Will Power

Today we read a story from Frog and Toad Together about will power. Frog and Toad were eating delicious cookies, and they couldn't stop, even though they knew they should. Frog thought it would be good to have will power. Toad said, "Frog, you can have my will power. I just wish I had the cookies."

Afterwards, I asked when my students had used will power.

One said he used it to stop himself from playing his video game all the time. (yay!)
Another said he used it to try to eat more healthy food.
Malik said one word: "broccoli."
The last said he uses will power to help him not be so shy when he meets new people.

Pretty good, no?

The day also included snowshoeing in the forest, metamorphosis of waxworms (and the escape of one of the moths, who happily landed on my pants), and very cute little red milkweed bug nymphs. They look like this:




But later they will look like this:




Pretty cool, huh?

The Snowy Day

We have been doing an author study of Ezra Jack Keats. As a culminating activity, we made a 3D mural of Keats' neighborhood. Most of his stories take place in one neighborhood in New York City. We brainstormed all of the characters, settings, and objects that should be included, and each student made several pictures for the mural. Our plan is to make little puppets of the characters, so they can act out the stories against the backdrop of the mural.

Many of you have read The Snowy Day, which was the first children's book published with a child of color in it (and as the main character, no less). I read The Snowy Day to my kids every year on the day of the first snowfall. It is a simple story of Peter, who explores the snowy city outside his house. The dramas he encounters are small: some big boys having a snowball fight; the snowball he saves in his pocket; the tall snowy hill he climbs. The world in the story is entirely peaceful, bringing you into the muffled silence of the world the day after a big snowstorm. No matter what, even with the excitement of the first snow falling outside the classroom windows, this book always makes my students quiet.

I was struck by the detail and beauty of their versions of Keats' illustrations, and most of all, at how well they emulate his style as an illustrator.

Here is Peter walking through the snow. You can see the small footprints he leaves behind him. He himself is tiny, which is just how he is in the book, where he has the perspective of a very small boy surrounded by the big, snowy, white world.

See the black lines? Those are the grooves he draws in the snow, as he walks, with the stick he picked up.

Here are the snow angels Peter makes. The blue one is already finished; the red one is the one he is making right now (that's him in it). Lying across him is the stick he carries around and drags through the snow. Next to him are the bare, wintery trees.

When Peter goes inside, he puts a snowball in his pocket for later. Here is a picture of his coat, hanging up.



If you look closely, you can see the snowball melting in the pocket, and dripping onto the floor.










Finally, Peter takes a hot bath after his day of exploration. Here is his bath.















Not to toot my own horn, but these illustrations were done almost entirely independently of adult input, although some children worked with a partner. I never felt like I was very good at art, and certainly didn't imagine I could teach it well. But we spend so much time in the early years at our school teaching about sketching, paying close attention to detail, getting the colors right, making decisions about the background, and zooming in on the subject, that by the time they are in second grade, their independent work displays the result of this instruction. They are also highly invested in doing excellent illustrations, and work very, very hard to produce their best work.

I will put more pictures of the mural on as we put it together.

Progress that destroys

That's what the Queen Mother (aka the principal) said when she came in my classroom a couple days ago and saw the chaos: "progress that destroys." I kept telling everyone who came in and saw this:

that is really wasn't as bad as it looked. "I know it looks like a mess," I would say. "But it's all in piles!" And that's what the Queen Mother meant too -- I was making progress, but the progress sure looked awful.

Today things look a little better.
And actually, that was this morning when I first got there. When I left this evening, it was even better than this, although an outsider might not be able to tell the difference. Today I had a slow morning, even going out to a cafe for coffee, a currant scone, and the newspaper before work. But then when I got there, I started to get a little panicky. Setting up my classroom hasn't been this hard in years. I guess I knew that moving up to a new grade and switching classrooms would increase my workload. But I hadn't anticipated all the work that setting up would be. I certainly hadn't anticipated that I would spend most of the first 3 days of the week sorting through things left behind by last year's teacher, choosing what to keep and what to get rid of. I haven't had to go through someone else's stuff in years -- it's been mine, and I've known what to do with it and exactly how I wanted the classroom to look. This year, I've been moving furniture this way and that, trying to decide what will work best, in a way I haven't in years.

The good news is that I only cried once at work today. So that's not bad at all! And with the help of the Wailin' Jennys (which I accessed at school from my home computer via my Sugarsync backup!!), I managed to wipe my eyes and get back to work. I got the furniture mostly where I want it, and I set to work organizing books. Second grade books are different from first grade books, and I got excited about old favorites from when I was little: Ramona, Roald Dahl, Frog and Toad. It will be fun to see my students reading these kinds of chapter books and loving them the way I did a long time ago.

The other good news is that at least I have learned enough over the years to stop and go home when I can't handle it anymore. I knew the other day, when I looked at the math shelf and it seemed utterly overwhelming, that it was time to go home. "The math shelf is not overwhelming, Ms. Swamp," I said to myself, "so it must be that you are too tired and too hungry to stay here anymore." So I went home. And as I face the holiday weekend knowing that I will be in my classroom for all of the next three beautiful, sunny days, I just remind myself that I spent more than half of the past two months in my sleeping bag, in beautiful places. So now it's everyone else's turn to be outside and relax, while I work on my room.

We all just have to hope the progress I'm making doesn't destroy my mental health before I'm done. :) Good thing I have several Friendly Neighbors around who came by last night to bring me flowers from their garden, shuck, blanch, and freeze 20 ears of corn, eat a 98% local dinner, and watch Obama give his speech. That should be enough to keep me sane.

Since my teaching brain is still on vacation

Here are a couple of things to look at, not written by me.

From a smart and lovely colleague... She does such a nice job of summing it all up. Both the messiness of teaching, and the pay-off. And also, perhaps, why tidy tasks are so much fun, even if they are a lot of work? Tidy tasks that get finished, unlike teaching, which is never done.

And an article about the birth of children's literature from the New Yorker. It involves several of my favorite things, such as children's books, libraries, people from Maine, and E. B. White. In case you don't have time to read all of it, here are a few of my favorite tidbits from Anne Carroll Moore, the librarian who was so influential in the world of children's literature in the early twentieth century. Although she was most certainly controlling and closed-minded in some ways, in others she was far ahead of her time:

"Books about girls should be as interesting as girls are,” she said at a time when most books were written for boys. She believed that her job was to give “to the child of foreign parentage a feeling of pride in the beautiful things of the country his parents have left," instead of melting them into a pot of homogeneity. And, "'do not expect or demand perfect quiet,' she instructed her staff. 'The education of children begins at the open shelves.'” Still true today, say those of us who do not believe in silent classrooms.