Cabin Fever Part 2

Well..... cabin fever has definitely taken over today at our house. It is snowing again... and sticking!When I got my fill of the white stuff powdering up the deck I decided to escape to the greenhouse.
Thank goodness for thriving plants and these beautiful variegated geranium leaves. I am ready for these plants to move outside.I think Isabelle just got tired of the snow also. She decided to ponder what to do next here while she caught up on her sleep.
I am afraid if this weather continues Annie will now have to get a sweater!
I am not dreaming of a white St. Patrick's Day.... I want a green St. Patrick's Day!! WAAAAHHHHH!

Perhaps It Is Cabin Fever?

Usually cats keep a set routine that rarely changes. Not at our house. Perhaps we can attribute it to cabin fever. McDuff hadn't visited inside the house since Shelby arrived, which was more than three years ago. He would hang out in the room attached to the garage and certainly in a bed in the garage, but not in the house. All of a sudden a few weeks ago McDuff has reappeared like he has always been hanging out with us in the evening. He comes in the kitchen in the morning to be fed and has even joined us on the bed at night. Go figure!Lily has also showed signs of a changed routine. When we adopted her she had never been around people or other animals much so she has always been a bit of a loner. She watches us a lot and is a follower outside, but keeps to herself inside in the room attached to the garage. Now she is venturing out also. She has jumped up on the back of the chair in the sunroom and rested behind JEJ's head. Today she just sat by the door like she was waiting for me to come and get ready for school (She always follows me in the morning and watches my routine of getting ready).
Did we add another dog to our pet family? No, Annie was given a spring cut that looks like a summer cut while it is still winter. Her fur was getting to be a bit of a mess and it was hard to tell if she was getting chubby or just had a lot of hair. JEJ decided a cut was in order earlier than usual. I can't believe how many cute freckles she has now! She does resemble a Pointer or German Shorthair and appears more lean as she continues to walk atop the snow that is STILL HERE!!
Of course, all these changes around the house just provide Shelby with new motivation for trying out her herding skills. With one more cat to corral around the house there is never a dull moment for Shelby.She still finds time to go out eat snow with her best buddy. Both of them are sure there are some yummy treasures buried right here. Will the snow ever melt? Perhaps there is someone else around this house that has cabin fever.

Learning How to Write

After yesterday's post I began thinking about how I learned how to write. When I say writing I am not referring to penmanship, but words to paper. The process of learning how to read is more vivid in my mind. At some point each child is given opportunities to write, but writing takes on so many more forms. Some of my early writing experiences were foundational structures which allowed me to move on to "real writing" later. I do remember copying the following poem in the fall of second grade:

The Squirrel

Anonymous

Whisky, frisky,
Hippity hop;
Up he goes
To the tree top!

Whirly, twirly,
Round and round,
Down he scampers
To the ground.

Furly, curly
What a tail!
Tall as a feather
Broad as a sail!

Where's his supper?
In the shell,
Snappity, crackity,
Out it fell.

I remember Mrs. Meyers reciting it, then me writing in on lined paper and drawing a picture of a squirrel. What is most memorable was memorizing it and performing it in front of the class. Looking at the poem now I can see the power of rhyme and strong words like "snappity, crackity". Even a simile has been introduced which I couldn't call by name in second grade. I don't even know if Mrs. Meyers knew by teaching that poem that she was forming a foundation for future writing, but experiences like this fill a child's imagination with examples that can be drawn out later.

I also remember doing Picture Study which involved studying a great work of art, the teaching composing sentences about that art, and the students copying them down on paper. Again, imitation is an effective strategy for moving a writer from set structure to structure with original thoughts. Later in sixth grade I felt so free when our teacher let us write our own page about the great work of art.
Letters were always a form of writing I recall composing as soon I knew how to write words. We wrote letters to our grandmothers, thank you letters for gifts, and in Camp Fire Girls it was a letter to a guest that had come to speak at our meeting. Many have said that the art of letter writing is fading, but I am a traditionalist. I still love to write letters and send them snail mail. I give my students opportunities to write notes and letters of appreciation to adults that surround them. I encourage them to also do "gifts of writing" to family members using their writing skills and heartfelt words at Mother's Day or before a parent conference.

In third grade my teacher gave us big white construction paper if we finished our work and let us create little villages with people and animals. I remember adding details to those pictures and sharing ideas with my friend KW, who was very artistic, and loving that creative time of letting my ideas out. I also think we wrote stories about those pictures.

As a grew as a writer I was given opportunities to compose poems and stories in class. It was always a big deal though. It was not part of our usual routine. I wish we would have written more, but maybe having it be such a special event made it memorable.

Today I had students working in groups to collaborate on a story. As they were keyboarding or writing in journals the room was abuzz with laughter and sharing. Budding writers move through phases that become a comfort zone. The boys in my class are in the "farts " stage and can describe that bodily function perfectly with vivid words and descriptions. In experimenting with theme, they have also decided every story has to have a zombie appear. Everyone waits now to see how the zombie appears. The girls are into mysteries. It always involves friends, spooky phone calls, a scary house, and boyfriends. They will move on soon to new and more challenging storylines. My phase used to be rhyming poetry. I would work so hard on getting the last word in each line to rhyme, I don't even know if the poem made sense!

As adults we are challenged to find the time to write. In the busyness of our work and life it is often difficult to have energy and inspiration to write much in the evening. Sometimes I just take that time to enjoy others' writing by reading blogs, grabbing poetry books, or a folder of student writing.
When you learn to read the letters and words begin to make sense. You move into more complex understanding of text, but once you learn how to decode the words, the science of reading is learned. Writing is different. I am still learning how to write. There are so many parts to writing that I shy away from. I don't write short stories because I don't feel like I can build characters effectively. I am not a lover of science fiction, so I don't attempt it. Academic articles have not been something I have sat down to create lately. The process of writing makes us lifelong learners. I can't imagine any writer ever saying, " I am done. I have mastered everything there is to know about writing. I guess I will move on to gourmet cooking." Hardly.

Learning How to Read

Next week I will be presenting a workshop on using poetry to teach reading and writing strategies to a group of teachers. During my preparation I have been reading and rereading poetry selections from many sources. I am struck by the volume of good poetry I continue to find in books, magazines, and web sites that I haven't even posted here yet!

Today I want to share one my new favorites I discovered this week. I really like the poetry of Billy Collins and he has worked hard to make poetry much more accessible to our students. This poem is a reminder of simpler days, a long, shiny hallway at Silver King School, and learning how to read.


First Reader

By Billy Collins


I can see them standing politely on the wide pages
that I was still learning to turn,
Jane in a blue jumper, Dick with his crayon-brown hair,
playing with a ball or exploring the cosmos
of the backyard, unaware they are the first characters,
the boy and girl who begin fiction.

Beyond the simple illustration of their neighborhood
the other protagonists were waiting in a huddle:
frightening Heathcliff, frightened Pip, Nick Adams
carrying a fishing rod, Emma Bovary riding into Rouen.

But I would read about the perfect boy and his sister
even before I would read about Adam and Eve, garden and gate,
and before I heard the name Gutenberg, the type
of their simple talk was moving into my focusing eyes.

It was always Saturday and he and she
were always pointing at something and shouting "Look!"
pointing at the dog, the bicycle, or at their father
as he pushed a hand mower over the lawn,
waving at aproned mother framed in the kitchen doorway,
pointing toward the sky, pointing at each other.

They wanted us to look but we had looked already
and seen the shaded lawn, the wagon, the postman.
We had seen the dog, walked, watered and fed the animal,
and now it was time to discover the infinite, clicking
permutations of the alphabet's small and capital letters.
Alphabetical ourselves in the rows of classroom desks,
we were forgetting how to look, learning how to read.

Old School Rebel!

Sometimes I am so old school. I remember when white boards were first introduced in classrooms. I thought I would never say good-bye to my colored chalk, soiled blouse cuffs, and dry cuticles for some high-powered dry erase markers. I did say farewell and I haven't used a chalk board for at least ten years now!

Now I was never that old school about desks. They always seemed awkward when you wanted students to group together to conference on writing. There was never enough room for them to stow their musical instruments, big coats, and backpacks underneath. I have used tables in the classroom for a long time now. In fact I have students beg to have one of the "old desks" sometimes because they like having their own space.

Old school and new school have always included the plan book and grade book, teacher neccessities handed out at the start of each school year. It is a yearly ritual to organize all your classes on those pages and see how much worse your eyes had gotten over the summer as you try to read the days of the week in the tiny squares placed there for attendance.

Urban legends have floated around the halls of education forever about those grade books going into the archives for one hundred years because there just might be a student who graduated from the district thirty years ago that will be asked on a job application how many days of school he missed in seventh grade.
We need to be ready to give that information. We turn in those books every spring as we leave for another summer break so somebody in the district office will have that information!

Old school has made another big shift. We started doing attendance a few years ago online. I still filled in those little squares each day of the week in my trusty grade book when students were absent. How can we trust a computer? What if it crashes and somebody's life is hanging on what day he/she was sick in 1995? As a teacher you protect your attendance book with your life. It may be coffee stained and have a few germs covering it, but it goes with you each and every day. How could you function if you lost the grades you gave students on their papers?

Now comes the granddaddy of shifts. Recently we were all trained to not only do attendance, but turn our hard copy old school gradebook into a online source. I sat in the training and timidly raised my hand and asked, " Does this mean we don't need to fill in those little boxes every week day of the school year or fill in grades each day on another page?"
She smiled and said, " You are safe! The state does a backup of the system all the time and you will never lose that data! The auditors say it is AOkay to say good-bye to grade books."

Wow! Now that was about a month ago. I hung on with some nostalgia to my worn, coffee stained grade book with the little colored marks showing if students were absent and present. My students kept hinting that they would love a printout of their grades ( What... a sticky note written on both sides isn't official enough for a basketball team grade check?).

Tonight I did it. I sat down, set up an online gradebook, entered all the data, and had beautiful printouts of grades before I knew it. I was amazed how easy it was. My students will be in shock tomorrow. I didn't even enter all the grades as backup in those tiny squares first. I am such a rebel.

I have to be honest here though. I just can't part with that grade book yet. It is filled with lists of things to do, student birthdays, and notes written in the boxes from students when they were waiting to meet with me. I just won't feel so obligated to store it in a fireproof box when I leave the room for lunch. If the water cooler tips over tomorrow and runs all my different colors of ink together on the many pages in my grade book, I will be okay. The Attendance Police will not come and take me away... I have all my data backed up now!

Blog Anniversary #2