On Thursday I asked my 4th graders to briefly describe to each other the imaginary Pilgrims (protagonists for works of historical fiction they will soon be writing) they had created the day before. Figuring it would be fun I decided to record and podcast these little character descriptions. You can listen to all of them on our blog, but here are a few that are especially delightful.
Elizabeth Ann Button
John Hopkins
Charlotte Anne Clarke
Samuel Fletcher
Here are several posts describing what we’ve done so far:
Last Friday’s Literary Salon featured my students reading selections from the monologues and dialogues of Laura Amy Schlitz’s Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! For a few weeks beforehand I’d read them one or two a day during our morning meeting. Each child selected one, practiced at home, and then read it on Friday. Not only that — I recorded their readings, turned them into audio files, and yesterday the kids put them on their individual blogs as podcasts. Of course, they are not as polished as those of the Park School fifth graders for whom the pieces were originally written, but my students had fun with them and performed them ably. Do have a look, a listen, and comment if you are so inclined. (They are very eager for comments!)
I’m more or less happily writing Chapter Six of The Graveyard Book. I say more or less as I’m at that place where I hope that the book knows what it’s doing because right now I don’t have a clue — I’m writing one scene after another like a man walking through a valley in thick fog, just able to see the path a little way ahead, but with no idea where it’s actually going to lead him. Neil Gaiman
This comment from Neil Gaiman really caught my eye because it speaks to a continual conflict of mine. That is, how much planning is necessary for my students to create well-formed Cinderella stories? I have found that without some direction many of them flounder (and do so even with an outline), but some are talented enough to chaff at any sort of planning requirement. My solution is to ask them to plan their stories and then work with them individually so that those who don’t want to stick with the plan feel free to fly off and those who need the plan to move them along get my help with that as well.
Here are two Horn Book articles offering opposing views on this issue:
Today, after a lengthy marinade in fairy tales and Cinderella stories (everything from the traditional Perrault to Harry Potter), my 4th graders will be starting their own stories.They’ve been thinking about them for a while, but today they will actually begin serious planning and, perhaps, some writing. I do have them create plans even if they end up barely using them. Sometimes a child creates a plan, begins writing, finds it doesn’t work, tries another, and sometimes several more until the muse truly hits.
Some teachers are very insistent that children outline stories and then stick to those outlines. I don’t feel that way at all. I think the plan (not really an outline) does give them some boundaries to work within, but I absolutely don’t want those boundaries to feel constricting or in anyway compromise them as artists. So it is a tricky balance.
Of course, I do a lot as we go along. I work with them individually (and we know and trust each other by now — hopefully!). I do mini-lessons to get them going. (One great source for this is Gail Carson Levine’s Writing Magic: Creating Stories that Fly, by the way.) We critique (more on this in another post), I do a lot of individual commenting, and lots more. It is very intense, tiring for me (reading and commenting on 18 drafts is indeed), but worth it. The final stories will be published (as we did last year) on the students’ individual blogs (which we started yesterday — they are still not open to the public though).
Today my class will give our beautiful Arrival Collection box to Shaun Tan in person. I only hope we can express to him how wonderful the experience of reading his book has been for us.
The children have created all sorts of fantastic documents, artifacts, maps, drawings, and more for the box — all based on this amazing book. Here are a few of them, but do go here to see them all. They are wonderful!
Last Wednesday we went to Ellis Island. At the kids’ request I brought along a copy of The Arrival and they brought their little booklets. Rushed as we were (the buses were late and we had to get back for our Halloween party, of course!), they were fascinated and many busily took notes throughout the exhibits. They loved seeing the actual Registry Hall, the large photographs that were used as research by Tan, the dormitory, the intriguing exhibits about the tests that new immigrants had to go through — just the whole space was remarkable to them. Even the seagulls flying around them on the ferry ride made them think of Shaun Tan’s birds flying over the steamship as his protagonist came into his new land.
The next day one child wrote that his favorite room was the “golden” one where there were walls of ships’ manifests, identification forms, and other materials directly related to The Arrival. Others loved the rooms describing those horrible tests that the new immigrants had to take (and were beautifully presented in Tan’s book). The connections between the immigrant experience, what they saw at the Museum, and Tan’s book were remarkable. For a bit more and a few photos head over to my class blog to read this post.
Every day we get new ideas about what we want to put into the box.
Already the kids have made a ship manifest, written letters, created a steamship ticket, food, birds, identity cards, family photographs, a diary, postcards and more is on the way.
Most exciting of all, in a couple of weeks we will be giving this box to Shaun Tan in person.
Using this book with my students has been a fantastic experience; I can’t recommend it enough. I will definitely do it again next year with few alterations. To review:
Before beginning, I showed the children Shaun Tan’s website on The Arrival. We discussed the images there, how to “read” them, and what they had to do with our studies of immigration. We talked about the challenges of reading a book that was all images, that had no words.
I constantly referenced back to our immigration studies. The Arrival follows the same structure of the children’s own oral history interviews. That is: Old Country, Journey, Settlement, etc. I showed them books and artifacts from Ellis Island that reinforced what was in the book.
I placed the children in groups of three to read the book. This seemed to be just the right number of children in a group — most of the groups worked well together and the children, in their journal assessments, remarked on how helpful it was to work together to determine what was going on in the story.
I gave the children small booklets in which to take notes as they read. Many of them commented that they loved the note taking. Perhaps because the book was wordless, there was something about putting their own words down as notes that was particularly satisfying.
At the end of each session, we came together as a class and one member of each group presented their findings in a podcast. This was incredibly motivating. I’m not even sure that many of the kids bothered to go to the blog to listen to the podcasts, but there was something about knowing that their presentations were being recorded and placed on the blog that was really compelling for them. After a couple of times, they became incredibly adept at passing the Ipod around as they commented on each others’ presentations. (Here and here are the final two podcasts, by the way.)
As they presented I held up a copy of the book to support what was being said. So we noticed even more during these presentations.
After we finished, my colleague Jenny Kirsch showed them a Powerpoint she had created, placing images from the book next to archival photographs on which they were based. This was exciting and fascinating for my NYC students.
Next they will write letters — I want them to make a box of memories for the hero of the book — full of his letters to his family, origami perhaps, whatever my students think should go in it. They may also want to write Shaun Tan. Letters seem the perfect final project for this book. Once these are done I will post once again on what the children come up with.
So teachers who want to try something new and different, give The Arrival a try! It is a wonderful book to use within a study of immigration, bringing together the essence of that experience today, historically, and always. And for anyone who found the book confusing, children will help you see it much more clearly!
My class blog is back. The old URL was: http://blogs.dalton.org/Edinger while the new one is
http://blogs.dalton.org/edinger (The difference is that my name is no longer capitalized) in case you have it linked. Let me know if there are broken links and I’ll get them fixed.
