Learning from a 7 Year Old Poet

It is morning and I am conferring with a first grader while her teacher observes. The child has written a poem about people rising early to see spring leave and summer arrive. This is the finished poem:

Summer Time 

Spring has bloomed out
under the tree of hope.
Morning is light.
Many have risen
early to see spring go.
Rapidly, watermelons start to grow.
The beach becomes a summer home.
The time has come for summer.
It has come to stay.

After we finish working on the poem, she asks to draw as she says drawing will help her to rethink the poem. At the end of March, I had the pleasure of teaching her in several 3 hour blocks and one of the things we did was draw in order to think through stories, add detail, and better understand our intentions.

After a bit more discussion, she asks if she can perform other poems as she thinks that acting them out helps to make poems.

As I watch and listen, this 7-year-old moves about the room dancing the poem awake. I marvel at her understanding of poetry and the inherent joy she finds while making poems.  She tells me,  "Poets act it out to feel the poem. I like to do that. It helps me answer."

When Joy, Play & Learning are Deliberate: Learning in K-2

This is such an inspiring look at literacy that is intentional, play-based, and artful.  From the UK.

Reading, Writing and Drama Playing




Lesson Plans Related to the Video:

Reception – The Gruffalo

Introducing the new story

Learning Objective:  To listen and respond to a story.

Context of Learning:  Linked to our context of Monsters and Dinosaurs we will be using the book The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.  The children will be developing their ability to listen and respond to the story, the sequence of the story and explore the setting, characters and theme of the story.

Success Criteria: All children to be able to talk about what they can see in the pictures.  All children to be able to say if they liked the story and why.

Key Questions:  Where is this story set?  What is it like in the woods?  What is a Gruffalo?  What does the word gruffalo make you think of?  What does the gruffalo look like?  Did you like the story?  What was your favourite part?  What did you notice about the story?

Whole Class teaching Explain we are going to be reading a new book and finding out about new characters.  Show the title page of the woods, where is this story set?  What is it like in the woods?  Discuss with talk partner what they can see and record comments around the picture. Introduce the character of the mouse and read the blurb.  What is a gruffalo? What does the word gruffalo make you think of?  Discuss children’s thoughts and feelings.  Show the children a picture of the gruffalo.  What does the Gruffalo look like?  Tell your partner. Read the story - Stop at varies intervals ask questions Why do the animals think the mouse looks good?  Look at the animals faces and discuss feelings, How is the animal feeling now they have seen the gruffalo? Booktalk – Ask children to share their thoughts about the story - Did you like the story and why? What was your favourite part and why?  What did you notice about the story? (rhyming words etc)  Was their a pattern?  How did the mouse describe the gruffalo?

Independent learning activities: Painting the gruffalo. Retelling the story using a variety of props in a large builders tray.

Reception – The Gruffalo 

Exploring Characters

Learning objective:  To talk about the main characters in the story and how they are feeling. To think, say and write simple sentences for a thought bubble.

Context of Learning:  Linked to our context of Monsters and Dinosaurs we will be using the book The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler.  The children will be developing their ability to listen and respond to the story, the sequence of the story and explore the setting, characters and theme of the story.

Success Criteria:  Children will be able to explore the different feelings of the characters by using their facial expressions and words.

Key Questions:  How is the … feeling?  How do you know?  Why is the … feeling like that?  What is the mouse thinking?  How many words in out sentence?  What is the first word?  What does it begin with?  What do we put at the end of our sentence?

Whole Class teaching Show pages from the story and discuss how the characters are feelings and why.  Can you use your face to show that feeling?  Explain that they are going to help to retell the story and that they must become the different characters using their bodies and faces to show how they are feeling. Retell the story with the children joining in using a drum to indicate when to freeze frame.  Use a microphone to interview the children in role about how they are feeling and why. Model writing  Now we have thought about how the characters are feeling we are going to write a thought bubble.  Show the last page of the mouse eating a nut, what is the mouse thinking?  Share with your talk partner, ask children to share their ideas to the class.  Choose a sentence to write, say the sentence, count how many words.  What is the first word?  What sounds can we hear in it?  When we have written the sentence count the words has it got the correct number of words? Reread does it say what we wanted it to say?

Independent learning activities: With teacher children to write their own thought bubbles – think, say, write a sentence. Using their own puppets and the theatre to retell the story.

Planned activities to support learning

Of the Gruffalo

Throughout the week planned activities both adult led and independent for the children to develop their knowledge and understanding of the story further.

• Drawing other characters using pastels
• Props to retell the story
• Puppets and a theatre to retell the story
• Puppet making
• Book making
• Using computer programs to draw the Gruffalo and parts of the story
• www.gruffalo.com
• Collage a gruffalo
• Label body parts
• Created storymaps and used them to retell the story in their own words
• Using instruments to add sound effects
• Writing speech bubble for what the characters say throughout the story
• Learn the Gruffalo song and actions
• Pairs/snap game using character pictures also children can describe or say a sentence about that character
• Sand tray – props to retell story
• Reading The gruffalo’s Child

Whole class teaching sessions –

·      The children listened for the repeated phrases and joined in.

·      Shared writing – labeling around the gruffalo how the mouse describes him.  Comparing the mouse and gruffalo. 

·      Explored the theme of who was the scariest creature?  Was the mouse clever?

·      Split into groups, each groups was a different character and we retold the story and the children acted out their part.

·      Learnt The Gruffalo song and made up actions.

II. Guided Writing: Experienced-based




Guided Writing Strategy Guide



Recommended Professional Resources

Corbett, Pie & Julia Strong. (2011). Talk for Writing Across the Curriculum. London: Open University Press.
Corbett, Pie. (2008). Storyteller. London: Scholastic.
Heard, Georgia & Jennifer McDonough. (2009). A Place for Wonder: Reading and Writing Nonfiction in the Primary Grades. Portland, ME: Stenhouse.

Hegemony Or Why I Will Not Talk in Class Anymore

Scene 1
A former graduate student shared that shortly after taking over a class (she's the 4th teacher this year) she reviewed the children's writers' notebooks.  She said she was dismayed to see that a few students had written the following entry:

"I will not talk in class anymore."

Scene 2
Last week a teacher I know discontinued working with a student teacher. She indicated that the student was not ready to teach given her lack of preparation that resulted in significant and consistent errors while teaching. The student teacher was denied a credential and returned to the college.

Scene 3

Some years ago I oversaw the literacy program for a public city school system. A neighboring charter school would hire the city's Reading Recovery teachers to work as after school tutors in order to teach those students who were most at risk for reading difficulties.  The leader of the Charter explained that he could not match the salaries of such senior and well educated teachers, nor could his school pay for the continuing contact and other costs associated with Reading Recovery.  What he could and did do was to pay for after school eduction for children. As he told me then, "Our teachers are too green to know how to do this (prevent reading difficulties).  They can help the Reading Recovery teachers and learn as the students are learning."

Scene 4
Yesterday, I passed by a charter school in an inner city.  It was a beautiful building in a neighborhood of mostly boarded buildings and largely littered sidewalks.  The building was well maintained and attractive with the sidewalks surrounding it, neatly swept. I thought about the number of studies I have read and the plethora of comments from public school advocates I have read all indicating that charter schools are no better or worse than public schools as measured by single test instruments and I wondered if such a measurement makes any difference to the people who send their children to this charter school.

I think of the players (teachers, students, student teacher, administrators) in these minor dramas and wonder about the complex issue that (in)form our understanding of schooling—a topic that ought to be fraught with positions, especially these days. Where one might expect to hear the clamor of different voices chiming, there seems to be just two dominant voices that relentlessly sound and sound again.  Are you pro-public schools or are you pro-charter schools?

Such a query is hegemonic posturing at best.  The current public discourse about teaching and learning is dangerously narrowed in order to position one's perspective and to obfuscate the more challenging realities we fail to discuss:

1. who has consistent opportunities to access high level curricula in this country and who does not and why is that;
2. what constitutes high level curricula (for whom?);
3. how do local values matter;
4. what are the relationships between poverty and learning and how do we create equitable environments for all;
5. how do we reconcile differences (who & what gets valued and not).

Instead of substantive conversations that take longer than the end page in a popular press magazine, we are subjected to smoke and mirrors. Consider the recent Newsweek column, A Case of Senioritis, Jonathan Alter penned. Alter writes:

After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It’s a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they’re young?

I am curious as to what study he is referencing (no citation was included) and take exception (and hope you do as well) with the syllogistic leap in logic that posits "top" teachers as being synonymous with youth.  Is Alter suggesting that youth and inexperience are correlates for fine teaching?  Is there some juried study that shows that?  The faultiness in such thinking is extraordinary, but no longer unusual in these Shoot Out at the O.K. Corral days. 

Lost in such binary advantaging (get rid of senior teachers and keep young teachers) are the necessary conversations about privilege, quality, relevance, context, opportunity, and empowerment we need to be having.  This us vs. them drama distracts and keeps us from addressing our shared responsibilities regarding democracy and schooling.  Recall John Dewey who wrote, “We naturally associate democracy, to be sure, with freedom of action, but freedom of action without freed capacity of thought behind it is only chaos.”  

I can't help but wonder what sense Dewey would make of the repeated calls for action (get rid of tenure, stop health benefits, do not pay for teachers' higher degrees, employ beginning teachers, privilege youth) by bureaucrats and billionaires who seem to make such utterances with mindfulness that makes me wonder to what end our democracy is secure.  Their posturing (employ young teachers, build charter schools) leaves not only public schools in chaos by undermining public trust, but our democractic system as well.  

I will not talk (in class) anymore may well be the first volley in this grand monologue about public schooling, especially as we seem to be running headlong into a two class system populated by those who have and those who serve those who have. Makes me wonder if all this posturing is a prelude to a return to serfdom.