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Poetry Forms are Hard!

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Teaching, tagged ABCs of poetry, double dactyl, poetry forms, teaching writing on April 5, 2013| 7 Comments »

I know this is an ugly picture. This is my journal page after struggling all day long with the double dactyl form. Ugh! I almost gave up. It was like a puzzle or a really hard math problem. Although, had it been a really hard math problem, I would have given up hours ago. I shared this process with my students. They could see me struggling. I would call them to attention and test it out, then shake my head, “No, not yet.”

The double dactyl form has so many requirements. I used to think rhyming was hard, but rhythm is harder. A dactyl is a long, short, short syllable pattern. Then there’s this rule that the second stanza has to have a double dactyl word. And who has ever heard of a spondee?

Most of the examples I read had a person’s name for the second line. I decided to use a book character and who better than the tragic character of Miggery Sow from The Tale of Despereaux? I found out by reading my poem aloud to my last group of students that you can’t quite “get it” if you haven’t read the book. I have to credit my fifth grade boys with the last line. High fives all around when they came up with that one.

My students are writing poetry like mad over at our kidblog. Please check them out and leave a comment or two. They love comments.

Now for my attempt to capture Miggery Sow in double dactyl.

Higgledy Piggledy
Miggery Sow was a
young girl who longed to be
princess like Pea.

Handful of cigarettes
perfidiously swapped;
Birthday wave brings forth a
queen wannabe.

Join Poetry Friday with Robyn Hood Black.

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Sharon Creech was Here!

Posted in Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged Bloomability, book characters, Sharon Creech on March 16, 2013| 10 Comments »

Slice of Life Challenge Day 16

I have been doing the Slice of Life Challenge with my students for the last two weeks. It has been so heartwarming to watch them rush in to class and beg to be able to use the computer to write their slices. This is what writing class should be like every day.

This week we had a special visitor to our blog, Sharon Creech. If you don’t know who Sharon Creech is, then you don’t spend any time reading middle grade fiction: Walk Two Moons, Heartbeat, Bloomability, Love that Dog, Love that Cat, and more. In my classroom, I have a Sharon Creech bucket of books. My 5th grade student, Brooklyn, chose to read Bloomability.

When Brooklyn was reading Bloomability, she was writing reader responses. It was fun to read about Dinnie’s adventures and Brooklyn’s thinking about the book. She finished it over the weekend. She told me she wouldn’t put it down until she finished. She almost walked into a wall reading the book. Here is part of her Slice of Life post when she finished the book.

No, no, no it has not ended. I have not just finished the book. This was an amazing book titled Bloomability by Sharon Creech. It gave you a feeling that no matter how shy, scared, worried, or nervous you are, you can bloom. As I was reading the last few words my words were “No, stop, another page will appear, and this is not over.” I felt as if as soon as I read them, I would depart all of the characters, or as if they were stranded there in the story, in that intense moment, or as if the rest of their lives are mysteries, and they are going on and living it without us knowing.

Have you ever felt this way when you finished a book, as if the character lives on?

Then this quote appeared on the Two Writing Teachers blog: “I love the way that each book — any book — is its own journey. You open it, and off you go. You are changed in some way, large or small, by having traveled with those characters.”
― Sharon Creech

So I posted this prompt for my students, “Has a character ever stayed with you even after you finished the book?”

This week, Brooklyn responded to that prompt. “My favorite character in a book was probably Dinnie. She was the main character in the book Bloomability by Sharon Creech. Dinnie helped me notice that to be able to have an adventure and opportunities I had to expand my bubble or maybe even pop it. I had to open up to the world and adapt to changes.”

I read Brooklyn’s post the same evening I got an email from Sharon Creech’s blog, Words We Say. So I took a chance and made a comment on her blog post directing her to Brooklyn’s Slice of Life post. Guess what? Sharon Creech responded! I couldn’t wait to tell Brooklyn. I even got teary-eyed when I told her.

She was so excited that her next blog post was this:

OMG!!! Sharon Creech had commented on my post about my favorite character. I owe it all to Mrs. Simon. She is my favorite author. I recommend all of Sharon Creech’s books, especially Bloomability.

To see Brooklyn’s Slice of Life blog, click here. If you comment, I cannot guarantee you will get the reaction that Sharon Creech did, but Brooklyn will appreciate it nonetheless.

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Ways of Seeing

Posted in Poetry, Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged 10 ways poem, crystal, glass apple on March 14, 2013| 5 Comments »

Slice of Life Challenge Day 14

At the wordlab this weekend, our leader used a poetry prompt called “Object Lesson.” I wrote about it here. Today, I tried the prompt with my students. I collected objects from around the classroom. I was amazed at the range of things I had to choose from; a crystal, a sunflower frame, a glass apple paperweight to name a few. The instructions were to write 10 stanzas, three lines each, with each stanza acting as a small picture of your object from a different point of view.
Due to the comment challenge for classroom slices, you may have already read some of these. My class is blogging at kidblogs.

This was such a successful prompt I wanted to share it with you along with a few of the resulting poems.

Ten Ways to Look into a Glass Apple
by Kaylie (6th grade)

Formed in the hottest fires
cooled down in the Nile River
an Egyptian artifact.

Bubbles trapped inside of it
waiting to be belched
into the world.

A paperweight
slightly dusty, from 10 years
sitting on an old scholar’s shelf.

A glass snack
waiting
for a glass automaton.

Slightly nicked
on one side
by the paws of a curious cat.

A fortune teller
looking into the orb
full of voodoo magic.

A gift,
wrapped nicely
in pink tissue paper.

A game of hide-and-seek antique
started by a grandmother
ended by a toddler.

A secret
curled up and hiding
for you to decipher.

A writing prompt
held in a young girl’s hand
who just finished sharing her poem.

10 Ways of Looking at a Crystal
by Emily (2nd grade)

1. Shining
So
Brightly

2. Pointing
Up into
The sky

3. Sparkling
Like a star
At night

4. The prettiest
I’ve ever
Seen

5. Your beautiful
Pointed
Shape

6. So nice
And
Smooth

7.The Beautiful
Marks inside
Of you

8. When you’re
In Light you
Shine like the sun

9.You have
the perfect
Former glory

10.Clear as
Water white
As snow

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An Author Visits

Posted in Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged Diane Moore, Flood on the Rio Teche, project based learning on March 7, 2013| 4 Comments »

Slice of Life Challenge Day 7

Yesterday our sixth grade gifted students met the author of a book they have been reading for our enrichment Wednesdays. We’ve been using project based learning while meeting monthly focusing on the theme of water. We selected the book Flood on the Rio Teche by Diane Marquart Moore for a number of reasons. One, this historical fiction novel would help the students learn about the history of New Iberia’s discovery and settlement, and Two, water is important to the story. Also, the author lives locally part of the year. We were lucky to catch her before she moves back to Sewanee, TN for the spring and summer.

Our students were interested in how she came to write the book, her inspiration and her research. But I saw the lights go on when she talked about being an author. She didn’t candy-coat it, either. Being an author is hard work. She gave advice that she had gotten from Ernest Gaines when she had the privilege of taking a class with him. He said, “Revise, revise, revise,” and “The first sentence is the most important one of the whole novel.” She talked about how once she figured out that the rain on a palmetto roof would hiss like the snake for which the Teche was named, her book was ready to be written.

Opening sentence for Flood on the Rio Teche: Rain hissed on the palmetto roof, and Antonio felt like hissing back at the downpour.

Diane writes a blog at A Word’s Worth.

The Slice of Life Challenge has been revealing to me as I participate with my students. There is an immediacy about it. They rush to the computer and often compose right there. Then they hit the publish button. I am amazed how fresh and fun some of the writing is. However, the teacher in me wants them to be conscious of their reader and use correct grammar. I want to think about how I can continue the momentum while showing them the value of revision and editing.

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Anonyponymous

Posted in Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged eponymy, word origins, words on March 3, 2013| 5 Comments »

Slice of Life Challenge Day 3

A mother of one of my students went to a garage sale last weekend. She selected a book to give to me, Anonyponymous, The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words by John Bemelmans Marciano. She wrote, “I found this little book and I picked it up for you because I thought you would enjoy it.” When she was paying for the book, she struck up a conversation with the woman holding the garage sale. She told her she was buying the book for her child’s teacher. Come to find out! the seller is my husband’s cousin. Two things strike me about this gift: 1) This mother was thinking of me when she saw a book about words, and 2) What a small world!

Fun Facts from Anonyponymous: Anonyponymous refers to those people whose names, eponymous, have become so much a part of our language that the person of origin has become anonymous.

1) Cereal comes from a reference to the goddess Ceres, goddess of crops.

2) Frisbee comes from drunk Yale students playing catch with a leftover tin plate from Mrs. Frisbie’s Pies of Bridgeport.

3) Hooligan (I sometimes call my students this when they are acting up.) Patrick Hooligan was a bouncer at an Irish pub in the slums of London, but his legacy was the mentoring of young hoodlums in the arts of robbery and assault.

4) Blurb was a buxom cartoon character placed on the cover of books Gelett Burgess handed out at the annual American Booksellers Association Dinner in 1907. Burgess defined blurb as “a sound like a publisher.”

On further examination of the book, I realized it is not going on the shelf in my classroom. I’m afraid some of the words are inappropriate for classroom research.

To see what my students are writing for their Slice of Life Challenge, click here.

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Water Triolet

Posted in Poetry, Poetry Friday, Teaching, tagged Poetry prompts, teaching gifted, triolet, water quotes on February 21, 2013| 12 Comments »

Sheri is hosting the round up today at her site, Sheri Doyle

In our district (in Louisiana, we call them parishes), our gifted students are spread across the parish in a dozen schools. In order to bring together our 6th grade students the year before they go to middle school together, we designed an enrichment program. The 6 elementary gifted teachers meet with all the 6th graders for one day a month to work on a specific real world project. This year our theme has been water, and I lead them in a poetry exercise each month.

This month I got the idea of using the triolet form from fellow Poetry Friday blogger, Joy at Poetry for Kids Joy. Last week, she posted a few triolet poems she wrote using quotes about writing. So I searched for quotes about water. The students’ handout included the directions for writing a triolet and a list of quotes about water. I asked them to choose a quote and use it as the first line of the poem. The best part about this exercise was I wrote with the students, and we did 5 small group rotations, so I wrote 5 triolet poems. I will only post my two favorites here.

Snow Day from Linda at Teacher Dance.

Snow Day
Someday we’ll evaporate together,
But today we’ll play in the snow.
Someday we’ll ignore the weather,
But today we’ll slip and flow.
Like two birds of the same feather,
we’ll talk and laugh and glow.
Someday we’ll evaporate together,
But today we’ll play in the snow.

–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved

Clean
Be like water, float.
Let bubbles wash you like soap.
Dance on waves, forget the boat.
Be like water, float.
Find a bottle, read the note,
Wonder, dream, imagine, hope.
Be like water, float.
Let bubbles wash you like soap.

–Margaret Simon, all rights reserved

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Digital Learning Day

Posted in Digital Learning, Poetry Friday, Teaching, tagged Animoto, names, Wordle on February 6, 2013| 7 Comments »

Today was National Digital Learning Day. We celebrated by making Name videos.

One of my students recently brought in a baby name book in order to select meaningful character names for a story she is writing. The students were playing around with the book looking up their own name meanings when a flash of an idea hit me. Let’s make word clouds and videos about our names! So we headed to the library so that each child could have a computer to use.

Wordle made by Kaylie

We used two websites: Wordle and Animoto.
First they made the Wordle. We took a screen shot of it and pasted it into Paint. There we saved the file as a JPEG.

On Animoto, students can make a 30 second video for free. The trouble I ran into at one of my schools was the Flash player wasn’t updated. Our good ole librarian came to the rescue and helped us update. To allow students to have an account on Animoto, the student used my gmail account by adding a plus sign and then their own name. That way I get the email about the video they created and they get free use of the site.

I will share two name videos with you. One was made using PowerPoint.

Open

And another used Animoto:

Vannisa's One of a kind Name.

Tara at A Teaching Life is hosting Poetry Friday.

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Am I up to the Challenge?

Posted in Slice of Life, Teaching, tagged Slice of Life Challenge, student writing on February 5, 2013| 8 Comments »

Join the Tuesday Slice of Life

Last year I started following the Two Writing Teachers blog written by Ruth Ayres and Stacey Shubitz, coauthors of Day by Day: Refining Writing Workshop Through 180 Days of Reflective Practice. Each week they host a blog round-up called “The Slice of Life.” If you regularly read my blog, you have seen the logo on every Tuesday post. What’s so nice about the Slice of Life is you can write about anything. And it keeps me blogging at least once a week. Well, in March comes the big Slice of Life Challenge…blog every day, all 31, in the month of March. Can I do that? Can my students do that?

I think we can, I think we can…

On Sunday, The Two Writing Teachers had a guest post by a teacher, Amanda Cornwell, who listed Ten Tips for Creating an Electronic SOLC for your Students. Amanda teaches middle school students. I teach elementary, yet most of the tips still apply.

I teach multiple grades in gifted, so my students are at different levels not only in ability, but also in their motivation to write. This year I’ve used kidblog.org with all of my students. It has been a safe place for them to write and respond and has provided a community of writers among my students who go to different schools. But the kidblog is private. I am considering opening a public blog for the March challenge, so other students and teachers can read my students’ posts. Please leave a comment if you would be interested in partnering up our classes for reading and commenting.

Here are my Ten Tips for Slicing about your life:

1. Think about writing all day long. There are many seeds out there on your way to school, in your dreams, and even in your conversations with your students. After the Super Bowl blackout, there were many comments and questions among my students that could have led to a SOL story about “What do you think happened?”

2. Turn off the inner critic. This is as hard for me as anything. But every time I talk to a fellow writer, I hear this message again and again, “Trust your voice.”

3. Start with an image. Images lead to description. Description leads to connection. There you go, a Slice of Life story.

4. Try different genres. Write an acrostic poem or the opening scene for a short story. Write about the last time your grandmother made gumbo or a short research piece about why cats’ claws are retractable.

5. Write together. When my students write, I write. We call it “sacred writing time.” I set the timer and no one speaks or gets up, or even sharpens a pencil.

6. Be realistic and set attainable goals. We are going to be out of school for Spring Break the last week of March, so I may set the goal at 16 days which is the number of days we will be in school that month.

7. Encourage each other. One of my students called commenting, “a compliment sandwich.” I like that. Start and end with a positive comment with a criticycle inside. Criticycle is critique with a little sweetness.

8. Prizes: Last year I bought all my students who participated in the challenge a pack of decorative sticky notes and a blank book. I will probably consider another similar practical gift as well as lots of high fives and way to gos!

9. Share your writing. In addition to typing into a blog post, my students enjoy sharing their writing. They like to hear me read as well. They encourage me and give me advice. I will continue to provide sharing time.

10. Celebrate. I am stealing this from Amanda. She had a picnic and reading to celebrate along with certificates signed by the principal. I like this idea. We may have to host a Slice of Life Author’s Chair when we invite parents and guests to come and hear our writing.

I am excited about this challenge. Won’t you join me?

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Calm before the Storm

Posted in Poetry, Teaching, tagged dogs, idioms, poetry on February 2, 2013| Leave a Comment »

When my students write, I write. When we were playing with idioms the other day, I wrote this poem about my dog Charlie, who in all other respects is the perfect dog. For an interview with me and Charlie, go to Coffee with a Canine.

Charlie when he’s calm.

Calm Before the Storm

In the middle of the night
when all the doors are locked,
the lights are off, the scent
of dinner lingers in the air,
we sleep soundly, softly snoring.

Before the first lightning flashes,
before the sound of rolling thunder,
and well before the alarm clock rings,
Charlie whimpers, then cries,
and suddenly, an all out frightening bark
wakens the whole house.

Sure as the groundhog predicts
the coming of spring, lightning strikes,
the rain falls, thunder booms.
The storm is here.

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Fair Play

Posted in Poetry Friday, Teaching, tagged fairy tales, Poetry prompts, The Time is Now on January 25, 2013| 7 Comments »

Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference is hosting today.

I subscribe to Poets and Writers The Time is Now writing prompts. This week the poetry prompt intrigued me.

“Choose any word from the dictionary and read its definitions. Write a poem using only the language of these definitions. Try repeating them in different combinations and using line break to create unexpected phrases. Experiment with how far you can push the limits of the language you’re working with. Use the word you’ve chosen as the title of the poem.”

I tried the exercise myself with varied results. I tried it with my elementary gifted students. At first I was worried. It took a while for them to even choose a word. My favorite came from a third grader. I’m not sure how much of the original definition became a part of her poem, but I loved her play with language.

Fair

People say you’re the fairest of them all.
Of course they say that in fairy tales,
you know,
when a fairy comes to help the fair lady.
She’s not that fair.
She is wicked. She is cruel.
The real fairest of them all
comes to help, to defeat
that so-called fair queen.
That’s why they say
you’re only fair
in fairy tales.

–Vannisa

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