Kids Care Who their Audience Is

It was interesting to see how my CT handled a problem that came up with the sixth grade students. Some of the students had gotten carried away writing their fictional stories. Their stories included violent scenes where they had used the names of their friends in class - for example, "A sea monster came along and ripped Ralph's head off."



Their intention was to make each other laugh - it was silly, gratuitous violence; I would call it going for a "cheap laugh."


My CT handled it with authenticity and in a well-considered way when she talked with the students. In speaking to me about it, she said she understood that 
some of this is fitting with the kids' development stage. 
But the thing she said that got an audible groan from the kids was that some of them must have forgotten that the sixth graders would be reading their completed stories to their third grade buddies.

It was amazing to see how instantly the kids were able to understand how inappropriate some of their stories were after they got that piece of information. The sixth graders love their reading buddies, so they did care about the effect their writing could have on them. With some guidelines for revision, they were able to make the stories o.k. for the little kids (e.g., bullets become marshmallows). It was such a nice example of the power of knowing who you are writing for.

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Good Questions

I’m thinking about how much we assume about kids. I keep going back to Vivian Paley and her talent for connecting with kids in a meaningful, non-judgmental way. In You Can’t Say You Can’t Play, she asked students at her school for advice about the rule she was interested in implementing in her kindergarten class. How often do we ask kids for advice?

My third grade reading/writing buddy, Miss C, is very bright and creative.  After we met and chatted a while, I asked her what she thought about spelling as a subject, since I was about to have her do a spelling exercise. She said, “I’m really good at spelling but it’s boring because it doesn’t give me much to work with.” It turns out she is quite articulate about what is challenging, boring, or interesting to her at school, and she is able to describe her learning strategies, too. I hadn’t anticipated getting this much good information from such a simple question.

In the article “The Power of Questions,” the author, teacher Annie Huynh, would find one of her third grade students, Natalie, “frequently talking or staring around the room [instead of reading].” Ms. Huynh decided to sit down with Natalie and talk with her about reading rather than applying more classroom management techniques to get her to stay “on task.” Together they uncovered information more likely to help the student choose books that are suited to her interests.

Why would a student take the risk to allow us access to their thoughts and feelings unless we have earned it by forging respectful relationships with them? I would love to hear examples you have seen of questions that elicited meaningful answers from kids, or examples of questions that shut kids down instead. I will look for examples in the comments section.

Thanks, and cheers.

What are my expectations for myself?

I've been working a little too hard, trying to keep up with everything for school and with my other obligations, but I am realizing how much I need to look for efficiencies wherever I can. It's hard to lower my expectations for myself.

Some of the time when I've stayed up late to finish work, I feel like it's completely worth it, as I really want to learn all I can now while I'm a still a student. I think that my categories have been too sharply drawn though.
As teacher, I will always be a student.

One thing that was missing from my teaching metaphor, the elephant shrew, is that even though it may have never been observed by human eyes, it surely spends time sleeping.

So off I go.

"I can't imagine life without ham!"

A third grade girl said this to me: "I can't imagine life without ham!"

A first grader was very emphatic: "I'll tell you one thing: math is EVERYWHERE!"

 I say: Enthusiasm is such a tonic.

What is a book? What is a map?

This is work from an art lesson I did with my third grade dyad kids. The kids made altered books with personal maps. Since they have been learning how to use maps, I showed them some unusual maps from a book called You Are Here: Personal Maps and Other Maps of the Imagination by Katharine Harmon.

One is below; it's a Japanese illustration of human internal organs and shows lots of little workers doing their various body jobs. Surrounding the body is text on the subject of how to eat to stay healthy.

Here is a kid wearing his in-progress altered book over his face.

This project raises questions about what a book is and what a map is, and what's behind our values around using books in an unconventional way. It's a very big deal to the kids to fold the pages of a book, and I love hearing their ideas about that.

The assistant librarian at a different school saw me doing a similar project and said, "Oh, I don't know what Mr. K would say about this." Mr. K is the wonderful school librarian. Later that day I showed him the book project, and he said he was thinking about writing a grant for some kind of art installation in the hall, and that our project might be good for that. 

This project works as a kind of scrapbook for the kids. They can fill the book with personal maps about trips they have taken, subjects or activities that are meaningful to them, things they would like to do someday. The student above let us know about a trip she took at a very important transition time in her life.

I have taught a similar lesson before where the kids wrote poems based on the story in the book. They cut and folded and twisted the pages into a tree. Then they glued the poems onto the endpapers, and wrote words from the book or poem onto leaves on the end of the branches.

Altered books allow so many possibilities for how to represent information, and so much potential for rich conversations with kids.

How do they see themselves?

I'm really intrigued by these self-portraits the third graders in my dyad placement have made. They made them in their first month of school, so I have only seen the finished products. They don't have the kids' names on them either, which makes them fascinating to look at. Once when I was studying them, a student came up to me and said she didn't like the way hers turned out. She pointed out hers, and I looked at it for a moment. It can be tempting to say something to the contrary when a child says they don't like something they made, to try to talk them out of feeling that way.

Time vs. Soul?

I'm guessing we are all having some version of this experience with our students in the placements.

We see the ways our cooperating teachers plan what they teach, adapt according to how things go, make sure they are reaching all of their students the best they can given the time they have. I am very impressed with the flexibility and intelligence these teachers are bringing to their work.

I also see the students' innate and powerful curiosity about the things and people in their environment, their willingness to dive deeply into what interests them, and how they so often let their hearts and souls show on their faces. I'm studying how teachers try to balance the limitations of time and resources in the classrooms with the need to address these kids' soulfulness and depth.

Recently when we had a guest teacher at our placement, a kid was finished with a dictation they were being given, and it was important that the other children have a quiet atmosphere in which to finish theirs. The boy was whispering and laughing with his neighbor, so I asked him to come over to a side  table. I gave him some paper and a pencil and told him to draw what the dictation sentence is about.

He started in, and did not look up until most of the other kids were out the door for recess. I was amazed at how quickly and how deeply he entered into this spontaneous project.

 If even experienced, talented teachers barely have enough time to teach their students what they need to teach them, I want to learn the efficiencies that make depth of experience and personal connection with kids possible, as often as possible. I am noting them as I see them, but I would love others' observations about what they are seeing along these lines.