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Chapter 1 Creating Book Awards Ask your class to brainstorm a list describing the characteristic of quality children's literature. Following a discussion of the processes of awarding the Caldecott and Newberry awards, your students could create personal book award criteria and apply these criteria to recognize their favorite books. Book Recommendations Establish classroom procedures for recommending favorite books to fellow readers. This may take the form of recommended book lists, book talks, a monthly newsletter of "good reads," or book invitations. Survey of Reading Habits Have your students conduct an investigation into the reading habits of fellow classmates and/or school and community leaders. Ask such questions as: Where is your favorite place to read? What time of day do you enjoy reading for pleasure? How does reading contribute to your work? Be sure to talk about your own reading practices with your students! What Makes a Classic a Classic? Students might investigate the qualities of children's books that are enduring favorites. They could survey local bookshops to identify books with older copyright dates that have undergone a series of reprints. Obtain copies of these books from a local library and hold a class discussion focusing on the qualities of these books that have ensured their continued popularity. What makes a children's book a "classic?" Exploring Literature through Art Young children communicate through visual symbols as easily as they communicate through language, yet by the middle grades many children feel very insecure about making art. Children of all ages who have the opportunity to transform their responses to books through visual means are learning to be confident creators. In addition, their familiarity with art can increase their visual literacy and their aesthetic understanding. Too often children are given a box of crayons and a small space at the top of some lined newsprint paper and told to "make a picture" of the story. Chalk, paints, markers, colored tissue papers, yarn, steel wool, cotton, fabric scraps, wires--anything that might be useful in depicting characters and scenes should be readily accessible. Teachers might provide more interesting paper such as wallpaper samples, construction paper, hand-painted papers, the "second sheets" of computer paper, and remainders from printers. The teacher's role is to design a rich environment for creativity by providing materials, challenging children's thinking, and honoring children's work. Teachers can help children think about their stories or poems by asking focusing questions like these:
Chapter 2 In follow-up discussions when children show their work to the class, teachers can encourage them to talk about choices and reactions. In this way, children are encouraged to reflect on or appreciate their own work and that of others. In addition, the teacher gains valuable insight into their thinking. Displays, Dioramas, and Museums Displays naturally attract children. While locked glass cases may be appropriate for some materials, it is the inviting hands-on aspect of a table display that entices readers to investigate books and things they might otherwise not discover or to create an inviting exhibit of work in response to a book or theme. Before beginning a study of the beach with kindergartners and first-graders, a teacher displayed a child's bathing suit, sand, a souvenir T-shirt from a nearby beach, and some sand toys, along with beach-related books. A diorama, another kind of display, is a three-dimensional scene often including objects and figures. Using cardboard boxes or shoeboxes turned on their sides, children can create a memorable scene from a book. A larger box partitioned in two allows a child to contrast two events or settings. Children should be encouraged to make every part of the diorama. If a teacher emphasizes the importance of accurate details, children must return to the book to check descriptions and facts. Teachers should also ask children to write about their diorama--how it was made, what it shows, and which book it is from. Then observers can appreciate the details, and the child has real authority and real purpose in writing. A museum is a labeled collection of objects that an author included in a story. A folktale museum made by older students included a pea slept on by the princess, a chicken bone Hansel used to fool the witch, and a feather left behind by the Crane Wife. Sixth-graders displayed their museum items on posterboard and presented their artwork to the class, explaining why each item pictured was important to the story. Displays, dioramas, and museums have the power to make a book seem more real to readers. Explanatory labels need to be written for each display. If the displays are shared enthusiastically with other classes, some children will surely find books they want to read. In the process of making scenes or visualizing parts of a story, children revisit the book to explore settings, rediscover the author's use of descriptive language, and often are better able to generalize about and discuss a story. These collections and the books from which they are taken then become highly visible to children and further invite them to keep reading. Responding Dramatically Creative dramatics offer children a unique opportunity to respond physically to a work of literature. One form of dramatic response is a tableau. A tableau is a living representation of a scene or image formed by one or more students posing silently and motionlessly. In this form of response a small group works cooperatively, selecting one scene from a work of literature to present in a tableau, or freeze-frame. The group selects props, discusses the characters' positions in relation to these props, and decides upon and practices appropriate facial expressions for each character. Once they are ready to perform, they strike their poses and then maintain these positions. Their stillness allows an audience the opportunity to reflect on the tableau they have created. The audience should consider:
Chapter 3 Printmaking Printing techniques have been used in book illustration for centuries and are used by many modern illustrators. Young children could create designs for their book responses or book endpapers by printing repeated images. A plate can be made from a cut potato, an image incised on a foam tray, or some other printing medium. A reliable plate that will withstand repeated use can be made from pieces of bicycle tire inner tubes. Cement rubber shapes to a wood block using rubber cement, and print as with any other block. This technique takes some careful planning, but such plates can be used to print endpapers for any number of books. While woodcuts and linoleum block prints are seldom practical or safe for younger elementary children, similar effects can be achieved with printing plates made from the plastic foam trays that grocery stores use to package meat or produce. The trays should be washed to remove all grease. Lines can be incised on the plate with dull pencils or ballpoint pens, and excess foam cut away. Then water-based printing ink is rolled on. It takes time to create these pictures, but children find it very satisfying to work in the same media as an illustrator. In another type of printing process, the printing plate is built up by gluing pieces of cardboard, string, and other materials to a heavy backing. Ink is worked into or rolled onto the plate, and a print is taken or "pulled" off the plate. Often art teachers are happy to be enlisted by the classroom teacher in helping children explore a particular technique such as printing. A stencil print allows children to apply paint or chalk in ways that resemble art techniques used by many illustrators. Artists like Leo and Diane Dillon often use an art tool called an airbrush to achieve smooth applications of color and clean edges. To make a stencil, a figure is cut from a piece of heavy paper, leaving the figure (the "positive" stencil) and the figure's shape (the "negative" stencil). The stencil is placed on a sheet of paper, and paint can be applied by flicking a brush over a wire screen or simply stippling the tip of the brush on the paper. For a "finger airbrush" technique, the edges of either the negative or the positive stencil are heavily chalked and the figure or shape is laid on a clean piece of paper. By holding the chalked paper stationary and gently brushing the chalk dust off onto the clean paper, an image shape or its outline is formed. Using different colors of chalk creates surprising shadows and shadings. Bookmaking Nothing motivates children to write as much as the opportunity to create, bind, and illustrate books of their own. Teachers need to learn how to bind books themselves before attempting to teach children. Materials for bookbinding should be made constantly available so that children can make books as the need arises. Most bookmaking materials can be readily purchased, but parents may contribute leftover fabric pieces for book covers to ease classroom budgets. There are many simple ways to create handmade books in which to "publish" children's writing. However, since bookbinding involves time and some expense, it should be reserved for the publication of carefully planned, written, and illustrated books. Children should look at the way beautiful books are made, the various media used, the carefully designed endpapers or title pages, the placement of the words, and so forth before they complete their own work. For endpapers children can use marbleized paper or colored construction paper that reflects the mood of their story. They can take as models books with patterned and decorated endpapers, such as Taro Yashima's endpapers for Crow Boy, which depict a butterfly and a blossom, symbols of the main character's growth; or Kathy Jakobsen's endpaper paintings for Reeve Lindbergh's poem of Johnny Appleseed, which depict a map of the region where John Chapman wandered. Many children enjoy planning dedications and jacket copy for their books as well. As children create their own books, they learn much about the care and design that have gone into the books they read. Before binding a book, children can be encouraged to sketch a "dummy" or practice book. The illustrations are roughed out and lines are drawn where text will be written or typed. In Her Book by Janet Wolf, the book's dummy is incorporated into the final product as endpapers, and children may wish to compare Wolf's dummy with the more detailed final illustrations as they work on their own books. Aliki's How a Book Is Made, Michael Kehoe's A Book Takes Root, and Janet Stevens' From Pictures to Words give children an excellent overview of the creation and publication of a children's book. How to Make Pop-Ups by Joan Irvine suggests ways children can incorporate three-dimensional artwork into their books. Aliki [Aliki Brandenberg]. How a Book Is Made. Crowell, 1986.Irvine, Joan. How to Make Pop-Ups. Illustrated by Barbara Reid. Morrow, 1987. Kehoe, Michael. A Book Takes Root: The Making of a Picture Book. Carolrhoda, 1993. Lindbergh, Reeve. Johnny Appleseed. Illustrated by Kathy Jakobsen. Little, Brown, 1990. Stevens, Janet. From Pictures to Words: A Book about Making a Book. Holiday House, 1995. Wolf, Janet. Her Book. Harper and Row, 1982. Yashima, Taro. Crow Boy. Viking, 1955. Online Publishing The presence of computers and the Internet in school classrooms and libraries has provided a new forum for publishing children's writing. There are many Web sites that offer space for the publication of text and illustrations. Some of these sites even include bulletin boards that allow site visitors to post feedback to young writers. When reviewing these sites, it is always important to note the ways that the site designers have made efforts to protect children's privacy. Sites should never include children's last names or school names. Be sure to review your school's Internet-use policy to determine your district guidelines for parental permission related to student publishing on the Internet. Some sites post a children's privacy policy on their Web site. Chapter 4 Picture-Book Editions of Single Songs Among the many values of songbooks in the classroom is their use as predictable and familiar reading material. In recent years, there have been numerous fine picture-book interpretations of well-known songs, including Skip to My Lou, The Lady with the Alligator Purse, and There's a Hole in the Bucket, all illustrated by Nadine Bernard Westcott. Music is included in each of Westcott's books. Other musically derived picture books for young children feature familiar counting songs, such as John Langstaff's Over in the Meadow. To children who already know the song, the text of these books presents easy and enjoyable reading. Songs that follow a cumulative pattern challenge singers to remember the order in which events occur. Aliki's Hush, Little Baby and Nadine Westcott's I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly are good candidates for feltboard or box-movie storytelling aids. If children help to create these, they are less likely to get lost in the song. Many familiar folksongs have been researched and presented in authentic historic detail by such illustrators as Peter Spier and Aliki. Spier presents The Star-Spangled Banner and The Erie Canal with historical background so that the songs almost become an informational book, too. These various editions are a good way to make American history come alive as children are introduced to many folksongs that are a part of the American folk tradition. Aliki's illustrations for Hush, Little Baby and Go Tell Aunt Rhody reflect early American art in quilt-patterned endpapers and the paint-on-boards method of early limner painters. In addition to the classroom extensions suggested, children may enjoy making their own book versions of other traditional songs like "Home on the Range," "Where Have All the Flowers Gone," or "Old Dan Tucker." Scott R. Sanders has invented details and told his own stories for 20 folksongs in Hear the Wind Blow: American Folk Songs Retold. Aliki [Aliki Brandenberg]. Go Tell Aunt Rhody. Macmillan, 1986. Movement and Literature Increasing attention has been given to children's control of their own body movements. The relationship between thought and movement has received much attention, particularly in England. Basic rhythmic movements might be introduced through Mother Goose rhymes. For example, children could walk to "Tommy Snooks and Bessie Brooks," gallop to "Ride a Cock Horse," jump to "Jack Be Nimble," and run to "Wee Willie Winkie." Nursery rhymes could also motivate dramatic action with such verses as "Hickory Dickory Dock," "Three Blind Mice," and "Jack and Jill." A favorite poem for young children to move to is "Holding Hands" by Lenore M. Link, which describes the slow, ponderous way that elephants walk. By way of contrast, Evelyn Beyer's poem "Jump or Jiggle" details the walk of frogs, caterpillars, worms, bugs, rabbits, and horses. It provides a wonderful opportunity for children to develop diverse movements. Both poems can be found in Jack Prelutsky's Read-Aloud Rhymes for the Very Young. In Jean Marzollo's Pretend You're a Cat, a longer poem that Jerry Pinkney illustrates as a picture book, Pinkney's watercolors portray 12 animals and, on the facing pages, children pretending to walk, wiggle, or jump like those particular animals. Children also enjoy making the hand motions and sounds for We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen, as the adventurous family goes through a river, "Splash, splosh." As children learn basic movements, they can use them in different areas of space, at different levels, and at different tempos. Swinging, bending, stretching, twisting, bouncing, and shaking are the kinds of body movements that can be made by standing tall, at a middle position, or by stooping low. For example, "A Swing Song" by William Allingham could be interpreted by swinging, pushing motions that vary in speed according to the words in the poem. Other poetry that suggests movement includes "Stop, Go" by Dorothy Baruch, "The African Dance" by Langston Hughes, and "The Potatoes' Dance" by Vachel Lindsay. All of these poems can be found in Favorite Poems Old and New by Helen Ferris. Children who have had this kind of experience are ready to create rhythmic interpretations of a longer story. May I Bring a Friend? by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, and Koala Lou by Mem Fox are examples of stories that lend themselves to rhythmic interpretations. de Regniers, Beatrice Schenk. May I Bring a Friend? Illustrated by Beni Montresor. Atheneum, 1964. A Survey of Alphabet Books Children of all ages would enjoy collecting and comparing the wide variety of alphabet books available for children. Visit your local and school libraries and bookstores to gather together a wide assortment of alphabet books that use varying formats and focus on different topics. For starters, see the list of alphabet books within this chapter. After collecting the books and reading them, children can construct a comparison chart to analyze the books' features. Categories for analysis might include: topic, format, text, number of letters presented per page, illustrations, and other distinguishing features. You might also engage children in a similar activity comparing other types of concept books, such as counting books, color books, or books that present opposites. Chapter 5 Murals Murals provide children with opportunities to work and plan together. These collaborative efforts need planning, and teachers might suggest that children make preliminary drawings or sketches before beginning. Lightly chalked areas on the final mural paper help children visualize the overall picture. A mural can also be assembled more easily by pasting children's artwork to a background. Older children might discuss how variation in size and shading, or overlapping, creates the illusion of depth. Murals can be organized around events in one story, a synthesis of children's favorite characters, or a topic or theme of study. One fourth-grade class made individual collage representations of houses from favorite folktales that were later glued in place along a picture of a winding road. Baba Yaga's chicken-footed house from Russian folktales stood between the witch's house from "Hansel and Gretel" and the giant's castle from "Puss in Boots." A written explanation for each house accompanied the mural. By providing a variety of materials and some organizing assistance, a teacher can help children successfully create eye-catching murals. Backgrounds can be quickly filled in with printing, using sponges dipped in paint for leaves and bushes or potato-printed tree shapes. It is important, both for a writing opportunity and for the many people who will view it, to complete the display of a mural with an explanation of the way it was made. Media Exploration A teacher can make use of a child's desire to replicate an illustrator's way of working by encouraging children to explore various media. Kindergarten children saved their finger-painting pictures, cut them up, and used them to create their own story illustrated in the collage style of three of Eric Carle's stories, The Very Hungry Caterpillar,The Very Busy Spider, and The Very Quiet Cricket. After seeing Leo Lionni's Swimmy, a group of primary children used lace paper doilies and watercolors to make prints creating similar underwater effects. Older children used dampened rice paper, ink, and watercolor to try to capture the look of traditional Japanese artwork used by Anne Buguet in On Cat Mountain by Francoise Richard and by Suekichi Akaba in the illustrations for The Crane Wife by Sumiko Yagawa. These children were answering for themselves the question "How did the illustrator make the pictures?" Techniques that easily translate to the elementary classroom include collage, scratchboard, marbleized paper, many varieties of painting and printing, and stencil prints. By making these materials and processes readily available to children, teachers can extend the ways in which they visualize their world as well as their appreciation for illustrators' works. Though schools can buy commercially prepared scratchboard, similar results can be achieved by crayoning heavily on shiny-surfaced cardboard, then covering the crayon with India ink dabbed on with a cotton ball, and then scratching designs or illustrations through the ink with a pin or scissor points after the ink has thoroughly dried. This process is tedious, so the technique is more suited for older children. A simpler "crayon resist" can be done by applying watercolor or black tempera paint over a crayon drawing. It is easy to put several drops of food coloring in water and let children paint this wash over crayon drawings to create sky, forest, or other background. Marbleized paper has frequently been used in collage and endpapers of well-made books. Children can create marbleized paper, using any paper and one of several kinds of color. Commercial marbleizing kits are available from school art-supply catalogs, but binders such as cornstarch added to water achieve satisfactory effects. Fill kitty litter pans or disposable or old baking pans with water and drop the color on the water surface. Acrylic paint works well and does not entail the messy cleanup that enamel paint does. Some types of poster paint and India ink also give good results. Place a piece of paper face down on the water and floating color, being careful not to trap air bubbles between paper and water. Gently lift the paper and hang it to dry. Colored chalk also provides a pleasing effect and poses fewer cleanup problems for younger children. Large sticks of sidewalk chalk may be grated over the water with a small piece of window screen or an old sieve. Results must be sprayed with fixative or hairspray when dry. Marbleized paper may be cut and used in collage or in the making of books as endpapers and covers. Carle, Eric. The Very Busy Spider. Philomel, 1984.------. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Putnam, 1989 [1969]. ------. The Very Quiet Cricket. Philomel, 1990. Lionni, Leo. Swimmy. Pantheon, 1963. Richard, Francoise. On Cat Mountain. Illustrated by Anne Buguet. Putnam, 1994. Yagawa, Sumiko. The Crane Wife. Translated by Katherine Paterson. Illustrated by Suekichi Akaba. Morrow, 1981. Making Alphabet Books One teacher of fifth-grade language arts gave her students 50 alphabet books and asked them to decide which ones were easier, which more difficult, and why. On the second day, they categorized the collection on four large wall charts (see "Alphabet Books" in Chapter 4). The 10-year-olds were surprised to see challenging titles like Jonathan Hunt's medieval informational book Illuminations and Max Grover's Accidental Zucchini. When the teacher asked children to make their own 26-letter alphabet books, the results were diverse. There were ABC books of sports, foods, animals, favorite hobbies such as fishing, riddles, lift-the-flap, hidden-pictures, and alliterative stories. The class was so proud of its work that they held an author party at which children shared their work with parents. Another class of older children read Brian Jacques' Redwall, a fantasy set in a medieval fortress defended by mice. They used an alphabet format and extracted events and things from the book to create their own A Is for Abbey book. Alphabet books are handy organizers of information from a thematic study. Teachers might use this as a whole-class project on a topic such as ecology, especially if children are encouraged to write a paragraph of information to go with "R is for rain forest," for example. Grover, Max. Accidental Zucchini: An Unexpected Alphabet. Harcourt Brace, 1993.Hunt, Jonathan. Illuminations. Bradbury, 1989. Jacques, Brian. Redwall. Illustrated by Gary Chalk. Philomel, 1986. Using the Web as a Resource for Learning about Authors and Illustrators The collection of World Wide Web resources related to picture books is growing rapidly. More and more authors and illustrators have personal Web sites that they have developed themselves or that have been developed for them by their publishers. Additionally, sites exist for authors and illustrators that have been developed by fans. Detailed information about authors' and illustrators' lives, artistic process, and publications is only a click of the mouse away. This wealth of readily available information opens up tremendous possibilities for student projects related to picture books. Students might create multimedia projects presenting the work of a single picture book author or illustrator or comparing the work of several artists. Students could create a Web-based scavenger hunt (or Webquest) for their classmates. The Web is also a resource that children might use to create thematic bibliographies or book recommendation lists. The possibilities are endless. Index to Internet Sites: Children's and Young Adult's Authors and Illustratorshttp://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/biochildhome.htm Yahoo: Links to Children's Author/ Illustrator Web Sites http://dir.yahoo.com/arts/humanities/literature/authors/children_s/ Yahooligans Collection of Author and Book Sites http://www.yahooligans.com/school_bell/language_arts/books/ Chapter 6 Story-Retelling Aids Children love to retell stories to each other, and aids help them recall parts of the story or focus on the sequence of events. One skillful kindergarten teacher discovered the power of a story box to turn children into storytellers: October 20: I sat in front of the class and introduced the cast of characters for Galdone's The Little Red Hen. These were all stuffed animal toys and I used an invisible seed, some tall grasses, a tiny bag of white flour, and a loaf of bread for props. At the end of my puppet show I boxed up the cast and props and labeled the box "The Little Red Hen." I put it in the reading corner for anyone who wanted to tell that story. Throughout the morning small groups of children made time to check it all out. Some just fingered the plush toys, examined the bag of flour, and smelled the loaf of unsliced bread. But Allison organized Jamie, Jeffrey, Viviana, and Joey each to be an animal while she spoke the part of the hen. This play was for themselves, not demanding or even needing an audience; the children were unaware of observers. The box is a great idea; there seems to be great ceremony in unpacking and packing up the kit. (Jinx Bohstedt, "Old Tales for Young Tellers," Outlook no. 33, Fall, 1979: 34.) Out of the dress-up clothes, one kindergarten teacher gathered men's boots, pants, a shirt, gloves, and a hat that children manipulated as they retold Linda Williams's The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. A cardboard pumpkin took the place of a real one, and this collection was boxed and kept in the play corner for the month of October. Felt boards provide another chance for children to practice telling stories more easily. (See the discussion of felt board stories in Chapter 13.) Once children have seen a teacher tell a story using the felt board, they are eager to use the props or to make their own figures to tell the story. Silhouettes placed on an overhead projector create yet another kind of board story. Where color is important, such as in Leo Lionni's Little Blue and Little Yellow, use tinted acetate unmounted--or mounted behind a cutout shape. A roller box movie is a third retelling aid. Each child draws a different important scene, the pictures are arranged sequentially, taped together, and then mounted on rollers. As each picture passes on the "screen," the child who drew the picture tells that part of the story. Needless to say, roller movies require children to talk through what scenes need to appear, who should present what, and so on. Pictures should be reinforced with masking tape on the back before they are attached to each other. The strip of pictures is then attached and rolled onto two fat dowel rods. The rods are inserted on either side of a decorated box or carton and the movie is scrolled past the audience. Using story-retelling aids is a special help to young children and students who have heard few stories read aloud. By practicing storytelling, children develop a sense of how stories are supposed to sound and how stories work. The teacher may introduce and demonstrate any of these aids, but it is in the making of their own projects that children utilize the widest variety of skills. They learn to return to the story for information and confirmation, to extract important points, to sequence events, to become sensitive to the language of the storyteller, and to "sound like a book." Older children also have the opportunity to practice their skills at summarizing as they negotiate what to tell or depict from longer stories and chapter books. Lionni, Leo. Little Blue and Little Yellow. Astor-Honor, 1959.Williams, Linda. The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. Illustrated by Megan Lloyd. Harper and Row, 1986. Fooling with Folktales, Fables, and Myths Children's literature offers many examples of how authors and illustrators reinterpret traditional literature for new audiences. Some illustrators modify the sense of a well-known tale by preserving the story but changing the setting. Roberto Innocenti took Charles Perrault's "Cinderella" and elegantly placed it in post-World War I Britain. Anthony Browne updated the Grimms's "Hansel and Gretel" by changing the setting to a bleak present-day city. But many more authors and illustrators take a well-known folktale and change the point of view, mix up the characters, alter the theme, or tell what happened next. Jon Scieszka plays with traditional forms and characters in books like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and The Book That Jack Wrote. His The Frog Prince Continued is a sequel in which a dissatisfied prince seeks witches from other folktales who can change him back into a frog. His The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf shifts the story to the wolf's point of view. Babette Cole's Prince Cinders and Bernice Myers's Sidney Rella and the Glass Sneaker present familiar patterns in new stories, each with a modern boy protagonist, while Ellen Jackson's Cinder Edna portrays a take-charge Cinderella. Jane Yolen's Sleeping Ugly plays with our expectations about folktales by giving the ugly but kind girl the prince and leaving the beautiful princess asleep to be used as a hat rack. Children who have been steeped in traditional literature can write wonderful parodies and sophisticated takeoffs. A sixth-grade class studied numerous Greek myths and discussed their characteristics. One boy's story perfectly captures aspects of myth such as a crisp beginning, few characters, the explanation of the origins of an animal, and the often deadly and arbitrary action of the gods: "Princess Skunkina and Olfactor" Fables also represent a discrete and highly patterned genre of literature that children can experiment with. Children ought to have many experiences with the original fables by Aesop and La Fontaine before trying their own hands at it. Working from the moral back to the story, one group of 12-year-olds decided to create other modern versions of fables. They thought of appropriate stories for such well-known morals as "Beauty is only skin deep" and "Don't cry wolf unless you mean it." Cole, Babette. Prince Cinders. Putnam, 1987.------. Princess Smartypants. Putnam, 1987. Jackson, Ellen. Cinder Edna. Illustrated by Kevin O'Malley. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1994. Myers, Bernice. Sidney Rella and the Glass Sneaker. Macmillan, 1985. Scieszka, Jon. The Book That Jack Wrote. Illustrated by Daniel Adel. Viking, 1994. ------. The Frog Prince Continued. Illustrated by Steve Johnson. Viking, 1991. ------. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Illustrated by Lane Smith. Viking, 1992. ------. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf. Illustrated by Lane Smith. Penguin, 1989. Yolen, Jane. Sleeping Ugly. Illustrated by Diane Stanley. Putnam, 1981. Heroes As a result of the events of September 11, 2001, the concept of heroism is at the forefront of our attention. Engage your students in a discussion of heroism. What does it mean to be a hero? What do we learn about the nature of heroism from traditional tales? In today's world, does being a hero mean something different that what we may guess it meant in ancient times? Is heroism external or internal? Whom do you consider to be a hero? Why? Chapter 7 Story-Retelling Aids Children love to retell stories to each other, and aids help them recall parts of the story or focus on the sequence of events. One skillful kindergarten teacher discovered the power of a story box to turn children into storytellers: October 20: I sat in front of the class and introduced the cast of characters for Galdone's The Little Red Hen. These were all stuffed animal toys and I used an invisible seed, some tall grasses, a tiny bag of white flour, and a loaf of bread for props. At the end of my puppet show I boxed up the cast and props and labeled the box "The Little Red Hen." I put it in the reading corner for anyone who wanted to tell that story. Throughout the morning small groups of children made time to check it all out. Some just fingered the plush toys, examined the bag of flour, and smelled the loaf of unsliced bread. But Allison organized Jamie, Jeffrey, Viviana, and Joey each to be an animal while she spoke the part of the hen. This play was for themselves, not demanding or even needing an audience; the children were unaware of observers. The box is a great idea; there seems to be great ceremony in unpacking and packing up the kit. (Jinx Bohstedt, "Old Tales for Young Tellers," Outlook no. 33, Fall, 1979: 34.) Out of the dress-up clothes, one kindergarten teacher gathered men's boots, pants, a shirt, gloves, and a hat that children manipulated as they retold Linda Williams's The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. A cardboard pumpkin took the place of a real one, and this collection was boxed and kept in the play corner for the month of October. Felt boards provide another chance for children to practice telling stories more easily. (See the discussion of felt board stories in Chapter 13.) Once children have seen a teacher tell a story using the felt board, they are eager to use the props or to make their own figures to tell the story. Silhouettes placed on an overhead projector create yet another kind of board story. Where color is important, such as in Leo Lionni's Little Blue and Little Yellow, use tinted acetate unmounted--or mounted behind a cutout shape. A roller box movie is a third retelling aid. Each child draws a different important scene, the pictures are arranged sequentially, taped together, and then mounted on rollers. As each picture passes on the "screen," the child who drew the picture tells that part of the story. Needless to say, roller movies require children to talk through what scenes need to appear, who should present what, and so on. Pictures should be reinforced with masking tape on the back before they are attached to each other. The strip of pictures is then attached and rolled onto two fat dowel rods. The rods are inserted on either side of a decorated box or carton and the movie is scrolled past the audience. Using story-retelling aids is a special help to young children and students who have heard few stories read aloud. By practicing storytelling, children develop a sense of how stories are supposed to sound and how stories work. The teacher may introduce and demonstrate any of these aids, but it is in the making of their own projects that children utilize the widest variety of skills. They learn to return to the story for information and confirmation, to extract important points, to sequence events, to become sensitive to the language of the storyteller, and to "sound like a book." Older children also have the opportunity to practice their skills at summarizing as they negotiate what to tell or depict from longer stories and chapter books. Lionni, Leo. Little Blue and Little Yellow. Astor-Honor, 1959.Williams, Linda. The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything. Illustrated by Megan Lloyd. Harper and Row, 1986. Fooling with Folktales, Fables, and Myths Children's literature offers many examples of how authors and illustrators reinterpret traditional literature for new audiences. Some illustrators modify the sense of a well-known tale by preserving the story but changing the setting. Roberto Innocenti took Charles Perrault's "Cinderella" and elegantly placed it in post-World War I Britain. Anthony Browne updated the Grimms's "Hansel and Gretel" by changing the setting to a bleak present-day city. But many more authors and illustrators take a well-known folktale and change the point of view, mix up the characters, alter the theme, or tell what happened next. Jon Scieszka plays with traditional forms and characters in books like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales and The Book That Jack Wrote. His The Frog Prince Continued is a sequel in which a dissatisfied prince seeks witches from other folktales who can change him back into a frog. His The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf shifts the story to the wolf's point of view. Babette Cole's Prince Cinders and Bernice Myers's Sidney Rella and the Glass Sneaker present familiar patterns in new stories, each with a modern boy protagonist, while Ellen Jackson's Cinder Edna portrays a take-charge Cinderella. Jane Yolen's Sleeping Ugly plays with our expectations about folktales by giving the ugly but kind girl the prince and leaving the beautiful princess asleep to be used as a hat rack. Children who have been steeped in traditional literature can write wonderful parodies and sophisticated takeoffs. A sixth-grade class studied numerous Greek myths and discussed their characteristics. One boy's story perfectly captures aspects of myth such as a crisp beginning, few characters, the explanation of the origins of an animal, and the often deadly and arbitrary action of the gods: "Princess Skunkina and Olfactor" Fables also represent a discrete and highly patterned genre of literature that children can experiment with. Children ought to have many experiences with the original fables by Aesop and La Fontaine before trying their own hands at it. Working from the moral back to the story, one group of 12-year-olds decided to create other modern versions of fables. They thought of appropriate stories for such well-known morals as "Beauty is only skin deep" and "Don't cry wolf unless you mean it." Cole, Babette. Prince Cinders. Putnam, 1987.------. Princess Smartypants. Putnam, 1987. Jackson, Ellen. Cinder Edna. Illustrated by Kevin O'Malley. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1994. Myers, Bernice. Sidney Rella and the Glass Sneaker. Macmillan, 1985. Scieszka, Jon. The Book That Jack Wrote. Illustrated by Daniel Adel. Viking, 1994. ------. The Frog Prince Continued. Illustrated by Steve Johnson. Viking, 1991. ------. The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales. Illustrated by Lane Smith. Viking, 1992. ------. The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by A. Wolf. Illustrated by Lane Smith. Penguin, 1989. Yolen, Jane. Sleeping Ugly. Illustrated by Diane Stanley. Putnam, 1981. Heroes As a result of the events of September 11, 2001, the concept of heroism is at the forefront of our attention. Engage your students in a discussion of heroism. What does it mean to be a hero? What do we learn about the nature of heroism from traditional tales? In today's world, does being a hero mean something different that what we may guess it meant in ancient times? Is heroism external or internal? Whom do you consider to be a hero? Why? Chapter 8 Composing Music Poetry can be set to music as children create melody and identify the rhythmical elements. One group of talented 7-year-olds composed music to accompany their own sad tale of a princess who was captured during a battle and taken from her palace. Her knight-in-arms wandered the lonely countryside in search of her, while the poor princess grieved for him in her prison tower. The children made up a musical theme for each of the main characters, which they repeated during the various movements of their composition. The story was first told to their classmates and then the song was played on the autoharp and glockenspiel. Older students composed a three-movement rhythmical symphony for Ged in Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. A recorder repeated Ged's theme in appropriate places in this percussion piece. When literature provides the inspiration for children's musical compositions, children's appreciation for both literature and music will be enriched. Le Guin, Ursula K. A Wizard of Earthsea. Illustrated by Ruth Robbins. Parnassus, 1968. Experimenting with Poetry Poetry provides many opportunities for children's writing. Eve Merriam's Quiet, Please invites children to imagine quiet sound--"ferns fluttering by the pond" or "invisible writing of butterflies." A group of 7- and 8-year-olds studied Tomie de Paola's The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog and created additional verses such as "She went to the hen house to get him an egg. / But when she got back, he was holding his leg." After reading The Book of Pigericks by Arnold Lobel, a small group of fourth-graders wrote their own "Bugericks."
de Paola, Tomie. The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog. Harcourt Brace, 1981. Reader's Theater Poetry Readers' theater also works for some poetry. Poems that include conversation, such as Karla Kuskin's "Where Have You Been, Dear?" or "The Question," found in her collection Dogs and Dragons, Trees and Dreams, have been successfully interpreted in this way. Children reading Mollie Hunter's The Mermaid Summer might also wish to read "Overheard on a Saltmarsh," the conversation between a nymph and a goblin about a necklace of green glass beads. This is in Isabel Wilner's collection The Poetry Troupe, which includes many poems for choral reading and readers' theater.
Hunter, Mollie. The Mermaid Summer. Harper and Row, 1988. Publishing Poetry on the Web Several sites on the World Wide Web are dedicated to the publication of children's poetry. Visit these sites with your students and discuss the poetry that you find there. Encourage your students to develop poems for submission to these pages. As noted previously, it is important to consider your school's policy on parental permission for posting student work on the Internet. Poetry Post Chapter 9 Comparison Charts Comparison charts have been used as tools for organizing talk and thought, too. One teacher asked a group of children who had read many novels by Betsy Byars to discuss how they are similar. Midway through the conversation children had raised such points as "The parents are never around," "The main character is usually about our age," and "Some big problem is always there." The teacher then helped children generate a chart with the titles of Byars' books, such as The Night Swimmers,Cracker Jackson, and The Pinballs, placed top-to-bottom on the left side of a large sheet of paper. Across the top of the chart, the children generated categories, such as "Where the Parents Are," "About the Main Character," "Big Problems," and "Who Helps and How." Now that the conversation was well under way, the graphic organizer helped children focus and continue the discussion while they filled in the grid they had created on the chart. Later, other Byars books were added, such as The Summer of the Swans and The House of Wings, which children also read to see how they fit the pattern. Children created artwork that represented some of the categories and wrote about how the books were alike and different. These were matted and hung next to the comparison chart. This activity helped the children analyze particular stories, synthesize several stories, and evaluate later readings. From the chart, they were able to generalize about the books by one author, a sophisticated skill for 10- and 11-year-olds.
Byars, Betsy. The Burning Questions of Bingo Brown. Viking Penguin, 1988. Diaries and Letters Once children can assume another point of view, they are able to retell a story in the first person. Authors use letters, journals, and first-person narratives to allow a character to reveal thoughts directly to the reader. Older children are more able developmentally to take on another person's point of view. The books they read often assist in this because many popular stories are written as first-person narratives. Some authors, such as Barbara Park in Skinnybones and Walter Dean Myers in The Mouse Rap, tell their stories from the main character's point of view. Thus readers see through the eyes of another person as they are immersed in the book. Teachers help children take another point of view when they ask them to write about a book as if they were the main character telling a part of her or his story. Other authors reveal a character's thoughts by having the character write diary entries or letters. Libby in Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Libby on Wednesday is part of a young authors group and keeps a journal; Sam Gribley's journal reveals the story of My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George. In thirteenth-century England the title character of Karen Cushman's Catherine Called Birdy convinces her mother to let her write a journal rather than do her spinning. Henri, who spends a year in another culture in Emily Cheney Neville's The China Year, writes letters to her teachers and friends back in New York. Fourth-grader Anastasia in Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik keeps modifying her "Things I love/Things I hate" list as her feelings and thoughts change. Children are quick to notice these narrative conventions if teachers help them. Judith Caseley's touching Dear Annie features some of the letters exchanged between Annie, her mother, and her grandfather from the time she is a baby to the time when she shared all 86 of them for her grade-school show-and-tell. After hearing Caseley's story, children might write their own letters to a treasured older relative or display the letters they have received. Because of their warmth, humor, or innovative formats, books like these are powerful catalysts to children's writing. Children may create diaries and letters for book characters who never kept them. In Katherine Paterson's Lyddie, the story of a New England mill girl, what might Lyddie have confided to her diary? In Mary Downing Hahn's ghost story Wait Till Helen Comes, suppose Molly kept a journal of the strange events leading up to her stepsister's dangerous friendship. How would entries show her gradual change from skepticism to alarm to action? Students might also create an imaginary correspondence between characters in one book; this requires children to maintain two points of view. In Carolyn Reeder's Shades of Gray, 12-year-old Will Page is forced to move to rural Virginia to live with his uncle, a conscientious objector in the Civil War. Children might write the letters Will never wrote to the friendly doctor who offered to adopt him. Or they might write Will's journal as he wrestles with the problems presented by the hard realities of rural life in Virginia following the war. Letters written and sent to authors and illustrators can be encouraged rather than assigned if a child or groups of children have read and are enthusiastic about books by that author. Authors appreciate the inclusion of self-addressed, stamped envelopes, or stamps, and they appreciate a child's candor and individuality above a "canned letter" copied from the chalkboard. Requests for pictures or biographical information should be addressed to publishers; letters to authors or illustrators should be addressed to them in care of the publisher.
Caseley, Judith. Dear Annie. Greenwillow, 1991. Read-Alouds to Build Comprehension Reading aloud to children can help to develop both vocabulary knowledge and comprehension skills. As noted in Chapter 1, reading aloud to children is the single most important activity for reading success. Well-written stories inspire exploration through talk. Realistic fiction can serve as an excellent springboard for classroom conversation. Teachers should model their own response to the story by "thinking aloud" about story events, addressing connections they make while reading, and the strategies they use to understand story events. Teachers should then encourage children to share their response to and understanding of the story. Reading aloud a set of realistic fiction novels that are related by a common theme or a common writing style encourages children to make connections between the novels and to deepen their responses. Chapter 10 CookingTeachers recognize the value of cooking in the classroom--the math concepts used in doubling a recipe, the reading skills involved in following directions, the social skills of working cooperatively, not to mention children's satisfaction in making something for others to enjoy. Cooking that starts from a book can enrich children's experiences with literature. Several collections of recipes reflect a literary genre, such as Beatrix Potter's The Peter Rabbit and Friends Cookbook. Karen Greene's health-conscious Once upon a Recipe alludes to many well-known children's books, with recipes such as "Princess Peas," "Curiouser and Curiouser Casserole," "Mowgli's Tiger Milk," and "Curious George Slush." Kate MacDonald's The Anne of Green Gables Cookbook emphasizes Anne's favorite sweets, and each recipe is also accompanied by a quote and illustration. The Wild, Wild Cookbook and Acorn Pancakes, Dandelion Salad, and 38 Other Wild Recipes by Jean Craighead George tell readers how to prepare wild food as Sam Gribley did in George's My Side of the Mountain. Several cookbooks would augment older children's reading of historical fiction. Barbara Walker's The Little House Cookbook features recipes for preparing all of the food that appears in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Quotes, historical notes, and Garth Williams' illustrations enliven the pages. In her collections of historical recipes, Hunter's Stew and Hangtown Fry: What Pioneer America Ate and Why and Slumps, Grunts, and Snickerdoodles: What Colonial America Ate and Why, Lila Perl explains how geography, history, and economics influenced what people ate. While historically authentic, the recipes in these collections use modern ingredients so teachers will not need to find a source for raccoon or skunk meat. All of these books are useful as supplements to American history and social studies as well. Some books, such as Tomie de Paola's The Popcorn Book and Pancakes for Breakfast or Benjamin Darling's Valerie and the Silver Pear, include recipes at the end of the text. Making a cake with her Russian grandmother helps a little girl be brave during a thunderstorm in Patricia Polacco's Thunder Cake. Children would enjoy making their own cake after reading this story. Other books merely suggest to the imaginative reader a possible cooking extension. Young children have made their own sandwiches or soup after hearing Russell Hoban's Bread and Jam for Frances and Maurice Sendak's Chicken Soup with Rice. Older students enjoy literary "Book Fares" in which each person brings to the potluck something suggested by a book. Gurgi's "munchings and crunchings" from Alexander's Prydain series, Carlie's "Famous Mayonnaise Cake" from Byars's The Pinballs, tea made from an herb that Mary Call Luther might have gathered in the Cleavers' Where the Lilies Bloom, and Meg's liverwurst and cream cheese sandwiches from L'Engle's Time trilogy were some of the offerings at one party. Cooking things with children based on stories they have read makes books memorable. Cooking gives children a reason to return to a story to check information and a chance to make the book character's experiences a part of their own. Children who follow a recipe practice valuable skills such as following directions, measuring, and doubling a recipe. Teachers can encourage authentic writing experiences as well by suggesting that children explain how something was made, the cooking problems they faced and how they overcame them, and where the idea for the recipe came from and how it was significant to the characters in the story.
Byars, Betsy. The Pinballs. Harper and Row, 1977. Quiltmaking Quiltmaking has long been a way to conserve materials, save the past, and share the making of things. While we often identify quilts with pioneer women, quilts and the art of stitchery appear in many settings. Children could make small quilts with patterns and materials significant to them. Quilted squares might be displayed with writing that explains the fabric choice, the pattern choice, or other features. While a bound quilt of squares made by a whole class is a stunning presentation, children do not then get to keep their creations. In place of stitchery, many teachers let children design quilt blocks drawn on paper with special crayons that transfer when the child's drawing is reversed and ironed onto fabric. Other products such as "liquid embroidery" may be applied directly onto the cloth. Press-on interfacing can be used to fix materials to wall hangings or banners, and children can then sew on felt, buttons, lace, beads, or other materials. Quilts, banners, and hangings that reflect a theme the class has studied, such as favorite books, Mother Goose rhymes, "Pioneers," or "Things from the beach," make a unifying end project. Children will then also be able to use the books they have studied for sources of artistic inspiration Newspapers and Newscasting By putting themselves in the role of reporters from newspapers or television news, children can "cover" the events in a book. An interview with Abel after his year-long stay on an island in Abel's Island by William Steig might include his advice on how to survive. A series of news accounts of the events recounted in The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill could present amusing battles between the mighty trucks and the puny pushcarts in New York City. Fourth-graders created a Comazotz newspaper as part of their activities while the teacher read aloud A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Their work reflected an awareness of what life might be like on a planet where all persons were required to behave similarly. As a way of looking across or back on what children know in literature, teachers can help children organize a group newspaper. Sections could include news stories, editorials, announcements, a fashion or society page, sports, lost and found, letters to the editor, advice, obituaries, and so forth. Content could be drawn from a particular genre, such as realistic fiction or folktales. One folktale newspaper, for instance, featured an advertisement for "Big Anthony's Carry-Out Pasta: All You Can Eat!" along with a report on breaking-and-entering at the home of the Three Bears and a review of society doings at Cinderella's ball. It takes time to develop a successful newspaper, as children must sift through what they have to read to recall specific events. If column headings are posted around the classroom, ideas can be noted and children can paste up their rough drafts of articles for reading by the rest of the "newspaper staff." Parents, teacher aides, or high school typing students can often be persuaded to help with typing if the newspapers are to be duplicated for each student.
L'Engle, Madeleine. A Wrinkle in Time. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962. Reenactment Students can gain a deeper understanding of a historical period by creating a reenactment of period times and events. Students at a Massachusetts school stepped into a live work of historical fiction when they participated in a reenactment of a Civil War encampment. Aided by a professional reenactment group, the students practiced battle drills, ate cornbread, lay on pallets, tried on period clothing, and even participated in an on-the-field court-martial that resulted in a conviction of treason. If you do not have the resources to invite professional participation, students may benefit even more by researching and creating costumes, sets, and props themselves. Chapter 11 Nonfiction's Influence on Report Writing Contemporary informational books provide numerous examples of how information can be presented in interesting, challenging, humorous, or beautiful fashion. Teachers who help children discover formats in informational writing help them avoid the stilted school writing that begins with "My report is on" and proceeds through copied encyclopedia phrases. Writers like Aliki and Gail Gibbons use a straightforward expository style that is lively and inviting. Their illustrations, with captions or labels, are simple but add to and extend the information contained in the words. Seymour Simon's Animal Fact/Animal Fable is organized as a guessing game. Statements about animals, such as "Porcupines shoot their quills," are followed on the next page with a related paragraph beginning something like "Fable: Porcupines cannot really shoot their quills." Diane DeGroat's illustrations vary from humorous to close up to straightforward. The useful If series, such as If You Lived at the Time of the San Francisco Earthquake by Ellen Levine, is organized in question-and-answer format. Children can arrange some part of nearly any topical report into a true/false, question-and-answer, or guessing-game format. Children should be exposed to many examples of close-ups, labeled line drawings, processes explained in box-and-arrow arrangements or timelines, and picture captions in such visually stunning books as the Eyewitness series titles Amazing Birds or Amazing Poisonous Animals by Alexandra Parson. Peter Spier's Tin Lizzie and Bernd Heinrich's An Owl in the House: A Naturalist's Diary are two examples of treatment of a life cycle, the first of a car and the second of an owl. Children could recast studies of objects or animals in these formats. Photo essays are wonderful ways to capture children's progress through a project. In Insect Metamorphosis: From Egg to Adult, Ron and Nancy Goor use clear prose and captioned pictures to portray the stages of insect development. Children who are creating a play from a folktale, making stuffed paper figures for a puppet show, or raising chicks in the classroom could develop a photo essay of the process and the finished product or ending point as a way of remembering it. Teachers who encourage children to notice format and form in informational books and use it in their own reports do much to help children become literate. Understanding the conventions by which information is conveyed, whether it is maps, timelines, charts, photographs, captions, surveys, or graphs, is a part of any literate person's skills.
Goor, Ron, and Nancy Goor. Insect Metamorphosis: From Egg to Adult. Atheneum, 1990. Directions, Explanations, and Surveys Many literature extensions have accompanying writing possibilities. Children who write directions for designing and printing from plastic foam trays need to write procedures concisely if others are going to understand the process. Writing directions for a literary game gives children an opportunity to write with clarity and precision. If others can play the game by following what the writer has written, then the directions have succeeded. Explanations and descriptions help others understand what children have created or accomplished. If students' work is displayed for a wider audience, as in school corridors, lunchrooms, or the library, then children understand the necessity for informative writing to speak clearly for them in their absence. In addition, displays provide a natural encouragement for children to revise and recopy, if necessary, for this public writing. Teachers can help children write longer and more complete descriptions by asking questions like these: How did you do this? What materials did you use? What part of the book is this based on? Why did you choose it? One such discussion produced the following from two second-grade boys: We made a diorama of Nantucket Harbor. We started with a cardboard box. Then we cut out some houses and then we made the whale and glued the whale on at an angle then we painted the whale black. We were going to make the under ground city but it was to hard to make. We had trouble on the whale we kept making the whale smaller. And we had trouble on the dock. And the sky and clouds because it was very hard. The windows on the houses were hard to. [sic] We painted the clouds 4 times. A group of first graders responded to The Biggest House in the World by Leo Lionni through a variety of media and math activities. They took surveys of children's preferences for color, kind, and size of house (one, two, or three stories). Their concept of the word house was enlarged to include the "houses" (shells) of a snail and a turtle. A bulletin board displayed the results of these extensions from a single book. Literary surveys give children experiences with representing their findings in graphs. One group of 11- and 12-year-olds surveyed each other on such topics as "Which Judy Blume books have you read?" "How many books did you read in March?" and "Have you read any books from these series: Baby-Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys?" Data were presented in pie and bar graphs, averages, and percentiles in a variety of interesting displays. Other surveys have been made of how frequently and how long each teacher reads aloud to the class or where and when children like to read. Children doing survey research will learn much about conducting and organizing the results of a survey. In addition, a teacher learns more about the reading profile of the class from these surveys. Teachers can help children state questions clearly so that answers can be categorized and counted. Discussing ways of representing information, such as bar or circle graphs, keys, and use of symbols, will help children create more visually interesting survey charts. Lionni, Leo. The Biggest House in the World. Pantheon, 1968. Nonfiction Magazines for Children Children may also be introduced to the genre of nonfiction through magazines. Often magazines are visually appealing, address a variety of topics, and appear less daunting to reluctant readers. Reading an article in a magazine might inspire a child to a more in-depth exploration of a topic through nonfiction literature. There are several quality children's magazines that focus on nonfiction: Ranger Rick, produced by the National Wildlife Federation, explores the natural world. This magazine targeting students ages 7-12 years includes news on nature and wildlife around the world. Chapter 12 Videos and Computers Moviemaking is not an easy task, but video cameras have given more children a chance to experience this art. Choosing what scenes to portray and critiquing the performances give children a chance to look back at a story for important clues to characters' emotions and moods before they take on the roles. Yvonne Anderson's informative book How to Make Your Own Animated Movies and Videotapes describes her work in creating films with children aged 5 to 18 years. In Making Your Own Movies, Harry Helfman gives hints on how to operate a simple, inexpensive movie camera and presents some basic techniques for shooting a film. A description of panning a picture is given, along with ways to vary the length of the shot. Considering the time involved in making movies, a teacher might want to work with someone knowledgeable in the field. Computer technology presents children with an ever-increasing variety of ways to respond to books. After reading Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Cat Running and Jerry Stanley's Children of the Dust Bowl about migrant workers in California during the Great Depression, several fifth-grade children worked with the school's computer specialist to create a documentary that explored the Great Depression. They prepared a CD-ROM program that included pictures of migrant workers, the dust bowl, fruit packing labels, and Depression-era songs that served as an important backdrop for understanding some of the books' themes and connected children to larger issues of this era of twentieth-century history.
Anderson, Yvonne. How to Make Your Own Animated Movies and Videotapes. Little, Brown, 1991. Author Studies An author study is an excellent way to combine learning about the craft of writing and the genre of biography and autobiography. An author study may be conducted by a whole class, by small groups of children who share an interest in a particular author, or by individual children. After reading as much of the author's work as possible and locating biographical information about the author, children can identify and discuss patterns in the author's work. How might the author's life experiences have influenced his or her writing? Older children may want to synthesize the biographical information they have obtained and compose a presentation about the author for their classmates. Many authors now have their own Web sites--or Web sites created by their fans--which are often good sources for biographical information. Additionally, there are many well-written biographies and autobiographies of children's authors available. Richard C. Owens Publishers have produced a Meet the Author series of photobiographies. The authors who have written for this series discuss their writing process, providing models for young writers to follow.
Bunting, Eve. Once Upon a Time. Owen, 1995. Conversations with the Past and Present Biographies help children to understand other people's life experiences and how those experiences shaped their perspectives and actions. Ask your students to try on the role of the person they are reading about. Choose a topic and ask several students in character to converse about the topic. How would the subjects of these various biographies interact with each other? Chapter 13 Developing Sensitivity to Language Children's appreciation of the writing of others increases as they listen to many fine stories, read widely themselves, and have many opportunities to create their own stories and poems. A teacher can help children develop their skills in descriptive writing by helping them to become aware of the power of words in conveying sensory images. After a story has been finished, the teacher and children might reread and relish particularly enjoyable words, phrases, or paragraphs. Children's use of sensory language in their writing requires many firsthand experiences of touching, feeling, and savoring textures, sounds, colors, shapes, rhythms, and patterns. Literature, too, can sharpen sensitivity to nature, people, and relationships. Rich sensory imagery helps children "see" the world around them in new perspectives. In George Ella Lyon's Come a Tide, the family stands on a bridge and watches parts of the neighbor's gardens, livestock, and household wash away as a spring storm makes the creek rise. When they return to their Kentucky holler, "Soggy furniture and mud-mapped rugs made mountains in front of each house." Lyon describes the noises, sights, and smells as people see their possessions emerging from the muck. When someone asks, "What do we do now?" it is Grandma who says, "If it was me, I'd make friends with a shovel." By asking primary children to notice how Lyon's choice of "mud-mapped" and Grandma's pithy statement create pictures in our minds, teachers help children appreciate the ways authors work. A child's interest in words begins in the cradle and proceeds into adulthood. A 3-year-old memorizes and repeatedly chants "Crash and clang!/Bash and bang! And up in the road the jazz-man sprang!" simply because he loves the way Eleanor Farjeon's words sound. Older children read to each other the outrageous descriptions and wordplay of such Daniel Pinkwater titles as Borgel or The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. Teachers can support children's natural fascination with words, wordplay, and word usage in many ways. A third-grade teacher read aloud and discussed William Steig's Amos and Boris with the children. Then they wrote diary entries as if they were Amos the mouse or Boris the whale. This was a typical entry on that first day: Dear Diary, A participant-observer in the classroom then shared favorite expressions he had copied from the book. The next day children wrote a second diary entry. The contrast between their first writing and the second shows the influence of simply calling attention to Steig's rich use of language: Dear Diary: All of the children showed a richer use of language in their second entries. Children seemed to use the first day of writing to master the diary form and to practice taking another point of view. The second day, however, they were ready to consider using language more succinctly and colorfully. Certain books invite readers to play with language. Kindergartners were eager to make their own two-word rhymes after hearing examples like "Tan man," "Pink drink," and "Stuck truck" from Bruce McMillan's One Sun: A Book of Terse Verse. After reading Mary Ann Hoberman's A House Is a House for Me, first-graders listed other possibilities for houses, including "Arms are houses for hugs" and "Buns are houses for hamburgers." Ruth Heller explores parts of speech in imaginative ways in books like Many Luscious Lollipops: A Book about Adjectives, while Jim Arnosky's A Kettle of Hawks and Brian Wildsmith's Birds call particular attention to collective nouns. Idioms, similes, and figurative language contribute color to the language. A group of 7-year-olds who were studying the human body traced an outline of a classmate on butcher paper and wrote on this poster idioms about the human body they had collected, such as "broken-hearted," "down in the mouth," and "a green thumb." Marvin Terban explores idioms in two books, In a Pickle and Mad as a Wet Hen. Other of his titles examine palindromes, homonyms, and double words such as superduper. Tom Birdseye's Airmail to the Moon is full of the colloquial expressions of Ora Mae Cotton as she describes losing her tooth: She was "popcorn-in-the-pan excited" when it fell out, but when she thought somebody had stolen it, she vowed that if she caught them she would "open up a can of gotcha and send 'em airmail to the moon!" Teachers who expose children to the curious and colorful ways the English language conveys meanings will see children's writing change as they notice the use of colorful language in the books they read. Children who have had experiences that sensitize them to figurative language and rich descriptive writing are much more likely to recognize the way fine writers such as Katherine Paterson, Russell Freedman, Virginia Hamilton, Bruce Brooks, or Nina Bawden use words.
Arnosky, Jim. A Kettle of Hawks and Other Wildlife Groups. Lothrop, Lee and Shepard, 1990. Single Books as Springboards Stories with strong organizational patterns often free children from being overwhelmed by the complete set of writers' problems--what to write about and how to begin, organize, sustain an idea, and end. Teachers who invite children to borrow patterns from literature often help especially reluctant writers simply to get started, while they challenge more able writers to go beyond what an author has created. In Rodney A. Greenblat's Uncle Wizzmo's New Used Car, a used-car lot sells outlandish cars such as the "Fluffy," which looks like a bunny on wheels. This spurred one 6-year-old to design three cars and the advertising to sell them. Using this same book, a group of second-graders designed their own mural of a used-car lot, drew cars, and wrote descriptions of what their cars could do. Judith Viorst's Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day has long been a favorite of children from first grade through middle school. Older children especially are masterful portrayers of all that can go wrong in one day. Charlotte Zolotow's ironic Someday inspires children to consider the future both seriously and humorously with such ideas as "Someday .andnbsp;.andnbsp;. my brother will introduce me to his friends and say 'This is my sister,' instead of 'Here's the family creep.'" Margaret Wise Brown's The Important Book describes what is essential and important about things such as a flower. Young children have written their own definitions of the essence of certain things after hearing this read aloud; older children in fifth grade interviewed each other and wrote descriptions of what they thought was significant about each other. Each illustrated essay was bound in the class's "Important Book." Byrd Baylor's The Table Where Rich People Sit helps readers consider the priceless gifts of the natural world. Children enjoy assigning monetary value to things that money can't buy, such as 20,000 dollars to "feel the wind and smell the rain an hour before it really rains." Baylor's Everybody Needs a Rock gives the reader serious rules to consider in selecting favorite rocks. Children have added their own rules for rock selection, and others might follow the pattern, creating rules for selecting a special tree or shell. Children delight in marking their own special days after reading her I'm in Charge of Celebrations. A group of 9-year-olds listened to Baylor's Your Own Best Secret Place and talked about the many kinds of secret places people have. After the class discussion, one boy wrote a version of "My Own Best Secret Place" that described how he got to the place, what it felt like to be there, and how it looked: My Own Best Secret Place Sometimes a particular book suggests a unique writing experience. When a group of fourth graders finished reading Sid Fleischman's The Whipping Boy, they wrote about other practical jokes that Prince Brat could play on his father, the king. One child devised this scheme: Prince Brat would get a mouse and put it in the royal soup. First he would hide the mouse in his pocket. Then he would go up to the royal cook and say, "May I smell the soup?" The cook would back away so the prince could smell the soup and slip the mouse into the soup. Then when the soup was served, one unlucky person would get a dead mouse in his or her soup. Tightly patterned or highly formatted stories make it easier for teachers to plan writing extensions. But the example of asking children to invent another of Prince Brat's pranks shows how an alert teacher can plan a writing experience that lets children enter into the mind of a character while at the same time calls attention to a humorous aspect of the story that appeals to children.
Baylor, Byrd. Everybody Needs a Rock. Illustrated by Peter Parnall. Scribner's, 1974. Expanded Classroom Dramatics Suggestions Pantomime is a useful form in beginning creative drama. In preparation for acting out Leo Lionni's story Frederick, a group of 6-, 7-, and 8-year-olds pantomimed the role of the mice. They scurried and scuttled about the room, busily gathering their winter supplies. Later, the role of Frederick was added, and again all the rest of the children played at being mice. Only after the children had thought about their roles as mice was dialogue included. Children might also pantomime small portions of a scene in order to understand and feel a character more deeply. For example, a group of 9-year-olds pretended they were the evil witch from "Snow White." They pantomimed waking up in the morning and then standing before a mirror to ask the well-known question, "Who is the fairest in the land?" Pantomime can be an essential step in the development of believable creative drama with children. Story Theater is a form of pantomime in which a narrator reads a story aloud while children take the role of characters and act out the unfolding tale. Books that have a lot of action or emotional reaction make the best candidates for Story Theater. The teacher or librarian might read aloud The Turnip by Katherine Milhous and Alice Dalgliesh, while six children pantomime being the old man, the old woman, the little granddaughter, the dog, the calico cat, and the mouse. As the children gain confidence with this kind of drama, the teacher can stop at appropriate points when the old man calls to his wife and invite the designated child to create the dialogue. Moving from pantomime to the extemporaneous dialogue is an easy transition to more complex forms of story reenactment. Improvisation takes children beyond a story to the creation of a new situation. For example, in one kindergarten, children heard several versions of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." The teacher assumed the role of a neighbor reporting that Goldilocks' mother was very concerned because her daughter hadn't come home. The children said they knew where she was and then retold the story. The next day, the teacher became a detective and said she had been hired by Goldilocks' mother because the child still hadn't returned home. In the role of detectives, the children brainstormed what information they would need to create missing-person posters for the lost girl: name, picture, age, and birthday. The children paired up to make their posters. At their third meeting, the children created a map of the forest on which they placed imaginary clues such as an apple with a bite out of it, or a trail of pebbles that Goldilocks could have left. The teacher provided a letter saying, "I am looking for a block parent," and a willing parent played the role, saying yes, indeed, Goldilocks had come to her house tired and hungry. But she knew her own phone number, so her mother had come for her and all was well. The next day, there was a thank-you note from Goldilocks to the detectives. The teacher reported that the children extended their play through this drama for weeks (Jean Sperling, "And She Jumped Out the Window Never to Be Seen Again," Literacy Matters, Ohio State University, Martha L. King Language and Literacy Center, 1, no. 1, Winter, 1989: 4-8.). Improvisation had allowed these children to imagine an event beyond a story and play it out. Improvisation can be used in all curricular areas. It could involve a meeting between Columbus and a native spokesperson, each reacting to the other, for instance. Dorothy Heathcote, a British educator, has been most successful in using improvisation to help children expand their understanding of life experiences, to recreate the past, or to imagine the future (Dorothy Heathcote: Collected Writings on Education and Drama, Liz Johnson and Cecily O'Neill, Eds., Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1984). She frequently "frames" a situation, suggesting, for example, that children who are in the midst of studying pioneer life have just been given a large sum of money to establish an outdoor museum devoted to portraying life in a frontier village. The children then must plan what they will exhibit, how to make it authentic, where to obtain artifacts, and so forth. This invariably sends them back to books to find answers to the questions they have posed. Improvisation also allows children to explore points of view of characters who may be underrepresented in literature. Older children might take on the roles of the Native Americans who appear in several scenes in Pam Conrad's Prairie Songs. An improvisation would allow them to create a dialogue with the white settlers, explaining their views and feelings at being displaced by this new culture. The two groups might then come to some understanding about ways to live together peacefully, an outcome that did not occur in reality but that is made possible through creative drama. Constructing puppets and stages: Numerous books are available that tell children how to make puppets, marionettes, and stages. Young children enjoy making simple cardboard figures that can be stapled to sticks or to tongue depressors. Paper bags stuffed with old stockings or newspaper can be tied to represent a puppet head and body. Ears, hair, aprons, and so on can be attached to create animals or people. By placing a hand in a sock or paper bag, the child can make the puppet appear to talk by moving fingers and thumb. Finger puppets can easily be made with bodies of finger-size cylinders stapled at the top. Faces may be glued to the cylinder top or painted on the cylinder itself. These simple puppets make fine storytelling aids for younger children. A stage can be made by turning a table on its side. The puppeteer sits or kneels behind the tabletop. Another simple stage can be created by hanging curtains so they cover the lower and upper parts of a doorway. A table, cardboard, or side of a large box can also be placed in a doorway. This type of stage is particularly good because children waiting their turns at the side of the stage are hidden from view. Older children or parents can construct a framework for more durable puppet stages. The educational value of planning and creating a puppet show far outweigh the time and effort required to produce it. Selecting stories for puppetry: The techniques of puppetry are most appropriate for certain stories. For example, a group of 7-year-olds presented a puppet show based on Rudyard Kipling's The Elephant's Child. At the appropriate moment, the crocodile pulled the elephant's short stocking nose into the familiar elongated trunk. Such action would be nearly impossible for live actors to portray. Another group of 10-year-olds used marionettes to capture the hilarious action of the laughing-gas birthday party described in P. L. Travers' Mary Poppins. Again, this scene would be difficult to portray in any other dramatic form. Other stories that lend themselves to interpretation through puppetry are The Amazing Bone by William Steig, The Fat Cat by Jack Kent, The Gingerbread Boy by Paul Galdone, Rosie's Walk by Pat Hutchins, and Frederick and Alexander and the Wind-Up Mouse by Leo Lionni.
Conrad, Pam. Prairie Songs. Harper and Row, 1985. |