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Today is my first day back to school. The kids come on Friday. Ready or not?
This year our gifted team plans to focus on heroes. For one of our Summer Poem Swaps, Tabatha Yeatts sent a prompt to write a poem from the words of someone. I chose to look at Malala Yousafzai’s words with the theme of heroes in mind. I found this image and quote.
One child
can step by step
walk across stones
wobble, fall, rise
to hope.
One teacher
can line her shelves
with books, voices
pointing the way
to climb.
One book
can open young eyes
to injustice, prejudice, pain
so they can build a road
to peace.
One pen
can move a single hand
to create new lines, new words
new art, making a change
to the world.
–Margaret Simon
Who is your hero? Can you write a poem off his/her words?
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Once again I am playing around with apps to use with my students. For my reader response this week with my virtual book club, I tried using Piktochart. I have mixed feelings about the results.
Piktochart is designed for business presentations that include data. Data is not my thing. Reading and writing is. So how could I re-use this program to fit in with digital literacy?
I chose a report template from the few free ones provided. Adding in a text box was cumbersome. We have gotten so accustomed to apps reading our minds. The text box never appeared where I wanted it to go, so I struggled to move it and arrange it. I don’t think students would have as much difficulty. They tend to be more savy with a mouse.
The part I did like about this process was the motivation to graphically design the ideas. Design is becoming a big part of digital media. If we tap into design with our students, I believe we add another element to their learning and processing. Making a product to represent their response to reading is a way to authentically create digital media. I may be wrong, but I think it would take some of the chore out of reader response. I still believe strongly in choice, so Piktochart will go on my list of choices for responding to reading.
Ruth Ayres invites us the celebrate each week. Click over to her site Discover. Play. Build. to read more celebrations.
Swinging for Addyson
1. When I heard the news that one of our students had been diagnosed with a brain tumor, I pulled out my crochet needle and created a prayer blanket for her. Saturday I gave her the blanket at a ragball fundraising event for her medical bills. Her smile says it all. Keep Addy and her family in your prayers as they continue to fight this battle.
Make yourself a park ranger.
2. Celebrating #clmooc and collaborative learning: This week marked the sixth and final make cycle of #clmooc. NWP joined the National Parks Service to encourage getting outside and exploring your national, state, and heritage parks. Kevin Hodgson invited me to join in the Google hang out on Tuesday evening. I love collaborating and learning from others. The archive of the hang out is here.
I had every intention of visiting a state park but the heat and the fact that my daughter was home kept me from participating further in this project.
Cheers to my daughter Martha.
3. Martha is home! My youngest flew in from Chicago for my last week of summer break. I’ve enjoyed spending time with her and just knowing she’s home.
4. My classrooms (I teach at two schools) are clean, organized, and decorated, ready for students to arrive all too soon.
photo by Jan Risher
5. Jan Risher, a writer for The Advertiser, the Lafayette regional newspaper, put out a call on Facebook for people to make paper cranes to honor the two victims of last week’s Grand 16 shooting. She gathered enough cranes to make two senbazuru. I made a few cranes and just doing this small gesture comforted me and helped me to feel a part of this community. I am very proud of the way the Acadiana community has responded with an outpouring of support and love. To me, it’s the only way to respond to violence…complete and utter kindness.
6. Speaking of responding with kindness and love, I celebrate James Taylor. In 1979 after our home had been totally flooded, the first album we purchased was James Taylor’s Flag. I listened to Up on the Roof so many times I memorized all the words. His music is still lifting up spirits and sharing love. Here is a recent performance in which the Charleston Low Country Voices joined him on stage. JT makes everything all right.
Poetry Friday is here. I always feel a sense of excitement and anxiety working on a post for PF. Today’s poem has been through a morphing of sorts. I started it in my notebook writing with my young writers camp. We stopped into our local independent bookstore, Books Along the Teche. My prompt was to steal a line from a favorite book to write from.
Ava Leavell Haymon is(was) the Louisiana poet laureate. Her latest poetry book, Eldest Daugther, was sitting near the front of our bookstore watching me and my students. I opened her up and found a line. “I am the light, standing in the kitchen window.”
I love to watch the light change from my kitchen window. This morning it illuminated a blue bottle on my outdoor bottle tree. Using PicMonkey, I altered the image and typed in my poem.
Join the Two Writing Teachers blog for Tuesdays Slice of Life Challenge.
Photo by Cajun Byrd on flickr.
The heat is on. Temperatures are reaching well into the 90’s with heat indexes of 100+. Humidity thickens the air. And yet, the party still goes on.
Last weekend my husband and I drove an hour north through fields of sugarcane and soybeans, past ancient live oaks along the ridge of the Bayou Teche. We were driving to see one of our favorite Cajun fiddlers, Michael Doucet, who was playing with 3 other musicians at Bayou Teche Brewery in Arnaudville.
I’ve known Michael since I taught his son, Ezra, in third grade. (If my calculations are right, it’s been 17 years.) Michael has always been charming and welcoming, even though he’s gotten quite famous. This day was no different.
There was a slight breeze. When it blew, we raised our arms like cormorants. We danced a two-step and a waltz and drank a beer fresh from the brewery.
I was transported back in time…
when the coolest place was on the porch
where musicians played in the late afternoon,
and the cicadas joined the fiddle tune,
when family was mother, father, brother, sister, cousin, Parran, Nanny, and the neighbors next door.
Michael and his friends captured that front-porch-family feeling with their music.
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A few weeks ago I wrote about a virtual book club I joined led by Julianne Harmatz. We read A Handful of Stars and wrote using Google docs. The model worked well, so subgroups have broken off to read other books. My group is reading Lost in the Sun by Lisa Graff. Resources are popping up for teaching reading that I have not tuned in before. Something about doing what you ask students to do makes the teaching more authentic. If I write a page full of sketch notes about a book and show my students, they see that this is a practice of a reader, not an assignment by a teacher. Julianne started a padlet, and we are still adding to it. This padlet will be a go-to for me this year. I hope others will continue to add to it and build more and more resources for writing about reading. Using Google docs for teaching is new to me. It’s so easy and natural, like writing a note to a friend. In the document, we notice and note things about our reading. Everyone responds differently, and that is the beauty of it. Because I teach individual students in gifted, the accessability of a Google doc will allow them to communicate about reading beyond the walls of our classroom and our school. Using the #WabtR, we can continue the conversation and perhaps match up students book by book. The possibilities are exciting. If you are interesting in joining in on this virtual book club fun, let me know. Link up your digital literacy posts:
Ruth Ayres invites us the celebrate each week. Click over to her site Discover. Play. Build. to read more celebrations.
“The sisters” My daughters and me.
The hardest time to celebrate is during tragedy. But it is probably the most important time to do just that. Count your blessings. Hug the ones you love. Live more fully.
There is a tragic disease running through our country, random gun violence. Violence has invaded my community. Lafayette is a mere 25 miles down Highway 90 from New Iberia. We go there often for dinner, for shopping, and to go to the movies. In fact on Thursday night, my daughter Maggie and I drove to Lafayette to visit one of her friends who has a new baby. We did a little shopping. We drove by the theater around 7:15 PM, but we didn’t know then that tragedy was happening there.
When my daughter wants to go out with me, I jump at the chance. She’s 30 and has her own life. Spending time with her is precious. Today I celebrate that we got our toes done, a matching peachy orange. I celebrate that we oohed and ahhhed over baby Camille. I celebrate that we loved and laughed and had a girls’ night out.
Two local teachers were out for a girls’ night out. Theirs turned evil and bloody. They were heroes. They saved lives. Here is the story.
Jillian Johnson was not so lucky. She did not survive. She is remembered for her contribution to our community. In an article by Christiaan Mader, a close friend of Maggie, he described who Jillian was.
She was a commanding presence as a performer and a human being, smoke-voiced as a singer and sarcastic in her swollen drawl that gave conversation with her an air of sharp gentility. She was prone to pronouncement, ably confident, audacious with a ukulele, provocative, unafraid, kind in measures of deserving and fearless in calling your bullshit. She spun yarns and made friends as easily as she sloganeered. She was a turn-of-the-century Louisiana politician reincarnated. She could have kept a chicken in every pot if she set her mind to it. A wry grin contains genius within its limits, and Jillian’s grin was the wryest. (Read the whole article here.)
Shortly after the news broke, I received a text from my friend Jen. A simple message of love. Jen has suffered the tragic loss of both a husband and a son. This was her message: “I know too well how life can change in an instant. Always wanting to tell everyone I love how very much I love them & appreciate their presence in my life. I hope you know how much you (and Jeff) are loved and valued! Have a beautiful day! We each are only guarenteed this very moment.”
Take this moment and receive the joy of Jillian playing with her band “The Figs.” And then take the next moment to tell someone you love them.
One of the joys of summer is the Summer Poem Swap, the brainchild of Tabatha Yeatts at The Opposite of Indifference. I sent a summer sonnet to Tabatha and she is featuring it on her site today. Thanks, Tabatha, for encouraging the sharing of poetry, making connections among us, and for keeping us writing.
Last week, I received a beautiful collage from Irene Latham. There are so many things I love about her poems. She chose two of my favorite subjects, herons and the bayou. She used a picture of a canoe. My husband and I have a canoe and don’t use it as much as we should, but when we do, it’s magical. Irene has obviously read my middle grade novel, Blessen, because there’s Blessen smiling next to the bayou. Thanks, Irene, for such a personal and special gift.
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This week I coached a writing camp. Usually space is important to me. The space we met in and wrote in was an art space, open and inviting, with pieces of folk art all around. The space felt comfortable and inspiring, not the case with the computer lab.
The computer lab was like a cave, long and dark. The AC didn’t work well, so it was warm. However, none of this mattered because once the kids got online and logged into our kidblog site, the space became as quiet as a bee hive, everyone buzzing and busy writing and commenting. When I asked the students about their favorite part of camp, the blog was high on the list. Online space is important, too.
I have not focused this week on the Clmooc make #4. The instructions were: “For this make cycle, we invite you to document, analyze and reflect on the variety of systems that influence your life personally and/or professionally. Use your creativity to document an existing system, access your ingenuity to improve an existing system or use your imagination to develop a unique new system and design a novel way to explain it.”
I decided to go back to my inquiry question, “How can I create an environment for student writing that encourages individual expression while covering necessary benchmarks?” I realized that the very act of content standards and testing is a system. So I am essentially asking about how I can hack the system. But I have to begin with research. Look at this Piktochart created by Christy Ball.
I am only on step three, doing the research. There is no rush here. Inquiry is like that. By its nature it’s slow and should be. If I rush into it, I risk losing focus and not valuing the question.
I started a padlet. Not much there yet. So far I am focusing on creativity. That is what I feel is most missing from standards and from testing. We are creating little boxes for students to fit in to. In reality, creativity is the thing that will lead to innovation and problem solving. How can I create a creative environment for my students? How can I value creativity and project-based learning while adhering to standards? Please inquire with me. You can add comments, write your own blog post, and/or add to the padlet.
Ruth Ayres invites us the celebrate each week. Click over to her site Discover. Play. Build. to read more celebrations.
Hayden reads his story to Jack, the lemur.
This week I am celebrating some great new writers. They attended Write Your Way writing camp with me. Above you see Hayden reading to Jack, the lemur. Jack took a tour of Main Street with us and especially enjoyed frolicking in the Bayou Teche Museum. He sat still long enough to listen to Hayden’s story about Al Hirt and Blue Dog.
Al Hirt and Blue Dog were getting ready for a wedding. Al was wearing a tuxedo and Blue Dog combed his fur. They were about to leave Al’s apartment .But before they could they heard a trumpet. They wanted to know where it came from. They looked and looked until they found it. A trumpet rested there. “Blow me and I’ll take you to the wedding,” it said. They were confused. But Hirt blew it anyway. They were then at the wedding. The End. –Hayden
Inspiration in Books along the Teche
Inspiration for writing was waiting all along Main Street. We stopped in at the independent book store, Books along the Teche. Emery found a line in The Book Thief that jumpstarted a whole new story for her. I hope she will keep writing it. That’s the thing about writing camp. It’s always too short. We set up a blog on kidblog that I hope the kids will use, but I know how summer activities take over and then school will start again. It’s hard to keep their focus once you release them.
Yesterday, I asked my writers to tell me their favorite part of writing camp, what surprised them, and how they will continue to practice their writing. The blog, writing in different places, and meeting new friends were top favorites. The surprises included “I didn’t think I was a poet,” and “I usually plan out my writing before doing it, but I was able to write a story and I don’t know where it’s going.”
We ate lunch yesterday at Victor’s cafateria, a favorite place for Dave Robicheaux (James Lee Burke’s MC). The clerk who checked us out asked me, “Are you a writer?”
I answered, “Yes.” I asked her to ask the students that question. Each of them said, “Yes, I am a writer.” I celebrate young writers today.
Margaret Simon lives on the Bayou Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana. She is a retired elementary gifted teacher who writes poetry and children's books. Welcome to a space of peace, poetry, and personal reflection. Walk in kindness.
Reflections on the Teche 