I was basically pulling together the normal threads of my Novembers.
This means the books, instruments, artifacts to introduce Native American cultures, being thankful, the notions of the earth changing through time, weather and erosion, rocks and minerals as well as forests, birds and observation. And towards months close.......planning on getting the Mayflower across the ocean somehow placing that in child's mind gently prepared to share a class feast and making our Molly's Pilgrim Clothespin doll immigrants...sooooo
I got out my rock collection. So glad to see them all again. I do enjoy rocks. But here is the interesting thing. I woke up the next morning, Wednesday, ready to go teach and incredible blinding pain hit me. Severe pain. Abdominal pain so great I buckled.
We now think it was a kidney stone and infection from this. But I have to repeat a CAT scan as it has some complicated things to sort.
A day gone to struggle with it.
But as I sat at the doctors I kind of had to laugh, who else but me would produce a kidney stone when starting their "rock" theme/unit?
My class is learning to make observations, learning to ask questions, sort things, find similarities and differences. It is a part of science in young children. And it has value as it weaves into their learning. First grade is a time where there is a great deal of wonder. And in that way I often wonder why teachers allow kids to lose that spirit/stance. I usually find it in those who do what they love with their life. Why do many teachers in fact lose that feeling? One reason I'm addressing this year comes from foolish restrictive Improvement models that are doing more damage than I will state here in areas like mine-poverty schools. As models for children it might make a difference if we teachers could hold onto a rock and find our bliss. Towards that end I have a book to recommend, followed by a few others to recommend along with a some photos and observations. Books I do enjoy working into the day.
The first book I recommend about "stones" is called "If You Find a Rock" it was written by Peggy Christian, photographs by Barbara Hirsch Lember.
I'm really glad I found this book. Hand tinted photos lend a very soft feel. At any age interesting as the simple text gently names different kinds of rocks. It creates a "lens" or categorization process for seeing a rock, as a skipping stone or wishing rock, as a writing rock or as sifting stones. Right away my first graders responded with going out on the yard to find "writing rocks" and sure enough one made a little picture of me to prove it.
You can tell it is me because I'm upside down and have on glasses. I'm like that.
This student responded to this book as we all might like to do, it motivated going out and looking for something and trying it out.
I find that a part of science in a very young child. Acting on their world, noticing results. The text has such lovely thoughts. A rock with a white line around it is called a "wishing rock" where the line is finger traced and then thrown far out in the ocean or field. We can do that here. We have that on our shore.
So after reading we looked at my rocks to see if we could find examples of the kinds listed in the text. We made a chart. Great for reviewing and noting "details" one of the Houghton Mifflin goals. And we were actually using "describing words" another Houghton Mifflin target. I used to call then adjectives.
I took them from this into a chart that talks about how scientist sort rocks. They found that very interesting so we read a book called Rock and Minerals. It is a much more straight forward book listing the ways we group rock and mineral specimens and why.
Here were some of the rocks we took a look at on our table:
This student responded to this book as we all might like to do, it motivated going out and looking for something and trying it out.
I find that a part of science in a very young child. Acting on their world, noticing results. The text has such lovely thoughts. A rock with a white line around it is called a "wishing rock" where the line is finger traced and then thrown far out in the ocean or field. We can do that here. We have that on our shore.
So after reading we looked at my rocks to see if we could find examples of the kinds listed in the text. We made a chart. Great for reviewing and noting "details" one of the Houghton Mifflin goals. And we were actually using "describing words" another Houghton Mifflin target. I used to call then adjectives.
I took them from this into a chart that talks about how scientist sort rocks. They found that very interesting so we read a book called Rock and Minerals. It is a much more straight forward book listing the ways we group rock and mineral specimens and why.
Here were some of the rocks we took a look at on our table:
And a very old collection from my brother in law.
When I go places I pick up a rock, these from 1999.
And some more rocks from walking...
The shiny box of rocks.....
And on our student tables each child this week is "listening to a rock" to see what it will "become" when we paint it.
Stories In Stone is a very interesting book because it ties my children into our work to understand California has a "past."
Stories in Stone: Rock Art Pictures by Early Americans (Hardcover)
by Caroline Arnold (Author), Richard R Hewett (Illustrator)
Stories in Stone is also teaching the children that Native American groups occupied the land/this land before us, living in ways dictated by the environment they inhabited. Because the children are noticing you can write with rocks, noticing these massive rocks on their tables and finding they can do chalk drawings on them then baby wipe this off and do another, they are interested in the work that this book brings forward in really good photographs.
This is the story of the Rock Art in the Coso Range in the Mojave Desert. Petroglyphs are introduced with stunning examples that are not so very far away to see from where my students live geographically. The Shoshone (I taught a family of Shoshone in Greenfield, CA) say these were made by their "old ones," their ancestors, and the book does a terrific job of speaking to what "we know" about that. One place we find out more is in the pictures. It is compelling to everyone to see a rock valley become a place to talk to the future generations about the ways of the past.
You can go visit the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest California to see Little Petroglyph Canyon. Wow.
Some pages we studied.
By far my favorite image. Isn't that incredible? That's a sheep!
I was rather deeply affected a few years ago when I taught up at the Warner School District in the mountains of San Diego. The children began a year with me very traumatized by fires that had licked up to their places both on two reservations and on their ranches. A few had lost homes (that reality just hit again down in San Diego). I began with my 3 to 6th grade class a long study of geology. And it had ethnographic elements. We introduced Native "explanations" for the unique rock that is abundantly protruding everywhere up on those hills. You really have to see it. And we learned the factors geographically that produced the way it "looked." As we studied we had more work to do... learning about the forces of nature involved, about water and how weather as well affected the landscape.
Not long after my first days there, as I saw a glimmer of what might work to hold together the year, bind it in meaning with the rock speaking to me it was so dramatically there, we went outside to a flag salute. It was a commemoration and silence for September 11th.
It seemed the recent fire traumas from the Julian Fire and then the remembering of what happened in the east coalesced into the children. They were very silent and calm that day. Visibly shaken. One of the mothers from the reservation approached me in the ceremony and suggested that the children might be helped by "worry stones." And she gave me this book to read to the class.
The Worry Stone (Hardcover)
by Marianna Dengler (Author)
It is a Chumash story, beautiful and .....indeed my children worked very hard to find the stones that fit their feelings. It was the beginning of what would become a close and compelling place we gathered to learn about our earth. Through the stones we were invited into the secrets of good mother earth.
In the story a grandmother shares a story with a little girl named Amanda who has found a stone. It is actually a story within a story both excellent. An Indian Maiden Tokatu (Dove) loved only Akima(back bear). It begins a story of love.
A marriage was to happen but discord came in the tribe and a war resulted. Akima was called to battle and tho his beloved kept a vigil he did not return to her.
On the wedding day Tokatu dresses and waits and he is brought mortally wounded on a litter. And the wind of Time carry away his spirit after they pledge to one another their love. Each year she weeps her tears to the earth, where he left her into the wind, and as she ages is herself taken away by the Wind of Time.
The small stones on Akima's grave are named her tears, now small stones. And in time as the story was lost to the tribe , to others, the knowledge of them lost as memories go...the stones, small rounded perfectly balanced in the hand, the stones came to be called "worry stones." And so the story continues. And the children become interested in finding a stone that is "just so."
I have found teaching that when something happens in the field of the children, in the field of their emotional needs, a disturbance, one of the poorest responses adults can have is to look away or ignore or move rapidly "on." To give children a story such as this one is a kind of anchor to validate the feelings. To allow them to search for and find a stone to name as their worry stone is indeed a kind of physical objectification to represent the move to the conscious of that which is so troubling in the unconscious. It is to bring this to story form, as the Native stories do so well, that the children can then write why they chose the stone, what worries it holds. This inspired my class to write a tremendous volume called Rock-U (rock haiku) . A way to speak one to another about the ineffable I felt.
There is a lot of trust, one to another, to do these kinds of projects, to write and share these kinds of experiences. Bonds are formed as we face our troubling times together. This story is one that is so excellent that it had to come to me as a gift. Only that way would make sense.
I must add that the illustrations are remarkably good. In my heart there is a piece of this story of stone tears shed for this bear who is taken away, that rings with the authentic sound of human suffering and the love one to another that binds us.
It is with no small voice I ask you to read Native Stories to the young.
It is into these stories a great deal of wisdom has been collected.
Water Dance by Thomas Locker spoke to me to include here.
Water Dance
by Thomas Locker (Author)
There are many ways to introduce the Water Cycle to children but this carries a Native American tone. It talks of the many forms water might appear in our world, as rain, as mist, cloud, river, waterfall, mountain stream lake, sea, storm, thunderhead, the droplets creating the conditions for the rainbow, almost as a riddle children look to see water working to transform us, an agent of change. A dance in the cycle.
At the end of the book the water cycle is fully described. That lends itself to my children creating those kinds of pictures. I have a cool song too. I like this book too because the artwork allows me to speak to the forces of erosion.
I asked the children today why the rocks on their desks had rounded edges.
I heard things like, "They came that way," and, "God made them." One child said they were "Worn off in a river," and another said, "We can find these at the ocean, over on the islands." So one of the questions they asked, and we usually chart several questions to look into, try to answer as we can over a week and write a few more, one of the questions at science time is why are these rocks rounded? And how can we "round rough rocks?"
I have a rock tumbler in the closet and they have all gotten a small rough rock. So next week we start tumbling. Tumbling rocks is a bit noisy. With our new birds chattering I'm not sure we will be the quietest class at school. But I am sure we will be investigating quite a bit.
You may know the next book I'm going to recommend to read with students.
It was a part of the Whole Language materials of a few years ago and that put it into the hands of many teachers. The book tells essentially a young Native girl's story of how to chose a rock. The artwork, line drawing, in the book is so stunning, so advanced for children's books , so poetic it seems able to speak to the personal and intimate and intensely internal spaces that this rock friend choosing occupies. In this way, for my purposes, it speaks to the dignity of friendship, the closeness and trust. The private world between friends and how essentially sacred an act that can be.
The book is Everybody needs A Rock by Byrd Baylor with pictures by Peter Parnall.
These are two powerhouses in making books. Do you know the story?
What happens in this story .....ten "rules' for choosing a rock as a special life long friend are given...by a young girl.....going to a mountain that holds all time is one, a choice made in quiet contemplation another , bent over with your eye at the level of your rock, these are just my paraphrases. Much more is there to be revealed. It works best to read this just as you go out to make your choices for rocks. Never after reading this have I had a child go choose and throw a rock or act irresponsibly. But always I have had to create a place within the room in a basket to now become a place we share rock treasures we find.
My students are gearing up to paint rocks. This is another thing I encourage. I'm probably painting bugs with them. Just because their reader touches on looking for insects and on beetles. But we may paint curled hibernating foxes, rabbits, mice in dens. we may look a lng time and find these rocks are animal rocks. We just will need to listen awhile and see.
I'm keeping some for the spice garden as markers. From summer school here are a few....
And soon to be a project for my class.
Today I read a book to my class, Stone Soup. There are many variations and it is indeed a classic in the interpretations that it seems to allow.
In fact today's version is so unlike the others( which are about tricking a naive person to meet your own needs to get something so you can eat ) that I think it an excellent way of introducing setting something on its ear. And so I read the story suggesting to my group that we can learn much from the tale. This year we seem inclined as a group to impatience, tattling, to watching and eying another to catch a mistake or get "yours." It gets old. Fast. And the story is so deftly able to weave a moral about the joy found in making stone soup.
Stone Soup (Hardcover)
by Jon J Muth (Illustrator)
In what I found to be a very fascinating telling (even more so for the brilliant watercolors) three monks Hok, Lok and Siew travel a road into a village traumatized by war and ill fortune. And from this warring the villagers are distrusting, not communicating, closed shut little stones. Locked in houses helping no one. As I think we are doing much the same in our school modeling as adults through so much of our "methods" in Direct Instruction, hording, power grabbing, watching one another, directed by mandates and narrowing the curriculum creating in our children shut stone hearts for lack of using skills in cooperation and sharing interactions ...anyway the monks in the story see this FOR WHAT IT IS and speak of "happiness" and what it means one to another. The three monks realize and point out this is a place that has cut off a way to its own joy. Seeing this they create a fire and start to make stone soup. A child assists with three rocks and a big pot and slowly the novelty, the actions around this "event" bring together the village.
Ironically today from 10 to 1 we staged a "happening" at Hathaway around the Exploring Space and Time Project. Painting an observation area. Talking about parts of a circle.
Griding off the space, allowing the children to paint the giant direction lines of the compass we are making. Using handheld compasses to set the direction. An event to bring the school together in this project.
A project that asks us to observe shadows and earth rotation, tilt, and to observe what we see measuring a shadow from a gnonom every Tuesday at 11AM. Anyway the children related to these two different situations. They made a connection.
The monks essentially create a "happening" in the village and the emphasis on this telling is not on whether stones can become soup. It is more on how each person brings to the giant pot an outpouring of generosity. A contribution to improve the soup. Not really competitive, this carries a Confucian sense of honoring the event and family by doing this with sincerity, generous spirit. One child in my room said, "Look they make a fiesta." And indeed they are able to share the soup in a beautiful banquet as they find happiness once more.
As a follow up we always cook some soup. My crockpot will be over next week. And children asked to bring in a contribution.
And we will write up the recipe too. ( and make rock collects, sort and scratch test, draw and observe trees and rocks, clouds and weather...I cannot begin to tell you about our days..rich with things to be done.)
So much to do.......................
This is a story of finding happiness.
And in this unit I am able to work towards my happiness by uniting the work we do in meaning making. And finding a way to address the concepts that are in our texts in situations that allow children to do things and enjoy connections. And not just bubble in a test sheet.
Stories In Stone is a very interesting book because it ties my children into our work to understand California has a "past."
Stories in Stone: Rock Art Pictures by Early Americans (Hardcover)by Caroline Arnold (Author), Richard R Hewett (Illustrator)
Stories in Stone is also teaching the children that Native American groups occupied the land/this land before us, living in ways dictated by the environment they inhabited. Because the children are noticing you can write with rocks, noticing these massive rocks on their tables and finding they can do chalk drawings on them then baby wipe this off and do another, they are interested in the work that this book brings forward in really good photographs.
This is the story of the Rock Art in the Coso Range in the Mojave Desert. Petroglyphs are introduced with stunning examples that are not so very far away to see from where my students live geographically. The Shoshone (I taught a family of Shoshone in Greenfield, CA) say these were made by their "old ones," their ancestors, and the book does a terrific job of speaking to what "we know" about that. One place we find out more is in the pictures. It is compelling to everyone to see a rock valley become a place to talk to the future generations about the ways of the past.
You can go visit the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest California to see Little Petroglyph Canyon. Wow.
Some pages we studied.
By far my favorite image. Isn't that incredible? That's a sheep!
I was rather deeply affected a few years ago when I taught up at the Warner School District in the mountains of San Diego. The children began a year with me very traumatized by fires that had licked up to their places both on two reservations and on their ranches. A few had lost homes (that reality just hit again down in San Diego). I began with my 3 to 6th grade class a long study of geology. And it had ethnographic elements. We introduced Native "explanations" for the unique rock that is abundantly protruding everywhere up on those hills. You really have to see it. And we learned the factors geographically that produced the way it "looked." As we studied we had more work to do... learning about the forces of nature involved, about water and how weather as well affected the landscape.
Not long after my first days there, as I saw a glimmer of what might work to hold together the year, bind it in meaning with the rock speaking to me it was so dramatically there, we went outside to a flag salute. It was a commemoration and silence for September 11th.
It seemed the recent fire traumas from the Julian Fire and then the remembering of what happened in the east coalesced into the children. They were very silent and calm that day. Visibly shaken. One of the mothers from the reservation approached me in the ceremony and suggested that the children might be helped by "worry stones." And she gave me this book to read to the class.
The Worry Stone (Hardcover)
by Marianna Dengler (Author)
It is a Chumash story, beautiful and .....indeed my children worked very hard to find the stones that fit their feelings. It was the beginning of what would become a close and compelling place we gathered to learn about our earth. Through the stones we were invited into the secrets of good mother earth.
In the story a grandmother shares a story with a little girl named Amanda who has found a stone. It is actually a story within a story both excellent. An Indian Maiden Tokatu (Dove) loved only Akima(back bear). It begins a story of love.
A marriage was to happen but discord came in the tribe and a war resulted. Akima was called to battle and tho his beloved kept a vigil he did not return to her.
On the wedding day Tokatu dresses and waits and he is brought mortally wounded on a litter. And the wind of Time carry away his spirit after they pledge to one another their love. Each year she weeps her tears to the earth, where he left her into the wind, and as she ages is herself taken away by the Wind of Time.
The small stones on Akima's grave are named her tears, now small stones. And in time as the story was lost to the tribe , to others, the knowledge of them lost as memories go...the stones, small rounded perfectly balanced in the hand, the stones came to be called "worry stones." And so the story continues. And the children become interested in finding a stone that is "just so."
I have found teaching that when something happens in the field of the children, in the field of their emotional needs, a disturbance, one of the poorest responses adults can have is to look away or ignore or move rapidly "on." To give children a story such as this one is a kind of anchor to validate the feelings. To allow them to search for and find a stone to name as their worry stone is indeed a kind of physical objectification to represent the move to the conscious of that which is so troubling in the unconscious. It is to bring this to story form, as the Native stories do so well, that the children can then write why they chose the stone, what worries it holds. This inspired my class to write a tremendous volume called Rock-U (rock haiku) . A way to speak one to another about the ineffable I felt.
There is a lot of trust, one to another, to do these kinds of projects, to write and share these kinds of experiences. Bonds are formed as we face our troubling times together. This story is one that is so excellent that it had to come to me as a gift. Only that way would make sense.
I must add that the illustrations are remarkably good. In my heart there is a piece of this story of stone tears shed for this bear who is taken away, that rings with the authentic sound of human suffering and the love one to another that binds us.
It is with no small voice I ask you to read Native Stories to the young.
It is into these stories a great deal of wisdom has been collected.
Water Dance by Thomas Locker spoke to me to include here.
Water Dance
by Thomas Locker (Author)
There are many ways to introduce the Water Cycle to children but this carries a Native American tone. It talks of the many forms water might appear in our world, as rain, as mist, cloud, river, waterfall, mountain stream lake, sea, storm, thunderhead, the droplets creating the conditions for the rainbow, almost as a riddle children look to see water working to transform us, an agent of change. A dance in the cycle.
At the end of the book the water cycle is fully described. That lends itself to my children creating those kinds of pictures. I have a cool song too. I like this book too because the artwork allows me to speak to the forces of erosion.
I asked the children today why the rocks on their desks had rounded edges.
I heard things like, "They came that way," and, "God made them." One child said they were "Worn off in a river," and another said, "We can find these at the ocean, over on the islands." So one of the questions they asked, and we usually chart several questions to look into, try to answer as we can over a week and write a few more, one of the questions at science time is why are these rocks rounded? And how can we "round rough rocks?"
I have a rock tumbler in the closet and they have all gotten a small rough rock. So next week we start tumbling. Tumbling rocks is a bit noisy. With our new birds chattering I'm not sure we will be the quietest class at school. But I am sure we will be investigating quite a bit.
You may know the next book I'm going to recommend to read with students.
It was a part of the Whole Language materials of a few years ago and that put it into the hands of many teachers. The book tells essentially a young Native girl's story of how to chose a rock. The artwork, line drawing, in the book is so stunning, so advanced for children's books , so poetic it seems able to speak to the personal and intimate and intensely internal spaces that this rock friend choosing occupies. In this way, for my purposes, it speaks to the dignity of friendship, the closeness and trust. The private world between friends and how essentially sacred an act that can be.
The book is Everybody needs A Rock by Byrd Baylor with pictures by Peter Parnall.
These are two powerhouses in making books. Do you know the story?
What happens in this story .....ten "rules' for choosing a rock as a special life long friend are given...by a young girl.....going to a mountain that holds all time is one, a choice made in quiet contemplation another , bent over with your eye at the level of your rock, these are just my paraphrases. Much more is there to be revealed. It works best to read this just as you go out to make your choices for rocks. Never after reading this have I had a child go choose and throw a rock or act irresponsibly. But always I have had to create a place within the room in a basket to now become a place we share rock treasures we find.
My students are gearing up to paint rocks. This is another thing I encourage. I'm probably painting bugs with them. Just because their reader touches on looking for insects and on beetles. But we may paint curled hibernating foxes, rabbits, mice in dens. we may look a lng time and find these rocks are animal rocks. We just will need to listen awhile and see.
I'm keeping some for the spice garden as markers. From summer school here are a few....
Today I read a book to my class, Stone Soup. There are many variations and it is indeed a classic in the interpretations that it seems to allow.
In fact today's version is so unlike the others( which are about tricking a naive person to meet your own needs to get something so you can eat ) that I think it an excellent way of introducing setting something on its ear. And so I read the story suggesting to my group that we can learn much from the tale. This year we seem inclined as a group to impatience, tattling, to watching and eying another to catch a mistake or get "yours." It gets old. Fast. And the story is so deftly able to weave a moral about the joy found in making stone soup.
Stone Soup (Hardcover)
by Jon J Muth (Illustrator)
In what I found to be a very fascinating telling (even more so for the brilliant watercolors) three monks Hok, Lok and Siew travel a road into a village traumatized by war and ill fortune. And from this warring the villagers are distrusting, not communicating, closed shut little stones. Locked in houses helping no one. As I think we are doing much the same in our school modeling as adults through so much of our "methods" in Direct Instruction, hording, power grabbing, watching one another, directed by mandates and narrowing the curriculum creating in our children shut stone hearts for lack of using skills in cooperation and sharing interactions ...anyway the monks in the story see this FOR WHAT IT IS and speak of "happiness" and what it means one to another. The three monks realize and point out this is a place that has cut off a way to its own joy. Seeing this they create a fire and start to make stone soup. A child assists with three rocks and a big pot and slowly the novelty, the actions around this "event" bring together the village.
Ironically today from 10 to 1 we staged a "happening" at Hathaway around the Exploring Space and Time Project. Painting an observation area. Talking about parts of a circle.
Griding off the space, allowing the children to paint the giant direction lines of the compass we are making. Using handheld compasses to set the direction. An event to bring the school together in this project.
A project that asks us to observe shadows and earth rotation, tilt, and to observe what we see measuring a shadow from a gnonom every Tuesday at 11AM. Anyway the children related to these two different situations. They made a connection.
The monks essentially create a "happening" in the village and the emphasis on this telling is not on whether stones can become soup. It is more on how each person brings to the giant pot an outpouring of generosity. A contribution to improve the soup. Not really competitive, this carries a Confucian sense of honoring the event and family by doing this with sincerity, generous spirit. One child in my room said, "Look they make a fiesta." And indeed they are able to share the soup in a beautiful banquet as they find happiness once more.
As a follow up we always cook some soup. My crockpot will be over next week. And children asked to bring in a contribution.
And we will write up the recipe too. ( and make rock collects, sort and scratch test, draw and observe trees and rocks, clouds and weather...I cannot begin to tell you about our days..rich with things to be done.)
So much to do.......................
This is a story of finding happiness.
And in this unit I am able to work towards my happiness by uniting the work we do in meaning making. And finding a way to address the concepts that are in our texts in situations that allow children to do things and enjoy connections. And not just bubble in a test sheet.
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