In the Classroom: Kid Podcasts on Writing Historical Fiction

My fourth graders have spent the last few months considering historical fiction and preparing to write their own about the Pilgrims.  They’ve done a ton of research about these long ago immigrants (including an overnight trip to Plimoth Plantation) and are all diving into their first story drafts.  On Friday we taught them how to do podcasts and now you can listen to the ones they did in which they tell you about this project, their characters, their research and more.  I’m very proud of them!

Dorothy May Swan

Elizabeth Ann Warner

Dorothy May Rawlins

Samuel Hopkins

Mary Anna Dodge

Cooper Brewster

Dorothy-Ann Annie Cook

David Winslow

DW’s character on the journey

Elizabeth Brown

In the Classroom: Great Read Alouds

I was delighted to see the short list for this year’s E. B. White Read Aloud Awards. I was particularly tickled to see Zorgamazoo recognized as it is so unique that I feared it would slip under the radar.  (You can go here to read more about what I thought about this clever novel in light verse.)

Here is the complete short list:

Picture Books

A Visitor for Bear by Bonny Becker, illustrated by Kady MacDonald Denton (Candlewick)

Louise, The Adventures of a Chicken by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Harry Bliss (HarperCollins)

One by Kathryn Otoshi (KO Kids Books)

Too Many Toys by David Shannon (Scholastic)

Books for Older Readers

The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas (HarperCollins)

Masterpiece by Elise Broach, illustrated by Kelly Murphy (Henry Holt)

The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

Zorgamazoo by Robert Paul Weston, illustrated by Victor Rivas (Penguin)

In the Classroom: Reading Aloud

I do all sorts of read alouds, but the most important are the ones where I do an ongoing novel with the kids just listening and enjoying themselves. That is, they don’t have to talk (in fact often I won’t let them), answer my questions (or, worse, someone else’s say in a worksheet),  or feel an sort of obligation to do anything other than listen.  That is what I did with The Graveyard Book, The Underneath (still have to do a post about that), and now the forthcoming middle grade book by Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me.  A sixth grade teacher after my own heart about this is Sarah at the Reading Zone who has a terrific post up today about her reading aloud beliefs and practices.

In the Classroom: If You Knew Time Like I Knew Time

The other day I started to read aloud a not-yet-published book set in 1979. The kids and I spoke about that being some time ago. One child said, “Oh yeah, that was when the Depression was.” Another’s face light up — ” You watch “Lost” don’t you? Right now they are in the 70s!”

In the Classroom: Motivational Rewards for Students— Good, Bad, or What?

For decades, psychologists have warned against giving children prizes or money for their performance in school. “Extrinsic” rewards, they say — a stuffed animal for a 4-year-old who learns her alphabet, cash for a good report card in middle or high school — can undermine the joy of learning for its own sake and can even lead to cheating.

But many economists and businesspeople disagree, and their views often prevail in the educational marketplace. Reward programs that pay students are under way in many cities. In some places, students can bring home hundreds of dollars for, say, taking an Advanced Placement course and scoring well on the exam.

Whether such efforts work or backfire “continues to be a raging debate,” said Barbara A. Marinak, an assistant professor of education at Penn State, who opposes using prizes as incentives. Among parents, the issue often stirs intense discussion. And in public education, a new focus on school reform has led researchers on both sides of the debate to intensify efforts to gather data that may provide insights on when and if rewards work.

Rewards for Students Under a Microscope – NYTimes.com

The Fortress of Solitude, Where Art Thou?

Now I’ve been happily connected on-line for almost two decades now. I love being able to write emails, posts, tweets, and status updates and love to read everyone else’s.  Yesterday, as usual, I was up early. Someone on facebook wondered about this and we had a friendly little thread of comments before moving off to our days. So there is  Virginia Heffernan in today’s NYTimes considering the art of the status update — the clever one versus the lame one.  Those elegant little tidbits we have to couch in 140 characters (that is the twitter limit) or less.  And it is all about connection, about social networking, about others.

What I think is less considered, especially among educators who are excited about these new technology tools, is the importance of solitude.  Being someone who needs a lot of it (a quirk of the introvert), I feel strongly that I need to train my students in the art of being alone even as I train them in the art of being together.  And so I appreciated Neil Swidey’s Boston Globe article, “The End of Alone.” While that title sounds a bit emphatic I think he has some good points in the piece, points that reinforce things I’ve been thinking about already.

For example, I constantly wonder what being a Peace Corps volunteer today is like. When I was in Sierra Leone in the md-70s our only contacts with home were with bi-weekly letters (and since they saved them, I’ve still got the ones I wrote my parents and grandmother).  No phone so I did not make a single phone call in two years.  Now I’m guessing calls are constant, email and twitter and facebook — all going on to keep you connected.

And because I think it is so important I do what I can to train my students to be alone.  Of course they can’t be literally alone in our overcrowded school, but I can insist on an intellectual solitude.  I do this by requiring them to spend whole periods writing or reading without any interaction with anyone else.  I don’t talk to them while this is happening and they aren’t allowed to talk to each other either. If they are writing, I might wander around the room peeking at what they are doing, but usually I don’t because I don’t want to distract them, I want them to live alone with their work. To tolerate the lack of instant feedback.  To consider the work, the book they are reading, the story they are writing,  on their own.

I suspect that I’d be a lonely girl if there was no online world for me.  Being able to connect intellectually with other likeminded folk has been fantastic for me. But I still need my solitude — time when I’m off line, ruminating, mulling things over. (Right now I’m lame and can’t run or walk which is driving me crazy — those are my favorite times of solitude and I hope to get them back soon. Soon.)  In education, especially those who are eager to use new technologies, it seems to be so much about social networking, about connecting.  Where, I sometimes wonder, is the purposeful disconnect?

In The Classroom: Happy Birthday, Mr. Darwin and Mr. Lincoln

What a fascinating thing to be celebrating the birthdays of these two remarkable men on the same day.

First of all, there are many new books out about Darwin, but my favorite still has to be Peter Sis’s  superb Tree of Life .  I read it to my class yesterday. Not only was it a great discussion starter about Darwin, but about how to do a biography as well.  A truly outstanding book.  For fun, I followed that up with something silly — this little ditty of Jon Scieszka’s  in Science Verse :

EVOLUTION

Glory glory evolution,
Darwin found us a solution.
Your mama is that shape,
And your knuckles always scrape,
‘Cause Grandpa was an ape.

As for Lincoln, my favorite of the new books out about him is Candace Fleming’s much-lauded, The Lincolns.

Here’s what I wrote last month about it.

I also am a huge fan of Candace Fleming’s scrapbook biographies and her latest, The Lincolns, is really wonderful. I just love the scrapbook approach, lots of small and fascinating tidbits to pour over.  Reading doesn’t always have to be linear and this book encourages a dipping in and dipping out approach. You can read it through quickly and then go back to parts of greatest interest, look at the photos, the letters, or other stuff.  The research is impeccable, the writing lively and engaging; a very, very impressive work of nonfiction.

And just a few minutes ago I read aloud the delightful Abe Lincoln Crosses a Creek by Deborah Hopkinson with illustrations by John Hendrix.  This is a superb work of meta fiction, perfect for 4th graders.  Author and illustrator collaborate beautifully to show young readers how you can never truly know history, that the best you can do is use what we do know for sure thoughtfully and carefully. As Deborah reminds us, “For that’s the thing about history — if you weren’t there, you can’t know for sure.”

PIcturing the Past at the JFK Presidential Library

At the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum

Picturing the Past

A Conference for Classroom Teachers, Grades 3-8, and School Librarians

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

8:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.

This program will explore the use of imagery — through illustrations, photographs and other primary sources, as well as great writing — to engage students in history. Featured speakers include award-winning children’s book authors Ellen Levine, Walter Dean Myers and Martin W. Sandler, and noted illustrator Wendell Minor.

Conference brochure with registration form (pdf)

…and me too, me too! From the brochure:

Imagining the Pilgrims: A Creative Approach to Learning History
Veteran teacher and author of Far Away and Long Ago and Seeking History, Monica Edinger uses primary and secondary sources, children’s literature, and new technologies to develop a love of history in her students. In this workshop, you will travel back in time and experience life as a Pilgrim in Massachusetts. You’ll decipher a seventeenth-century journal entry, analyze children’s book illustrations, and learn how to guide students to write and illustrate their own historical fiction with imagined Pilgrim characters.

In the Classroom: About That Harvest Festival

Our corn did prove well, and God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good, but our peas not worth the gathering, for we feared they were too late sown. They came up very well, and blossomed, but the sun parched them in the blossom. Our harvest being gotten in, our governor sent four men on fowling, that so we might after a special manner rejoice together after we had gathered the fruit of our labors. They four in one day killed as much fowl as, with a little help beside, served the company almost a week. At which time, amongst other recreations, we exercised our arms, many of the Indians coming amongst us, and among the rest their greatest king Massasoit, with some ninety men, whom for three days we entertained and feasted, and they went out and killed five deer, which they brought to the plantation and bestowed on our governor, and upon the captain and others. And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so far from want that we often wish you partakers of our plenty.

That’s the description of the harvest feast from which our American Thanksgiving comes from.  It was published in 1622 in Mourt’s Relation, the earliest account of those Mayflower passengers and their settlement (and I copied it from Caleb Johnson’s excellent account and explanation of the event).

I’ve been teaching a lengthy unit on this group of early American immigrants for many years.  Among many other activities I have the kids read (and annotate) a few pages from Mourt’s Relation (the title page is below) and have even gone to look at an original copy at NYPL’s rare book room.  Probably the best online source for information about this harvest feast and the settlement is Caleb Johnson’s labor-of-love, Mayflower History.  I’ve written extensively about this unit on this blog, at my class blog, in books, articles, and elsewhere.  One online article specifically about the Mourt’s Relation activity can be read here.

At this time of year there is always a lot of stuff, some unfortunately problematic, happening in schools around this holiday.  When I first designed and taught this unit around fifteen years ago I knew of no one doing anything like it.  Since then it seems to have become part of many elementary students’ studies, I’m happy to see.  That is, they go past the myths and begin to explore the actual documents and information around this complex story.  Since 1994 I’ve been taking our fourth graders on an overnight to Plimoth Plantation that has a very sensitive way of teaching visitors about this event.  Since our students are so well-informed and relatively free of the stereotypical notions of my youth, I’m surprised when I read of others who still are being taught in the insensitive ways I was taught.  And it reinforces my strong belief in the need to teach history in depth, in ways that help children to think hard about complicated stuff, rather than just feed them facts for tests.  Unlike many of my peers in this era of tests and NCLB, I’m able to do so and sure hope that as a new era dawns in January that more are able to do as I do.

There are many recent books for children providing thoughtful, carefully researched, and in-depth looks at this holiday including Penny Coleman’s Thanksgiving: The True Story and Catherine O’ Neill Grace and Margaret M. Bruchac’s 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving.

In the Classroom: The Graveyard Book

It is raining outside, the shades are down, and the classroom is dark. The only light is a small dog-shaped lamp behind me illuminating the final pages of The Graveyard Book.  A couple of my fourth graders are sitting next to me reading along as I read aloud.  Several more are sitting directly in front of me, faces up, engrossed in the story.  Still others are lying flat out on the rug or scrunched up on pillows.  I’ve been reading for over thirty minutes now and there has not been a sound, not a rustle.  I can almost feel the children’s anticipation as I get to the last page of the book and read the final three words.

A few weeks back as the children avidly speculated about what would happen to Bod, wondered whether he would see Scarlett again, questioned why Jack was after him, and worried if he would survive I asked if they’d like to hear the last three words of the book. Words, I assured them, that wouldn’t spoil anything.  Yes, they said, please!  Please! And so I read those last three words to them. They were just right. Enough to know whatever happened, the ending would be good. And it was.  I choked up reading those words, reading those last sentences, just as I always do when reading the ending of Charlotte’s Web. There is something transcendent about the endings of both books. Both are sad and happy.  They are good.  And, above all, they are satisfying.  For my students, Bod’s story ended as it should.

***

After falling in love with book last summer I was delighted to see the enthusiastic reception it received in the children’s literature world. The reviews have been glowing and it is being justifiably touted for the Newbery.  But some wondered, what will children make of it?  So I decided to read it to my nine and ten year-olds and was gratified to see that they loved the book as much as any of us grown-ups did. So much so that we’ve created a mural of the book.  We may still scatter a few of the characters (say the living, the dead, and cats) around the border, but I’m so thrilled with it and eager to show it off that I’ve gone ahead and photographed it for you to see. The top part is the graveyard, the middle section is the town, and the bottom contains the kids’ favorite creepy places — the otherworldly Ghulheim and the tomb of the Sleer (and you will have to imagine getting to this by going down, down, down below the hill of the graveyard and the town).  We purposely used different materials and styles for each section  (Tissue paper, pipe cleaners, glitter, mod podge, various patterned papers were some of the materials. My favorite material has to be the cardboard from a Kleenex tissue box used for the gravestones and book title.)