A Letter to my Students

Clip art licensed from the Clip Art Gallery on DiscoverySchool.com

Dear EDCI 302 Teachers of Tomorrow: 

It has been a pleasure getting to know you this term.  I want to thank you all for your hard work, critical thinking, and positive attitudes.  The school community will be lucky to have you - and I want to wish you the very best in your professional journey.

If you remember just one thing from our few months together - I would really like it to be this:
Students will rise to the occasion of excellence in your Language Arts classroom if you create an environment which nurtures:

• a love of language (or willingness to play with language and try different strategies); 
• a meaningful purpose (I almost wrote "a meaningful porpoise"...which would make for an interesting story, wouldn't it?); 
• a safe environment; 
• a balanced approach;
• constructive feedback;
• and, an authentic audience.

Sharon Creech managed to create such a classroom via Mrs. Stretchberry in Love That Dog.  Nancie Atwell and Lucy Calkins have been working on creating such an environment through Writer's Workshop.  Donald Graves, Tom Romano, Penny Kittell (and many more) have been calling for teachers who value personally-meaningful engagement in the writing process for many years.

So much depends
upon a language-rich classroom
in the school where you will teach.


So much depends upon
a willingness to try
and an open mind.

You all have a beautiful opportunity in front of you.  Go forth bravely, and enjoy!


Sincerely,


Carol N.

Places to go, things to write and books to read

Image Courtesy:  Novelist on Ebsco

The Northwest Territories Literacy Council has created a Writing Ideas Toolkit which appears to have a wealth of information for the beginning or veteran teacher.

The Red Cedar Book Awards :  Many schools in British Columbia are involved in reading and voting for these reader-choice awards.  Even if you don't participate fully, you can look here for a phenomenal reading list.

The Pacific Northwest Young Reader's Choice Awards (YRCA): I have never been disappointed choosing a book from the YRCA lists.  The books are often top-quality, well-written, fully-engaging books.   I highly recommend browsing their current and past lists.  For those of you wondering about finding age-appropriate books, YRCA has them categorized nicely into Junior (grades 4-6), Intermediate (grades 7-9), and Senior (grades 10-12).

Last, but not-by-any-means-least,  Novelist  is an on-line database available through the public library website, and is a wonderful tool for helping students find more of the types of books they like.  They have reviews by highly-esteemed journals (Booklist and  Library Journal....), which are valuable for helping teachers select appropriate books for their classroom.

Haiku to You Winnie the Pooh

"There is something delicious about writing the first words of a story. You never quite know were they will take you.

I stole this from Chloaye....who took it from Beatrix.  Wonderful, isn't it?  I love to hear what authors say about writing.  For some reason, their words will stay with me, even if the date and time of big events in my own history won't.  My brain is wired that way . . . and I'm okay with that.

John Irving once said something along the lines of, "writing is a great way to spend your time alone."

I like writing, but I don't like spending time alone.  Much like my morning coffee, I need to write....for my own sense of well-being; but I don't do lonely well.  When I was completing my English Degree at Trent University, way back in the 1990's, I used to go down to the Champlain College Snack Bar, set myself up in a booth, and scribble my essays into a three-ring binder.  Since I didn't live at that particular residence, nobody knew me...I could be alone in a crowd and the writing felt less lonely.

In that booth - the far one to the left of the big window - I would often meander away from the prescribed assignments to write journal entries, poetry, or letters home to my grandmother.  These writing distractions (journal, letter, poetry) helped me to focus my active mind.  I needed that little taste of creativity, or the meaningful inward glances at my own life, to counterbalance the writing I was completing for my professors.   Over time I managed to integrate more of my creative self with my critical eye, and the process became more enjoyable.  I learned then that writing begets writing, and I still stand by that belief today. 

The more I write,
the more I want to write,
and the better my writing gets.
I hope.

Thinking back to a younger age, I was seven-years old when I first learned the power of the written word.  It manifested itself in a spiteful poem scribbled into a pink journal with a cat on the front of it which Santa left in my stocking the Christmas before.  My older sister had made me feel such angst I thought I would spit, or burst.  Since I didn't like spitting, and bursting was out of the question, I grabbed my pen, ripped into the journal and wrote venomous lines of ink across the page.

I have the worst sister in the world.
I would trade her in,
but nobody would take her.

That was my first Haiku of sorts, though I didn't know what Haiku was then, and I"m still not sure it would fit the definition.  What I do know for certain:  I needed three things to begin my life as a writer.  I needed the tools, I needed the feeling, and I needed the environment to write in.  We owe it to our students to nurture a language-rich culture in our classrooms.  To support students through exposure to a variety of rich texts; provide opportunity for writing to beget writing;  nurture the social aspect of learning - through peer conferencing and shared writing; and help students to place their own value on the written word.

I would like to end with a quote from the creator of that honey-searching bear of little brain, followed by my own attempt at being clever:

Ideas may drift into other minds, but they do not drift my way.
I have to go and fetch them. I know no work manual or mental to equal the
appalling heart-breaking anguish of fetching an idea from nowhere.

- A. A. Milne

Writing is not a passive activity. 
Teaching writing is not a passive activity either. 
We need to do what Winnie the Pooh's creater knew.

Nurture a climate right for inspiration.
Snowflakes falling with individual purpose and intent.
A desire to play in the snow.

Comic Writing

Comics were not my thing when I was growing up, and I don't mean that in a snobby academic way - I simply didn't think comics were written for me as their audience.  They belonged to the world of the boys I knew.  Superheroes, good versus evil, the grand gesture of saving the world...these were not my story.  But there was another reason I wasn't drawn (no pun intended) to them - reading them took a lot of work, and I was not a strong reader. 

My interest in graphic novels was piqued when I was working on my Master's in teacher-librarianship.  Maus, Persepolis, Blankets, Owly, Bone, and Baby Mouse opened my eyes to the genre.  I loved the narrative, but also the artwork.  The heavy black-and-white drawings in Persepolis, the love story and artwork in Blankets, the sweetness in Baby Mouse and Owly, all caught my attention and invited me into the world of comics and graphic novels.  I began to champion them for use in the classroom. 

I was so intrigued, I even had a go at writing/drawing the first chapter of a graphic novel.  I learned that creating such a visual story took a lot of work, and the process of telling was pared down to what was truly essential.  The ability to communicate with drawing and words widened the stream of narrative for me. 

Now that I am a parent, I watch my eight-year old gobble the Bone series for the third time. I was recently  pleased when he tried to create his own comic on Bitstrips, and started with a comic representation of our family. 

Liam spent a good deal of time on creating each member of our family (from left to right, Me, Liam, Charlie, Dad, Charlie, Aidan and Kieran.  You will notice that in my son's mind, he and I are the same height, and each of the boys is more buff than their father (it's okay to stretch the truth when you're telling a story, I always say).

The comic below was written by my friend's son when he was in Fourth Grade.  When he showed this to me last year, I was really impressed by the quality of his art, but also of the narrative voice he has developed in such a short time.  He has applied all that he knows about the comic genre in this three-page spread.

I just love the expression represented in the latter photo. 

Our conversation in the elementary class about the use of hand-writing/printing versus keyboarding can be carried over to these two examples: the hand-drawn comic versus the one created electronically.  Is the process engaging the student as much in the electronic version as the hand-drawn?  Is one more authentic than the other?  Does it have to be?  What is really important here, the artwork or the story? Or is that even a fair question?  Perhaps it's like comparing apples to mangoes.

One might argue that we can't compare these two samples because one represents a full story, while the other is more aptly described as a family portrait.  A better judge might be the students themselves, creating their representations with both mediums, then reflecting on and evaluating both experiences.

The bottom line for me is that there is a story and it wants to be told.  Whichever tool we use; whether that be ink, pencil, chalk, digital representations, talking to ourselves in the mirror, or moving a stick in the wet sand - as individuals we all have something to say.  Our job as teachers is to support our students in the telling of it.

Clearing the Path