Seedfolks: building off of common ground

"...everybody left.  Buildings abandoned.  Men with no work drinking from nine to five instead, down there in the lot.  Always the sirens, people killing each other." -Ana (Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, pg. 7)

"It had been such a wonderful change to see people making something for themselves instead of waiting for a welfare check.  To see part of the neighborhood looking better every day, and to smell those good smalls of growing plants." -Florence (Seedfolks by Paul Fleischman, pg. 85)

     It's amazing how a little bit of green can completely change a community, even bring a community together like it did in Seedfolks.  Last year I spent my spring break helping out in an after-school program and spending time with the people that live in one of the roughest neighborhoods in Philadelphia.  While I was there, what shocked me the most was how little "green" there was.  There was trash and needles everywhere on the ground, but not trees or bushes.  The parks were all concrete and the little grass that was present was either brown or covered with trash.  I couldn't imagine growing up in a place that had more glass bottles on the ground than trees.

      Early this semester I went to see Majora Carter speak at the IU auditorium.  She is an activist and consultant that has played a huge part in the greening of the South Bronx and other cities around the country.  She spoke on how the greening of a city can truly transform a community for the better.  She said that crime rates and other social "problems" significantly decrease in cities that have parks.  Many of her projects provide employment and empowerment for the community members. While I was listening to her speak, I kept getting all these grand ideas in my head about partnerships between my future classroom and local activists and all these different things I could do to empower the students in my classroom through hands-on experiences.

      The garden in the book Seedfolks brought that desolate community together.  The people had something to take pride in, something that made their community visually beautiful.  The garden bonded them together and connected them with their physical location.  It provided them with healthy food to eat and a non-threatening place to meet the people that lived next door to them, the people they saw in the store and on the street everyday but had never thought about talking to.

Photo from www.greeningofdetroit.com

It makes me excited thinking about getting involved myself in projects like this, and then getting my students involved.  Something like this with a class could be a beautiful collision of life lessons, practical skills, and academic "standards."  And that, it what makes me excited to teach.

*another cool organization to check out is The Greening of Detroit.  They have been doing work like this in Detroit for over 20 years now!  They do a variety of youth and community educational programs and would a be a good resource for ideas of things to do with a class.

Poetry is more than the words on the page

"It's the poet inside of me who knows how to live.  It's the poet inside of me who is wide awake, and ready to embrace the beauty, the challenges, and the mysteries in life.  It's the poet inside of me who celebrates living on a daily basis, and finds extraordinary joys in very ordinary moments" (p. 10)

    This is an excerpt from Kalli Dakos' letter to young poets in the book Seeing the Blue Between.  I love everything about this quote.  It captures so much truth about poetry and what it means to be a poet.  Kids don't understand and are never taught that poetry is more than just the lines you write down on the page.  Poetry allows you to see the world in a way that is different than how most people see it.  This was the message behind many of the poet's letters in this book.  Observe the world around.  Use your sense.  Make inferences.  Give objects a voice.  Explore words. Make up words. Expose truth.  This is what being a poet is really about.

By Shell Silverstein, a great classroom poet.

   But how do we get there?  Very few students could just sit down and write an amazing poem.  We must help them along the way.  The Multigenre Research Paper book gave many different mini-lessons on poetry that can help kids practice their poetry skills.  It seems like it is best to give students structure in their poems to begin with.  Teach them to write acrostic poems, or outlined poems like the "I am" poems.  This will help them gain confidence in their poetry abilities.  Then give them free reign.  Have them read other poet's poetry.  Let them write in free verse.  I think this is the part that many teachers miss out on.  So many kids have bad experiences with poetry because all they have written are Haiku's and acrostic poems.  They haven't really become poets.  Give students chances to look at the world in a new way.  Challenge them to use their senses to write.  To break the rules of "normal" English.  Give them the challenge of painting a picture with their words.  That is true poetry.

   The key is though, as teachers, we must show them how.  This doesn't mean that you have to be a wonderful poet yourself, but be familiar with poetry.  Try and understand how poets view the world.  Have students read poems and talk about them and the perspective they give.  Very few people are just born poets, everybody has to learn at some point in time.  Teaching students to view the world as a poet is beneficial in more aspects than just writing poetry.  It helps students learn how to take in the world around them and be aware of what is really going on.

I Think You Two Will Get Along Quite Well.

    Explorer's Club meet MGRP, MGRP meet Explorer's Club. I think you two will get along quite well. You both involve both reading and writing.  You both encourage students to write about things that interest them.  And you both allow for different genres of sharing information than just a straight up research paper.
    The article "The Explorers Club: The Sky Is No Limit for Learning" by Premlata Mansikhani explains her process of exploring and research that she did with her ESL classroom.  In many ways it reminded me of the Multigenre Research Paper.  It was led by student questioning an creativity.  The students were encouraged to present their findings in more ways than just writing.  Some drew and illustrated; one girl made a puppet show.
   I think that this inquiry-based learning is especially great for ESL students.  I tutor two young girls from Korea who are learning English and one of their biggest struggles is that they just don't have all of the experiences with words and subject matters that they need as a frame of reference.  They don't know a lot of words or expressions because they have never heard or seen them used before.  But by engaging them in researching a question that they have, and supporting them throughout the research, hopefully they could begin building up their reference base.
    I do have a few questions about this process though.  What is the best way to support the kids while they are doing their research?  How do you find books that are easy enough for them to read and get good information from, but not too hard that they will get discouraged by attempting to read them? 

    On another, somewhat related note, I went home this weekend and went through a pile of stuff my mom is getting rid of.  I found tons of notebooks that I had written in from around 2nd grade to around 6th grade.  I have posted a copy of one of the pages I wrote.  It is my writing that I did after researching a question that I had always wondered about.  The memory of writing this is very vague in my mind.  I can't remember if I wrote it for school or just for myself.  Either way, it is good support that kids enjoy writing about questions that they have.  I just thought it was interesting that I was reading about this topic of inquiry and research in the classroom and then I stumbled upon my own early research paper and thought I would share it with all of you.

Small baby steps

   In both Elizabeth Hale's Crafting Writers and the article School Talk: Conferring in the Writing Workshop the focus is on teaching students small specific skills that they can use in their writing.  I think so often as teachers we see the "big picture."  We can see the potential that our students have and immediately we want them to be there.  We want them to learn everything all at once and want to fix every aspect of their piece of writing.  We get overwhelmed by how much we have to teach them.  I'm sure this does nothing but overwhelm our students.  When you go into a conference and say, "you need to fix this, this, this, and this," I'm sure that does nothing to advance a child's confidence or desire to write.
   It is much more manageable if we focus on small things that they are doing well, helping them improve strategies that they are trying out, and introduce new, specific strategies they can try.  Helping the students take baby steps as writers will help them improve.  It will build their confidence and give them realistic, foreseeable goals to work toward with their writing.
   One question I have is how exactly do you decide what is most important to talk about with your students during the conference.  How do you decide which skill out of the many skills that they might need to learn to introduce to them?

I am not a planner...

   I have another confession to make: I am probably one of the most unorganized people in the School of Ed.  Just last week I finally bought all of my binders and folders I needed for my classes.  Up until that point I had one notebook and one binder for everything.  Papers were everywhere.  It really was a disaster.  I still don't have a planner for this year.  Even worse, when I do have a planner I never use it.  I usually end up writing things in after I have done them just so it looks like I use it.  Pathetic, I know.
   Using a planner is just not the way I am wired.  I keep things pretty well organized in my mind, but I also hate having a scheduled planned out that I feel like I have to stick to.  I am a very "fly by the seat of my pants" type of person.  A huge part of the excitement of life is not knowing what is coming next.  I was a counselor at an overnight camp this summer.  I was the counselor that never wore a watch; I started off with a Dora the Explorer watch, but she drowned in the pool on the first day of camp (I took that as a sign that I didn't really need one).  My cabin was always that last ones to arrive to different events, and I was always the last one to turn my lights out at night.  My campers would ask me what we were doing next and I would always tell them "It's a surprise!  You'll find out when we get there!"
   However, school is much different than camp.  Sometimes my laid-back personality scares me a little bit going into the field of teaching.  Often times, kids really need structure to help them focus, especially the littler ones.  I'm afraid I won't be able to provide them with the type of structure that they need.  How much structure do kids really need anyway?

An example of a tool I could use to help organize my classroom

   As I was reading through Crafting Writers by Elizabeth Hale, it really hit me how organized most teachers are and need to be.  I was so impressed how it mentioned how organized all of her conference sheets were and the template of a form to fill out after conferencing with your students.  Most teachers are already pressed for time, so you can't really afford to waste time looking for student papers and records.  It just helps things run more smoothly when there is organization.
   At the same time though, I think learning is pretty chaotic, and should be in some sense.  If you truly have a classroom that is student-centered, I think it probably will look a little bit crazy because students may be doing different things at the same time.  They will be discovering things through having experiences.  I think that I can use my free-spirit as a strength in the classroom.  I will be willing to adapt my plans to what my students need.  If we get off topic, but learning is occurring, I think that is ok.
    This isn't to say though that I shouldn't plan anything.  I know that it is something that I really need to work on.  I think I will have to find a good, loose organizational system that leaves room for my spontaneity, but still provides structure that students and myself need.

How on Earth Did I Learn All This Stuff?????

       How on earth did I learn how to write?  Reading through Crafting Writers  by Elizabeth Hale made me think back to the good old days when I was in elementary school.  I think I remember doing some of the mini-lessons that she talks about, but really it all seems very fuzzy.  I get what I actually did confused with what the teacher that interned with in high school did with her elementary class.  She was very intentional about teaching students how to make their writing more interesting, especially their stories.  I remember her teaching lessons on how to capture the attention of your audience, how to use sounds in your writing, and how to add details.
       I do remember in second grade working on writing a detail paper.  Each year in my school district, we would spend a week writing a paper that went in our school records.  In second grade we had to write about our favorite food and describe it using all of our different senses.
      I feel like there is a very big disconnect though between the type of writing you do in elementary school and what you do for the rest of your life.  Most of what I can remember about elementary school writing (probably through 4th grade or so) has to do with writing narratives and fictional stories.  After that, it seems like most of my writing has been academic papers, book analyses, research papers, and things of that sort.  Very rarely do I feel like I got to be creative with my writings except for a few assignments in my AP English class.
    So, my question is, did all of that intentional instruction (or "teaching crafts" as Hale would say) on how to make narratives and stories interesting help me with my academic writing somehow?  They are such different genres of writing.  Maybe the exposure and experience with language helped my master how to manipulate words to have them say what I want.  I could have transferred that from fun writing to academic writing.
    I guess I just wish that there wouldn't be such a drastic cut off.  I wish that middle school and high school teachers would allow students to still enjoy writing, to just write for the sake of writing.  I think though that because this isn't always the case, it is so important for elementary teachers to expose their students to writing as an art form.  Then, maybe, when they do get into middle school and high school, they will have the desire to be creative with writing on their own.  By teaching our students these specific skills, we can help them for the endless amounts of academic writing that is headed their way, as well as direct them toward a life-long passion of writing and an appreciation of the skills of a good writer.

Choices Choices Choices...

            Indecisive.  That would be one word that I would definitely use to describe myself.  However I am an odd type of indecisive; I either can’t make a decision because there are too many choices, or I have a very strong feeling about something and I go with it without looking back for one second.  I am always the last to order when I go to a restaurant and I usually make up my mind by doing a last minute round of "eenie meenie minie moe."  Then there are other times that I just pick something without really thinking about all the options and just run with it, kind of like my decision to come to Indiana from Michigan.

            Projects like the Multigenre Research Paper are like honey my lips – sweet, but sometimes for me it is too sweet that it makes me uncomfortable.  I love the freedom to be able to choose any topic that I want to write about.  I love that there are no restrictions on what I can chose to learn more about, that I get to spend my time researching something that makes me excited.  At the same time though I am so overwhelmed.  I have so many different passions and interests that I don't know where to begin.  I feel like a little kid with a sweet tooth that is walking into FAO Schweets for the first time.  I'm sure that with time though I will be able to narrow it down and make a decision that I will be excited about.

            It's good for me to be experiencing this because I am sure that there will be kids in my future classrooms that feel just like I do.  I am a big supporter of letting kids have a lot of freedom with their learning, writing especially.  I think it is such a valuable experience for kids to have being able to pick a topic that they want to devote time to learning and writing about.  I love that in the Multigenre Paper the students also get to communicate their research in different forms of writing.  Information is all around them and by them learning how to communicate through different genres of writing they will also be learning how to learn from different genres.

             So my question is: How much structure is too much, and how much is too little?  I think the answer will vary from student to student.  There will be kids that get an idea and just take off, and then there will be other kids that need more help discovering their passions and how to find information and then communicate that information.  I think this Multigenre Research Paper can cater to the needs of a large variety of students.