I do a lot of “writing into the day” with my sixth graders. They keep a notebook full of writing that either begin with a prompt I give them, or freewriting, or something connected to the lesson plan of the day. I want them to explore their inner worlds with this kind of writing that won’t get graded for grammar or punctuation — they can follow their thoughts and focus in on content, not mechanics (in their notebooks).

I often have them writing short stories and to help, I have them generate class lists of possible story titles. What they come up with is always amusing to all of us, and many can’t wait to get started telling a story from one of the titles.

Here is a list from a recent brainstorming session:

Adventures of Billy Bob and Joey Jane

Attack of the French Toast

The Story of the Chocolately Chocolate Bar

The One-armed Lunatic

Homework Trouble

The Thing Outside My House

Mr. Coyote Doesn’t Have a Home

Don’t Go By the Apple Tree

Moose

Homerun Kid

The Day I Rode My Bike to School

Purple

Rabbits Versus Hares

Fire-breathing Butterflies and Acid-spitting Unicorns

Popcorn Fight

Shattered

Don’t Sniff Dirty Socks
Lonely Souls

The Talking Book

Mrs. Mallory

Room 319

The Hole

The Day of Bad Luck

Pencil Sharpener Horror

Slimy Soup

A Night in the Light

The Polar Bear That Lived in the Rain Forest

The Hybrid of Doom

The Weird Man

The Freaky Robot

The Story of the Lost Abutment

The Virus

Alien Potatoes

Evil Lunch Room Food

The Blue Pool

A Hole in the Moon

OMG

The Day My Eyes Popped Out of My Head

Reading People’s Minds

The Day My Cat Turned Purple

Anti-Mad-Eye

My Mom Kidnapped My Math Teacher

Who Says Pigs Can’t Fly?

The Striped Pig Who Walked Down My Street

Goodbye, McFartalot

Miranda’s Birthday

Space Invasion
Don’t Look in your Sandwich

Cheese Gone Bad

The Dairy Section

Unread

The Red Ruby

The Day Polar Bears Took Over the World

It Came … From Day Care

Beneath the Church

The Road to Nowhere

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for I-scream

Independent Forever

Dark Swamp

Camp Hornhock

The Day My Spit Turned Purple

The Boy Who Ate His Mom

When Computers Go Mad

Ripples in the Water

Gnomes in the Shower

LOL

Which story would you write?

– Kevin

I often like to gather information from my students through electronic surveys — I like the ease of use and how it can visually show the data back to them. In the past, I have used Survey Monkey but recent changes in the Google Document Suite makes it so easy to create surveys and forms, gather the answers and then analyze the information that I have hung up my Monkey and gone to Docs.

You can read how to do this from Google itself (see the post) but it really is quite simple: create a form, ask questions, provide possible answers, embed or link to the survey, and get started. The responses get tallied in your Google Docs as a spreadsheet, but there is also a way to see the results as a visual chart.

So, how have I used this?

• At the start of the year, I gave out a brief survey just to get a sense of who my students were as an overall group, with questions ranging from interests and hobbies to how they use technology;
• I have used the form as a reflective writing device, having students think and write about a particular project. This now only gives me their thinking, but it also provides me with valuable feedback on aspects of the project that connected with them, or not.
• We used the form to gather ideas for student social action projects as a brainstorming session, then narrowed down the choices and plunked them into a survey. Students then voted on a particular project, which they have become leaders of at our school. The use of the tool allowed them to be in charge of the idea from start to completion. (See some of the ideas they generated for a proposed Teach the Teacher Day and results about a fundraiser activity)

I created this survey as a sample.

– Kevin

(this is a sort of repost from my blog)

I love to get kids writing as soon as they hit the seats, just to let them know that writing and exploring will be part of the year ahead. This year, I decided to try a few new twists to what I traditionally do on the first days of school.

I normally try to do a survey of my students, just to get a better sense of who they are and what they are thinking as a group. This year, I decided to create a Form Survey though my Google Documents (I got this inspiration from someone else in my various networks and even started with a copy of a Google Form from them, but I can’t for the life of me remember who it was — if it was you, dear reader, sorry). Google has made many improvements to this survey concept over time and it was quite easy to set up and then embed right into our classroom blog.  A bonus: it gathers all of the answers for you right in Google Docs. Nice. (Here is a link to the form, as embedded on our Weblog site called The Electronic Pencil)

Next, I thought about the answers and how to present them back to the students. I remembered Wordle – the word cloud application. So, I gathered up the answers to the question around what students are looking forward to this year, stuck them into Wordle and came up with this:

Pretty neat, eh? The kids loved seeing this and it was a nice collective image. (By the way, to save a Wordle, you need to do a screen save as a photo. You can’t download directly from Wordle, unfortunately).

Next, I took their responses to the question of their greatest accomplishments so far, and collected them in Google Docs (again), but tinkered with their new Google Themes. I will share this out to them (and our other teachers on my team) next week. See the student responses.

I have to admit: I am struggling with how to convert my multiple choice questions into graphs via Google, so if you have any links to help me, that would be most appreciated.

Peace,

Kevin

In response to Ben’s post about Grammar Girl, I thought I should mention a site that I like to have in my RSS feeder. It is called Podictionary and it is run by Charles Hodgson (no relation — we have established this). Charles does a great job of digging into the history of words and presented them in an engaging style.

Recent words include:

• Humble
• Filibuster
• Scandal
• Freebooter

Here is how Charles describes his work:

“Every day podictionary delivers a new short story about the history of a common word to thousands of subscribed listeners.

Not only is podictionary an audio word-a-day, but as the number of words grows in the podictionary archive the website is becoming an on-line audio etymology reference of sorts.

It’s all for fun, so please enjoy.”

It’s worth a listen. You can subscribe in iTunes and other services, or just listen in your RSS reader (as I do).

– Kevin

Wordle is an interesting application that takes whatever text you feed it and turns it into a variety of different kind of word clouds. It can also resort your tags if you use Delicious or even the tag words from a weblog. The results are interesting and Wordle allows you to resort the cloud or change the format and/or color of the words and the background to a number of possibilities.

I took Ben’s last post about VisuWords and put his text into Wordle. Here is what came out:

Then, I took this blog site and gave the RSS feed to Wordle and it spit out:

I love how the word “students” dominates everything. And this identification of words and themes is one way that a teacher might use Wordle with students. Perhaps a student could take one of their pieces of writing, put it into Wordle and analyze what comes out. Or, as someone showed me recently, you can take a famous poem, add the text to Wordle, and then have students guess which poem it is by looking at the words in the visual rearrangement.

And now, the hack tip: You can save your Wordles to the gallery at their site but if you want to share it on a blog, or save it as a file, you need to do a screen save. On a PC, you can use the “print-screen” key, go into MS Paint, paste it and then save as a .jpeg file. Then, you can upload it into your blog or photo sharing site (such as Flickr) I’m not sure about Mac — maybe someone could share that hack via the comment on this post.

In an event, Wordle is a fun and interesting way to re-organize your words.

– Kevin

Kevin (a.k.a. dogtrax) recently amazed me with his students’ poetry anthology, which he making available here at lulu. Here is the story:

This year, as we ended our unit on poetry, I decided that I wanted to try something a little different with my students’ poems. In the past, I have collected voluntary submissions of some poems, gathered them into a Microsoft Publisher document to make it look pretty, hit the photocopy machine and cranked out a bunch of stapled booklets. It worked just fine for what it was.

But I want my students to see themselves as published writers as much as possible. So, this year, I decided to be bold and use Lulu, the self-publishing site, to create a real book of student poems. I had tinkered in the year with using Lulu for some of my own work, and I was inspired once again when I saw that the collaborative @manyvoices project that had students using Twitter to write a story across the world published a final version through Lulu (I bought myself a copy). My students were excited about it, too.

And, so, after all of us doing proofreading and choosing some basic designs from Lulu, our book of poetry, entitled Exploration, is now for sale via Lulu. The cost is about $5 per book, which isn’t too bad, but shipping costs another $5. If I had another month in the school year, I would just use order forms for parents and buy a bunch in bulk. But time is running out (two weeks left) and so I have been directing

students and families to the Lulu site, in hopes they will order a copy. (I have also set it up so the download of a PDF version is free, although one student asked why you would want that when you can have a book that you can hold in your hands — nice insight in the digital age).

This is what the cover of the book looks like:

I think I will do more with publishing next year, knowing how easy it really is with web-based platforms. My hope had also been to do a fundraiser in which we publish short stories and sell the book collection for a little bit more, and use the proceeds to benefit an organization in Darfur, which my students learned about and became advocates for earlier this year. But, again, time ran out on us.

Peace (in publishing),
Kevin

This article has been cross posted from Self-Publishing Student Poetry at Dogtrax.edublogs.org

Okay…so, what does that mean for you? It means having students write their thoughts instead of speaking them, which is, as we all know, an important skill when one depends on the internet/email to communicate. Below I give a very basic explanation of how it works and how you can use Firefly in your classroom.

HOW IT WORKS

When you visit a firefly-enabled website, you can click anywhere on the site and start typing. When you do, a bubble will pop up with whatever you are saying. Pretty interesting.

WAYS IT CAN BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Have your students look at different documents. Set a timer and do virtual stations. Each time the timer sounds, students would go to a different virtual station (or page of your website) to discuss via firefly.
2. You could anonymously post various students’ work for critique. Then they can print screen when they are done.
3. Put pictures of various advertisements your website and have students evaluate it for bias and/or method of using propaganda.
4. Have students do something like a word cluster.

I like this site because it allows for quiet evaluation of materials while giving a the assignment an edgy feel.

I would love to hear from you regarding ideas for using firefly.

Poetry can be such an internal experience that it is nice to break out of the personal now and then, and make it a social experience. Certainly, poetry slams are one way to do this. Another way is to read and write Poems for Two (or more) Voices, which is an activity I do with my sixth graders. This style of poetry is designed to be read aloud by more than one person, with the voices weaving around each other — sometimes in unison and sometimes, not.

We begin by reading from some collections by Paul Fleischman (Joyful Noise) and Theonis Papas (Math Talk). Fleischman has also created some poems for four voices (called Big Talk) and we do try one of these, but they are tricky as I have to photocopy the pages and he has color-coded the parts. I love both collections but the Math Talk poems are neat because they explore such concepts as Googol (the number, allowing me to talk about the difference between Googol and Google), imaginary numbers, the Mobius Strip and others.

Then, my students work on short Poems for Two Voices. I try to have them consider using opposite ideas (summer and winter, for example) if they get stuck. Or have one voice like something and the other voice not like it. This conflict can give rise to some interesting poems. We then perform them for the class with partners.

We also podcast the poems.

Take a listen to this year’s collection:

• Group One
• Group Two
• Group Three
• Mr. H and Mr. M read a poem (written by Mr. H) Read The Full Story…

I introduce poetry to my sixth graders by using this book — My America: A Poetry Atlas of the United States, edited by Lee Bennett Hopkins– as a way for them to hear some wonderful place-based poetry and as a way for them to consider the many ways the regions of our country have distinct features. The poems in this collection are sorted by region of the country, with poets such as Langston Hughes (”Alabama Earth”), Carl Sandburg (”Laughing Corn”), and Natasha Wing (”Behind the Redwood Curtain”) all featured. The poems lay out a sort of geographic terrain for the reader, through words and verse. And before each section on a region, the book provides an overview of the states profiled in the poems.

I use the book as a treasure hunt of sorts.

I give them a map of the United States, with regions highlighted (such as the Northeast, the Southwest, the Plains, etc) and we talk about what makes those areas different from others. This might mean talking about the dry, deserts of the Southwest or the rainy fog of the Northwest or the impact of the lakes and waterways on the Great Lakes region. This conversation situates them to the map.

I then read 10 different poems from the book and as they listen, they must write down which region of the country is being represented by the poem. The importance of imagery and a sense of place is most important, and they become intent listeners to the poems, which I read two or three times. In my own mind, I am also embedding some rich poetic techniques in their minds. Personification, alliteration, imagery … it is all there and being used effectively.

Later, after we go over the answers, they then write their own Poems of Place, using imagery and figurative language to get at the essence of some place they know, or have visited. They cannot name the place in their poem and the next day, as they read and share their poems, the rest of us try to guess just where the poem is set.

I love that this book crosses the lines between writing and geography and history, and it provides a nice inroad into thinking of the power of poems.

– Kevin

(This is reposted from Kevin’s Meandering Mind)

I thank Bud the Teacher for this one.

I am a co-editor on a book (which will be published sometime in the future by Teachers College Press in partnership with the National Writing Project) on how technology is changing teaching practice in the writing classroom, and how teachers are assessing such work in light of national and state curriculum standards. It’s been very interesting to read the chapters as they filter in (mine is about a digital picture book project).

The NCTE is also looking for stories of how technology is impacting our teaching practice and what it means. Here is what they write on their website:

We’re interested in how your teaching has changed—in how you have altered, adjusted, or shifted your habits and expectations—since the time you began teaching. For example, what has changed in your approaches to reading? Writing? Evaluation of students? Use of technology? Confidence level? Rapport with parents? Balance of personal and professional life?

Whether you are a 30-year classroom veteran or a new teacher, you have a story, and we’d like to hear it! Email us 150 words or less describing changes you have made in your teaching and your teaching life. Please include your full name, school name, years of teaching, and a preferred email address or phone number in case we need to contact you. Send stories to chronicle@ncte.org.

You might want to consider writing up a piece about your classroom. I, for one, am thinking of something along the lines of podcasting.

Peace (in reflection),
Kevin

In a previous post, Ben asked us to consider how we use figurative language techniques in the classrooms. As luck would have it, I am right in the midst of a unit around figurative language with my sixth graders. I often begin with hyperbole, as my students are naturally prone to some exaggeration in their stories anyway.

We begin by talking about American Tall Tales and the way they use hyperbole to entice the reader and excite the narrative. I remind them that many tall tales were first based on real people. I talk about this equation:

Hyperbole + Legend= Tall Tale

We then listen to the story of Davey Crocket and I conduct a listening quiz. They love this story of this bizarre man who was born when a comet hit the top of a mountain, wrestled with the biggest panther of the forest and tamed it, took on Mike Fink in an animal-sound duel on the Mississippi River, and then headed off to the Alamo (where, unfortunately, he met his end that began his journey into American folklore).

Using this concept, I have my students write short tall stories about some real life event that happened to them. I provide an example of a tall tale story in which my entire classroom of students turns into penguins one day. They get a chuckle out of that one and are eager to write.

This year, we blogged our tall tale stories at The Electronic Pencil and then I collected some of the better stories and used Google Page Creator (a free website tool from the Google Suite) to make a website of tall tales.

Here are a couple of student tall tales:

Read The Full Story…

Ben shared some great prompts for journal writing for his students, and I thought it might be a nice balance to show some of the writing prompts that I use at the elementary school level. We do mostly-daily writing in notebooks, where my students’ only task is to be creative, keep writing and focus on content, not style or grammar (We work on those concepts in larger projects).

Like other teachers, I have borrowed, stolen and adapted from many different sources and brainstormed my own original ideas. I’m not always quite certain anymore which were mine and which were someone else’s. So, if you think you recognize any of these prompts, you probably do.

Here are some of the activities:

• Change the World — If you were given a chance to make one positive change in the world, what would it be? (You can listen to some of my students answer the question in a podcast from earlier this year)
• Design a Car of the Future — Use illustrations and expository writing to design a car on the market in the future. Make sure you use writing and symbols to identify elements of the car.
• Short Story Titles — Everyone brainstorms a list of five inventive short story titles and then everyone “donates” one title to the class list, which we pull out from time to time.
• Falling Leaf — Using first person narrative point of view, write from the viewpoint of a leaf falling from a tree in Autumn, and share the leaf’s experience. Create a sense of “voice” for the leaf. (And watch out for the lawn blower).
• Spiral Story — Breaking out of the habit of writing left to right, start a story at the center or the edge of the notebook page, and then write a story in which the sentences spiral either in or out on the page. The story should have some kind of round object in it.
• Invent a Sport — Invent some kind of new sport and, using expository writing, explain the rules on how to play and what kind of equipment is necessary to play your game.

And of course, we do plenty of freewriting, allowing them to make the choices on what they will write about and in what genre. As long as they are writing, I don’t bother them, and we almost never share our freewrites. That lets them get personal, if they want.

Here is a poem that I wrote the other day in class as my students were immersed in freewriting. I shared this over at my blog as part of a Slice of Life project.

Entering into Freewrite
Listen to the poem as podcast
I’m listening to pens – the words have no sound –
It’s all thoughts on the page.
These quiet moments are delicate pockets of complete freedom,
encouraging composition of poems, stories, plays, songs
and even comics –
They write with heads bowed and eyes focused;
Some move lips to mouth the words;
A silent incantation springing forth from mind to paper and back again.
I move among them as a ghost – a spiritual companion –
writing my own poem about them, writing,
in a sort of tacit recognition that what they do here has meaning,
even if the only eyes ever to read their words are their own,
and only their own.
We move on this journey, together,
as writers.

What prompts work best for you? Please share so I can steal your ideas (in a friendly sort of way)

– Kevin

(FOR OTHER POSTS ABOUT JOURNALING, CLICK HERE.)