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.

This was the first time I’d seen activities for the new Turtle, Turtle, Watch Out. There were turtle shape poems which looked like ancient, beautiful style art. What about these wild pine cone birds for Bird, Bird, Bird? Extraordinary.

What a lovely school. The science teacher, Ms. Wildfong, showed me the science building. They have lots of animals. It really feels like a science-in-action place.

The music teacher, Ms. Wilson, shared the use of Bird, Bird, Bird: a Chirping Chant. She was teaching kids the half and quarter notes and how to use the staff by getting them to sound out and choose among a few notes to set this book to music.

The art teacher, Ms. Knoop was a wonder. Love her! She’s made a creative space, complete with old plastic toy color wheel, great supply drawers, and projects galore. She partners with another teacher to do a whole big unit on fibers. Ms. Knoop brings in wool from her sheep and they dye it with natural plant dyes and spin it. Wow. Hands on science and history and art all at the same time.

Thanks, Seven Hills, for an inspiring day. Your students and staff are great! Lunching with with these joyful, dedicated educators was a pleasure. Their ideas popped like popcorn. Really, it was like being in some of the great creative meetings I had at National Geographic. You walk away uplifted and refreshed.

Wow. This is the largest young author event I have seen. Over the course of 4 days, about 3,000 students from surrounding school districts were brought to Northern Michigan University. Students rotated from my talk to speakers including a musician, an Arctic explorer, and an expert on a local trout restoration program. Some students were given outdoor nature and journaling time, too.

The audiences were enthusiastic, thanks to the local educators. My programs were introduced by creative chants, memorized poetry readings, and even a full performance of Splish, Splash, Animal Baths, complete with orchestra and animal costumes/dance. (Thank you, Ms. Asplund and Ishpeming Strings!)

Of course what makes this event special was that each student had written a book. I was there to celebrate them! Teachers who choose to attend bring their entire class. Every student in the class writes a book. This is folded into the curriculum. 

Students learn by doing. They had so many insightful questions about writing and nonfiction. You could tell they were really digging into the writing process. The conference is a yearlong goal and makes their writing come alive.

Just look at what students are doing in a classroom I visited. (They won me in a raffle. But after meeting the teacher and kids, I felt like I was the one who won.) They made bags for all the writing they did in class that year. I love the message on their wall.

The young author conference  was cohesive and so well run. I wish I had photos of the huge, overstuffed notebook of instructions that is passed on from committee to committee, year after year. That helps make it work.  Committee members carry over so that not all the conference coordinators are new each year. The event features a banquet/gathering of local literacy educators and reading supporters—basically the dynamic, creative folks of the community. I could have talked to them all night!

Lisa Gravedoni and the rest of the committee made my visit a joy. They sure know hospitality. Thanks to them, kind of fell in love with the people and landscape of Marquette. The beautiful lake. The beautiful trees. The outdoorsy, positive attitudes of the people up there.  They make the best of snow by skiing, snowshoeing, dogsledding—doing just about everything you can imagine. It’s a climate not without its hardships, yet the people seem to embrace life, even hug the stuffing out of it.  

If it weren’t for my tropic-loving, southern blood, I’d move on up there for life. I liked it that much. They have a yummy thai restaurant and a cozy local bookstore, Snowbound Books. The bookstore name gives me pause. But I understand that being snowbound does give you time to do crafts . . .

On the drive home from the U.P., way down in the L.P., a huge black bear crossed the highway in front of us. Was that a sign? Should we return to the U.P.?  I’m thinking . . .

One focus was graphing. Students researched a topic and then graphed what they learned. Sometimes it was the part of an animal’s body. Sometimes it was a fact related to the animal. Some students did this work after reading Ant, Ant, Ant: an Insect Chant.

Another strategy used by literacy coach Lee Motley at Red Bank Elementary is to have young students, right after reading, talk/write/draw about what they remember from a book. This solidifies what they have learned. It carries it from past memory into future understanding.

Still other students and one brilliant teacher took facts from The Bumblebee Queen and leapt into their own creative ABCs of bees. Beautiful! Reorganizing what you have learned solidifies it, as well.

My thanks to the teachers and librarians at the Lexington Elementary Schools.

I believe that Mrs. Huff mentioned The National Writing Project as one of the sources for her ideas. Also mentioned frequently in S.C. were workshops and books by Ralph Fletcher, Linda Hoyt, and Jeff Anderson.

At Pleasant Hill Elementary, D’Etta is doing some terrific special days of reading. Small groups of readers order a paperback book. Then they all bring the book and lunch and read and do special activities related to the book. Because I was visiting, she featured One Is a Snail and Trout, Trout, Trout: a Fish Chant books. But she does this project even when there is not an author visiting. 

Also, take a look at what the Spanish Immersion classes are doing at her school. They do science and math in Spanish. Senorita Hood had them write sentences about where the dust in their sunset had originated. 

I love how one classroom retired (buried) general, overused words in favor of specific terms. The kids actually called the teacher on it if she used one of those words! They scoured The Bumblebee Queen for such words but found none. Whew. I believe they said they had learned this technique from Ralph Fletcher.

D’Etta and others organized a huge reading festival for the entire community. More on that later. Hurray, D’Etta, for all you do!

Interested in vultures? Buzzard Day in Hinckley, Ohio is coming up on March 15, 2009.