I'm a literacy specialist at a K-8 school in Northwestern CT. My job is two-fold: I work with at-risk first grade readers, supporting them as they learn to read, and I work with classroom teachers, helping them improve and refind their literacy instruction.
Today, 3-14-15, is a once-in-a-century Pi day! To celebrate, I’m serving up a “slice” of pie! In case you’re math is a little rusty, you can brush up visiting Wonderopolis, or by watching this TED ED video:
By medea_material (originally posted to Flickr as Chocolate Pi Pie) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsBy Evan Shelhamer (Pi Day Pie) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsBy GJ (Pi_pie2.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsBy Paul Smith (originally posted to Flickr as Pi pie) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsIn case you’re on a diet, you can enjoy pie vicariously through books,
movies,
or nursery rhymes.
Illustration from Sing a Song for Sixpence (1880) by Randolph Caldecott via Wikimedia Commons
Happy Pi Day, everyone!
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
Earlier this week, I wrote about a piece in The New York Times that asked columnists to consider which books they read over and over again. There are many books I’ve reread, but one of the best by far is The Birchbark House (Hyperion, 1999), Louise
Erdrich’s middle grade novel about Omakayas, a young Ojibwa girl, and her family. Erdrich’s depiction of their life on the shores of Lake Superior in the mid-1800s, which was a National Book Award finalist, offers readers a window into a culture that has essentially disappeared.
When I taught third grade, I read The Birchbark House to my students every year. But it’s been almost ten years since the last time I read this book. This week, I revisited Erdrich’s lyrical prose and “found” this poem in the final chapter, “Full Circle.”
Although spring, with all the force of tender new buds,
opening magically,
touched her heart,
there would always be
a shadow to her laughter.
The ground harbored sunshine, spread warmth beneath their feet.
Omakayas felt the calm sweetness of the earth
and tears burned.
Where was Newoo?
She missed him.
There were birds, little birds with white throats,
sweet spring cries.
“I remember their song; their song was my comfort,
my lullaby.”
Piercing spring music. White throated sparrows
calling out to one another.
Their delicate song surrounded her, running in waves through the leafless trees.
Omakayas heard something new in their voices. She heard Newoo.
She smiled, as the song of the white-throated sparrow
sank again and again through the air
like a shining needle,
and sewed up her broken heart.
You can learn more about The Birchbark Househere, and find out more about found poetry here.
Please be sure to visit Laura Shovan at Author Amok for the Poetry Friday Round Up.
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
My writing schedule has been disrupted by staying at school too late over the past few days, so this “Currently” list seemed like a good way to try to get back on track. Thanks to Fran McVeigh and Bev Baird for the inspiration!
CURRENTLY:
Listening to the wind. It’s howling this morning. Morning Edition is on, but I usually listen to music when I write. Mozart and Scarlatti are my favorites. On my way to work later, I’ll be listening to Erik Larson’s new book, Dead Wake, about the sinking of the Lusitania.
Eating oatmeal and toast for breakfast.
Drinking coffee!
Wearing my pajamas and bathrobe.
Reading Enchantment Lake, by Margi Preus. I love Preus’s writing, and this is an engaging mystery, but I haven’t had a lot of time for reading lately.
Feeling happy that the weather has finally changed and there are hints of spring in the air. The snow is melting faster that I thought possible.
Wanting more time to read. My TBR pile is about to topple over!
Needing to get ready to go to Rhode Island this weekend for the Teaching Studio’s Educators’ Institute. Vicki Vinton, Sharon Taberski, and Cornelius Minor are the keynote speakers!
Thinking about how we’ll celebrate my son’s upcoming 30th birthday. Will we go to Brooklyn, or will Michael and Julia come home for the weekend?
Enjoying having an extra half hour this morning to sit at the kitchen table to eat my breakfast, write this slice, and watch the sunrise.
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
When her children were small, evenings were busy and full.
Dinner on the table before exhaustion set in.
Baths and stories,
boys in their blanket sleepers,
clean and snuggly,
clamoring for stories and lullabies.
Years went by. Swim meets and soccer practice,
boy scouts and music lessons.
Dinner later and later.
Rushing seemed their only speed.
Then one of those boys left for college. Fewer games to cheer at,
mountains of laundry eroded to foothills.
Soon enough, both boys were gone.
Now she is greeted by a fluffy orange cat,
purring and happy to see her.
The house is quite.
Nowhere to rush to.
At times,
the silence of her empty house
made her feel
superfluous.
But most of the time, she welcomes the peace at day’s end.
In the kitchen, no longer rushed,
she finds pleasure chopping onions,
slicing carrots,
keeping time with the dripping rain.
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
My role as literacy specialist encompasses three main responsibilities. I work with teachers to develop and refine curriculum and instruction, conduct model lessons in classrooms, and work with tier 3 readers in grades K-3. I love everything about my job, but the best part by far is working with tier 3 students. They work hard and will try their best, even if I’ve overshot what I think they can accomplish. I am in awe of them.
On Monday, one of my first grade students had a breakthrough moment. She has been struggling with learning short vowel sounds, so we’ve been practicing them. A lot. The word work portion of our session involved a mixed short vowel sort. She was doing a great job stretching out each sound, then blending them back into the whole word.
Then she came to the word “snug.” She covered up the -ug chunk, read sn, covered up the sn and read -ug. Then, with the confidence of a Hollywood star, she read “snug.” Hurrah! But she wasn’t finished. She turned to the “Awesome Readers…” chart right next toher, pointed to the “Chunk it” strategy, and proceeded to explain to me what she had just done and why it was better than stretching out each sound in the word!
To say that I was thrilled is an understatement. These kind of spontaneous metacognitive moments don’t happen every day. I praised her for using the strategy and the chart. I told her how proud I was of her for working so hard and for thinking about the strategies I’ve been teaching her. She was beaming!
I was never a cheerleader, but sometimes I feel like one as I work with my students. Of course I teach and model strategies for decoding and comprehension, but I also encourage students when they’re frustrated. I coach them through the hard parts. I celebrate their successes.
In her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, (Random House, 2007), Carol Dweck tells us “the view you adopt for yourself profoundly affects the way you lead your life.” In other words, my celebration and acknowledgement of my students’ hard work may be more important than the decoding skills they’re learning. For it is through this acknowledgement and celebration that they begin to see themselves as capable and confident. They begin to see themselves as readers.
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
One of my favorite features of The New York Times Book Review is the “Bookends” column. Every week, two authors (from a group 15 journalists and novelists) “take on questions about the world of books.” These questions are varied and wide-ranging. Recent columns have addressed everything from “Why Do We Hate Cliché?” to “Does Fiction Have the Power to Sway Politics?” I’ve been thinking about this week’s question, “which books do you read over and over again?” since I finished reading the column.
I was not a voracious reader as a kid. I did read and love Charlotte’s Web and James and the Giant Peach, and I’m sure I reread them. But I don’t remember reading them to the point where I had passages memorized or the books fell apart. Columnist Dana Stevens clarifies this distinction in her response to “which books do you read over and over again?” when she says “there’s rereading a book, and then there’s inhabiting it as an alternate reality…”
This is where the power of reading lies. It’s through this habitation that we truly begin to, as Dorothy Barnhouse and Vicki Vinton suggest in their book What Readers Really Do, “think about how those lessons and ideas might impact and inform our own lives.” (p.183) While we do have these kind of transformational encounters with books as adults, it is the books we read as children that often have the largest impact on our lives.
But I don’t think this kind of habitation necessarily happens without help. Many kids do find that life-changing book on their own, but more often, they need our help and guidance. In order to help with this, we need to know books and our students. We need to foster the kind of interactions with books that, as Dorothy and Vicki also state, “gives us an opportunity to give voice to the way that text let us feel validated and less alone. And naming that for children allows them to go forth with more awareness of the role books can play in their lives.” (p. 180)
The list of books with the power to change lives is as long and varied as children themselves. But there are a number of books that turn up again and again on lists of transformational books. I would include anything by Kate DiCamillo on such a list, although The Tale of Despereaux and The Illuminated Adventures of Flora and Ulysses are my favorites. Pam Muñoz Ryan, Christopher Paul Curtis, Sharon Creech, and Jack Gantos all have written books that have the power to change young readers lives. And this year’s Newbery Medal winner,The Crossover, by Kwame Alexander is the latest wonderful addition to this list.
In her Newbery Acceptance speech for The Illuminated Adventures of Flora and Ulysses, Kate DiCamillo explained that everyone involved in making books for children has “been given the sacred task of making hearts large through story. We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries and contradictions of ourselves and of each other. We are working to make hearts that know how to love this world.”
Books that do that are books worth rereading.
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
It’s been a busy weekend, filled with family, errands, cooking, and chores. And, in Connecticut at least, the sun was shining and the temperature climbed into the thirties! I actually went outside for a short walk. The birds were also happy with the weather, and one inspired this haiku:
From his frosty perch
a crimson cardinal chirps
welcoming the dawn.
By LASZLO ILYES, via Wikimedia CommonsThank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
I love the feeling of possibilities on Saturday mornings. The whole weekend is ahead with time for tasks I didn’t get to during the week. There’s also time for reading. Like many of you, I’m always reading at least 3 or 4 books. Also like many of you, I’m always interested in what others are reading. Here is a quick picture of what I plan to read this weekend.
A Brain Pickings column I’ve been wanting to read.Poems from the Poetry Friday Round Up at Robyn Campbell’s website.Your slices!
Happy reading, everyone!
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.”
~ Flannery O’Connor ~
Like this blue jay and everyone else in the northeast, I’ve stared at plenty of snow this winter. So how hard could it be to come up with a poem for Carol Varsalona’s “Winter Whisperings” gallery? I had jottings about winter everywhere, a false start to a poem here, a line that definitely should be abandoned there. Nothing was coming together.
Taking a cue from Kate Messner, I decided to try to capture the many different moods of snow into one “Sometimes” poem.
“Sometimes Snow…”
Sometimes snow whispers itself into the world, falling gently to the ground,
muffling every sound.
Sometimes snow ROARS through the air,
the north wind sculpting it
into undulating drifts.
Sometimes snow settles on tree branches,
offering itself to
thirsty blue jays.
Sometimes snow is blue in the moon’s glow,
catching stark shadows,
crisp as X-rays.
But then, come March, snow begins to
melt.
At first just a trickle,
then a torrent,
filling brooks and
streams and rivers,
washing away
our winter weariness,
Be sure to visit Robyn Campbell for the Poetry Friday Round Up, and thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Don’t forget to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
Have you ever ridden in the rumble seat of a 1930 Ford Model A? For a ten year old, almost nothing is more exhilarating.
When I was a kid, our neighbor owned a tree farm. Neat rows of shrubs, pine, willow, and birch trees stretched for a quarter mile from the edge of his yard, creating a miniature forest in the midst of miles of cow pastures. Narrow lanes lined the perimeter of the nursery, and one or two paths cut through the center, allowing easy access to all the trees.
Uncle Jack, as everyone called him, was my best friend’s uncle. He and his mother lived in a ranch house close to the road, built there I’m sure so there would be more room for trees. Because Lisa’s grandmother lived there, she and her brother Johnny spent a lot of time there. Because this was right next door, I spent a lot of time there, too.
Most of the time, we played all sorts of typical kid games. But on certain days, beautiful sunny days that were clear and warm, we went out in the Model A. Uncle Jack’s 1930 Ford Model A was stored in the back of the garage under a musty brown tarp. Johnny, who was two years older, loved to drive this car around the nursery and Lisa and I loved to ride with him.
Sadly, I don’t have a photo of Uncle Jack’s car. This is the closest copyright-free image I could find. By GPS 56 from New Zealand (1930 Ford Model A Roadster) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons
The blue paint was faded, and the seats were hard and cracked, but we didn’t care. To us, this old car was a chariot that whisked us away to adventure. As soon as the car was out of the garage, Lisa and I scrambled up into the tiny seat that appeared like magic from where the trunk should have been. Then we were off along the the pathways between the trees.
I’m sure we never went more than 20 or 30 miles per hour, and maybe we didn’t even go that fast. Of course the lanes were rutted and uneven. But bouncing over the bumps was part of the thrill. And what a thrill it was to be riding along with the wind in our hair, the sun on our faces, and not a care in the world.
It’s almost unimaginable to me now that we were allowed this kind of freedom, to be driven around by a twelve or thirteen year old! Yet we never had a mishap of any kind and no one ever got hurt.
Soon enough, we outgrew the Model A and our afternoon drives. We were off on adventures beyond the boundaries of the nursery. But we carried away fond memories of those joyous days, cruising along those tree-lined lanes.
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each day during the month of March and on Tuesdays throughout the year. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
![By medea_material (originally posted to Flickr as Chocolate Pi Pie) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/chocolate_pi_pie_march_2010.jpg)
![By Evan Shelhamer (Pi Day Pie) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/pi_day_pie_13346244934.jpg)
![By GJ (Pi_pie2.jpg) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/pi_pie2.jpg)
![By Paul Smith (originally posted to Flickr as Pi pie) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/pi_pumpkin_pie_january_2008.jpg)
![By LASZLO ILYES from Cleveland, Ohio, USA (♂ Cardinal Uploaded by Snowmanradio) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cardinalis_cardinalis_-cleveland_ohio_usa_-male-8.jpg)
![Sadly, I don't have a photo of Uncle Jack's car. This is the closest copyright-free image I could find. By GPS 56 from New Zealand (1930 Ford Model A Roadster) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/1930_ford_model_a_roadster_11164444945.jpg)
Reading to the Core 