He might be a millionaire. He might be carrying loads of money. He might eat kivis. |?| He might kill people. He might be a street baller. He might drive a limo. He might have a sister. He might have a gun. He might have some cigarettes and tobacco. He might be famous.

The repetition of “he might” is a nice touch, I think. The form of the verb shows me that this writer is aware that he is regarding the image as an interpreter speculating on meanings embedded in the picture, not determining what he sees, assigning definite meanings, but assembling possibile backgrounds for what the photo suggests.

A nice activity!!!

Inda