Tag Archives: perspective

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Two-Voice Poetry

5th grade spent two days reading and creating two voice poetry. This project came about after I met with Mrs. Freeman to brainstorm ideas for her ELA classes.  We were looking at this standard:

ELAGSE5RL6  Describe how a narrator’s or speaker’s point of view influences how events are described.

During our planning, we looked at books and poetry that featured multiple perspectives and decided that we would focus on poetry.  I found several books to serve as mentor texts.

  • Messing Around the Monkey Bars by Betsy Franco
  • Can I Touch Your Hair? Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship by Irene Lathan & Charles Waters
  • Seeds, Bees, Butterflies, & More by Carole Gerber
  • Joyful Noise by Paul Fleischman
  • The Friendly Four by Eloise Greenfield
  • This is Just to Say by Joyce Sidman

During the 2-day project, the students, Mrs. Freeman, and I read aloud examples of poems from each book and talked about the perspectives and style of the poem.  Some were funny.  Some were serious or about historical events. Some were sarcastic. We tried to showcase examples that would appeal to many different interests.  Then, we set students up for their work session.

In pairs, students continued to read mentor poems from the featured books to get more familiar with how two voices could work together from two different perspectives.

When they felt ready, they moved to a brainstorming sheet. On the sheet, they thought of possible topics along with what two perspectives could talk about that topic in the poem.  We encouraged students to choose two perspectives that would offer a different take on the chosen topic.  We tried not to give too many examples, but if students were stuck, we made suggestions that might spark their own ideas: hot cheetos/hot takis, cell phone/landline, nintendo/xbox, school/home, twitter/instagram, etc.

Once they decided on the topic and perspectives they liked, they started trying out some lines of their poem.  Many students looked back to the mentor poems for a structure or style of writing.  Others picked topics like politics, where they needed to do some additional research in order to truly take on the perspective they were attempting.

Mrs. Freeman, Mr. Kinnaird (student teacher), Mrs. Mullins (collaborative spectrum teacher), Mrs. Kelley (special education teacher) and I all walked around and conferenced with writing pairs.  We nudged them to expand their voice, use descriptive language, and practice their poem before publishing.

The work session spanned both days.  Once students were ready to publish, they used their computers to record their poem on Flipgrid.  This is a piece of the project that will continue in the coming days as students finish their poetry.

There were several moments where I paused and looked around at the whole group of students working. What amazed me was how engaged each pair of students was.  Yes, students worked at different paces and some needed more support than others, but no student sat back and did nothing. They were focused on the task, and it made me wonder about this particular experience and what made all students engaged.  Was it the choice? Was it the partnership? Was it the freedom of poetry? Was it interest? Was it the authentic audience on Flipgrid?  I don’t have the answer, but what I do know is that I loved this experience and I hope I can continue to create these kinds of projects with teachers and students in the future.

Please take time to listen to the many student voices on this Flipgrid.  You can leave students comments on this post or use the emoji reactions on each video to let them know how their poetry made you feel.

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Wishes and Plans: Exploring Life Challenges Through Books

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Somehow, I’ve managed to read three books recently that all feature a main character grappling with the challenge of having an absent parent. I didn’t choose these books because of this fact, but reading about someone’s life challenges that are so different from my own has made me a better person. In his recent Newbery speech, Matt de la Pena referenced an encounter with a librarian where she said that she loved his books but didn’t stock them in her library because she didn’t have those kinds of kids at her school. Those kinds of thoughts make me cringe because books allow us to escape to magical worlds and do things we could only dream of doing and they can also allow us to step into someone else’s shoes for just a moment to get a brief perspective on the world through someone else’s eyes. While it can’t make you an expert on the struggle that the character is going through, it does allow you to see that we all face challenges and struggles and we don’t always wear those troubles on the outside for everyone to see.

One of these books is Raymie Nightingale by Kate DiCamillo, which I already mentioned on the blog. Two of these books that I read are upcoming releases from Farrar Straus Giroux. Barbara O’Connor’s Wish comes out in late August.   It features an 11-year old girl named Charlie whose mother is having trouble keeping her life in order and whose father is in jail. She goes to live with her aunt and uncle in a small town. Every day of her life since fourth grade she makes the exact same wish and wonders if it will ever come true. Charlie’s list of ways to make a wish is pretty impressive, and I can’t help but wonder how many ways there are to make a wish after reading this book. What did Barbara O’Connor discover that she didn’t even include in the book? While Charlie is with her aunt and uncle, she meets a stray dog who she names Wishbone. Along with her new friend Howard, they craft a plan to catch Wishbone so Charlie can have a pet of her own.

Woven into this tale of longing for a pet is Charlie’s struggle with finding a place she belongs and her desire to have a mother and father who care enough about her to give her a stable home filled with love. That struggle affects how Charlie interacts with those around her. She lashes out at anyone who ruffles her feathers, and I couldn’t help but wonder how I would act if faced with a similar situation. I can’t say that I blame her for writing mean things to her teacher, giving kids a shove, or insulting her aunt.  What I was struck with the most was how her Aunt Bertha handled every incident of acting out. She offered nothing but love and understanding. I must admit that my own reaction might be to jump at the negativity with a punishment, but Bertha just offered a heap of love.  One of the quotes that still stands out to me after reading wish is:

Sometimes we get so caught up in our own drama and challenges that we lose sight of what others are going through. Instead of being quick to judge or react, I want to slow down and remember that love is a powerful gift.  Barbara O’Connor has once again masterfully written a southern tale that can speak to us all.

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In Kate Beasley’s Gertie’s Leap to Greatness coming in October, Gertie deals with an absent parent as well. However, this parent lives in the same town and still doesn’t have any interaction with her.  How would that feel to know that your mom lived just a few streets away yet had no interest in seeing you or talking to you? It’s certainly very far away from my own experience of having a mom and dad who are always there for me, wanting to know where I am at every second, and still want to talk to me every single day on the phone. Gertie is a firecracker of a girl. She takes matters into her own hands and makes a plan to be the best 5th grader in the entire universe. Gertie wrestles with her absent parent in a different way than Charlie does. She thinks that if she does enough then her mom will notice and want to be a part of her life or realize that Gertie is so awesome that she doesn’t need a mother anyway. Gertie has something standing in her way: a new girl named Mary Sue. Both of them have what it takes to be standout students, but their battle for the top results in even more struggles for Gertie to deal with.

Gertie is a character that I just want to hang out with. She is full of wit and adventure and can take just about any situation and make the best out of it. She does all of this even with a gloomy situation hanging over her. I think about my role in education and how a student like Gertie might slide by unnoticed as having a challenge to deal with. She isn’t one to reach out for help because she thinks she has to handle it all herself. How do I recognize those students? What opportunities can I give to students that allows them to shine and be the star that they are?  I love how even the stern Mrs. Stebbins recognized the potential in Gertie and gave her a moment to shine.

I highly recommend all three of the books mentioned in this post. Check them out at your local independent bookshop or library and add them to your collection.

I love to read books that I connect to, but I also love to read books that challenge my thinking and open my eyes to new cultures, perspectives, or challenges that are different from my own experience. I hope that I’ll keep finding books in my path that enrich my life in this way. As I’m looking toward the new school year, I am thinking about goals and what I hope for the students and families in our library. Right now, I hope that we can all step into the shoes of characters that we connect with but more importantly step into the shoes of characters that give us new perspectives to learn from and enrich our lives. I want to work as hard as I can to offer a collection of books to our readers that gives the opportunity to do this.

 

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Why Do We Explore Space?: A Virtual Field Trip Opportunity

Ms. Kelly’s Kindergarten class has just amazed me across this year by how they have used a study of space to flow into so many of their standards.  They have written their own ebooks, composed music, written lyrics, researched multiple questions, and now they are coming up with a plan to help the people who want to go on a one way trip to Mars.  During the course of this study, an interesting question came up.  Why do we explore space in the first place?  It’s something we haven’t even considered during all of our research.

It came about because of an email that Ms. Kelly got about a virtual field trip to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.

30 minute virtual field trip begins at 1:00 PM (ET) and is appropriate for all grades. Get a tour of a NASA facility and learn about the research being carried out into planetary exploration. Learn why it is important to explore the universe and how our knowledge of the universe has expanded due to the space programs. Understand the multitude of scientific practices involved in space travel, and see the application of many of these in the real world.

The virtual field trip is next Friday May 1, 2015 at 1PM EST.  It’s appropriate for all grade levels and it’s free!  All you have to do is register and you can even have students submit questions ahead of time.  http://www.discoveryeducation.com/Live/of-the-people-space-day-2015.cfm

Ms. Kelly wondered if we might explore the idea of space exploration a bit before students engage in the virtual trip.  I’m brainstorming about this right now, but I first wondered about putting the question out to more people.  I wonder what all of us think about why we should explore space or even why we shouldn’t.  I decided to make a Flipgrid.  Anyone can post a 90 second to this grid responding why we should or shouldn’t explore space.  I would love to have kid voices and adult voices from multiple perspectives to share with this Kindergarten class.

If you have a moment, reflect on the question and make a video.  If you have even more time, do this with your own students in the next few days.  If you don’t have time to make a video, consider sharing it with someone who might.

Why should we explore space? (or not explore space)

My thinking at the moment is that I will share these videos with my Kindergarten students as an opener.  We’ll take time to read some books such as The Planet Hunter or Moustronaut and reflect on the question ourselves.  Then, students will have a chance to add their own ideas to the grid along with the other voices.  http://flipgrid.com/#c6c0c1f0

Ms. Kelly and I never know where we are going to end up.  We just keep our minds open, look for opportunities, and give it a shot.  We usually find that our risk-taking leads to some miraculous opportunities for our students.

 

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Collaborating Globally with Perspectives on Explorers: The Results are In!

Barrow Explorers

Two big library goals for this year are to give students time to dream, tinker, create, and share as well as collaborate globally.  Our fourth grade is wrapping up their explorers perspective project.  They considered six explorers and whether these explorers were in fact heroes or villains.  This project has spanned a few weeks and has involved research on six explorers in the social studies standards, persuasive writing, thinking from alternative perspectives, and creating persuasive Flipgrid videos.

You can read about how the project started here.

You can read about our videos and voting procedure here.

Students recorded their persuasive videos using Flipgrid.  We put all of those videos onto a Google site along with forms for voting whether or not each explorer was a villain or a hero.  Over the past few weeks, I have invited people around the world to interact with the project and vote.  I’ve shared through this blog, Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus communities.  It has been amazing to see how many classrooms have viewed the projects and sent us positive tweets and messages about our students’ work.

After sharing their work with the world, the results are in.

Is Christopher Columbus a hero or a villain?

Christopher Columbus Google Forms


Is John Cabot a hero or a villain?

John Cabot Google Forms

Is Vasco Nunez de Balboa a hero or a villain?

Vasco Nunez de Balboa Google Forms

Is Juan Ponce de Leon a hero or a villain?

Juan Ponce de Leon Google Forms

 

Is Henry Hudson a hero or a villain?

Henry Hudson Google Forms

 

Is Jacques Cartier a hero or a villain?

Jacques Cartier Google Forms

It looks like most of us look to the explorers as heroes with a big exception for Christopher Columbus.

In addition, our Flipgrid had some very interesting data.  As of this posting:

  • The Christopher Columbus question was viewed 530 times and had 186 likes
  • The Jacques Cartier question was viewed 148 times and had 65 likes
  • The Henry Hudson question was viewed 99 times and had 52 likes
  • The Juan Ponce de Leon question was viewed 139 times and had 68 likes
  • The Vasco Nunez de Balboa question was viewed 94 times and had 47 likes
  • The John Cabot question was viewed 120 times and had 45 likes

This has been such a special project.  I hope that we can do more work like this where classes are viewing one another’s projects, offering feedback, and considering different views.  We will end this project with a connection with the Flipgrid team very soon.

If you want to view the student projects, you can still visit their site.

 

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We Need You to Vote on Whether these Explorers are Heroes or Villains!

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Fourth grade has been hard at work.  They have been researching multiple explorers in their social studies standards and considering whether those explorers are heroes or villains.  It all started with a lesson in the library using a video about Christopher Columbus, Encounter by Jane Yolen, and Tagxedo.

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After that, students selected an explorer and began their research.  They took their information and used that to write a persuasive piece convincing an audience that their explorer is a hero or villain.  They used Flipgrid to record themselves reading their persuasive piece.  All of the Flipgrid videos are housed on an Google Site for easy access and each explorer has a Google form voting tool to indicated whether that explorer is a hero or a villain.

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Now, this is where you come in!  We need you to watch our videos and vote on our heroes or villains.  You can choose an explorer and spend some time on that one explorer or you can watch them all!  You can share this project with other classrooms or educators and ask them to share.

If you choose to do this with a class, we would love to hear about it!  You can tweet pictures or comments to @plemmonsa  Most importantly we want you to vote and share.

 

Soon after our Thanksgiving break, we will take a look at the results and most likely connect with our friends at Flipgrid to talk about coding and our project’s reach.

We hope that our project makes you think about the many perspectives in our world’s history and that you enjoy hearing our voices.

Barrow Explorers

Click here to access our Explorer Google Site!  Tip:  If you are in Google Chrome, you will need to click on the shield in your address bar to load the “unsafe script”. This will show you the embedded grids.  Otherwise, just click on the link on each explorer’s name to access the Flipgrid on a separate page.  Feel free to “like” student videos by clicking the hearts, but don’t forget to vote on the Google forms on our site.

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Perspective on Explorers

I’m very excited about a project with our 4th graders this month.  This project is a spinoff of something we did last year with explorers and Native Americans.  This year, we are just focusing on explorers.

To kickoff the lesson, we did a very similar kickoff to last year’s project.  The entire fourth grade came, which was about 65 students.  We used a video from Biography.com about Christopher Columbus.  We only watched the first two minutes of the video.

http://www.biography.com/people/christopher-columbus-9254209/videos/christopher-columbus-mini-biography-6831683604

Following the video, I asked students to tell me what words they would use to describe Columbus.  They turned and shared with a neighbor first and then I used Tagxedo to capture several of their words into an image.

columbus video

Then, we read the book Encounter by Jane Yolen.  I love pairing this book with what students are already thinking about Columbus because it typically flips their outlook on Columbus and explorers in general.  I asked them the same question about Columbus, to describe him based on the book they just heard.  Here’s how their words changed.

columbus encounter

 

This lesson was meant to setup the whole research process that students will now embark on.  They will each select one of the explorers from the 4th grade standards:

SS4H2 The student will describe European exploration in North America.

a. Describe the reasons for, obstacles to, and accomplishments of the Spanish,
French, and English explorations of John Cabot, Vasco Núñez de Balboa, Juan
Ponce de León, Christopher Columbus, Henry Hudson, and Jacques Cartier.

b. Describe examples of cooperation and conflict between Europeans and Native
Americans

They will ask themselves, “Is this explorer a hero or a villain?”  Some teachers may even assign a perspective for students to take even if they disagree with that perspective.  I told them to think back to Columbus.  Even though many of us think he’s a villain after reading Encounter, we were still able to come up with all kinds of words to describe why he was a hero.  Students will use a Sqworl pathfinder along with other databases and print books to research. They will write a short persuasive piece convincing an audience to believe that their chosen explorer is a hero or a villain.

Barrow Explorers

We will use Flipgrid to create videos of all of these writing pieces.  I made one grid for each explorer so that we hear both perspectives in one place.  They will be stored on a Google site so that we can easily view all of the videos.  I also made a Google form so that viewers can easily vote for whether they think each explorer is a hero or a villain.

Our plan is to share this with our entire school as well as share on social media and this blog when we have everything ready to go.

Be on the lookout for your opportunity to give the students feedback on their work and participate in this project.