MISS BROOKS' STORY NOOK- Barbara Bottner

Here's a book for writers' workshop. Or storyteller's workshop. Or to add to your basket on bullying. Or just to read aloud, because kids are going to love it. Missy, who you may remember from MISS BROOKS LOVES BOOKS (AND I DON'T) is a little girl who loves to go to her school's library story each morning. Unfortunately, along the way, she has to pass the home of Billy Toomey, the neighborhood bully, who steals her hat and teases and just generally makes Missy's life miserable.

After one such morning, Missy arrives at school to discover that a power outage has forced Miss Brooks to turn story hour into story telling hour. Miss Brooks teaches the children about the elements of story- characters, setting, events, and satisfying conclusion. At first, Missy is reluctant to tell a story, but then she uses her story to solve the real life bully problem in her life!

One you will definitely want to own!

REFLECTIONS FROM ANOTHER WEEK

"So what do you think we should do tomorrow?" the fourth grade teacher asks as we consider the next day's writing workshop. He glances down at the plan we made three weeks earlier.

We are two days away from the big event (which shall remain nameless) and writing instruction has reached what feels like a fever pitch. We have written and written and written to prompts- one pagers, four pagers, narrative, description, persuasive, favorites…The kids have done it all.

"I don't know," I respond, "Let me look at today's writing and think about it tonight."

That night I read through the stack of 30+ four-page (ok, many three page) essays. The prmpt was to write about something they had learned to do.

• A remains enamored with Robert Munsch. Every day he does some weird twist on the Munsch theme, repeating phrases, putting his own name into Munsch's stories, adapting Munsch's stories just a bit so that he can call them his own.

• K writes a beautiful story about his older sister (who passed away in a car accident 18 months ago) teaching him to ride his bike. Midway through the story, however, he switches narrators from first person, where he is telling the story, using the pronoun I, to third person, where he uses his name as a character in the story.

• M loves dialogue. The piece she wrote about learning to cheerlead is so dialogue heavy that it's hard to follow what is going on.

• Many of the other students are also using dialogue. Reading through their work, I decide that teaching kids to punctuate dialogue is somewhat like teaching long division. There are a million different ways you can get it not quite right.

• Yesterday, during our skills block, the teacher reviewed contractions. Today R writes yes, ye's.

• We have also been reviewing nonfiction text features. Today Q decides to use subtitles instead of transitions in her fiction piece.

• Z and P both write pieces that are absolutely beautiful for about a page and a half- great lead, dialogue, rich details. Then, evidently, they get tired or run out of time, and cram the middle and end of the piece into one paragraph using none of the tools that they have displayed earlier.

• K writes about learning to play the saxophone with his mother. The piece rolls along beautifully for about a page, to a point where K is talking about one of the songs he and his mother taught themselves to play. At this point, for whatever reason, he decides it would be a good idea to include the full text of the words to the 16 line song.

• S, who is one of the best writers in the class, writes a three paragraph conclusion. Basically she just repeats herself, juxtaposing the sentences in three different ways.

So what am I going to teach them the next day? I riffle through the stack of papers again and decide to get up early and think about it in the morning when I am fresh. By the next morning, I have decided. I will teaching them nothing.

We have written and written and written all year. We have taught and taught and taught all year. At this beginning of the year, these kids usually produced about a half of page of text. They didn't know anything about a lead or a conclusion. They didn't write with details or dialogue They didn't use paragraphs.

And now they are using all of those writers' tools. Granted, there are a lot of approximations. It's not perfect. But they are experimenting, and growing and writing their way towards becoming proficient writers. And basically, their growth as writers has been phenomenal.

And so, during the mini-lesson, I tell them that. I leaf through the stack of papers, acknowledging all of the good stuff I saw last night. I tell that every single kid wrote to the prompt. Most kids gave their work a title. I read them three different kinds of leads. I share several really terrific details and examples of dialogue. I admire the circular endings that several kids have chosen to use.

And then, I review how to punctuate dialogue. And I send them back to their seats. To write. To experiment. To grow. To learn. Because that is what writers do.

And if they are not ready by Tuesday…

SOME OF MY OUT OF THE BOX THINKING FOR THIS WEEK

On Friday, Mary Lee had an amazing post about thinking out of the box. If you haven't read it, hop right over to Year of Reading and do it now. Really. Be sure to take the six minutes to watch the video. It's amazing.

Mary Lee's video and the accompanying poem gave me a new lens for thinking about an event that had occurred on Thursday in a class that I was working in:

I've been fussing a lot lately about how important it is to have a solidly grounded, theoretically based teaching philosophy and to make curricular and pedagogical decisions based on those beliefs. In a few less words, "I believe X, so I do Y." When I do that in my own teaching life, that's when kids learn best. Take this situation from last Thursday, for example.

I am working with the fourth graders on writing fiction, specifically, writing fiction to a prompt. Many of my students come from homes where lots of stories are told, but few come from homes where many stories are read aloud. I try, then, when I write narrative, and particularly fictional narrative with kids to read them lots of great stories. One of my favorite authors for this is Robert Munsch. Munsch was an oral storyteller before he was a writer. Munsch's work is sophisticated enough that older kids enjoy the content, and his writing style is easy for them to imitate. Munsch draws heavily on the the traditions of oral storytelling, e.g. things that happen in threes, events that repeat three times, repeating phrases. Because he uses these tools so masterfully, they are easy for kids to recognize and duplicate.

A. approaches at the end of independent writing time. He is a sweet, sweet guy, an English Language Learner, who is super eager to please. When he came to fourth grade, A rarely wrote more than a paragraph. The writing was simple, the language was simple, and his use of conventions was simple. A is a kid who has really taken off as a writer, however, in the past few month. He regularly writes two, and occasionally even three well-developed pages during writing time. He knows how to use several different leads, including a question, a sound effect and what we call "setting the scene." He uses what we call "rule of three" (have three events, add three details to make a picture in the writers' head/give three examples to support your thinking). He can write dialogue, and punctuate it pretty close to correctly. He knows how to end a piece without saying, "And that's the end of my story." Most importantly, he can evaluate his own work, and tell you what he has done well, and what he wants to do on the next piece of writing.

One thing I know about A, however, is that he is not usually a writer or learner that grasps a concept or technique on the first try, or often not even the second, or third. Usually A needs to approximate, get feedback, approximate again, get more feedback, approximate, and get more feedback. It takes him four or five or ten tries. A is persistent, however, and eventually, he gets the hang of whatever we are working on.

Today, A can't wait to show me what he has done during writing time. The prompt was to imagine you woke up with a new body part, e.g. antlers, or a giraffe neck, or wings. A. has taken Robert Munsch's story, PURPLE, YELLOW, GREEN, about a little girl who begs her mom to buy her markers, first washable markers, then smelly markers, then indelible, never wash off until you're dead and maybe even longer markers, and basically inserted his own name into it. He's used Munsch's details and even his language. He tells me that he is going to have himself draw bunny ears on his head, but at this point, he is almost two pages in, and has not yet reached the prompt. That's a teeny bit of a problem given that the assigned length for this story cannot be any more than four pages.

We are at the point in the year where we have four teaching days until kids have to be able to show that they are proficient writers. And when I look at A's piece, my heart jumps into my throat. A four page piece that has not hit the prompt after two pages is probably not going to cut it. I take a deep breath. I remember what I believe. I try to practice what I have preached.

First, I acknowledge what A has done. "Wow, A, you really loved that Robert Munsch story that we read today, huh? And you have used his ideas and his words in even your own work." A beams from ear to ear and has to read the piece aloud to me again, just so I can get the full effect of Munsch's words in his story. I make myself breathe deeply again, then I try to honor A's approximation, "I love how you listened during the mini-lesson and how you used Robert Munsch's thinking to help you write your own story." A is still beaming, and again has to read me several lines lifted pretty much directly from Munsch.

Then I provide feedback to push A forward. I gently remind him about the prompt we are writing to. He tells me that he is going to use Robert Munsch's markers to draw bunny ears on his own head and talk about what a day would be like with bunny ears. "Ohh, I get it," I say. "That's a great idea." We talk a little about balance, and about how the beginning probably can't be quite as long as Alex has made it, and about how the people who grade prompted writing need to know pretty quickly that you are writing to their prompt, and then A., still smiling goes back to work some more on the piece. He is still incredibly pleased with his efforts, and I'm not totally sure he has heard anything I have said. I'm thinking he will draw the bunny ears on himself pretty soon, but either the piece will be four pages and be totally beginning heavy, or he will have a six or seven page story, that's way too long for a prompted writing.

I make myself take a a few more deep breaths. And try not to think about how much more teaching will need to go on before A. is proficient at using this technique vs. how many days we have left before he needs to be proficient. A is becoming a proficient writer. Whether it takes three more days or three more weeks or three more months, I need to keep doing the same things Don Graves taught me to do a hundred years ago. Listen to the writer. Celebrate the message. Honor the approximations. Think about the one thing that will help the writer move forward. Teach that one thing. And then send the writer back to learn from his/her writing.

Teaching should not be about trying to cram children into little boxes. Teaching should be about celebrating who children are as learners, and honoring who they are becoming. However long it takes.

SO NOT THE HEINEMANN CLASSROOM*

*WITH HUGE APOLOGIES TO ONE OF MY FAVORITE PUBLISHERS!

Tom Newkirk used to talk about the Heinemann classroom. You know, one of those classrooms where all of the students gaze in rapt attention as the teacher delivers a flawless minilesson (and no one picks the gravel out of the bottom of their tennis shoes or has flatulence issues). And then those same students leave the meeting area, open their beautifully decorated writers' notebooks (no one's notebook ever disappears or has pages glued together), pick up their previously sharpened pencils (which never break within the first 30 seconds of quiet writing time) and write masterly, carefully crafted pieces, which they then share with well-trained conference partners who deliver brilliant advice which leads to still more wonderful published pieces.

I have a confession to make. I am so NOT the Heinemann teacher. I so DO NOT have a Heinemann classroom. Take last Wednesday, for instance. I am in a second/third grade grade ELA-E/ELA-S classroom (a room where students whose first language is Spanish speaking are transitioning into English). My state says that if ELL kids have been enrolled in schools in the United States for three or more years, they have to receive most of their instruction in English and they have to take the state reading and writing tests in English. And so now, a week before the writing test, we are doing our best to prepare them.

Today's prompt, "Everyone has things they like to do. Describe one of your favorite activities and tell why it is your favorite." I believe kids need to talk before they write, so we spend time talking about our favorite activities-- I tell the kids I love walking my dogs in the park. We talk about sports- baseball, soccer, football and basketball. We talk about games (mostly video) and craft activities. We talk about things kids do with their families- swimming, camping, picnics. After a few minutes of conversation, I think we are almost ready to write. I draw a large four square planner on chart paper, model my thinking, then send the eight and nine-year-olds off to plan and write. Sounds pretty Heinemann-ish so far, right?

Actually, midway through the mini-lesson, X started to get very teary and now he is in full scale crying mode. I sit down next to him on the rug and ask what's wrong. Sick? Worried? Someone hurt his feelings? X cries harder. "I just want to go home," he wails. "I just want to go to bed." X lays down on the rug, curls up in something akin to the fetal position, pulls his hoodie over his head, and continues to weep softly. I am not quite clear on what is wrong, and I don't know how to fix it, so I sit next to him and rub his back.

In the meantime, E announces that he has lost his notebook, and several students engage in a mad search (there really are classrooms where someone's writer's notebook doesn't get lost every day?). Eventually the lost notebook is found under E's chair and most of the other kids settle in and begin to write. A small crowd of X's friends, though, are concerned that X is unhappy and they bring their notebooks to the rug and formed a kind of circle around X. Usually I'm pretty strict about the first 2o minutes of writing being at your seat, but today, I let it go.

R, one of my friends from a second grade intervention group, is X's good friend, and sits right beside him. R wants to write about playing baseball. He is on a team, he tells me. "What's the name of that team?" he asks me. "You know," he says, "the ones with the red and white shirts. They start with kuh." I actually don't know much about the baseball teams in the area, although I might be able to play "Name That Team" if we were talking about football. X raises his head slightly. "It's the Cavaliers," he says. "We play on the Cavaliers."

L, another second grade friend, appears at my left shoulder. "I want to write about explosions," he declares. "You know, the ones where the red and blue stuff bubbles. They do it in Mr. M's class," he says, pointing toward the fifth grade room next door.

I don't know much about the red and blue explosions in Mr. M's class either. "You mean the science experiments," I say.

L is a little irritated with me. "You know," he says. "Like this…" He begins to sketch. First he draws something that looks like a beaker.

"Science experiments?" I repeat. "You mean you like to do science experiments."

"No," says L. "Like this." He uses his eraser to scrub out the beaker-ish thing, then draws what looks like a test tube and someone in a lab coat.

"You mean you like science club?" I ask. L does not look totally convinced, but evidently decides that that is as good as it's going to get. He scrubs out the picture of the scientist-looking person and goes back to his seat.

R is still writing about baseball. "And I did it four times," he says proudly. "You hit the ball four times?" I ask.

"No," says R. "I catched it."

"You caught the ball four times?"

"Yeah, I catched it," says R. X pokes his head up again. "Does that say favorite?" he says, pointing to a word on R's paper where the spelling is a little questionable.

L, still trying to figure out his plan for science experiments as his favorite activity, is back at my shoulder. "What else can I say?" he says. I try to remember what science experiments they have done this year. "Butterflies?" I say. "Did you like watching the butterflies grow? Or how about dissecting the pigs' eyes in science club?"

L looks a little unsure. "How about I just write that I like learning about eagles?" he says and heads back to his desk (I SWEAR most days there is not this much activity during quiet writing time!)

I turn back to R, who is trying to help his friend G with English spelling. "You know," he says, "an e, one of these." He forms an i in the air in between them. E is the name of the letter i in Spanish, and the information appears to be helpful to G. I try not to think about every grad school class I have ever taken- children are supposed to work in one language or the other-- they are not supposed to code switch. "Do you know how to spell brother?" G asks me.

L comes back again. "Do you know about Michael Jackson?" he asks.

Michael Jackson??? What happened to the explosions with the red and blue water and learning about eagles? I glance over at his paper and see that he has totally changed his plan and is now writing about Michael Jackson.

"Do you know about Michael Jackson's dances?" he asks.

"A little. I know the moonwalk." Evidently, so does A, because he jumps up from where he has been sitting next to X and proceeds to demonstrate.

"No that's not the one I mean," says L. He stands on one foot and uses the other to make a scissor motion across his shin, in a move that looks vaguely like someone trying to itch a mosquito bite on a hot summer evening. Much to L's annoyance, I don't know the name of that dance either.

"You could say you like to do his dance steps," I suggest. L gives up on me and goes away.

"So do you know how to spell brother?" G asks again.

Mrs. S. catches my eye. "Carol, we have to end. I have a bunch of stuff to pass out today." I look up at the clock and it's 3:30. The kids leave in ten minutes so share time will have to wait until tomorrow.

Someday, I would like to visit one of those Heinemann classrooms. The rooms where I teach are so far removed…

WORD BUILDERS- Ann Whitford Paul

I collect books about words and language play. This week, while browsing at the LIBRARY (I really am trying to curtail my book buying a little), I found a book that I really HAVE to own. WORD BUILDER is poet Ann Whitford Paul's latest creation. The whole book is one long metaphor; Paul compares the writing of a book to the building of a city. "Begin with 26 letters of the alphabet. Pile your words like blocks into sentence towers. The sentences become "paragraph villages" that transform into "chapter cities" and eventually become "a book." The text is very simple. Most pages contain only one or two words, or maybe a sentence. 

It's Kurt Cyrus' fabulous illustrations that really drew me to this book. The book begins with a little boy, dressed in a hard hat. The little boy uses a variety of machines and tools, everything from bulldozers to hammers, to "build" the three-dimensional word  illustrations on each page. I can picture kids like my son poring over these illustrations, then trying to draw their own.

This book is a "gotta have."

WORD FUN SERIES

Teachers at my school have focused on writing this year, and our hard work is beginning to show. Students are demonstrating more focus, specificity, and voice. They are still struggling however, with conventions and spelling. I attended a district work session on writing earlier this week, and it appears that students all over our district are having difficulties in this area. 

I believe conventions are important. Kids need to understand that writing is about expressing ideas clearly and conventionally. They need to know that writers worry about getting their thoughts down on paper, but then about cleaning them up so that others can read their writing easily. They need to understand that people judge you based on your spelling, punctuation, and grammar. When I talk to kids about conventions, I generally refer to them in terms of how conventions impact the reader. We talk a lot about conventions as "using your writers' manners."

Yesterday, I came across a really fun series for helping kids understand/remember conventions and parts of speech. The WORD FUN series, published by PICTURE WINDOW BOOKS, has books on many grammar related topics:

• DIFFERENT KINDS OF WORDS- contraction, compound word, homonym, synonym, antonym
  
• PUNCTUATION MARK- period, question mark, exclamation mark, comma, quotation marks, apostrophe
  
• PARTS OF SPEECH- noun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction, preposition, pronoun, interjection
  
• MISCELLANEOUS- prefix, suffix, palindrome, onomatopeia, alliteration

All of the books are titled, IF YOU WERE A…. 

I bought two- IF YOU WERE A QUESTION MARK and IF YOU WERE A SUFFIX. Each of these books appears to have kind of a "dual text" format. The pictures, done in collage, tell a story. IF YOU WERE A QUESTION MARK, for instance, is about a skunk, dog, duck, koala, and an owl who are having a birthday party. The dog, Sophie, discovers that her strawberry cupcake is missing and they have to call a detective. The animals ask lots of questions, e.g.:

• Who could help us solve this mystery?
  
• Are you worried the thief will steal your cupcake too?
• Sam only likes chocolate?
• Is that strawberry frosting on Jasper's nose?

The animals' questions are kind of embedded in the illustrations.

There is a whole other text, however, done in a different font, that teaches kids some of the rules about the function and uses of question marks, e.g. here are the ones that match the questions listed above:

• If you were a question mark, you would replace a period at the end of a sentence that asks a question.
• If you were a question mark, you could ask how people are feeling.
• If you were a question mark, you could make it clear that a statement is really asking for information. 
• If you were a question mark, you could ask the really important questions. 

IF YOU WERE A SUFFIX addresses the meaning of different suffixes, e.g. -ing, -ed, -er, -est, -ed, -ful, -less. The story line in this book is not quite as clever; each picture stands alone, instead of telling a connected story. Even so, I think kids will love the collage illustrations, and might even want to make some of their own. 

I believe that kids need information presented in lots of different ways. Sometimes, they need explicit information about the rules of using a particular convention. Other times, they need to see a teacher or student modeling how the convention is used in his/her own writing. Sometimes, it's helpful to look at the convention in the context of a much loved mentor text. And still other times, books like, IF YOU WERE A… velcro the information into children's heads. This series gives me one more tool I can use to help my students become better writers…