Thanksgiving Activities, Gratitude, and More

It’s November! We made it through most of the Fall and the election! Thanksgiving (and a break!) is around the corner, so sharing some reminders and activities. Here are some from the past: Thanksgiving & Native American Heritage Month Resources & Reminders. 

Always center Native American perspectives however you address Thanksgiving in your classroom (and in general). For example, you and your students could look at the Native Land map to see whose land you're on and emphasize that they are still here. You could research the tribe whose land you are on and find out about where they are living now.

Also, show students the table depicting original tribal names and note that many tribal names were changed by white settlers. 

Learn about land acknowledgements by watching Land Acknowledgement | Molly of Denali.  (Sidenote, Molly of Denali is a great example of representation, own voices, and a genuine character that has typical trials and tribulations as all kids do. Alaskan Native voices are involved in all aspects of production and research shows positive effects on children’s use of informational text after watching the show.)

You and your students can think about creating a land acknowledgement at your school or in your community. However, keep in mind the limitations of land acknowledgements, and talk to students about how they should just be the first step and DO NOT and CANNOT undo or “fix” past wrongs. For a more in depth analysis from a Indigenous perspective, listen to this story from Oregon Public Broadcasting: As land acknowledgments become more common, Indigenous people grapple with next steps - OPB

A new picture book that is a re-telling of the story of Thanksgiving is Keepunumuk: Weeâchumun's Thanksgiving Story. There are discussion guides online, but unfortunately the book is sold out and won’t be back in stock before Thanksgiving. However, something to keep in mind for next year! 

I try to incorporate gratitude into my classroom all year, especially towards people in the building who take care of us. There are many studies about the positive effects of gratitude and students love putting good energy out there and planning surprises or pick-me-ups for others. 

Nikki Grimes expresses it so beautifully:

Find this poem on Twitter here. Use it to inspire students and/or yourself! Another fun idea is tiny gratitude stories from the New York Times. They asked Tell Us What You’re Thankful For, in Six Words in the past. I love these ideas for so many reasons, at the very least because there are plenty of mentor texts for students and it is something quick and easy (and FUN). Students could challenge others in the building to write one as well and add it to a wall or bulletin board.

See other Gratitude Activities We Love from our post last Thanksgiving.

Happy (almost) Thanksgiving. Hope your holidays are relaxing and filled with deliciousness!

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April is National Poetry Month

Happy April or National Poetry Month! Poetry is something to infuse into your classroom (and life) everyday, but if you don’t have time to teach a standalone poetry unit, you can use it as a morning greeting, introduction to a topic or subject, or a way to share information. There are so many different types of poems. We don’t have a poetry unit as part of our 3rd grade curriculum, but we make sure to have plenty of poetry books in our classroom. I’ve learned that students who read one novel in verse often want to try others, so I always include them on my “teacher recommendations” shelf. Novels in verse also make wonderful read alouds, too. They sound beautiful when read aloud and are relatively quick reads.

Here are some ideas for teaching poetry that we shared in 2019. Many of these could be standalone lessons or part of a larger poetry unit.

In the past, Gabby read This is a Poem That Heals Fish by Jean-Pierre Siméon (translated from French) to our 3rd graders and asked them to write their own poem starting with, “A poem is..” as many characters in the book do. She played music while they were writing, and when the music stopped, students rotated to a different desk and continued that poem. The results were lovely, hilarious, and sometimes surprisingly dark (see the cover photo for an example). It was a fun activity that would work for an introduction to a poetry unit, National Poetry Month, and building collaboration or thinking about different writing voices. You can read more about the book and see some of the beautiful illustrations here.

Here are some other new (ish) books for National Poetry Month:

Kiyoshi's Walk by Mark Karlins is another beautiful resource for introducing poetry or thinking about where to find writing inspiration. A child asks his grandfather where poems come from, and his grandfather helps him find out by taking him on a walk around the city!

Unsettled by Reem Faruqi (yes, I can’t stop recommending books by Reem Faruqi!) is a must for the classroom. Nurah moves to Georgia, USA with her family from Pakistan and the novel follows the ups and downs of their big move. Nurah loves her family, swimming, and art. She’s thoughtful, determined, and brave, an excellent MC. Through her eyes we see the ups and downs of other characters’ lives too from colorism/xenophobia/racism, relationship physical abuse/ bullying, miscarriages, and mental health( depression, Alzheimer’s). All of these pieces are included in a way that felt both real enough, but still light enough for middle grade— which is a true feat in itself. (I’m quoting from Gabby’s Goodreads review as this book is still on my “to read” list!).

My Thoughts Are Clouds: Poems for Mindfulness by Georgia Heard is another book on my “to read” list, but it looks beautiful and very helpful for everything we are all managing in the classroom right now! 

Mii maanda ezhi-gkendmaanh / This Is How I Know by Brittany Luby and illustrated by Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley is a bilingual Anishinaabemowin and English book showing how a young girl and her grandmother know when a new season is starting. This book is also on my “to read” list, but seems like it has potential to be a wonderful mentor text. The author is of  Anishinaabe descent and the illustrator is of Ojibwe descent.

Samira Surfs by Rukhsanna Guidroz is another middle grade novel in verse on my “to read” list. Samira is a twelve-year-old girl who is a Rohingya refugee. She and her family had to flee their home and are now living in Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Samira starts learning to surf, but has to overcome many obstacles to do so. The book includes an author’s note explaining the situation in Myanmar. I want to read it myself as it sounds like it has so much potential for a read aloud and something to recommend to my students. 

The Last Straw: Kids vs. Plastics by Susan Hood is yet another book I still want to read, but the excerpts I’ve seen include lovely nonfiction poems about kid activists fighting to protect the environment. Plus, the book includes a timeline, author’s note, further resources, and more to encourage students to keep learning. Seems like a great book for Earth Day or everyday.

Happy reading and writing!

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Ideas for Teaching Poetry

Happy Snow Day to any other teachers who are at home like me today! Since I actually had time to read books that were not for school today, I was reminded of a poetry unit we taught with our fifth graders. There were so many great sessions, examples, ideas, and books for teaching poetry at NCTE (which I attended in November) that it made me miss teaching a full poetry unit!

For those of you who have a poetry unit or are just looking for new ways to teach, introduce, or incorporate poetry, here are some of my favorite lesson ideas:

• Start by asking students what is poetry? How can you tell if something is a poem? What makes something a poem? We asked our students to think about these questions and then looked at a lot of different poems together. This is a great way of dispelling misconception (poems must rhyme, anything can be a poem, etc). Our students would usually end up with some variation of the idea that poems must have some kind of meaning.

• We wrote “breathless” poems (do not search this term on the internet, especially on your work computer!). The way you write a breathless poem is to write about an experience. Then, cross out the parts you would eliminate if you were out of breath and couldn’t say every word. We went caving with our 5th graders, so we started with that (shared) experience and modeled choosing what words were non-essential and physically crossing them out. Finally, we wrote (or copied and pasted) the final version with just the words that were left! The students loved this structure and came up with some great poems.

• Mentor texts are huge in poetry, but students don’t always know where to find the line between inspiration and imitation (which is understandable!). We solved this problem by finding a mentor text that models using a mentor text, written by the one and only Jacqueline Woodson! Her poem Learning from Langston (from her book Brown Girl Dreaming) has her mentor text within her poem. We compared and contrasted the mentor text and poem and asked our students: How did JW make the structure her own?  What did she learn from Langston? Then, it was their turn to try it out.

• Now that your students have a better idea of how to use mentor texts, write some food inspired poetry using Gary Soto as a mentor author! This is a great way to introduce the idea of metaphors and similes (or review them if your students are already familiar with them.) It’s also an excellent hook as almost everyone has a favorite or despised food they can write about. (We used some of his poems with food metaphors from his book, A Fire in My Hands, but of course, you could use any of his poems as mentor texts).

• Another mentor author we love is Neil Gaiman and his book Crazy Hair. You can read more about how we used this book here, but it was a wonderful social emotional learning moment as well a poetry one!

Image from: https://literaryfusions.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/calamity.png

• And of course, we could not teach poetry without including a mentor text from Kwame Alexander. His books have some many great formats, structures, and ideas, but we tried what we called “definition” poems with our students (photo above). The basic structure is the word is the title, the pronunciation and part of speech are listed, and then the word is defined. Next, there are three examples of how to use the word. We gave our students dictionaries and they wrote their own definition poems. This was a wonderful lesson in how to use a dictionary, vocabulary, and poetry.

We’d love to hear more ideas for teaching poetry (especially ideas for mentor texts! There are so many wonderful texts out there).

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Book Review: Crazy Hair by Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean

This is one of our favorite books! Ms. Arca reads this one, but we both relate.

Summary: This book is a rhyming text (we call it a poem) in which a little girl asks the main character why his hair is so "crazy". He responds with the most dazzling array of answers. There are beasts that live in his hair, and a circus, and hot air balloons.. The art is also phenomenal. Each stanza ends with "..inside my crazy hair" and even our 5th graders will fill in that section and join in the reading.

How we use it: We use this text in our poetry unit. We LOVE it. This is one of the last poems that we have our students write in the unit because it is more personal. The prompt for this poem is to take back ownership and claim an aspect of yourself that you sometimes feel insecure, judged, or uncomfortable about. I (Ms. Arca) then talk about how even though people ask about my hair, touch my hair without asking etc.. this poem embodies my claiming of this part of myself with PRIDE. Our students write poems about hairy arms, big feet, 'funny' ears, "being weird", 'tallness", freckles.. The list goes on. It is a hard and vulnerable poem-- but we love the social-emotional work that this lesson brings to the table and the poems are personal mantras of hard internal and academic work!

Questions / conversations with the students:

• There are always students who feel resistant to this poem, it makes them feel uncomfortable  ("I like everything about myself" or "I can't think of anything"). For these students we return back to a brainstorming list we've done in the past.

• "Crazy" is a complicated word, and we know that. One thing we talk about in this context is how since this is your poem of ownership-- you can call it whatever you'd like to. I make a point to share that I do NOT like it when other people tell me that my hair is "crazy". We talk about the difference between what you or an inner community can call itself, versus what doesn't feel okay for others to say about you. This conversation comes up again and again in our room in different veins.

• We make a point to celebrate what they share. It is brave to take something on that you don't always feel secure about and claim it with pride. We tell them how proud we are of them for doing this work and how as humans this is hard, but important work to do. We all have to be our own cheerleaders sometimes!

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