I just returned from four days as the Karla Harry Visiting Author at the Gordon School, in Providence, RI. The time at Gordon was one of the highlights of my career.Here are some of the shadow plays the kindergarten and 3rd graders did. The teachers and librarians collaborated to create this exciting exploration of light, shadow, and literature. They did Trout Are Made of Trees, Vulture View, and Honk, Honk, Goose. 

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My chant books are a celebration of  words, rhythm, rhyme, and biodiversity. To celebrate my upcoming (June 16th, 2011) vegetable chant, I’ve assembled sound samples to help in teaching and understanding these books.

After a quick reading of the book, a 6-year old spontaneously practices, is able to chant a section, and has made up some dance moves to go with it.   RahRahRadishesOutLoud

Here I teach the new chant to a large group, line-by-line. Rah Rah Radish youngauthorsconf. I teach word-by-word and challenge a group:  Teaching Insect Chant.  Here I perform a high speed version of the Fish Chant End . An older student rhythmically reads Bird, Bird, Bird_ A Chirping Chant.

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Check it out! Kids did a bumblebee study that was published in a major science journal, Science. Article about their article here. Yes, I’m still following bumblebee news, to share it with those of you reading and creating materials to go with my book, The Bumblebee Queen. Here are some other activities, within this site, for bumblebee fun. The United Nations Environment Program also just released a study about bees worldwide.

SEVEN HILLS-DOHERTY

I’d just been to Seven Hills-Lotspeich. How could another school day be just as fun? Well, if you’re at the other Seven Hills Campus—Doherty. It can! This Cincinnatti school just percolates with life. If I were going to be a teacher, I’d want to work in one of the Seven Hills Schools.

Why? Because excellent schools need faculty that care for one another, that lunch together, that chat and exchange ideas.  This school has it on both campuses. Education can be joyous when staff share that passion for helping students. But left alone in classrooms, teachers can grow isolated, like stay-at-home moms who love their kids but need some grownup time now and then. Staff development makes it sound all technical. That is helpful. But the core of the best schools I have seen is a caring staff community: community that nurtures creative teachers and does not squash them. You could see it at work, hear it at work during my lunch with some of the Doherty teachers.

Seven Hills also has another community that uplifts the place. The parents. Wow. They pitch in for all kinds of things. At the whirling center of joy is librarian Linda Wolfe who I had the pleasure of spending the day with.

She is a dynamo who knows children’s literature inside out. She created wonderful activities to go with my books. Just look at what they did with Vulture View. She found some kind of scratch paper that is black with silver underneath. The students cut out vultures and scratched through to make the beautiful silvering of the feathers.

She describes how she introduces Trout Are Made of Trees to her students. To celebrate the book, she used a scale/math/art activity. She gave kids large photos of the aquatic insects. Then the children had to draw them, as accurately as possible, on the tiny pieces of paper. It’s a good thinking project. You can just imagine how many neurons fire when trying to duplicate but shrink an image.

In the halls were more art projects to celebrate If You Should Hear a Honey Guide; Dig, Wait, Listen; and other books. Penguins for Antarctica. Maps of South America. There was art of many kinds.

Among my favorites was an organizational project done by Mr. Schmidt’s class. They took my books and graphed them in various ways to show the content and relationships in the books. It’s a good way to prepare for writing books of their own.

I saw and experienced all of this in one short school day at Seven Hills Doherty. Just imagine what a student could learn in a school year of being with these hard working, creative educators.

2nd Grade Music Students at Red Bank Elementary studied rhythm by analyzing and marking rhythms for stanzas in my book, Ant, Ant, Ant: an insect Chant. They also performed the text with rhythm instruments. Wow, talk about creative and enthusiastic educators!

Understanding. Decoding. Absorbing. Whatever you want to call it, kids develop skills to dig into nonfiction text. They learn to pay attention to details and themes.

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A few more photos from Lexington School District in SC. I was there for 9 days of talks including a weekend READ Fest, a community event put on by the extraordinary school librarians of this district.

Read The Bumblebee Queen. Pull out the chewiest, most evocative vocabulary and put it on sticky notes. Then move around the words to make a poem of your own.

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These are from Hamilton Traditional School in South Bend, IN.