Slice of Life | Reflections on the Teche

Archive for the ‘Slice of Life’ Category

I Spy a Septercet

Posted in Poetry, Slice of Life, Writing, tagged Jane Yolen, science poems, septercet on September 20, 2016| 12 Comments »

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If you follow my blog, you know I am a little obsessed with poetry. In the world of words, syllables, and sounds, I find puzzles in making them all fit together into something meaningful. Jane Yolen was recently featured on Michelle Barnes’ Today’s Little Ditty with a challenge to write septercets. This is a form Jane Yolen created with the pattern of seven syllables in three line stanzas.

I challenged my students to write septercets. And I played along.

I Spy

Looking for spinning spiders
hiding between limbs of trees
miraculous thread designs

Studying patterns of light
refraction reflecting bows
miraculous sky designs

Skipping stones from uncle’s pier
a ripple breaks the surface
miraculous water designs

–Margaret Simon

Can you write a septercet about the harvest moon above? Share in the comments and on Ditty of the Month padlet.

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DigiLitSunday: Learning from Each Other

Posted in Blogging, Digital Learning, Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged Slice of Life, student blogging on September 18, 2016| 5 Comments »

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Lani watches a video about solar storms on Wonderopolis.

Yesterday I made the biggest mistake of my life. I went outside in a big, fat LIGHTNING STORM! I almost got struck by lightning too! (Kids, just don’t make my life choices.) It all started in Breaux Bridge…

I went to Dixie RV ”Super Store” to shop for a vacation RV. Out of the crystal blue sky fell a raindrop. It started drizzling. (I don’t know How it was possible, when all the clouds were pearly white.)

In a matter of SECONDS it started raining in like the flood was back. The ditches were filling up in 0.2 seconds. Then, the lightning started acting like stupid Angry Birds and I was the little Piggie with a phone as an egg. To make matters worse, Dixie RV has to be rich and have golf carts to ride around in the windy rain. While the rain was blowing in my face I noticed a tragedy. My phone was getting wet! I screamed in my mind so loud that I am sure everyone heard me.

I got out of the golf cart and a lighting strike was about 2 inches from meeting my face! I screamed to the gods and cried of scaredness. Hey! You would cry too! Guarantee!!! That experience has taught me a very important lesson: NEVER GO OUT IN A LIGHTNING STORM! BAD IDEA!!!!

Slice of Life by Lani (5th grade)

Every week my students write a Slice of Life on our class kidblog site, Mrs. Simon’s Sea. With digital tools such as grammarly, edit, copy, paste, etc., they can successfully post a small piece of their lives. Some of my students, like Lani, write these with ease. Lani sees the drama in everyday life.

I used the above slice as a mentor text this week. I wanted my students to notice how a small moment can be big. I wanted them to identify craft moves to emulate. So I asked them, “What do you notice?” We made a list.

All caps used to show emphasis.
exaggeration (hyperbole) that creates interest.
paragraph structure
ellipses…
parenthetical statement (adds voice)
imagery “crystal blue sky” and “pearly white clouds”
simile (metaphor)

Madison tried it out.

Two NIGHTS ago there was a LITERAL LIGHTNING STORM!!!! It all started on my way to Olive Garden…..

We were just on the highway out of my cousins trailer park and when I was looking out of the window and then there was huge flash of lightning and another and they scared me, but, atleast they stayed in the clouds!

After a few minutes, when I was looking out of the front window, there was a HUGE flash of lightning and I practically jumped out of my seat, and since the sky was so black that you couldn’t see the clouds, I was really scared!(It was scary since you couldn’t see where the lightning was going to come from.)

Slice of Life by Madison (3rd grade)

Drafting and revising a weekly slice gives my students practice in writing long about a small moment, a chance to try out craft moves, and a platform for their own voice. For me, when my students compose digitally, I am able to easily grab mentor texts for lessons. I can hold up my students as examples. I can shine a light on good writing.

Join the conversation by leaving your link.

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Slice of Cleaning Out

Posted in Poetry, Slice of Life, Writing, tagged Naomi Shihab Nye on September 6, 2016| 15 Comments »

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This long Labor Day weekend was just the time I needed to clean out. Usually it’s a summer chore, but this summer I traveled quite a bit, so I put it off. In a month, my daughter is getting married. We are hosting the rehearsal dinner at our house. I want things to look nice.

Obviously, no one will be looking in my drawers, but I’ll know they are neat and organized.

Cleaning out also leads to memories. I found this Thanku poem written by Kylon when he was in third grade. I think he’s in 8th grade this year.

I was thinking about the little gems and memories today when I wrote poetry with my students. We were discussing Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem Valentine for Ernest Mann and how poems can hide.

Note: Kylon wrote this poem, but Kieran was the boy who cried on the last day of school. Both were gifts in their own way.

Poems Hide

Sometimes when you aren’t even looking, you find them,
tucked into the junk drawer, sticking out,
saying, “Here I am; Read me aloud!”

That’s where I found this poem.
I was looking for something else,
a roll of tape maybe,
but what I found was this gift
from that last day of school
when you cried into your mother’s lap
because you would never be in third grade again
with me,
with Mr. Pants, the class guinea pig,
or with that desk
that had become your sacred space.

Things change, Kieran,
but memories live on,
Like poems
in the junk drawer.

–Margaret Simon

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Slice of Life: Writing Free

Posted in Photography, Slice of Life, Writing, tagged Brian Doyle, hummingbirds, Katherine Bomer, notebooks, student writers, The Journey is Everything on August 29, 2016| 13 Comments »

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Thanks to Carol Varsalona for this image to add my words to.

Every time I walk by the kitchen window, I look toward the hummingbird feeder. I put it out after the flood two weeks ago. The rain had stopped. A hummingbird flew to the window and hovered looking right at me, as if he was saying, “Where’s the sweet stuff?” It didn’t take me long to find the feeder and a storage of food in the cabinet, but he did’t return…for days. I wondered if he ever would.

He’s there now, and almost every time I look. I’ve come to depend on his appearance. Like he’s the rainbow after the storm. He’s the sign we all need that life goes on.

Photo by Margaret Simon

Last week I read aloud the essay “Joyas Voladoras” by Brian Doyle to a group of 6th graders. This is the first essay in Katherine Bomer’s book, The Journey is Everything: Teaching Essays that Students Want to Write for People who Want to Read Them.

In his essay, Brian Doyle crushes our own hearts by writing about the hearts of hummingbirds.

(Hummingbird) hearts are stripped to the skin for the war against gravity and inertia, the mad search for food, the insane idea of flight. The price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer more heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures than any other living creature. It’s expensive to fly. You burn out. You fry the machine. You melt the engine.

My students audibly gasped. Their reaction was pure emotion.

Katherine’s book leads us all on a quest for that reaction from our readers.

Watching my hummingbird, (Yes, he’s mine. I’ve named him Chuey), I realize that the smallest of beings, those minuscule moments, can bring about an emotional reaction.

However, to be open to these moments, I must be willing to write…every day.

Monday, I asked my students to start the class time sitting with their notebooks for 10 minutes and just writing. This freedom to express whatever was happening in their heads excited my young writers. There wasn’t a sound except the clicking of pencils for 10 minutes. Then they couldn’t wait to share!

Jacob wrote about a song he couldn’t get out of his head.
Noah wrote about imagining that everything was made of candy.
Madison wrote about the fire drill earlier in the school day.

To grow my young students into writers, I need to help them view their world as something worth writing about. To show them, I join them. I write freely and share the dribble that comes out on the page. I talk to them about how we must weed through the dribble to find some good stuff. To find those small moments worth savoring and sharing.

If you missed it, here’s the link to the storify for the #DigiLitSunday Twitter chat with Katherine Bomer.

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Mississippi Book Festival

Posted in Slice of Life, Writing, tagged middle-grade authors, Mississippi Book Festival, writing on August 23, 2016| 15 Comments »

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Mississippi Book Festival 2016

I am lucky in so many ways. I grew up in the great state of Mississippi, my parents still live there, so I was able to attend the best book festival ever. The author line-up was a middle-grade teacher/author’s dream come true. Just look at that picture above. There’s me with Kate DiCamillo, and me with Jacqueline Woodson, and me with Irene Latham, me with Kathi Appelt, and me, my mom, and my blogger friend Keri with Augusta Scattergood.

Surrounded by such amazing authors and just plain smart generous people I felt amazing, smart, and generous. I also got brave. I realized early in the day that when you ask a question, a famous author knows you and likes you better.

I listened while Kate DiCamillo told stories that I had heard before (at NCTE 2015, on a streaming video with Mr. Schu, and on The Yarn podcast). But as she spoke and told her stories, funny ones that I never tire of hearing, I remembered on The Yarn interview that she said the only book she would consider rewriting was Tale of Despereaux because of its complicated plot structure. As a teacher of smart kids, I happen to love the structure of Despereaux. It makes for great conversations about craft. So I held up my hand and said that to her, face to face; she was looking right into my eyes.

And Kate said that the narrator in Despereaux guides the reader and guided her, too. Isn’t that a beautiful answer? When I stood in the forever-line to get her to sign my books, she knew me. Well, at least for that moment she did.

Kate (I can call her by her first name now since she knows me) left me with this advice as a fellow writer: “Write your Heart.” I have a WIP (work in progress) that is just that, my heart, so I am comforted by that advice.

With my new brave on, I asked Jacqueline Woodson a question, too. She talked mostly about her new book Another Brooklyn, but I wanted to know how she speaks to social justice through her picture books, specifically Each Kindness.

She told the story that led her to write Each Kindness. She was visiting her daughter’s 2nd grade classroom. A girl came in with striped pants on. Jacqueline admired her pants, but then she overheard another child tell this girl, “Why’d you wear those pants to school?” And the girl covered her pants with her jacket the rest of the day.

Jacqueline says you can’t be didactic with kids. You have to teach them through story, so she thought about how all of us at one time or other have probably said a mean thing that we could never take back. Each Kindness makes us think about what we say and the ripples our words may cause. I so admire Jacqueline for her social consciousness and for her gift of language.

Here is advice to writers from Jacqueline Woodson.

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Slice of Sunshine

Posted in Gratitude, Slice of Life, Writing, tagged art therapy, Great Flood of 2016, Louisiana, sunshine on August 16, 2016| 9 Comments »

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The rain started early Friday morning. I knew this was a serious rain because school was cancelled 5 minutes before I walked out the door. The rain stayed for days, falling in sheets for hours and hours. By Friday afternoon, the news media was calling this an Historic Flood. One of my colleagues posted on Facebook that her house was going under. I watched and waited. Finally a text came that she and her family were rescued and safe.

But the rain kept falling. By Saturday morning, I went into a panic. The bayou water had not risen this high in the 12 years we’d been living here, and neighbors said not in 20+ years. This was truly an historical event.

The sun peeks through the trees. Water is up to the back step.

We put the furniture up, rolled rugs, emptied book shelves, and watched and waited.

Sofas raised up on kitchen chairs. Mimi watches the sun come out.

Then on Sunday morning, the sun came out. The water was a few feet from our back door, but it hadn’t come in.

Not everyone in our area was as lucky. This incessant rain was worse than any hurricane. And the flood waters did not discriminate. Everyone here knows someone who is cleaning up today.

Painting the rain, collaborative work by a mother and son at the shelter.

In my gratitude, I went to the shelter in our City Park to help out with an art activity with the kids. It was crazy and messy and just what I needed.

Messy art is the best kind!

Today, I want to focus on the sunshine.

The sun will come out.
We know this is true.
There is always light after the rain.

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Slice of Life: Laughter

Posted in Gratitude, Slice of Life, Writing, tagged daughters, Happiness, Laughter on August 9, 2016| 18 Comments »

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As I get older, I am learning to appreciate a good laugh, even if it’s at my own expense. I am trying really hard to embrace this getting older thing. My birthday is this week, and I will be 55. There, I said it.

I enjoy listening to podcasts when I am driving, so this weekend on my drive to and from New Orleans, I listened. I will probably forget which exact podcast it was (that happens with age), but I think it was the TED Radio Hour about Time. Anyway, some researcher said that we get happier as we get older. I believe this is true, except, of course, if you get grumpier.

I believe I am happier now than I was ten years ago. My daughters are grown-ups and such delightful grown-ups they are. I am grateful for all that I have in my life, my husband of 34 years, 3 healthy, happy, successful daughters, and a mother-in-law who likes to celebrate birthdays with me in Africa.

My girls think I am hilarious. Mostly because I’m so stupid. The above picture was taken by daughter number 1 after I had taken a failed selfie with daughter number 3. I love how we laugh the same way.

I think it is time for me to embrace happiness. To realize that happiness is precious like gold, like the rainbow, like love.

I wish for you a day (a year, a life) full of laughter. There is no way to watch this scene from Mary Poppins and not laugh. Enjoy!

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Slice of Life: Lagniappe

Posted in Blogging, Digital Learning, Gratitude, Slice of Life, tagged DigiLit Sunday, Digital photography, Katherine Bomer, lagniappe on August 2, 2016| 20 Comments »

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In Louisiana, the term Lagniappe (pronounced lahn-yahp) means a little something extra. Imagine my surprise when my colleague told me that we start school on Wednesday, not Tuesday. I have a whole extra day of summer! Lagniappe!

Lagniappe is taking a break in the shade when the temperatures rise.

Lagniappe is a roseate spoonbill fishing by the roadside.

Lagniappe is goldfish glittering on top.

Lagniappe is finding old treasures.

This name plate was a gift from my supervising teacher when I was student teaching. I wasn’t Mrs. Simon yet, but I would be by the time I had my own classroom. This gift meant so much to me. I’d forgotten how much until I found it. I’ve always preferred to be called Mrs. Simon rather than Miss Margaret, as some teachers in the south do. I think this preference stems from my pride in being Mr. Simon’s wife. Our 34th anniversary is this weekend, and we will be dancing the night away.

Lagniappe is the Wonder quote app which speaks to me today.

(more…)

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My Friend Loved Chickens

Posted in Blessen, Slice of Life, tagged chickens, Entropy Magazine, fiction writing, Lisa Meaux, teacher-writers on July 26, 2016| 18 Comments »

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It’s summer now. The sun sets more reluctantly than at any other time of the year, and as it slowly drops behind the canopy of live oaks and crepe myrtles, my remaining twelve hens drift nearer and nearer to the coop, pecking and scratching along in a lazy, singular unity.

I feel so strongly about these hens. As oblivious as they are to love and anything else that is neither food nor peril, they seem to carry with knowing authority the solutions to all mysteries, as our solutions are somehow in rosary beads, old pots, and June bugs. If they miss Passion, they don’t show it. Somewhere between earthworms and hawks, they carry on, finding the best spots for dust baths and squabbling over the grapes I feed them from my hand, until they inevitably make it home as the sun sets.

And rather than leave an empty space where Passion once perched on the roost, they will scoot closer to each other and fill it in, knowing that the world goes on and knowing — announcing, maybe, as Mary Oliver would say — their place in the family of things.

–Lisa Meaux, 1956-2016, excerpt from “The Birds: Passion” from Entropymag.org

My friend, Lisa Meaux, loved chickens. The above excerpt is from a short story she wrote about a friend and a chicken who both had ovarian cancer. The story is just like Lisa, a mix of the ironic and the tender.

I first met Lisa when I was working on my masters in gifted education. She was the lead teacher in a summer program in which I interned. As the years went by, Lisa found her way to the writing project, and our relationship grew around teaching and writing. Two years ago, she retired and married the love of her life. Little did any of us know that her life would end so soon.

On Saturday, I attended a beautiful gathering to celebrate her life at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. The stage was set with a portrait of Lisa holding one of her chickens. Two teacher-writers from her writing group read from a variety of pieces that told the story of Lisa. Her writing life centered around her love of her home, her animals, and her family. A fitting tribute to her through her own words.

Back in 2009, Lisa, Nettie, and I attended the New Orleans writing marathon. The marathon focus was fiction. I felt like such a novice at fiction writing, but the genre was comfortable to Lisa. I remember she wrote a story about a woman who leaves a piece of her clothing at various places in New Orleans and eventually walks into Lake Pontchartrain completely nude. It was a brilliantly crafted story.

At that retreat, Lisa gave me a gift of a bracelet of blue beads and thus the name for Blessen’s chicken, Blue. If it hadn’t been for Lisa, there would not have been a chicken in my story, or, for that matter, a story at all. She met with me to discuss my book and planted the seed that would become the theme for the book, “Death happens in threes.”

There is an empty space where Lisa lived. Her friends feel it. Her husband feels it. Her students feel it. Unlike her roosting chickens, I am not quite sure how to fill the space that belonged to her. I still struggle to know where I belong in the family of things. But I know this for sure: The world goes on, and I am a better person for having known and loved Lisa Meaux.

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Slice of Farm Life

Posted in Blogging, Slice of Life, Travel, Writing, tagged farm, NY, Slice of Life, Tara Smith, Washington County on July 19, 2016| 15 Comments »

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I don’t know how I have come to be so blessed. If you’ve been keeping up with my blog or Facebook posts, you know I spent two weeks in Tanzania, Africa, a gift from my amazing mother-in-law. And today, I am in upstate New York at Tara Smith’s farm. Like Tanzania, the nights and mornings are cool, and that alone is reason to leave South Louisiana in the mid-summer. Unlike Tanzania, this place is lush and hilly and green.

On the farm, I can breathe slowly. I feel an energy for just being present. Tara is a perfect hostess. She ran down the hill from her writing spot five minutes ago because I asked for a lap blanket. Our dinner was fresh and delicious beginning with Caprese salad and ending with sliced watermelon. This morning, blueberry pancakes, my favorite.

I was trying to remember how I got here. Not in a geographical sense, but when did I meet and become so attached to these friends? I am here with Tara, Julianne, and Kimberley. (They are each writing a post today about our time together.) The fact is I can trace each friend back to this very space, my blog. We met through a commitment to writing and sharing our lives with each other. Connections happen here that I do not plan or predict or that I even realize are happening until a day like today.

Julianne traveled from L.A. and I traveled from LA. to be together on a hill in Washington County, NY.

This is Tara’s house on the farm. It is as lovely and charming on the inside as you can see from the outside. I am back in time to a place of stillness and grace.

This is Sophie. Every farm needs a dog like Sophie, keeping watch and providing comfort.

The four of us are taking a break from talking to write our separate slices. Sharing our slices of life is what brought us all here to be present with each other, to make space for writing, and to enjoy the abundance of life. I am so grateful for Tara’s generosity, for this community of writers, and for this amazing gift of nature. I can believe the world is good. I can feel hope. I can be me.