Speaking To The Trees

Yeah, somehow I didn't really get that "tree hugger" was a way of labeling.
It always sounded so nice to do.
I love trees. (I don't mind hugging either.)
You?
As a teacher I always had kids do as many projects as I could around listening to and observing a tree. Those lessons came from this book. Teachers go to that link, it's excellent!

But today I'm going to talk about another book that I really enjoy:

"The Lorax" is wonderfully adored in my 1st grade, I admit if you are celebrating Seuss that you might not go to that book until you have learned some of his other works. I just wait until the day a child asks to read "this one" from our Dr. Seuss March You Pick It box.
The webpage from his official site on the Lorax is so wonderful. You must go to see. Here.

And, also, please if you are considering what to do for Earth Day, soon approaching...go look at The Lorax Project. You'll love it. I do too. (That and my shout out for The Earth Day Groceries Project. )

I don't think The Lorax has yet been made into an excellent film version, Wiki suggests it soon will be, but I keep hoping for one that a film animated along the lines of this Pandora sensation, just utterly takes your breath away. Each time this book, The Lorax, is selected from the U Pick It reading we do after lunch in my Sheltered Immersion 1st grade I know at least one person on the carpet is going to enjoy the sing song today-and certainly that would be me.
I grew up in the trees of West Virginia, born to a father very at home in the woods. Very few Sundays ever passed Dad didn't drive us out somewhere for a walk in the woods. I love to walk in the woods. Very few days I didn't spend in our backyard woods. Later we had a farm, those woods later taken by a highway project, for awhile we had 86 acres to explore.
My students, many have never seen a forest. Some have never stood in something I'd call a human right. Not too far from us in Santa Barbara is a lovely forest that sometimes I have been able to take my students to see. Everytime I do so I watch them in wonderment.
I read an essay recently by a person that communicates with trees, it was in the book Kinship With Animals.
Here is an excerpt from an essay called "In the Company Of Great Teachers, by Linda Tellington-Jones, she was communicating with an ancient fig:

"Come and sit by me, and I will tell you a story.
Sit on me. Anywhere in the sun.
Once upon a time there were many like me.
We had lived long upon this planet and had aquired much wisdom.
Our understandings and love sent out positive vibrations, which had
far-reaching effects.
Then came man with his lack of understanding,

In order to re-balance and re-align the earth, your people
must once again recognize the Kingdom of the Plants, the Animals
the Minerals, and the Nature Spirits as one
and as vital to the survival of the planet.
That your race recognize the God within is only the start.
That we are recognized as one with you in the balance of existence
is the key to-not only survival-but to
heaven on earth"

Maybe Dr. Seuss did tree talking too, although his trees are especially exotic.
First the story.


via videosift.com

If you are unwilling to give the 25 minutes to watch I'll give a short synopsis. Very short because I think I can refer you out to Wikipedia.
****************spoilers******************
This is a caution tale. It's about a world already ruined.
You enter the book and everything is so ugly, so spoiled, it smells horrible, no one can breathe.
Your job in the story is to understand why.
Eventually you are lead to the Onceler who tells the tale, the secret hidden tale from inside his hidden shack, through his can and string.
It seems that the trees, Truffula trees once grew in these parts.
Once.
But something happened and you are there to understand how useful those trees became.
For that unwinding you need wisdom. Remembering, recall, the history.
If you want to introduce the IDEA of history to children, who at 6 sometimes kind of just look at you and roll over...you can discuss this as the history lesson of what happened in this pretend world. You can even keep a kind of time-line to introduce quite clearly the idea of "timelines."
What came before?
And before?
And before that?

It is a warning from way out wherever, speaking for the trees, about what consuming all of them to run into the production of goods in exciting lives, what that can do ...seen from a desolate, ruined, tree-less mess of a ruined world, that used everyone of them.
You really wouldn't say this is painted here with a light hand.
I do like it, so much, but I recognize that it is heavily laden with a point of view, one even if I share, I can use to discuss "point of view" and even further discuss with the third graders that usually come over for our follow up tree making and design work, use to suggest we look to the language within it that is persuasive.
It makes an argument, puts forward evidence, and it's a way to talk about this kind of writing.
So from the get go, even with young kids, I start to teach considering author intent.
Thinking about things like
What does this book seem to be teaching?
How did you feel when x y or z happened?
How does the author exact those responses?
(After teaching personification) How do we see personification used?
Oh, you get it....

Truthfully I do read the book in spring, I do quite a few lessons connected to trees and the cycle of the deciduous trees right about now, so I do move into creative, science projects and other work. Our Avenues books for ELD had a lovely tree story of the seasons of a tree. So that comes out. Along with other I really enjoy sharing.

Sky Tree: Seeing Science Through Art

There are so many tree books to share, and the favorite books are my many identification guides. I have ones that emphasize leaf, others tree. So we begin to think about trees, on a treeless campus stuck in a hood that more closely resembles a prison than anything else I know off hand. All our trees were chopped by eager maintenance crews every summer until their work is done. Even those planted to recall students we lost.
Hum.

To get us in the mood I like to share a slideshow with my kids. I have my own, from Santa Barbara :



But this one from Flickr is also wonderful:



They like to look to music and for that may I suggest you find something woody.
Maybe:



Well, once there was a place with beautiful trees, in a beautiful land, that found so many uses for the trees they forgot the greatest reason for them, the utter beauty they supplied.
And were left with nothing but one, one important thing, a seed.

Here are beautiful Santa Cruz trees I like to share with my kids..



He was so proud of this picture...

This was a project we did as a follow up to reading, my 1st graders making Truffula trees....their way. We used these wonderful paints, dot paints from Lakeshore.
It really made the project work. Then we wrote tree poetry.
I did too.



Perhaps.....you'll forgive my writing.
Trees mean so much to me....I can't do them justice.

Thank goodness Dr. Seuss and The Lorax did.