Wonder love

How to Teach Reading and Writing (and a little math and science, too)

Stella loves to lay in the hammock. I'd say it is her favorite summer pastime this year. I spent about an hour laying in it with her one morning this week, and I taught her to read and write. Here's how:

1. As we were swinging gently back and forth, I looked up into the tree and saw that a spider had made a web and the sun was catching it just so we could see every line. Having finished reading Charlotte's Web the night before, I asked Stella if she imagined that Charlotte's webs looked that way? Could she see the orb lines and the radial lines? 
2. I reached for the drawing paper and pens that were available in our little outdoor studio space and invited Stella to draw the web she saw. This is a difficult task, but she gave it a try. 
3. When she finished, she wanted to write, "From Stella" on the bottom of the paper. She asked me how to write "From". So I told her the letters and she wrote them down.
4. Then she wanted to write "I love you". So we started with "I". She wanted more letters so I explained to her that was the whole word. 
5. She asked if she could write a heart and I said yes but that wouldn't be the word. She would need letters to make the word "love". So she asked for the letters.
6. This time, I made the sound /l/ because I knew it was a sound she had in her name. I told her it was the sound in Ste -- ll --and she blurted out happily, "l"! And then she was tired out, so she decided to stop the writing.
7. We laid back in the hammock for a little more snuggling and swinging. A squirrel hopped along the top of the fence but got startled when it saw us and ran away.
8. We checked on the web again and Stella noticed a tiny moth flying around it. She wondered if it would get caught and the spider would eat it. We considered the patience it takes to be a spider. 
9. I looked up on the tree and noticed a bit of sap running from a knot hole. I remembered that Stella had asked about making syrup very recently, and took a moment to make the connection for her.
10. She hopped up and cleaned the raspberry bushes of berries, then hopped back in.
11. We noticed that the spider's web had broken. And we took a little more time to consider the patience and feelings of spiders. Stella spent a few moments trying to talk to the spider in spider language, which I, like Fern's mother, could not understand.
12. Stella decided to add the spider to her drawing. She asked me how many legs it had and I told her. Stella's spider got 8 legs counted carefully -- on each side of the spider's body.
13. We noticed a second spider building a web behind the first, and we were reminded of Charlotte's babies.

Okay, so Stella doesn't yet read and write independently. But an hour spent like this, in the context of good books and materials at hand and making conversation in the wide world -- an hour spent snuggling and connecting and considering the feelings of spiders and squirrels -- an hour spent noticing and wondering and making meaningful marks on the page -- this is how she will learn. Experience offers her a chance to find her place in the family of things. She, like all human beings, wants a way to participate.

And it is oh, so much more fun than flashcards.

No homework

I was just finishing an article for Opal School's newsletter about the wonder of learning. I looked up from my work to see Max and his dad fully engaged in the collaborative creation of a new comic strip series. Character development. Plot lines. Dialogue. The need to spell Vanquish just right. The illustrations. The incredible detail.

I am so glad Max didn't have any homework tonight. 

Happy Birthday!

Today we are long-distance celebrating the birthday of my own beloved mom, and 9 year old Max has written her a gift, which we'd like to post here. Max has been working on this story since he interviewed my mom about her childhood as part of his study of his family history in his Opal School classroom. Here is Max working on an observational drawing of a photograph of my mother picking potatoes when she was a very small girl in Northern Maine.

And here is the narrative he crafted from the story she told him that captured his imagination: 

A Crash Shakes the Family by Max

It all started with the day of the crash. All I remember was the flashing lights and the sound of the sirens. Then it all went black.

I woke up in a big, white room with the smell of wet paint and plastic. It was all very strange.

Later that day, when I woke up I said, "Where am I?" I saw my dad sitting across from me. He said, "You must have hit your head pretty hard to not know where you are. Anyway, you're back at the farm!" I felt the lumps on my head. They throbbed with pain when I touched them.

"But," said my dad.

When I heard the 'but' I sort of knew what was coming, I thought. He led me outside where we saw the truck. It was a mess. There were metal scraps scattered all over, like mice running around an abandoned shack.

"I'm reckless," I said.

"No, you're not. You're... just...um..."

"Inexperienced?" I barged in.

"No, you just haven't learned everything yet."

I walked back inside and up to my room. I saw my teddy bear. I grabbed it and curled up in my bed. And before I knew it, I was asleep.

I woke to find the sun beating down on my room like a big splot of spilt butter. When I got out of bed, "Oooooow", my whole body hurt. I was badly bruised from the crash.

That's when I heard my mom. "Come and get it!" Her voice drifted from the kitchen. I went for my dresser when I remembered I had gone to bed with my clothes on. I rushed downstairs, all the time wondering "What's for breakfast... what's for breakfast?"

When I got down for breakfast, I smelled the wonderful scent of eggs and bacon. It smelled soooo good. I was in a trance. I went straight to the table.

After breakfast, I went outside. Some people had come and were helping my father pick up the scraps of metal. I ran over to help but they said there was nothing I could do.

So I went back up to my room. But I didn't lie down. Instead I just sort of stood there and felt the aching in my heart that I would never forget that day in my life again.

Author's Note:

This story is about my nana and how she crashed the truck. She got very shaken from the crash. But she still had to keep working on the farm because there were only 3 people on the farm to work. It was her and her mom and dad. And all of them had to run a farm with 4,000 chickens. And you can guess how hard that was.

***

The students in Max's Opal School classroom have been thinking about how these family stories have helped them to know themselves better-- considering how the stories they learn about what came before them help them understand something special about themselves. And, inspired by Jacqueline Woodson's book Show Way, they have tried to determine what their own "show way" might be. Max has taken this very seriously.

One day, not long ago, when his 12 year old sister, Sophie, nagged at him with an exasperated, "Don't you ever stop??" Max replied with an immediate, "Nope! That's my show way! I never give up!" And topped it off with a great big smile, a bit of a chest puff, and not so much as a hint of annoyance at Sophie. 

Thank you, Nana, for your many gifts. We hope your day was special. We love you so.

Most alive

Everyone has lots of stories that live in their hearts. But they choose to tell the ones that are most alive.

Opal School Kindergartner

A wonderful comment overheard in the Opal school kindergarten today, by visitors there to see a window into our Story Workshop. 

It was a good day.

Story Workshop

 

Tomorrow we'll have our first Opal School visitation day this year. It is focused on a structure we call Story Workshop-- which began as a little idea I had a few years ago in response to the question-- What are the connections between literacy and the arts, and a desire to go find them.

It seems that every time I share our research and our stories about Story Workshop at Opal School, I return to a little something I heard Jerome Bruner say when I was in Reggio Emilia on a study tour way back in 2002. "Children learn the syntax of their language to tell stories."

2 year old Stella's stories are coming out like this these days: "Aaaah time. Aaaah Maine. Aaaah fish. Aaaah bread. Aaaah tummy." (Once upon a time, I went to Maine. I saw a fish. I ate some bread. It went in my tummy.) 

Not much syntax, but a whole lot of story. And sheer delight when she's got a willing listener. 

Thinking

I realize I haven't written much (anything) about Sophie's adventures in middle school. She's been off now to one of our public school district's "focus" programs since early September, and the best news, of course, is that she loves it. It's a small 6-8 program with about 75 students, none of whom are allowed access to their cell phones during the day. This is especially good for rare children like Sophie, who do not own cell phones.

But I found a post this morning over on Camp Creek Blog that inspired me to tell a little story. Lori posted: 

From our first years in the educational system, society has ways of discouraging the expansive, questing mode of attention that’s essential to creativity and personal rebirth. In one poignant indication of what happens when young children learn to switch off active focusing and just go through the motions, second-graders from different schools were given a problem to solve: “There are twenty-six sheep and ten goats on a ship. How old is the captain?” Nearly 90 percent of students from traditional classrooms answered “Thirty-six”. Not one pointed out that the problem didn’t make sense, compared to almost a third of the kids from less conventional, more mindful classrooms. — Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, Winifred Gallagher

Earlier this week, Sophie was working on a routine homework assignment called a "writing focus". In her literature study at school, she's been assigned to read My Brother Sam is Dead along with a whole group of other kids. [If you haven't already, now would be a good time to click "Nancy Atwell Speaks Up" under the Smart and Good sidebar to hear everything that is already wrong with this picture... but I digress.] In order to do the writing focus, Sophie and her classmates have to answer a litany of questions organized around some kind of paragraph structure. These are the kind of questions that send the kids back to the text searching, searching for whether the blanket Sam had wrapped around him after battle was green or brown. And occasionally requiring them to cite text to prove it. When they return to class, they exchange papers, read each other's answers, and mark them right or wrong. If ever there is any ambiguity-- like whether townspeople would be more upset over the British stealing cows or guns, the teacher decides, and if you're on her side, you're right. (I'm not sure if she is required to cite text.)

Okay, and so now some of you I'm sure, are wondering how I can possibly stand idly by and let Sophie spend her time this way. When I did get a chance at Back to School NIght to ask her teacher some questions about this process, she explained it all. "Children this age aren't capable of thinking beyond literal questions about text." And because I stopped breathing at that point, it became more important for me to walk to my car than to try and engage in any further conversation. Sophie will eventually be done with this literature group, and I do want to be around when it's over.

Hang on, there's a bright spot coming.

This week, I happened to be helping her type up one of her last assignments for this book. I noticed that one of the questions she was supposed to answer began with, "Do you think..". My heart sang. But when she started flipping pages in the book, I was confused. And when she found the answer, as black and white as ever, I was crushed. And angry. But if I have learned anything over these first six weeks of adventures in regular public school, it is composure. So I said, "You know, Sophie, that question isn't really fair. It starts off, 'do you think' but it still has an answer that is right or wrong. Any question that asks you what you think should never be a set up for being wrong."  (I couldn't help myself here...) "Your teacher has made a mistake." Sophie agreed, and we moved on. A few questions later she told me, "Here, look, this one really is a thinking question. 'Do you think that it was realistic for Sam to have hope in light of his situation?'" Here is her response:

I think it's realistic for Sam to hope to be freed. It's always good to have some hope, even though you know the truth may be otherwise. In a way, the hope can keep him alive while he still is. When you lose hope, you lose everything. Nobody has the power to take away your hope if you can keep it inside you.

And, um, she's right. Of course.

I asked her later what had happened in class when they'd gotten to that first "thinking" question. Did the problem with the question come up? And you know what? It did. The teacher apologized for her mistake. 

After 8 years in a school that focused on wiring children's brains to be fully alert and alive in an "expansive, questing mode of attention", I don't think there's any going back for Sophie. In the meantime, she'll learn to cite text in perfect form, have plenty of space left over in her brain to learn to navigate the expectations of this new environment, focus on building new relationships, and get a lot of typing practice. 

At some point last year, she let me know that she "hated to talk about books!" And so best of all for me, maybe, is that after a few weeks of this she told me that, "it really is more interesting and fun to have a conversation about what you think about a book, than to answer questions your teacher already knows the answer to." And she's getting a chance to discover this for herself.

Of course, this whole story does nothing to help the situation in our schools that is so clearly bent towards the issues Lori's post describes. Except to make me ever more committed to keep sharing what seems to be working. So it goes.

Brain, Child

I'm not sure why I'd never picked up a copy of Brain, Child before. It is, after all, "The magazine for thinking mothers". But I suppose I don't feel like I fit that category much while grocery shopping. Especially not lately. Lately I'm working too hard just to remember to buy diapers. Or too busy dodging the stares of other shoppers, horrified by the noise my two year old is making. 

Lucky for me, an Opal School parent I adore suggested I pick up a copy, along with any other Opal parent so inclined, and that we get together on a regular basis and talk a little about what we read. What a good idea that has turned out to be.

Without having to think about it, I picked up an issue at the grocery store and brought it home. To my great delight, I found an essay by Catherine Newman, my favorite chronicler of mommyhood. And you're in luck, too, because it's posted on the Brain, Child website here. So I hope you'll read the whole thing yourself and enjoy it. 

But in case you don't have time, I'll give you a snippet:

It's as if, having once been placentally connected to your beating heart, having once inhabited your actual body, your children continue to live there with you. For better and worse, you are never alone again.

In the midst of musings on the subject of conjoined twins, I found myself thinking. Thinking mostly about what an amazing thing it is to have someone wrap words around something you've sensed for so long, but never found words to express for yourself. 

I look forward to talking with other parents about what this magazine inspires them to think about.

The moment I've been waiting for

It was a quiet moment in our early evening family hours tonight. Sophie had a rehearsal. Bob was out. I was finally getting a chance to get the plum galette that I'd been working on in pieces since Sunday in the oven. Stella was splashing in the smoothie she'd just spilled on the table. Max was reading a book at the other end of that table. 

And it looked so normal that I almost missed it.

But some deeply rooted connection somewhere inside me forced a double take. Was that Max reading? Questions flashed though my mind. What was he reading? Was he really reading? (I paused on this one just to make sure.) Had I told him to do that? (I searched my memory.) Had he forgotten that he'd finished what was required as homework hours earlier? (Couldn't be.)

And then I realized it: Max was reading. Not a comic book. Not a graphic novel. Not a picture book. Max was reading a novel. Max was reading a novel he'd picked up himself off the table and chosen to enjoy. And he was enjoying it.

It's rare, I think, that 9 year olds in American schools get a chance to come to reading on their own. In our schools, 5 year olds take standardized tests, are labled deficient, sent to remediation, drilled on letter sounds. They are taken away from the blocks, the stories, the social interactions, the out of doors-- all the stuff of which real books are made. The words in books are only as good as the meaning inside them. Children who do not come to reading on their own, are the children who never come to reading at all. 

I've always believed that this moment would come for Max. But I also always worried that I might be wrong. I wasn't always patient. So I am relieved this evening. And I am grateful for the time Max has had to occupy himself with other things, like blocks and stories and friends and playing outside. Because something in all those experiences he's had living in the world has led him to connect deeply to the words he's reading in Crash.

If anyone out there happens to run into Jerry Spinelli one of these days, thank him for me.

Cherished authors

Today, in Opal 2, with our 7 - 9 year olds, we began the kind of writing workshop we call story workshop at Opal School. After reading When Lightning Comes in a Jar by Patricia Polacco, the children were asked to consider the kind of story of their lives that they might tell to their own grandchildren. They found it hilarious and intriguing to imagine themselves as great great grandma's and grandpa's. 

They were asked to play with ideas for this kind of story while they played with materials like blocks, puppets, sand, watercolor crayons, drawing pencils, or natural materials and other found objects and loose parts. They played happily, and created ideas for stories. At first I was a little frustrated because the stories they told were mostly fictional and not so interesting to me-- like the squirrel who had a flat screen TV and neighbors. I was not so convinced that had the potential to go anywhere.

But then somebody reminded me of Harry Potter. "I mean, those are the kind of stories we'll want to tell our grandchildren!" And I realized these kids were way ahead of me, oh, and as usual. Of course we don't only share the stories of our own lives with our children, we share the stories other people have created and books we love and our own lives get richer as we hope to improve the lives of the children who come after us.

Una shared the idea for the squirrel with the fancy television with the whole class. And I asked them what they thought. Would that story be one that might live on after her? Amelia set me straight. "Of course it could!" she said, "She'll tell it to us, and we'll tell it to others and it will go on and on around the whole world because she is a cherished author!" I knew this was possible when I turned to see Una's smile bridging her ears, sparkling with the very idea. 

Possible, indeed.

More connection

It's amazing what just a couple of comments will do!  Among many other fabulous sites, which I'll explore in more depth later, I found The Well-Read Child. The post over there today is an invitation to bloggers to spend Thursdays writing about books they're reading with kids. That sounds like a connection worth making, and here it is, already Thursday, so here goes...

In Opal 3, with the 8 - 11 year old children there, I've been reading Laurie Halse Anderson's new book, Chains. (See my "what we're reading" sidebar for a link.) It is a story set during the Revolutionary War in Manhattan and told through the powerful voice of Isabel, a young slave. In Isabel, Anderson has created one of the most moving and effective portrayals of the perspective of a slave that I have ever encountered. The tension between the private experience of this child, and the public events of the time, provides incredibly provocative material for rich dialogue and discussion. How can we be fighting for our liberty as a country while this child remains enslaved? 

In the character of Isabel, Anderson has created a rare opportunity for readers to develop empathy for the perspective of a slave. In the preface of To Be a Slave, Julius Lester writes, "History is not just facts and events. History is also a pain in the heart and we repeat history until we are able to make another's pain in the heart our own." It is difficult and complicated to intentionally put pain into the hearts of children we love-- whether they are our own children or the students we teach. This is one of those rare books that brought me to tears as I read it aloud to my students-- not so much for the experience of Isabel, but for imagining the experience of the children I was reading to, had they been in her place. Hard as it is sometimes, in our efforts to send our children into the world, well-prepared to encounter and lead it, we must take their hands and bring them along.

But that's the key-- to join them in encountering this pain-- be with them,comfort them, and hold them close. As much as I love this book, it breaks my heart to think that children are reading it alone in their beds at night. Without a companion, Isabel's communication with a 21st century child would be overwhelming and scary. 

To think that there are classrooms out there studying the Revolutionary War with worksheets and textbooks and without Chains, breaks my heart as well.

If you are looking for a book to read aloud with your 9 - 12 year old this summer (especially if they just did the war with worksheets) ... this might be the one I'd recommend.