We live in an age of information overload. There are so many books, blogs, and websites that it’s impossible to read everything. Because of this, I was only vaguely aware of author Lisa Bonchek Adams and her blog that chronicled her battle with metastatic breast cancer. Ms. Adams passed away from this disease last week and the outpouring of grief from her followers has been astonishing. Among the tweets have been quotes from Ms. Adams’s writing. And although I don’t in any way equate the challenge of writing a blog post every day with the challenge of having cancer, I found this bit of wisdom tailor made for those of us half way through this month long writing challenge:
“Find a bit of beauty in the world today. Share it. If you can’t find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do. Persevere.”
Driving home from Rhode Island yesterday, the sky was overcast and gray. Suddenly, an almost perfect rectangle of blue appeared. The clouds seemed to have made a window just to let that bit of beautiful blue sky shine though.
Dave Spicer [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsGiven that one theme running through Saturday’s conference was opening doors, I couldn’t help but think it was a sign that the door was open, that I should persevere. Persevere with my writing, which I sometimes question. Persevere with improving relationships that sometimes feel too hard. Persevere with doing what I know is right for my students. There is beauty to be found in pursuing our goals.
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.
I spent the day yesterday at the Rhode Island Convention Center where The Teaching Studio at The Learning Community, a public charter school in Central Falls, Rhode Island, held their 2nd Annual Educators’ Institute. Hundreds of teachers spent the day with noted educators Vicki Vinton, Cornelius Minor, and Sharon Taberski, learning new ways to improve their practice.
Opening doors to new possibilities was a thread that wove its way through all of the wisdom shared by Vicki, Cornelius, and Sharon. I’m excited to return to school tomorrow and talk with my colleagues about some of these ideas. Today, I want to share a peek inside those doors that were opened for me.
Vicki Vinton shared her latest work, which centers around three strands of meaning making: comprehension, understanding, and evaluation. Vicki talked about how we can help kids “make their thinking visible through a handful of simple charts,” and she urged us to share books that are accessible and “get kids involved doing the thinking right from the get go.” For those of you who don’t know Vicki, she is co-author with Dorothy Barnhouse of What Readers Really Do: Teaching the Process of Meaning Makingand shares her brilliance regularly on her blog, To Make a Prairie.
During lunch, Cornelius Minor, a staff developer at Teachers College Reading and Writing Project, talked about empowering kids to be the superhero of their own lives. He urged us to get rid of the idea of “my kids can’t…” because “we are the people who say the awesome things that help kids be awesome.” We have to respect kids and find ways to give them “a chance to live in text that is compelling and sustaining.” He cautioned us to be patient with this process, that learning is messy, and that kids will not get it right the first time. But through a cycle of doing, feedback, and encouragement, they will accomplish great things.
In the day’s final keynote, Sharon Taberski, author of On Solid Ground and Comprehension from the Ground Up, shared “Five Ways to Grow Critical, Engaged Thinkers.” Sharon urged us to “embrace the workshop model and its abundant opportunities for both balance and differentiation.”She reminded us that brain research shows that both explicit instruction and time to practice are critical if students are to master the skills they need to be independent readers, writers, and thinkers. Sharon also emphasized the need to “let the students do the heavy lifting” and to teach kids to be “purposeful and strategic.” Finally, she talked about aligning our “belief systems about teaching and learning” with our goals for student learning and to design our classrooms in ways that are physical manifestations of what we value.
Each of these keynotes and the breakout sessions presented by Vicki, Cornelius, and Sharon deserve their own post. But each opened a door in my mind, and I’ll be thinking and writing more about these ideas in the weeks to come.
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.
Today is an exciting day here at Reading to the Core! I’m so happy to welcome poet Leslie Bulion to talk about her third collection of nonfiction poetry, Random Body Parts: Gross Anatomy Riddles in Verse (Peachtree, 2015). Leslie is also the author of At the Sea Floor Cafe: Odd Ocean Critter Poems and Hey There, Stink Bug!, as well as four books of fiction. You can read about all of Leslie’s work on her website.
The words “gross” and “riddles” in the title of this collection will automatically lure readers who wouldn’t ordinarily pick up poetry. In the opening poem, Leslie invites readers to “Riddle Me This:”
“Of course you have a body,
But do you have a clue,
Where all the body parts you’ve got are found
And what they do?”
Leslie delivers on her promise of grossness. In “Lunchtime,” kids will learn which body part has “Mucus [oozing] from deep inside” and which makes “gobs of mucus disgusty.” (“The Gatekeeper”) Leslie’s poems are full of humor, and allusions to Shakespeare’s plays are woven into every poem. Side notes include the kinds of fascinating facts kids love. For example, didyou know your kidneys are the size of a gerbil?
Mike Lowery’s appealing illustrations blend cartoon-like drawings with photos and antique anatomical prints. Leslie included a glossary, as well as notes about the poetic forms used and the Shakespearean references. There is also a list of resources for further investigation.
Without further ado, welcome, Leslie!
Thanks so much for inviting me to your blog, Catherine!
Photo by Jen Schulten
I’m always interested to learn where authors get their ideas. What made you decide to write a poetry collection about anatomy?
A week of summer entomology camp for grown-ups sparked my science poetry journey as I thought about pairing two wonderful things that come in small packages: hundreds of millions of years of evolution packed into a critter the size of a beetle, and a poem’s elegant arrangement of words and ideas. From HEY THERE, STINK BUG, the next obvious stop for me was AT THE SEA FLOOR CAFE: ODD OCEAN CRITTER POEMS, since I have a graduate background in oceanography. I always mine my subjects for their full grossness potential, so moving on to body parts was–well–a no-brainer.
One aspect I love about the collection is that each poem contains an allusion to one Shakespeare. Why?
In my collections, I am always working from what I call my “big idea.” In RANDOM BODY PARTS, the big idea is riddles, since the subject matter is fairly familiar. I am carefully selective about the forms of poetry I use for each individual subject. One obvious place to start this collection was with a sonnet about the heart. I chose Shakespeare’s Sonnet #18 as my mentor text. Fun! I decided to keep playing with Shakespeare’s words and moved on to “Grumble, grumble, roil and rumble” inspired by the witches’ speech in Macbeth. Shakespeare’s rich words and phrases are part of our English lexicon and will be enjoyed over and over again during the lifetime of any reader–it’s never too early to start sampling the banquet!
Can you describe the process you used to research these poems?
I read GRAY’S ANATOMY and other reference books, used many excellent online sources, and my favorite: I watched the UC Berkeley online “General Human Anatomy” lectures given by the inimitable Dr. Marian Diamond (here’s a link to a NYTimes article about the class http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/education/edlife/18anatomy-t.html?_r=0 ). Back to school! YAY! I reread Shakespeare, and read many recent reference books about Shakespeare’s language, and combed through lists of quotations, revisiting the original sources when something caught my eye.
I became a dedicated list-maker: lists of disembodied parts, lists of favorite Shakespeare lines, phrases and his wealth of invented words, lists of poetic forms I wanted to include. Then I played the match game. Some of the Shakespeare references are more obscure than others–the process was a challenge!
What advice can you give to teachers and students who are inspired to use Random Body parts as a mentor text and write their own collection of nonfiction poems?
In all of my collections, I try to include a range of poetic forms. Some forms are simpler and some are more complex. They all use some sense of rhyme and/or rhythm, and those aspects touch on math and music as well as language. This may seem counter-intuitive, but paring a body of science research down to a coherent and elegantly brief poem is a wonderful way for students to seek and demonstrate an integrated understanding of their subject matter. Rather than listing “facts,” I suggest finding the juicy nugget of story you’d like to communicate about your particular subject. What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned in your research? What was surprising? What connections have you made? Those are the ideas that give science poems their shape. I love the readers’ theater possibilities with poetry, and especially with poems for two (or more) voices. Also, writing and solving riddles taps all kinds of other skills, and provides many classroom possibilities for learning fun. On the illustration side of things, I think the book’s multi-layered design and Mike Lowery’s illustrations provide endless mentor art possibilities–so accessible, fun, and visually literate!
Who are your poetic influences? Favorite poets?
There are so many wonderful poets writing now that I’m going to limit my answer to the poets who set me on this path from my childhood (thought I didn’t know it at the time): A.A. Milne and Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss.
You say on your blog that even though you wrote poetry when you were younger, you didn’t always want to be a writer. What finally helped you decide to become a writer?
My friend Pam told me to. That’s the real answer. She is a writer and editor and has been my friend since I was 12. Well into adulthood I wrote her a long letter about making choices as a parent, and she asked me to write for the magazine PARENTS. Somewhere along the way I told her a story about something that happened to one of my daughters and she said, “That would make a good children’s story.” I’ve never looked back since.
Leslie, thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions! I know teachers will be happy to include this collection in their health/anatomy units.
It is absolutely my pleasure, Catherine. I am so excited to add this new collection to my body of work!
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.
Today I’m also joining Alyson Beecher of Kit Lit Frenzy and other bloggers who feature nonfiction picture books each Wednesday. Thank you, Alyson, for this round up of terrific new nonfiction!
The word challenge is a appropriate on so many levels for this Slice of Life Challenge! How do I make the time to write everyday? How to read all the terrific posts being shared? How do I come up with an idea of what to write about Every. Single. Day.
It’s not that I don’t have ideas. It’s that they don’t always cooperate, or I don’t have the time I need to develop them. So what to do on those days?
A few months ago, I received an intriguing postcard advertising Rip the Page! Adventures in Creative Writing (Roost Books, 2010) by Karen Benke. The jacket copy goes on to say that the book “Includes wordplay, open-ended writing experiments, encouragement from writers and poets, and enough blank pages to let your words roam…” I ordered it immediately.
To say that this book is full of inspiration is an understatement. I could open up to any random page and have a topic to write about in under a minute. Today’s slice is courtesy “Favorite Words,” a page with sixty random words. Benke describes this as “a list of some of my favorite words to snack on.” I chose the word “honeysuckle,” which unleashed this:
By Aftabbanoori (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsThe potential of this book for classroom use is endless. I can’t wait to see what my students come up with based on their favorite words!
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.
Yesterday, I wrote about the ripples created by sending blog posts out into the world. This is true of tweets, too. One of the connections I made last year thanks to blogging and tweeting was meeting Laura Purdie Salas. Laura is a prolific poet, and her new book A Rock Can Be… (Millbrook Press) was published yesterday! Congratulations, Laura!A Rock Can Be… is a companion book to Water Can Be… and A Leaf Can Be… All three of these books are gorgeously illustrated by Violeta Dabija.
“A rock is a rock, our Earth in your hand.”
In A Rock Can Be…, Laura turns her attention to an object that, at first glance, may seem mundane, even a little boring. But, look with Laura through her poet’s eye, and rocks turn into objects of beauty, useful tools, and more. Laura’s rhyming text is full of scientific truths (“lava flow-er” and “desert dune”) as well as whimsy (“lake skimmer” and “hopscotch marker”). Dabija’s inviting illustrations make you want to jump in and join the fun. A Rock Can Be… will inspire children to look at rocks in a new and creative ways.
Paragraphs giving factual information about each use of rocks mentioned throughout the book is included. There is also a glossary and a short list or resources for further reading.
Teachers, librarians, and others who spend time with kids in Kindergarten through second or third grade will want all of these beautiful books for their collections. Each will encourage students to, in the words of Naomi Shihab Nye, pay “attention to the world.”
A rock can be…a pyramid! I found this rock on the shore of Beddington Lake in Maine.
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 miracle is this: The more we share, the more we have.”
~ Leonard Nimoy ~
Last week, I shared Jacqueline Woodson’s heart-breaking Each Kindness (Nancy Paulsen Books, 2012) with a fourth-grade class to begin a series of lessons on theme. As I read these words, “This is what kindness does, Ms. Albert said. Each little thing we do goes out, like a ripple, into the world,” the image sending Slice of Life posts out into the world came into my mind. There’s an important difference, though. When you share a Slice of Life post, the ripples of kindness return to you in wonderful and surprising ways.
I wrote my first March Slice of Life Challenge post without much forethought to what a month of blogging EVERY DAY would entail. I certainly didn’t have a plan. I know that I NEVER anticipated the way my posts would ripple back to me.
Through this warm, supportive community, I’ve made so many friends I’m afraid if I start to mention you all, I’ll forget someone. When I was NCTE’s national convention last November, I don’t think there was a single session when I didn’t sit with a friend made through Slice of Life or blogging. The truth is, the kindness sent out by this community is overwhelming. Thank you to all of you who have influenced me and helped me grow as a teacher, writer, and human being.
Bruce Coville wrote in his poem, “Ripples” that
“Words and gestures ripple outward,
What shores they reach we cannot name.”
I can’t wait to see where this year’s ripples take us. Happy Slicing, 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.
At Sherman School, we make March a month-long celebration of reading. We always pay homage to Dr. Seuss on March 2nd by reading old favorites such as Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat. But we also use this day to launch a month-long theme related to reading. What better way to celebrate Read Across America than by doing just that…reading about each of the 50 states.
This year we’re incorporating Laura Purdie Salas’s new book, Wacky, Wild, and Wonderful: 50 State Poems, into the festivities! This wonderful collection of poems is as diverse as the country it celebrates. There are poems about geography, geology, and weather. There are poems about ecosystems, food chains, and history. In short, there is something for everyone in Wacky, Wild, and Wonderful: 50 State Poems.
Each class will choose a poem that supports a topic they have been studying. For example, second grade might choose “Wisconsin: Catch!” This poem, about a bald eagle’s swooping down to the water of the Mississippi to catch a fish, is a natural for their study of food chains. Students could illustrate Laura’s poem or use this as a mentor for their own food chain poem. The form, cinquain, is very accessible for second graders.
To share their learning with the rest of the school, each class will decorate their classroom door to highlight their study of Laura’s poem and how its related curricular topic. I can’t wait to see what each class comes up with. The possibilities are limitless. Best of all, the classes that create the best doors will Skype with Laura later this spring.
I’m really excited to be pairing Laura’s poems with Read Across America, and will be posting photos of the doors and the kids’ work throughout the month here and on Twitter.
Laura also shared our plans on her blog today. Please pay her a visit to learn more about Wacky, Wild, and Wonderful: 50 State Poems and the other poetry collections in Laura’s “30 Painless Classroom Poems” series.
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each Tuesday. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination…”
~ Mary Oliver ~
When I was a senior in high school, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time. It was pure coincidence that Monet’s famous Water Lily paintings were starring in the exhibit “Monet’s Years at Giverney” at the time of this visit. Seeing those paintings was a revelatory experience. My appreciation and love of art began on that spring day.
Le bassin aux nymphéas Claude Monet , 1919 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Although nothing compares to standing in front of a magnificent work of art, kids don’t have to visit a museum to learn about art and artists. Gorgeous picture books about artists and their work abound. These books will inspire young artists to pick up a paint brush, scissors, or clay and begin creating their own art.
I searched for the origin of the trend of picture books about artists, but couldn’t find a definitive answer. The first picture book about an artist I remember (probably not a coincidence) is Linnea in Monet’s Garden, (R&S Books, 1985) by Christina Björk and illustrated by Lena Anderson. Björk blends the fictional account of a young girl’s pilgrimage to Monet’s home in Giverney, France with facts about Monet’s life and art. Illustrations of Linnea’s trip are combined with photos of Monet, his masterpieces, and the his beloved gardens that inspired so many of his paintings. A timeline of Monet’s life, a family tree, and a description of the museums Linnea visits in Paris are included, as well as a very brief bibliography are included.
One of the most recent picture book biographies of an artist is The Noisy Paint Box: The Colors and Sounds of Kandinsky’s Abstract Art (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014) by Barb Rosenstock, illustrated by Mary Grandpre. This 2015 Caldecott Honor book introduces young Vasya Kandinsky as a proper Russian boy, who is bored by his studies and his monochromatic life. Vasya’s world is changed when his aunt presents him with a “small wooden paint box.” Suddenly, colors swirl around him, creating a cacophony of sound. Kandinsky had synesthesia, which enabled him to “hear the hiss of the colors as they mingled.” Discouraged by his family from following his dream, Kandinsky persevered, capturing the music the colors created. In the process, he “created something entirely new–abstract art.”
An Author’s Note includes additional information about Kandinsky’s life, as well as information about synesthesia. There is also a list of sources and websites for additional information.
Another recent title that will inspire young artists is Lois Ehlert’s autobiography, The Scraps Book: Notes from a Colorful Life (Beach Lane Books, 2014). This joyous book is filled with Ehlert’s signature collages, photos of Ehlert’s family, collections, and her inspirations from nature. Ehlert parents, both of whom “made things with their hands” shared their tools and materials with young Lois. She describes finding “ideas in the world around” her, and is full of encouragement for young artists. “An egg in the nest doesn’t become a bird overnight,” Ehlert states. Good advice for us all.
Alexander Calder, who “invented the very first mobiles,” is another artist whose parents nurtured his creativity from a young age. Tanya Lee Stone’s Sandy’s Circus: A Story About Alexander Calder (Viking, 2008; Author’s Note and a list of sources included), illustrated by Boris Kulikov, describes Calder as a boy who always had a workshop and tools. He used scraps of wire, wood, and other materials to create jewelry and toys for his friends. After art school, Calder, nicknamed Sandy, used these same materials to create a “magical, moveable circus,” which he performed in New York and Paris. Calder’s exuberance shines through in Kulikov’s illustrations. Children of all ages will be inspired to “turned ordinary objects into extraordinary art,” just as Calder did throughout his lifetime.
Watch a performance of “Sandy’s Circus:”
You can also view how one school was inspired by Sandy’s Circus: A Story About Alexander Calder to create their own circus:
I had never heard of Calder’s circus before, but his whimsical creations immediately reminded me of the art of Melissa Sweet. Sweet’s illustrations vividly recreate the world of Horace Pippin in Jen Bryant’s biography, A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin (Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). This Schneider Family Book Award winner also won the NCTE Orbis Pictus Award for Outstanding Nonfiction for Children and was named a Robert F. Sibert Honor Book. Young Horace loved to draw, “loved looking at something in the room and making it come alive again in front of him.” Self-taught, Pippin pursued his artistic vision through a life of physical pain and hardship to become widely known and admired. His paintings now hang in museums around the country. Bryant and Sweet both include notes about the origins of this beautiful book, and an extensive list our resources is included.
You can read more about this book and view the book trailer here.
Henri Matisse is another visionary artist who never gave up on his art, despite physical hardships. In The Iridescence of Birds: A Book About Henri Matisse (A Neal Porter Book, Roaring Brook Press, 2014), Patricia MacLachlan poetically relates the origins of Matisse’s vivid colors and natural subjects. Hadley Hooper’s illustrations are saturated with the same monochromatic blues and warm reds, oranges, and golds that Matiesse used in his paintings. Notes are included from both MacLachlan and Hooper, and there is also a list of books for additional reading.
One of those is Henri Matisse: Drawing with Scissors (Grosset & Dunlap, 2002) by Keesia Johnson and Jane O’Connor, with illustrations by Jessie Hartland. This book, from the “Smart About Art” series, is a more complete biography of Matisse, as it might be written by a fourth or fifth grader. It includes information about different phases of Matisse’s career, including his final collages, which he began creating after he became ill and could no longer stand long enough to paint.
Another volume in this accessible series is Mary Cassatt: Family Pictures (Grosset & Dunlap, 2003), by Jane O’Connor and illustrated by Jennifer Kalis. Children are naturally drawn to Cassatt’s impressionistic paintings of the everyday lives of children and families.
Childhood memories are the inspiration for the work of Wanda Gág, (rhymes with jog, not bag, as I learned in the Author’s Note) author of the beloved picture book, Millions of Cats. Deborah Kogan Ray’s Wanda Gág: The Girl Who Lived to Draw (Viking, 2008), recounts Gág’s life, beginning with her childhood in Minnesota. “A love of art was valued above all else in the Gag home” and Wanda was moved to draw everything around her. Overcoming hardships seems to be a theme among many artists, and Gág is no exception. Like Pippin, Calder, and other, Wanda Gág didn’t give up on her dream of becoming an artist or her father’s advice to “Always look at the world around you in your own way.”
Seeing the world in your own, unique way is the theme of No One Saw: Ordinary Things Through the Eyes of an Artist (Millbrook Press, 2002). Prolific poet Bob Raczka has selected sixteen famous artists and one of their iconic paintings and paired it with a simple sentence such as “No one saw stars like Vincent Van Gogh.” Each large reproduction gives kids a chance to pore over the details of these paintings, observing and noticing the details that make these masterpieces instantly recognizable. The simplicity of this book belies its power, which Raczka sums up perfectly in this final line: “Artists express their own point of view. And nobody sees the world like you.“
In this age of standardization, these beautiful books give children the important message that their vision of the world matters. From the lives of these artists, children learn that if they open their imagination to the beauty that surrounds them and follow their dreams, anything is possible.
Nonfiction Picture Book 10 for 10 is a “celebration of nonfiction picture books” organized by Cathy Mere, and Mandy Robek. Thank you, Cathy and Mandy for hosting! Please be sure to visit the Picture Book 10 for 10 Community to find lists of other wonderful nonfiction picture books.
Me thinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.
~Henry David Thoreau~
My cat has cabin fever. He has always preferred being outside, but as he’s grown older, he spends more time inside. The cold and snow are no longer an adventure for him. So he bats at my yarn when I knit, chases nothing into the front hallway, and tries to toss his scratching pad into the air like a frisbee. He’s quite entertaining.
I miss being outside, too. I usually walk a mile or two each Saturday and Sunday, with shorter walks squeezed in here and there. But the snowbanks are too high, the roads too narrow, and the temperatures too low to walk outside for any distance.
These walks clear my head and stretch my thinking. Most often, I walk with my dear friend, Colette, and we hash out all the problems of the world. Our teaching experience is at opposite ends of the spectrum (her’s mainly in a high school English classroom, mine mostly elementary), which helps us each gain a better perspective on education in general.
I have been walking on the treadmill, but the view in my basement is no match for the Connecticut countryside. And, although I’ve read some terrific professional books, they can’t compare to having a conversation with my friend.
Watching my cat this morning made me think of a student I saw skipping in the hallway the other day. Like every school, we have rules about walking in the hallways, so I really should have reminded her to walk. But I didn’t. Instead, I marveled at the joy her steps contained. Who knows what ideas were unlocked as she traipsed back to her classroom.
What Thoreau knew 150 years ago, and my skipping friend knows instinctively, science now has plenty of research to support. Entering “impact of physical activity on learning” into Google Scholar yielded 67,500 results in .15 seconds. A standard Google search turned up 27,000,000 results in .47 seconds. Reports like this one from SPARK, an organization devoted to combating childhood obesity are full of findings that support a link between physical activity and improved academic achievement.
Maybe we shouldn’t all start skipping in the hallways, but we should incorporate movement into our classrooms and get our students moving whenever possible. Who knows where our legs, and our thoughts, will take us.
Thank you to Stacey, Tara, Dana, Betsy, Anna, and Beth for this space for teachers and others to share their stories each Tuesday. Be sure to visit Two Writing Teachers to read more Slice of Life posts.
![Dave Spicer [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/break_in_the_clouds_just_-_geograph-org-uk_-_1227548.jpg)
![By Aftabbanoori (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/honeysuckle-2.jpg)
![Le bassin aux nymphéas Claude Monet , 1919 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://readingtothecore.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/le_bassin_aux_nymphc3a9as_-_claude_monet.jpg)
Reading to the Core 