Aug22011 SBendIN

To find their name and more information on them, click here. Then celebrate by reading Ant, Ant, Ant: an Insect Chant!

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.

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.

BUMBLEBEE MATH 

(A mathematical look at The Bumblebee Queen by April Pulley Sayre) 

BEING A MATH DETECTIVE

(Building number literacy and sensitivity) 

After a first read of the book, as a story, look through it again, as a math detective.

Math can help you notice things and connect facts that you see. 

So let’s be math detectives

What to we notice about numbers in the book?

For younger students:

Let’s look through and write down what we see.

(Write down an honor various responses from kids counting.)

(On the cover, we see:

examples that may be suggested by students:)

three flowers on the left (columbine)

six legs on a bumblebee

two wings on a  bumblebee

Three petals on each flower. Three trillium. They are named “tri” for three.

(On the first full spread we see)

Six-sided snowflakes

Four-toed bird feet. 

One chamber where she lives

You could count the number of pieces of grass

You could count the number of trees.

Do you notice there are lots of things to count on each page?

There are many  numbers to notice on each page. 

Let’s try to narrow down what we count. 

Let’s stay as close as possible to the bee and her life.

What numbers that we hear or see are important to her life? 

Let’s read. 

For older students

1) Read the book and write down any numbers mentioned in the text.  If you find them in a sentence, write down the entire sentence.

One way to look for numbers would be to scan the pages quickly for number shapes.

Try that. Does this technique find all the numbers? Why or why not? 

(No. Some numbers may be spelled out in letters. So you will need to read, not just scan. 

Some numbers may not be spelled out. You may need to look for clues to those numbers in the illustrations.)

Answers: examples numbers students may have noted

250 bumblebee species

In 5 days, the eggs hatch. 

The larvae spin cocoons 10-14 days after hatching

In ten days, the cocoons ripen. (Bees emerge.>) 

A bumblebee colony can contain 30-400 bees

Three kinds of bees: queens, workers, drones

USING NUMBERS YOU HAVE GATHERED

CARDINAL NUMBERS/ ORDINAL NUMBERS

How many places did the bumblebee look before she found a place to build her colony?

2

By number, which place did she choose?

The 3rd place she looked. 

Pause to investigate ordinal/cardinal numbers

Cardinal number….denoting quantity  one, two, three, four five.

Ordinal number . . .denoting order 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th.

GENERATIONS

Take the figures you have gathered about the bumblebee’s life. Create a timeline, of the days of a bumblebee’s development. 

I have teamed up with Charlesbridge publishing, the publisher of this book, and created the Be a Stream Hero contest. The winner of the contest wins a school visit from me.

In fact, in honor of Trout Are Made of Trees, Charlesbridge publishing staff spent a day cleaning up the Charles river! This was featured in Publisher’s Weekly. But here’s a few photos of the day on their blog: 

http://charlesbridge.blogspot.com/2008/06/practicing-what-we-publish.html

A good book to tie in with Trout Are Made of Trees is Jim Arnosky’s The Brook Book: exploring the smallest streams.

For older readers, I have heard about but not read a novel written by the great Jean Craighead George: The Case of the Missing Cutthroats (Ecological Mystery) paperback. Perhaps some older fish-loving readers might enjoy this one, which has to do with habitats and native fish.  It’s older but was re-released in paperback.

Here’s an organization, River of Words that has a yearly contest for kids’ creative writing about nature. In 2008-2009, the contest is about watersheds!

http://www.riverofwords.org/contest/index.html

How can a leaf become a fish? Join two young children and two adults to find out, as they observe life in and around a stream. Energetic collage art and simple, lyrical text depict the ways plants and animals are connected in the food web. Back matter provides information about the trout life cycle as well as conservation efforts that kids can do themselves. It’s a natural choice for Earth Day.

Kate Endle has done a great job of illustrating this book with a bright, rich collage of paper and fabric. It reminds me of beautiful quilt art. I think Kirkus Reviews best understood the art. They said, “The illustrations, done in mixed-media collage, are a testament to the fact that wondrous new things can be created out of the pieces of other things, and thus, they reinforce the theme of interconnectedness…”

This book would be a great tie-in to Trout, Trout, Trout, a Fish Chant. See below for instructions on entering the contest related to this book.

See standards here.

By the way, the Pettisville, OH kids dancing in the photo are performing their rendition of “The Ants Go Marching…”

March Release: HUSH LITTLE PUPPY, illustrated by Susan Winters (Holt) This is a beautiful bedtime book about a little boy trying to get his puppy to sleep. The art by British illustrator Susan Winter is just perfect. 

October Release: BIRD, BIRD, BIRD: A CHIRPING CHANT illustrated by Gary Locke (NorthWord) Gary created art that is laugh out loud hilarious.

October Release: VULTURE VIEW, illustrated by Steve Jenkins (Holt) I am so excited about this book. The art is spectacular. All cut paper collage. Caldecott Honor winning illustrator Steve Jenkins has outdone himself with this one. His wife even made the paper specially for this work.

This year, look for me at the Butler University Conference, the Dublin Literary Festival (OH), and teacher inservices in Warren TWSHP, IN. My schedule is packed with young author conferences, school visits, and other adventures around the U.S.

Before or after a study of mapping, or a study of human explorers/adventurers, you might want to have kids talk about great journeys. Read Home At Last to introduce journeys. Using information from books or the web, look at maps to see where animals migrate.

The Arctic tern in the book, a bird which travels from Antarctica to the Arctic, is also a great introduction to these regions and their differences. The bird spends summer in both places.

Sea Turtles are animals that make tremendous journeys
too!

And then those are those smaller journeys, through time and small spaces. Listen to this story and find the journeys and pathways followed by bumblebees.

In June we are in bug mode: photographing butterflies, caterpillars, dragonflies, beetles, and just about any creature that comes to our yard. My Canon EOS 20D, equipped with a EFS 60mm macro, is constantly clicking. Then there are the wildlife rescues that invariably come at this time of year. We took an injured woodpecker to a rehabilitator. We helped the juvenile box turtle across the road.

Last week I operated on a dragonfly that emerged from its underwater nymph stage in the skimmer of our watergarden. At this critical, formative stage, it fell into the water. I found it, wings stuck together, and drying in this mangled shape. As the dragonfly crawled on my shirt, I gently used a leaf to separate its back wings so they would not dry together. One of its front wings was folded as well, but I was afraid I might injure it by trying to fix this part. So I left that wing alone. A day later I saw it flying in the garden. It is a female blue-dasher.

The bluets, which are damselflies, are visible in quantity. They are laying eggs.

I just finished a novel and sent it off to a publisher. Last week I received an early copy of BIRD, BIRD, BIRD: A CHIRPING CHANT, which is being released this fall. The art, by Gary Locke, is laugh out loud hilarious. I can’t wait for you to see it.

Common milkweed, swamp milkweed, and butterfly milkweed are all in bloom in our yard. The caterpillars are munching. I hope all of you out there are enjoying the summertime.

Bird, Bird, Bird is follow-up to the wildly popular Trout, Trout, Trout: A Fish Chant celebrates American birds and bird diversity in general through a wild chant of their common names. This nonfiction text—illustrated whimsically by Gary Locke, an extraordinary illustrator—will make you laugh. Backmatter includes fun facts about each kind of bird featured.

For English/Language Arts and Science Standards see the standards page.