Polar Bears

Today we read an article about polar bears.  Before we read the article, I showed the class the title of the article, "It's Even Too Cold For Polar Bears."  What a great title!  As we looked at the title I asked the class to think of questions that they thought they would be able to read while reading the text.

I stole this idea from a professional development day we had earlier this year.  I love the wording of that question.  It forces the students to come up with their own questions but it also forces some limitations on those questions.  The class came up with a great list of questions:

• Where did this happen?
• How cold was it?
• Did any polar bears die?
• Hom many polar bears was it too cold for?
• How did polar bears get too cold?

It was that last question that I wanted to know the answer to as well.  I mean they are polar bears.  After making the list, I passed out the article and the class read the text.  As they read the text they would put an "A" above the spot where they found their answer.  Here is the text of the article if you want to read and find the answers.

It's too cold for Chicago's resident polar bear.

The city's Lincoln Park Zoo says its polar bear, Anana, was kept inside Monday because of the record-low temperatures.

Zoo spokeswoman Sharon Dewar says that the below-zero weather might be comparable to what polar bears experience in the wild. But Anana doesn't have a thick layer of fat that bears typically get from eating things such as seals and whale carcasses.

That extra insulation would make it uncomfortable to live in Chicago during the rest of the year. So Anana gets a different diet.

While she stayed inside, Anana lounged in her comparatively balmy indoor climate that's kept at 40 to 50 degrees.

Anana usually has access to both an indoor and outdoor area. She'll be allowed to venture outside Tuesday.

I thought that was an amazing article. I think the class was pretty interested to learn about how polar bears are different in the zoo than in their habitat. What I love about the exercise is that students are creating their own questions as they read. They also are realizing that the answer to their questions can be found in text.

Hope you are all having a great week.

Crafting our Poems

The chapter we are reading now in Poetry Matters is about having students craft their poems, and it starts with this quote--

"The world is full of poets with languid wrenches who don’t bother to take the last six turns on their bolts."  —X.J. Kennedy

I am a writer who struggles with these last six turns.  I write a first draft and always think that I am done.  That is why this chapter is brilliant.  It really gives some simple strategies to help our students work on making their poems even better after the first drafts.  

The first piece of advice that Ralph Fletcher gave in the chapter was to try using fragments.  After we read this section of the book I shared the poem Subways are People by Lee Bennett Hopkins.  

Subways are people-

People standing

People sitting

People swaying to and fro

Some in suits

Some in tatters

People I will never know.

Subways are people-

Some with glasses

Some without

Boy with smile

Girl with Frown

People dashing

Steel flashing

Up and down and round the town.

Subways are people-

People old

People new

People always on the go

Racing, running, rushing people

People I will never know. 

Then the class had some free writing time to try and use fragments in their poems. I thought the class did an amazing job of creating poems using fragments. Here are just some of the amazing examples:

Buses--

Kids yelling
Kids screaming

Kids out
Kids in

Kids bouncing
Kids jumping

Kids going here 

and going there

This was just a little of the poem.  I love how this student captured the energy (that is a nice word) of the bus.  

New York

Dark night

light buildings

cars driving, drifting on 

the go

different colors

even some I do not know

Tall buildings

small houses

twisty turn roads

horns honking

people yelling

Cars driving, drifting 

on the go

I loved this bit of writing about New York.  I also love the confidence this author shows by repeating a line from their poem at the end.

Reds

Reds, Red

ball flying

ball zipping

bat swinging

people cheering

innings ending 

home runs happening

Run Reds go!

There is more to this poem that makes the ball park come alive.  

When the students were done creating this new writing, they went back to pieces of writing in their Writer's Notebooks and looked for places where they could try to add fragments.  This allows the students to practice those, "last six turns on their bolt" that Kennedy talked about in his quote.  

Tomorrow I hope to show you some more of the work the students are working on to make their poems even better.  I also promise to catch you up on some of the things we are doing in reading and social studies.

I hope you are all having a great week.

Book Meeting

Today I got to attend a book club.  I loved this because of how many book clubs that I make our students attend.  My book club was a group of Donovan teachers getting together to discuss the book Notebook Know-How by Aimee Buckner.

It is amazing to get the chance to get together with the remarkable teachers that I am lucky enough to work with and share and discuss new ideas.  Today in our group we discussed how different teachers organize their notebooks, what goes in our notebooks, and the struggle to find the balance between writing with our students and conferring with our students.

All these are areas that I am constantly thinking about and tinkering with in my room.  It is the last idea that I struggle with the most as a teacher.  I want the class to see me as a writer.  I want them to see that I struggle.  I want them to see me work to make my writing better.  I want them to see me be successful.  I want them to see how I work through the writing process.  I think when the class sees me as a writer they realize that authors are not these mystical beings who produce these amazing texts out of the blue.  They are normal everyday people who take the time to notice things in the world, write them down, and then work hard to make their ideas better.

At the same time I want to have conferences with my students.  I want to be able to know exactly what they are working on in their notebook.  I want to be able to see the strategies that they are experimenting with in the notebook.  I want the chance to sit and just talk one-on-one about writing.  

In the end I do not think I should pick one over the other.  I think, as with almost everything in life, I need to find a balance.  I need to write with my students and at other times I need to put on my conferencing hat and have conferences.  I think year after year I get better at deciding when it is time to be a writer and when it is time for conferences.  Hopefully by thinking about these ideas and discussing them with great teachers I will give our students exactly what they need.

Thanks to Mrs. Reuber for organizing and facilitating this book club.

I hope everyone is having a great week.

Writing Joy

Today in both classes I had the best time during our daily writing time.  I always enjoy our writing time but today every second I turned around I saw something that I loved.

The first thing I noticed as I was walking around the room for conferences was a student with a poem out.  Now this does not seem like much but it was a poem that we had not talked about in some time.  I asked the student why he had the poem out.  "I wanted to write a poem about my family and make it like this poem."  I could not have been happier.  Good writers get ideas from other good writers.  Here was an author putting that into practice.  The poem this author shared during share time was brilliant.

Then I turned around and what did I hear, "That does not sound right."  Amazing words coming from a young author.  I leaned down and conference number two started.  These words, "That does not sound right," show so much about this young author.  First of all it shows that the student is going back and rereading their writing as they write.  This student realizes that revising does not just happen when a draft is finished it is constant.  I also love that this student has realized that writing needs to sound write.  This author got to work and when it was time to share it sounded amazing.

Later in the day I was having another conference and I saw a student who had written words in a very interesting pattern.  Some of the letters were up and some were down.  I asked why they had decided to write the letters in this interesting pattern.  "Mr. Tarr the poem is about fall and the wind is blowing the letters up and down like leaves."  Brilliant.  This author realizes that authors make choices and those choices need to have a reason behind them.  The poem was outstanding.

Finally (although I could share more) I had a conference with a student who was flipping back-and- forth between two pages.  When I asked why, the student showed me the first version of this poem.  I was so impressed and I told the student that I loved that he was reworking the poem.  Then it got even better he showed me the very first draft.  Here was a young author working on his poem for the third time before his first draft.  Here was a young author who has realized that good writers do not just crank out a first draft.  They work and work and work to make their writing better.  The amazing thing, each draft did get better.

I love when I can walk around our class and see students putting what they are learning into practice.  I am lucky to be blessed with such amazing students who are willing to try these things that will help make them better writers.

I hope you had a great start to your week.

Texts, Texts, and more Texts

In class today small groups started to present information about the historic tribes of Ohio that they had been learning about since Wednesday.  As the groups shared students were keeping track and making a timeline of when the different tribes arrived in Ohio.

When we were done listening to half of the groups share, I showed the class a map of North America from the 1700's and a list from a General Store in Ft. Wayne Indiana from the early 1800's.  While we were looking at these two texts I started to think of all the different types of texts we had read in the last two and a half days.

We had read a commercial, a how to video, poems, a text book, a map, a list (that happened to be a primary source), our independent reading books, dictionaries, and the class is filled with small reading groups that are reading all kinds of books.  I was happy to see such variety in such a small period of time.

One of the new shifts in education is introducing students to a variety of texts and making sure that there is an increased emphasis on nonfiction texts that students read.  I think that this shift could have a huge impact on our students.  I know that when I was in school during Language Arts time we only read stories.  This was great if you liked stories, but I loved reading nonfiction.  The lack of variety of texts that I was exposed to was startling.

Hopefully by exposing students to a variety of texts more and more students can find texts that they love.  Also the exposure to multiple types of texts will better prepare the students for what they may read later in life.  Now even though I am all for exposing students to new types of text, I do want to make sure that I keep exposing the class to quality literature.  After all I am Language Arts Teacher and literature is an extremely important part of my life.  I hope that by sharing some of my favorite authors and books that our students will develop a lifelong love of reading.

When I think about some of the books and authors that we have read together or aloud, the list is quite impressive.  In read aloud we have read last years Newbery Medal winner, then we read Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin.  Grace Lin is an author who has won her fair share of awards.  Our next read aloud book is going to be from Kate DiCamillo who just last week was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

In reading groups we have groups reading books by DiCamillo, Lin, Cynthia Lord, Beverly Cleary, and so many more amazing authors.  And then there are all the authors we have read in poetry.  This year we have read Frost, Hughes, Heard, Prelutsky, and Sandburg just to name a few.

I hope that by surrounding our students with all of this quality literature and also exposing them to all the different types of texts that exist in the world that our class will be filled with lifelong readers.

Hope you all have had a great week and will get some time to relax this weekend.

Great Day

Wow today was such a good day.  Both classes were working hard, and I had so much fun.

We are continuing to read the book Poetry Matters by Ralph Fletcher.

I absolutely love this book (I realize I have said that before).  The reason I think it is so amazing is because it makes some very complicated things seem so simple.  Also I think the students can relate so well to the book because Fletcher uses examples from his poetry but also includes examples from fourth, fifth and sixth graders.  The students see these examples and realize that they can do these things that authors like Fletcher and Heard use in their writing.  

We have already talked about the first two pillars of poetry (emotion and image).  This week we have started to discuss the third pillar of poetry which according to Fletcher is music.  In the music chapter the class has been introduced to the ideas of using alliteration and repetition for emphasis.  To show the students some other examples of poems that use alliteration and repetition we read the two following poems as a class.

I Am Running in a Circle

I am running in a circle
and my feet are getting sore,
and my head is
spinning
spinning
as it's never spun before,
I am
dizzy
dizzy
dizzy.
Oh! I cannot bear much more,
I am trapped in a
revolving
...volving
...volving
...volving door!

~Jack Prelutsky

The WolfGeorgia R. Durston

When the pale moon hides and the wild wind wails,
And over the treetops the nighthawk sails,
The gray wolf sits on the world's far rim
And howls: and it seems to comfort him.

The wolf is a lonely soul, you see,
No beast in the wood, nor bird in the tree,
But shuns his path; in the windy gloom
They give him plenty, and plenty of room.

So he sits with his long, lean face to the sky
Watching the ragged clouds go by.
There in the night, alone, apart,
Singing the song of his lone, wild heart.

Far away, on the world's dark rim
He howls, and it seems to comfort him.

Today after we shared the Jack Prelutsky poem I was amazed by the writing that I saw and heard during share time.  What I loved about what I saw during writing time was students using the example poem that we shared in class to create their own poem.  I had a student write a poem about being in a snowball fight, another write about babysitting their annoying little brother, another write about indoor soccer, another write about Kentucky basketball, and yet another write about gymnastics.  What all the poems had in common was they all had used Jack Prelutsky as a writing teacher.  

These poems looked like, sounded like, and felt like the poem I Am Running in a Circle, but all the poems were created by our fourth graders.  I heard another teacher this summer say she loves it, "when her students stand on the shoulders of other writers."  Today our class was definitely standing on the shoulders of other writers and their writing was amazing.  I will try and grab some of the notebooks this weekend so I can share some of the examples with you.

I hope you are all having a great week.

We are Back!!

I will not lie I had been going a little stir crazy at home, so I was so excited to get back to our room today.  I am just going to imagine that all of the students were just as excited as me.  I am sure they all went running out of their doors to leap onto the bus and get back to school.

Since we are still so close to the New Year, I wanted to focus on goal setting today.  To me goals and resolutions are exactly the same.  To start our discussion about goal setting we watched a commercial.

We watched this video three times.  The first time that the class watched they just watched for their enjoyment.  The second time I asked them to look for what they noticed (they noticed a ton).  Finally the third time they watched I asked them to look for what the young man grabbed after he set his new goal.  They were all able to tell me he grabbed his goggles.  After I got the answer, I had the groups turn and talk and think about why he grabbed his goggles.  They all knew that the boy was going to practice.

I love this commercial for talking about goals.  It is so easy to make a goal.  I have made a ton since the New Year.  The challenge of goal setting is the work that follows.  At an early release earlier this year a presenter showed us a video from a U.S. olympian about how she sets her goals.  I decided that we would watch a few parts of the videos to see how an olympian set her goals.  

  

In the video Emily Cook talks about how she made her goal to get to the Olympics.  Then she creates her goal pyramid and talks about all the steps she had to make to reach her goal.  

I really want our students to have goals.  I want them to have goals about school, about their future jobs, about where they want to go to college, and about anything else they want.  At the same time I want them to understand that when you set a goal this is just the first step in the process.  

Over the next few days we are going to have the class make goals for something they want to accomplish during the rest of this school year.  Today they worked on creating a goal about anything they wanted.  I enjoyed listening to all of the different goals from the classes.  I also shared some goals that I had made for this year.

Goal Number One:  Run the Flying Pig half-marathon in under one hour and 45 minutes (I realize this is not a blazing fast pace, but I would be happy).

Goal Number Two:  Continue to work on speaking fluent Spanish.  I have found a great app and have been working each day since the New Year.  My mother speaks fluent Spanish and she always wanted my brother and myself to learn, so hopefully I can show her I have finally learned.

Goal Number Three:  Try to add one blog post a week where I talk about something from the professional world of education.  

Goal Number Four:  Read more books.  I have gotten used to reading articles and blogs online.  I want to get back to reading more books. 

Have any of you set goals to accomplish in 2014?  Do you want to share them with us?  What will you do to make sure you accomplish the goals?  Let me know by leaving a comment if you want.  I would love to share your responses with the class.  

Hope you are all having a great week.