February 20, 2008–Schaenen

Fourth grade, first hour

I brought in the big box of gently used books donated by Leo, my nephew in New Jersey. We opened it, read his cute note, and then I laid out the books and invited the kids to browse and choose one that looked interested, one that wanted to keep. Then they read for a while, wrote thank you notes, and we played the word guessing game on the chalkboard for the last 15 minutes.

“It has a “t” on the top of it. It is a big building and people pray in it.”
Answer: The Revolutionary Center, a food pantry place in the north city.

“He a person. He a best. He come from the dead.”
Answer: [Some wrestler.]
Interesting thing: Above was how the boy wrote his clues, but when he READ them LOUD he said, “He’s a person. He’s the best. He come from the dead.”
This is evidence of style shifting from written to oral. But also, there is typically instability from one domain to another for this child, who (and this has nothing to do with standard/Ebonics, I don’t think) has some kind of processing block when it comes to getting his EXTREMELY fluent oral verbal skills to appear on paper in writing. Letters and words go missing no matter what code he’s writing in.

A funny moment: one child, having written the thank yous and seeing everyone else had, too, was eager to play the game. He said, “We ready.” and again, “We ready.”

Me: “We ready?”
Second student: “We ARE ready.”
First student: “We ready.”
Me: “We ready?”
Third student [to me]: “Please don’t start that.”
Me [smiling]: Don’t start what?
Third student: “Makin us switch back and forth.”
First student: “We ready.”
Second student: “We ARE ready. How many times you going to say that, man?”

This was all very fast….an indication of how second nature this subject is in classroom conversation–so second nature that I have students utterly bored by it, now, like “we get it, we get it, already.”

Fourth grade, second hour

We did the same thing but I laid the books out on a table. They chose books and read a while to themselves and then drafted thank yous. The thank yous were all very different – some involved crayons, glue, cutting the paper, turning it sideways and writing as if it were a commercial card. Many kids included facts about Leo I had mentioned, that he loved to play tennis and baseball, that he lived in Montclair. I forgot to mention that I passed out nice patterened paper to use instead of plain lined paper. Some kids wanted to use both so I let them.

A cute exchange with AW, who was play-bragging about his dad who lives in a mansion. I had said I wanted them to maybe watch less TV this week so they had time to read their new books, less video, etc etc. AW was in the middle of a long signifyin about his rich daddy, and he said, “I had my butler read my book while I be listening to my MP3 player.”

AW: My daddy live in a mansion. We got a maid, we got a butler.
AP: You got a limosine?
AW: Yeah.
AP: We got two.

Code Switching vs. Style Shifting–What’s in a Name?

[I wrote the following AFTER entering the blog below, because upon a night's sleep I realized I was growing less comfortable with the conceptual image of "switching."]

As I read more in the linguistic literature, I realize that it might be a good idea to alter how we reference the choice-making about language use. Most of the time, for most people, it’s not as though a switch is flipped and suddenly every single aspect of the Discouse – lexicon, phonology, syntax, gesture, tone, contour, etc – goes intact from one code to another. (See Lippi-Green: English with an Accent) It’s more accurate to imagine degrees of shifting—style shifting, is what I’m now going to call it, as sociolinguists do. Think of Oprah—she rarely speaks in AAE, syntactically. But she will often shift her tone, her tag questions, or in some other way signal her solidarity (and lay claim to the covert prestige that goes along with such solidarity) with an interviewee who is African American. Or even one who is not, in order to signal something like “I’m real, connected to the people out there in TV land, and you’re not.”) Politicians do this, too. Or you might have a person speaking “standard English” in every grammatical way, but pronounce ask “aks,” which is simply metathesis, an inversion of consonants, and something that has been going on in English forever—bird once having been bryd (there are many other examples). In a hundred years, everyone will likely be saying aks instead of ask, because it is a more natural way for a human mouth to manage those sounds. Another person might have his verbs “agree” in accordance with the practice of conjugating “irregularly,” which make it “standard English” (rather than regularizing the pattern–I is, you is, he is, we is, you is, they is–which renders the language stigmatized and “vernacular”) BUT say “ain’t NOTHING!” in order to make a point humorously with the emphatic use of a mulitple negative. My point is simply to consider the spoken languages represented very grossly by the terms “Standard English” and African American English on a fluid spectrum (shiftable) rather than as perching on/in two separate circuits. requiring a wholesale translation (switchable) from one to another. It may be easiest for young kids (and teachers) to think of “switching,” but on some level actual speakers know from experience that in reality, there’s all kinds of blurring and shifting and negotiating between the two.

-Inda

February 13, 2008

Fourth grade, first hour

Before class, I had xeroxed a photo of Barack Obama standing with (being clasped by) Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, who is also a young, African American political star. (The photo appeared in a New Yorker profile of Booker this month.) We discussed what the image in the photo suggested. How did these two men feel about each other, if you had to say. D said he thought it looked like Booker was about to fight Obama, that there was a fierceness in his expression. I agreed, but suggested that strong POSITIVE feelings can sometimes come across as aggression. I told some of the stories of the two men’s lives, and tried to help D see that Booker was grasping Obama in solidarity, looking fiercely into O’s eye as if to say, “I’m with you on this.”

After this I handed out copies of a page of the article, the part where the author (Peter Boyle) relates how Booker prepared his introductory remarks before Obama was to speak at a NJ rally. I read the text aloud. It tells how Booker looks at the prepared notes, declares them to be “too vanilla,” and says aloud that what this moment calls for is “some chocolate, or maybe some Neopolitan.” Boyle explains that Booker then dashes on to the stage, shouting a protracted hello, then launches into a VERY animated speech – in standard English, but making use of the rhythm, rhyme, and tonal semantics of African American English (AAE). As Obama comes onto the stage Booker bows deeply at the waist and then exits.

The students knew right away what Booker meant by vanilla and chocolate and Neopolitan (meaning a mixture of both vanilla and chocolate). “Too white,” of course, was NOT how Booker wanted to sound. “This is code switching in action,” I said, “in a very public way, in a very self-conscious way. Booker knew how he wanted to sound and make some choices about how he should say what he needed to say in order to connect with the audience.”

So then I asked the students to sit down and write a speech. “The genre for today is speech,” I said. “You can pretend to be Obama, or Clinton (there are still a couple of Clinton fans in the Room). Or you can really compose any kind of speech. But you have to try to convince us of something, of why we should vote for you, or for someone you believe it. You can use any code you want—Ebonics or standard.”

DT, looking up from his work, said to me, “I’m talking in vanilla language.”

His was this:

Hi, my name is Hillary but you know me as Clinton. And the reason I gathered you here today because you guys should vote for me and not Obama but anyways you guys should vote for me because was there ever one time you felt like you should be in the hospital but you don’t want to because you don’t have a lot of money to pay the bill? Well, you can with medicare. And that is not why I want you to vote for me. I want to win this vote to stop the war. I also want to win this war for better schools, I also want to win this war for opportunity.

SA :

My Speech on How to Fix America
Hello, my great Americans. I hope to change the world with my knowledge. I hope to help people who need to be helped. My plan is to cure people who are ill. I want to help the schools have more books I also want to help the world not just America but the world and I can’t do that alone I need your help we need to take a stand and we need to stop the prejudiceness and we need to stop the wars against the Iraqis we need to have a life of happiness. We need to stick together.

MW: (I like this one because she wrote both the introducer’s part AND the candidate’s part)

Good morning my voters. How are you doing today? I would like to introduce someone who is strong, someone who has courage here he is Barack Obama.
Hello people thank you for giving me your support and all your might to vote for me. I will do my best to help out the community. I would fix up all the schools give books out and give more education out to kids and give more tutoring. There are people out here struggling to get houses we can buy houses we can fix up houses but we need change in our lives we need to help each other out in our community get better policeman there’s nothing wrong with that because we need to HELP THE COMMUNITY OUT.

MC: (This writer, who is charming, happy, cooperative and kind, really struggles with getting complete words/sentences on paper. His spelling is really rough, but he always sounds out as best he can. Sometimes he misses words altogether. That’s why I was overjoyed to see this lengthy speech.)

Hello my friend. [I] am Packman and I want everybody to vote for me because I need to be in the White House. Kids will have the best school lunch and the killing will stop because the war need to stop so moms can keep their children alive and keep them off the street and the people that [are] poor will have big house[s] but there one important thing I have to say is that I will let the children sag because that not a bad thing to do so I will give kids that are in the foster home a home so that [they] can be comfortable just like people that have big house[s].

When everyone was done writing the kids performed their speeches aloud using the microphone. I encouraged/allowed the audience to give audible feedback as if it really were a rally. So the strong comments usually received claps, foot stomps, nods, and “oh, yeahs.” Some people ad-libbed off their written work, some read word for word.

Fourth grade, second hour

We did the same thing as the first class. Except for two boys, this class generally writes at a lower level than the first hour. The work is heartfelt, but just not as deep or complete.

MS:

Vote for Me
Vote for me. My name is Barack Obama. I plan on stopping the war and bringing our family home to freedom. We need out family home so we can take care of them and they can take care of us. We need them and they need us. There is not a reason not to stop the war. People are dying and people are dead. People think if I stop the war the other people in Iraq are going to come kill us. That will not happen because when I stop the war people are going to say I am the best and WE WON THE WAR.

Second Grade

In our circle I read HAPPY HEDGEHOG BAND and POSSUM COME A-KNOCKIN, two illustrated books that use rhythm, humor, rhyme, and sounds to tell the story. Then I asked the kids to write their own. I wrote one, too, while they worked. Here’s mine:

I went out to the market
Seeking taters for my soup
But the grocer was a-sleepin
And I steppped into some poop [this got a laugh, natch]
I looked up on a shelf
Where I saw a little elf
Who pointed at a doggy
And then I learned the truth
He didn’t take a walk that day
Had nowhere else to go
And the consequences faced me
On the bottom of my shoe
revised to: When I walked into that store.
OR……..As I passed right through the door.

These lines don’t rhyme, but I emphasized that they don’t have to rhyme precisely.

Here’s JB’s:

Once there was a girl
That liked the boy
But the boy didn’t like the girl
The girl was sad
So she got a bat
And hit the boy
Upside his head
The boy said okay
You can be my girl
But then the girl didn’t want to be his girl
And they lived happily ever after.
This strikes me as one of those classic dramatic narrative plots, revealed simply and strikingly by a second grader.

AB:

Rat-a-tat-tat where my cat
Ma says you were sittin on the kitten
I said I wasn’t sitten on the kitten
Ma said Maybe Dad was a. . .
knock knock
Ma said who is that knockin at the door?

TW:

The Walking School
Once I came walking to school
I saw the school walking
the teacher was dancing
the principal was going
the student claming [?]
I said The School Walking Away!
They looked they saw nothing the school was swimming
they looked again the school was wet
That why they believed her.

Third Grade

We did the same activity as second grade.

KH:

I’m walking down the street
and heard something and it went beep beep.
My neighbor came out the door and she go Kelcie open dat door
So I go what is you screaming for
My mom told me to walk to the store
So when I walked to the store that lady go
Where did you go
I go why do you want to know
The lady go don’t slam that door
I go what are you looking for
She go no, no, no I’m not telling you what I’m looking for
What so not ask me to stay when I hit the door
The radio go this is Racherd [?] Radio
And I go wait before I hit the door.

KW: [Echoing me and the book and making it her own stuff!]

I step into some poop
I had to taste some soup
It tasted so disgusting
I wanted to start chucking
I start sleepin I start peakin
Mom was in the kitchen cookin some chicken
It tasted delicious I wanted to start kickin.
Mom what’s wrong you want some
I’m kickin
You want to start pickin
Pick me kiss me you want-a start kick me yeah.

I may pull a few kids out of this group. There are three of four kids (girls) who don’t really seem like they care to belong, or to try. I’ll talk to the teachers next week and see what they think.

Inda

February 6, 2008–Schaenen

February 6, 2008

Fourth grade, first hour

We began with a long, heated, lively talk about the primary election. Many strong opinions. I brought in the morning paper, reviewed the two-party system, how it leads up to the general election in November. I also brought a print-out bio of Obama. More than one student was VERY concerned about Obama’s safety as an African American in the public eye. Talk of Malcolm’s fate, and Dr. King’s.

“They gonna shoot him up as soon as he step outside ‘caus they don’t want no black man runnin the country.”
“I want him to be president but I don’t want him to die. I don’t want to help kill him.”

Then we settled down and wrote out these opinions on paper. One student had an interesting solution:

“I think there should be two presidents because Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are trying their best to help the world …It wouldn’t be fair to vote for just one person who is trying hard to fix our world…”

Another one:

I want to vote for Barach Obama because I think we should have an African American president because we never had a black president. I won’t vote for Hillary Clinton because she don’t have the strength to be the president. Another reason I want Obama to be president because it was too many white presidents and now we need an African American president. I think Obama have the strength to be president, and the reason I say that is because us African American people is strong and we have the power to say what we think is right. My opinion about Obama is he went to college, he passed his grades, he got his education he went through some bad things and some good things through his life but he still stayed strong aas he moved on with his life. He married a wonderful wife had great kids. Hillary Clinton married a fool she gone turn out to follow his footsteps one day.

Now of course a reader can see all kinds of borrowed thoughts and phrases in this text—a fourth grader talking about “wonderful wife and great kids?” Or calling WJC a fool? Not to mention all that race-centered stuff about white and black presidents. But there’s also that business about being strong, having power, having a voice – all that being connected somehow. It was really a whole hour of exploring and questioning the connections here. The notion of “race,” of being black OR white, plays HUGELY in the way these kids view the world. Obama’s presence in the public landscape is enormously charged. One girl said she was very worried when she saw “all those white people standing behind him” on TV. She was worried that THEY might be the ones to kill him. I walk a fine line at these moments: dismantling certain assumptions without discrediting the logic that puts them in place, allowing for genuine feeling while settling expression into civil public discourse. It’s all very challenging and interesting. When the conversation got very black/white, and someone said something too extreme, which I would have to question, one student said:
“But Ms. Schaenen…”
“Ms. Schaenen ain’t white. She mixed.”
Somehow, for this one child, I had to stop being White for the moment. My own identiy, in the heat of the conversation, perhaps had to pass into a more amorphous place so that they could feel there were no “outsiders” present. This is just a guess.
What I honestly believe is that we’re all mixed, but are socialized to believe in a mythical notion of “race” that we “belong to.” After all, Italians and Jews were once considered non-White. Who’s white and who’s not has always been a social construction. This is not a fourth grade thought, but it crossed my mind yesterday. At that moment, my students – who have always in the past considered me white (often adding “no offense, Ms. Schaenen,” when discussing some aspect of racial/judicial injustice they traced to white oppression—aired the possibility (for a particular purpose) that I am “mixed.”

Another thing about the batch of papers: even the students who often write in nearly 100 percent standard English, when riled up about the election, “let themselves go” and created texts in pretty thorough AAE. With no comment or anything, they were simply getting words down hastily and unguardedly.

Fourth grade, second hour

Instead of beginning with conversation, with this class I started with writing. “ If you were 18 and could vote, who would you have voted for yesterday?” Again, these kids are 9 and 10: what we are reading are probably distillations of what they are picking up from news and community before being flavored by their own young perspectives.

“I would vote for Barack Obama because I never want a girl to be president because she will get us shot up by the people who we are at war with so when I turn 18 I will vote for a man instead of a woman who can get me shot up.”

“If I had a chance to vote I would vote for Hillary Clinton. I would vote for Hillary Clinton because she would be the first white lady to become president. I would vote for Hillary Clinton because if she is going to clean up America and she will keep the soldiers in war and not take them out of the war because they will come out of nowhere and come and kill us. I would vote for her.”

“If I was 18 years old and I was allowed to vote I would vote for Barack Obama. I would vote for Barack Obama because he is trying to stop the war and bring our people home. Also, he is trying to help the elementary school in St. Louis. Finally, Barack Obama made a commercial telling all of St. Louis that he is trying his best to become our president so he can help our community.”

Second and Third Grades

What a fun day with these guys!
We played a superfun game. I wrote a sentence, not quite complete, on the board. We all wrote it down:
“Once upon a time there was a mouse who lived……”
I left it open and everyone completed the sentence however they wanted to, Then we passed our papers to the person on our left in the circle. I was playing, too, which was really fun for everyone (especially me). We took two or three minutes to read what was written and then add to the story “so that it made sense.” Eventually the stories got back to the original person and we got to read them aloud, which was always fun. Some comments along the way:

“Oooh, I can’t wait to see what y’all wrote on mine.”
“Thank you, Ms. Schaenen. Somebody finally wrote something good like Eric Carle who inspired me in my writing,”

As we read aloud people smiled and couldn’t help calling out “I wrote that” when the story contained the sentence or two that they contributed. The stories got nice and long, which they also loved. Interestingly, as the stories moved around the circle certain themes emerged – the mouse getting fat and needing exercise, a witch doing bad stuff, and a few other things cropped up in more than one story. Another funny thing: someone erased the name I gave the mouse on my turn and changed it to another name. Not exactly according to rules, but there you go! They’re all cute, but here’s just one:

“Once upon a time there was a mouse who lived in a mouse house. And he always ate cheese. He would crawl out his hole at night. And one day the mouse went out of his house and went out of the house to move the mouse said that he will come back some day. And so he traveled very, very far, over the ocean – the Pacific Ocean – all the way to China, where people do not eat so much cheese.
“What is all this little white stuff,” he said.
“Why, that’s called rice,” said a small voice.
“Who are you?”
“I am a mouse,” said the little mouse. “I had ran away from the evil witch,’ he said. And he said, “Can I live here and she said yes and she put cheddar cheese and pineapple, and juice. Then Oreal fed themouse. And then the mouse got exercise.”

I changed the starter sentence for third grade:
“Once upon a time there was a cat who lived…”
The whole process was just as enjoyable for all of us. There came to be an insider joke among us, too, because whenever I saw the plot taking a turn toward the violent or gangstery, I changed it drastically into something humorous, not scary and goody-goodyish. Then the boy who went after me (on my left) laughed uproariously at my attempt and re-tweaked it to make it the way he and the other boys wanted. It was a playful sense of knowing what was “OK” and not “OK.” For example, when one cat shot another cat, I wrote “But, ha-ha, the gun was just a toy gun so the other cat ran away. The house cat got a band-aid for his bite and decided to go for a walk.” Then the boy on my left wrote, “The cat met the other cat again then pulled out a real gun and killed the other cat…” It’s almost like they’re saying to me, ‘this is the stuff in our imagination. You can try to get it gone, but it’s there no matter what you say.’” And yet there was a distanced, fictive freedom in this whole game that felt very mutually appreciated. One boy actually said, “Awright, awright, you want me to write white style?” I asked him what he meant, and he said, “All proper, like yes, ma’am, no ma’am.”

So here’s one full example from this hour, Can you guess where the author is a boy, a girl, or me?

Once upon a time there was a cat who lived in a castle. The cat was lonely until it met a female cat too. Her name was Ariel. And had a cat fight and pulled out a gun, three knives and [?] hammers. No, sorry, I was wrong. There were no knives, guns, and hammers in the castle. Instead of fighting, the two cats ate a huge pile of fish until they were very full. After they ate one of the cats pulled out a gun and shot the other one. It was sad and everyone got shot even everybody in the world. And popped back up and lived happily ever after, The End.

It felt so nice to be on a fully fictional, playful footing, all of us engaged in a shared process.

-Inda

January 24, 2008

4th grade, first hour

As I entered the classroom behind the kids I heard A say, “What we doin’ today?”
“What we doin’ today?” I repeated.
I took out my tape recorder and decided on the spot to do a mini-lesson on standard/Ebonics, which from now on in this blog I will call AAE, which seems to be the most current label for Black Communications, Ebonics, African American English, and all the other ways of naming how some African American people communicate at some times and among some people. The kids know and like Ebonics as a descriptor, and that’s fine, too.
D, switching the sentence, said, “What ARE we doing today?”
I said, “A said ‘what we doin’ today’ and D said, ‘what ARE we doing today.’ What’s the difference between those two ways of saying the same thing?”
Everyone blurted out something like the following: “One is Ebonics and one is standard English.” Yes, yes. It took several minutes of conversation and also looking at the two sentences on the board (I wrote them down) in order for the students to see that what I mean by my question was, HOW are the sentences different specifically? What’s different in spelling, syntax, etc etc. We agreed that absence of a G on doing and the assumed ARE in the Ebonics version were the two differences. “The Ebonics sentence does not need the ARE to be correct.” Anyway, I plan to transcribe the whole thing and write up the lesson more formally. But you get the idea of how it sounds…
Next a few people told some stories—D about Camp Sherwood, and A about nearly drowning one time (his cousin pulled him up).
Next we moved on to do some writing. We spoke a little bit about the upcoming MAP tests, and how they needed to learn how to approach the “genre” of the standardized test. The kids all feel that it’s long, and that stories are long – my sense is that my role is to just encourage them to take it all in stride and try their best on the test. A couple of kids don’t like not being able to “ask for help” at all, having to guess if they don’t know something. Later in the day I sat down with Ms. Jensen and Ms. Twellman and we talked over a couple of thoughts that had come up in the class.

4th grade, second hour

I repeated the mini-lesson on Ebonics and got some great stuff on tape from AP, who is a kid who struggles in school, has serious emotional concerns blocking his progress, yet has a natural ear for language and its varieties. For writing, some of the students wrote thoughts and ideas about Ebonics, others wrote about “a perfect Sunday,” and others individual things (A, for example, wrote a testimonial about Sherwood Forest, the camp he attended last summer.) AP wrote a piece of fiction, the longest amount of writing he’s ever done in the class:

“Super Kid
Once upon a time there was a rich boy who had a castle. He lived in a village. His name was TJ. He liked to go out in the woods. He likes bacon and egg in the morning every day. One day when he was walking in the wood he found a |chos|? emerald in a gigantic cave.”
What impresses me about this piece is the rigorous way AP has adopted and rendered the fairy tale formula—“once upon a time” as a genre. He sets up the WHO and the WHERE. He offers some context about the hero (“He likes to go out in the woods and eats a particular breakfast every day.”). And then he sets the action in motion. This is a very literary piece of text from a boy who has always seemed rather cut off from text-making. He loves listening to stories, and followed VERY closely last year when I read from The Well, however. But he is a difficult student to teach, mostly because he seems to hate school and in general seems to have to contend with pretty harsh realities outside of school.

The new boy from Oklahoma, R, wrote about a little gadget his mother implanted in his stomach in order to alert her to his breathing at night, which once stopped. His story rather fascinated the rest of us.

RB introduced me to a new Ebonics vocab expression—“What’s up, Mo?” It basically means, What’s up, dude? What’s up, dog?

Me: Whass up, Mo? I wonder where that came from.
RB: We just made it up.
Me; Who made it up?
RB: Everybody. We all just started sayin it.

RB is very very quick and attentive. I was trying to call attention to the things about ourselves we cannot control – like skin color – and how those things are different from the things we CAN control – like our speech.

Me: I mean, I can’t control the fact that my hair is floppy.
RB: You can control whether your hair is floppy. You can just put some gel in it to lay it down.

Of course she was right. In this day—with plastic surgery, gillions of products and ways of grooming ourselves beyond recognition—there really is very little about our appearance we can’t control if we really want to. And even skin color—they all know what Michael Jackson did to himself. And even though they generally do NOT approve of what he did, they understand that it is possible. I guess this is a good thing for RB to sense: she can have a say in both how she appears AND how she sounds. Also: I can’t get away with sloppy analogies.

SECOND GRADE

First the students wrote about super powers. If they could have any power, what would it be? I had written a paragraph on the board stating my own preference, and also listed a few other powers that came to mind. Their own replies were good efforts and heartfelt.

DT:
Invisible and Strong
I want to be invisible because when I be a police and a voctim running out a bank I can catch the victim. And I want to save the world.

[I think I might check what DT means by “victim.”]

AB:
I have a super power and my super power is I am a half mermaid, and a half person. And when I am in the ocean I am a mermaid and when I come out of the ocean I am a person and then I go to my house and get clothes and I go to school and be normal and do my work until I go home and go to the ocean until morning and when I am away I will put on my clothes and go too school. The end of my story bye bye for Ms. Shcaenen all done.

AJ:
I want every super power in the world. Because I can save people. In St. Louis, and people will like me more. And people won’t bully me. I will hold them up in the air too they can stop bullying me.

DF:
If I could have any super powers I would be Dasher [Dash, from The Incredibles] because I will be the fastist person in the world and I will dust everybody in St. Louis, India, China, Rochester New York. And then I will transform back into what I was before I got my superpowers.

TW [who has a sister in the same grade; they both come to RF4]:
If I could have any superpower it would be shapeshifter because I want to act like my sister and have her voice so they think I am her and turn [into] everything in the world.

KH:
If I had a super power I would want to fly. Flying I think is really fun. I would go everywhere. And if someone is chasing me I would fly up and they would not know where I went. Then I would fly home. I would fly with the birtd and if someone wants to fly with me I would grab their hand and we would go in the sky.

OH:
I want to be a fashion designer and make clothe just like That’s So Raven and then they can call me O, That’s So Raven Assistants and be a good fashion designer because I can sow shoes, pants. I want to be a super hero like when I get ready to go on a big trip. I love being a super duper hero for a long time and be a super and a good hero and keep it and be my power and I love my powers.

After this writing time we played the writing version of PASSWORD, where each child gets a noun and they have to write clues on the board to make the others guess what their word is. They cannot use the word itself. I get six kids going at the same time on the boards that rotate – so the class plays in halves. Some words:
RIBS, TOMATO, SHELF, SHOELACE, RAT, CLOWN, GRANDMOTHER

Can you guess the word from these two “real life” clues as written by second graders?

“It is very small. It is in salads. Some people eat it with nothing and some people have it as a salad. And it is very red and small.”

“Old. Your mother came from her. She need help. She in a wheelchair. In the store she stay a long time. She breathe through a machine. Somebody drive her.”

THIRD GRADE

Ms. Allen’s class had to go to PE so we were a very small group, which was nice. We did exactly the same lesson as second grade—the super powers and the password game.
In this class we had two kids who wanted to be mind readers, one who wanted Superman’s powers, and one who wanted to be able to have super speed so “I could go to Florida to see my grandma and grandpa. Go to Texas to see my cousin. And see the Statue of Liberty. This is a picture ofme on water.”

TG [who is very shy, never is quite confident, and always give s good try at all activities]:
I want to read everybody mind. I want to find out what everybody is thinking. I want them to be special to me and everybody. I want to be the best mind reader. I want to know what they are thinking but they are not saying. I want to know what people think. This is a picture of me doing it.

KH [super confidentt, often looks at me suspiciously]:
Mine Reading
Once upon a time there was a girl named K and she wished she’d read mines when she looked in the sky she saw a shooting star. So she wished what she wanted and the next day she woke up she read her four month nephew PJ’s mind. He was thinking that I wish I had 1,0001 dollars. K started laughing. K went to school and saw her friend T, E, M, J, K, M, and O. First, K read T’s mind then she read E’s mind she was wishing she was rich like M and O. The I was like okay ocrad [awkward] then M and J said what’s ocrad I said oh nothing then 3:30 came K went to after-school.

I love the way this story begins as a third-person tale about the author herself, then shifts into the first person at the end…I also love the way she identifies feeling awkward having access to her friends’ thoughts. Very true!

The Password game was also fun.

“It can destroy your home. It can mess up your town. It is very strong. They can kill you. You could get hurt.”
[TORNADO]

A nice week!

Inda

January 30, 2008

Fourth grade, first hour

We began with a chat about the “habitual be,” the “be” in an African American English sentence that indicates ongoing action. The students recognized the base word “habit” in habitual, because some woman had come to school talking about bullying and habitual teasing. So we saw that the sentence “That kid be mean,” means (in standard English) “That kid is usually, typically mean. By contrast, “that kid mean” in standard English means “That kid is being mean right now.”

The kids said they wanted to go outside for recess.
M said, “I hope Ms. Jensen come back because Ms. Twellman don’t like the cold but Mrs. Jensen do.”

A switched it:
“I hope Ms. Jensen comes back because Ms. Twellman does not like the cold but Ms. Jensen does.”

After a little more practice switching sentences back and forth, they wrote plays or monologues starring animal characters. I like this idea because then the way the animals speak – in what code – is up to the writer. D, for example, wrote about two dogs in the ‘hood—a pit bull and a rotweiler. One said, The dog catcher always messing with us so I’m go bite him on the butt for real.” New vocab: vaco means a vacant house.

MW’s play starred two rabbits:

Flopsy: I am making a garden for the picnice this Saturday.
Mopsy: Oh, great, may I help?
Flopsy: Sure.
Mopsy: Okay let’s get started.

Fourth grade, second hour

We began with a similar mini-lesson on code shifting, then the kids began drafting letters to people with the intention of airing or solving problems. It’s a version of the “change the world” exercise. We had another new boy come into the class, who asked an interesting question out of the blue: When bats hang upside down, why doesn’t the blood pound in their heads like it does ours? I hope to be able to answer that by next week.

To a prison warden:

Dear Mr. Officer:
I miss my dad because he been in jail for a long time and can you put him out of jail because he always did things for me and he cared for me and my mom he didn’t mean to hurt her and make his jail time less and I want to see him agin because he was the only dad I have and I need some one to play with and he bought me toys [?] he is a good person and he did a lot of things and I want him

To the Board of Ed:

Dear Board of Education:
I think you all should not close down Gundlach. I hope you can give this school 5 more years or 3. My name is…… I am a 4th grader here at Gundlach. My teacher is Mrs. H-A, principal Mrs. J. I been here every sense I was in kindergarden. Please try your best to save this school. And I will thank you with all my heart.
Thank you,
AW

Another one to a prison warden:

Can you please let my dad out of jail. I did not really know him but my mom lets me write to him. I think he sufared a nof. I miss him.

Second Grade/Third Grade

So we are launching a small unit on the Olympics – which can lead to conversation/writing/reading about China, other countries, geopgraphy, sports, some other global things.

I laid out four stations around the room with big information books about China. Each child had a pencil and a small pad and after a whole group discussion and orientation they set out in small groups to research China, where the Olympics are going to be held. None of the kids knew about the Olympics – what they were, how they worked – so I will back track next week and give them more background info to read, respond to. I asked them to take notes about the things they were learning about China that seemed interesting to them. Food, writing, customs, clothing, etc etc. Many of the children enjoyed trying to copy the writing patterns. They also loved having their own little yellow pad to work with: “I like these pads and there’s enough for everybody.” We also looked at the world maps, and saw how China was really on the other side of the planet.
We have a ways to go in this “reasearch” mode. Most of the children simply copied over the words directly from the information books. They do love doing this, however, and I think that something interesting happens when they read the words back to themselves. One second grader copied over the Chinese words in Chinese and then wrote:
“I wrote in Chinese because I want to learn. This girl crushes lime leaves into her bath water so she can smell good.”

Part two of the activity will be “translating” their notes into a letter to a younger cousin helping this cousin understand a little more about China. The concept is to transfer the information, summarize, excerpt, pull out important stuff and get it into their own words. We’ll see if this works. A few kids got started on this stuff:

LP (third grade):

“I would tell my little sister or brother that a health organization UNICEF and other partners hope to have freed the world from polio by 2005. Polio is a terrible disease.” Then he drew cartoon below. Two figures are speaking. One word bubble says: “A girl has a terrible disease.” The other one says, “Tell me more big brother.”

KP (third grade):

“The thing about China is that the writing is different and the food is different from American writing and different from American food. The food is different because China eat sticky rice and cake. That is what I know about China.

-Inda