Introducing Poetry throughout the School Day For millennia – even before Homer started reciting The Iliad and The Odyssey – we humans have been telling one another poems. Even today, children and adolescents often spontaneously make up poems to tell one another, in jump-rope rhymes, insults and comebacks, riddles, and other verses. What is it about poems that so appeals to us? On the other hand, many adults today feel turned off to poetry, never venturing to scribble a verse and rarely listening to it, except when tuning in to a song’s lyrics. What happened to make us so wary of poems? Why Poems? Poems intrinsically appeal to us because of their rhythm, their rich imagery, and and their ability to extract the pot-liquor from the boiling cauldron of our experiences. Here’s an example: Fog by Carl Sandburg The fog comes on little cat feet. it sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on. How does Sandburg do that – capturing the essential images and impressions of fog in twenty-one small words? To be honest, we can’t tell you exactly how he does it. Perhaps we have to admit that – like electricity – it seems to happen as if by magic. The secret to the magic isn’t in the topic he chose. In the many anthologies containing Sandburg’s poems, you may find a wealth of other poems about almost any classroom topic you and your children can think of. For instance, you may find Sandburg’s poem in • Jack Prelutsky’s (1983) anthology, The Random House book of Poetry for Children (p. 96), New York: Random House. Prelutsky’s anthology also includes poems on ferns, wind, George Washington, smells, boa constrictors, Halloween, being rude, basketball, waking up, cockroaches, the taste of purple, feeling frightened, a hog-calling competition, family members, unicorns, toasters, flying, and so on – even poems on the whole universe. Why have poets written about so many different topics, expressing so may different feelings and points of view? Because poetry can work like a magnifier, to enlarge the very small and bring it into view, or to focus sunlight on something to intensely that it catches fire. Throughout this book I hope to inspire you to incorporate poetry into every aspect of your curriculum, adding its distinctive insights to whatever you teach. Why do so many of us avoid writing poetry and teaching poetry to our students? I don’t know for sure, but I suspect that for too many of us, our early love of poetry was drilled out of us by teachers who felt obliged to teach us poems that we didn’t love – and that they themselves didn’t love, either. The key to teaching poetry is – as you might have guessed – your enthusiasm for an enjoyment of the poems you share with your students. If you relish a particular poem, your enthusiasm will infect your students, and they’ll enjoy it, too. Throughout this book, I make many suggestions for poems, teaching strategies, and ideas for extending poetry concepts across the curriculum. Please feel free to take whichever of these suggestions appeal to you and to modify or to reject altogether any that don’t speak to your heart and soul – or that just seem foreign to your own teaching style. Try to remain open to trying new things, but recognize when your guts are telling you, “This poem doesn’t work for me,” or “My students and I don’t have fun with this activity,” or “What were they thinking? My students and I could never do that!” I have come up with a basic format for introducing poetry to your students, which I believe is effective. Give it a try, and see whether it works for you and your students, then adapt it to suit your needs. First of all, immerse your students in the sounds and the language of the poem or poems you are introducing. Next, encourage your students to explore the poem, considering how it’s put together and how it might be modified. Finally, encourage your students to experiment with the kind of poem you introduced, perhaps creating a class poem or creating individual poems similar to the poem or poems they explored previously. Immersion When immersing your students in the sounds and language of a poem (or set of poems), introduce the poem, invite your students’ responses to the poem, and then extend what they have learned across the curriculum. Before you introduce the poem, however, you may have to do some advance preparation. ADVANCE PREPARATION For whichever poem you introduce, you will need to post the poem in some way. If you like the poem and plan to use it again later, you may wish to prepare a wall chart with the poem written in large manuscript printing. If you aren’t yet sure about how well your students will respond to the poem, you may prefer just to write it on a chalkboard or whiteboard at the front of the room. Throughout this book, I offer suggestions for advance preparation. In addition to the poem, you may need to prepare other materials or to introduce other experiences or activities. INTRODUCE THE POEM Once you have posted the poem for all your students to see it, read the poem aloud to your students. Use your whole body, your voice, your facial expressions, and your gestures to highlight the drama and rhythm of the poem. For instance, if you are reading Sandburg’s “Fog,” crawl (or stoop) as you creep on quiet catlike feet across the floor; sit silently, leaning and looking; then quietly move on. Emphasize the pauses and the silences Sandburg suggests with his line breaks. Read the poem a second time, inviting your students to read the poem with you. For the third reading, invite them to read the poem, using lowered voices, pauses, and silences, as you feel appropriate. Invite small groups of students to act out the poem, as the remainder of the class choral-reads the poem aloud. INVITE RESPONSES TO THE POEM After you have introduced the poem, ask your students to respond to three kinds of questions: a viewpoint or empathy question, a language question, and a poem-structure question. • Viewpoint or empathy question. Ask questions that prompt your students to see the experience as the poet sees it, or to see it from the viewpoint of a person or object in the poem. Example: For Sandburg’s “Fog,” you might ask, “What does the word ‘haunches’ mean?” “What does ‘harbor’ mean?” “Why did Sandburg choose those words? What words could he have chosen instead?” “What other animal moves quietly? How would the feeling and imagery of the poem be different if Sandburg had used a different animal for his poem?” • Poem-structure question. Ask questions that incite your students to think about how the poet structured the poem and about how the poem might be different if it were changed in some way. Example: Ask,” How well would the poem work if Sandburg wrote out the whole poem on one line, and we didn’t take any breaths or pauses in the whole poem?” “What would happen if we dropped the last line of the poem? Would the poem still give us the whole story of what fog does? How would that change the poem?” “How else could we change Sandburg’s poem” (you could try experimenting with the lines on looking, too, such as with “It waits watching” or…) EXTEND YOUR STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM. Build on the concepts, the language, and the poetry forms introduced in the poem, extending what your students have learned across the curriculum areas of literature, science, mathematics, social studies, art, and music and movement. Literature. Just a couple of the children’s books that you may want to link to Frost’s poem are • Lapp, Eleanor. (1978) In the Morning Mist. Chicago: Albert Whitman. • Shaw, Charles. (1947) It Looked Like Spilt Milk. New York: HarperCollins. Science. Experiment with water and condensation. Put a sponge in the bottom of each of several resealable plastic baggies. Pour some water into each baggie, thoroughly soaking the sponge. Tape the baggies to sunny windows and to other spots around the classroom. Observe what happens to the water in the baggies. (If the temperature is right, you should be able to see a minicloud form in the baggie in the window.) If you’re reading this poem during cold weather, you can invite your students to create “fog” on your classroom windows, by exhaling onto the windows. Another option is to freeze a clean, dry glass, then let it sit out in the classroom, and observe the water condensing on the glass. Math. Invite your students to count the syllables for each line in Sandburg’s poem. Next, have them choose another poem they enjoy (e.g., a familiar song or a verse book). Invite them to count the syllables in the more predictably rhythmic poem. Which poem is more fun to read aloud? Why? Which poem is more mysterious and creepy to read? Why? Social Studies. Set up a TV-news-studio dramatic-play center, with a chalkboard for the weather report, a news desk and papers for reading the “news,” suit jackets or other clothing suitable for news reporters, and an assortment of photos from National Geographic, People, and other newsy magazines. Encourage your students to be camera operators, producers, and other members of the “news team.” Art. Create water-drip and –blow paintings. Add water to tempera paint, and offer students one sheet of highly absorbent paper (e.g., paper towels or art paper) and one sheet of glossy paper (e.g., butcher paper or fingerpaint paper). Give each student a small container of the watery tempera, and offer each an eyedropper and a straw. Have each student use the eyedropper to drip some of the paint solution onto the paper, then use the straw to blow the paint across the paper. Invite the students to compare what happens with the absorbent paper, as compared with the glossy paper. (The straw won’t blow the liquid as easily on the absorbent paper as on the glossy paper.) Music and Movement. Invite your students to sing and act out a “foggy” version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” For instance, here’s one possible verse to this familiar tune: On cat’s feet, you move so slow Creeping, creeping, softly go Softly, slowly, on the ground Never ever make a sound Moving slowly, you tiptoe Down along the ground so low Exploration Once your students have been thoroughly immersed in the poem – its language, its form, its concepts – they are ready to explore the poem more deeply. At this point, you can encourage them to take the poem apart, play with it, modify it, and try putting it – or a variation of it – back together. In exploring Sandburg’s poem, you might try thinking about how it would work if it were about a thunderstorm. Would it simply “[come],” or would it “stomp” or “stamp” or “pounce” or move in some other way? Would it enter “on little cat feet?” Probably not. What kind of transportation would it use? Would it be a tyrannosaurus rex, a thunderboat, a locomotive, a polar bear? Would a thunderstorm simply “[sit] looking?” What would it do? Where would it do it? Surely it wouldn’t sit “on silent haunches.” Would it then just “[move] on?” Would it trickle away into a fine mist, would it march on to the next city, or would it go out with a bang of thunder? Work as a class to come up with your own creations, using Sandburg’s poem as a starting point, but not limiting yourself to the words or even the format he used for describing fog. You may even have a different point of view about fog. Perhaps it’s a terrifying invader, who sneaks up on unwary drivers or bicyclists, enshrouding them. The poem you and your students create will be unique to their personal experiences, their interpretations, and their linguistic repertoire. Experimentation Encourage your students to experiment with the kind of poem you introduced. When you are first introducing your students to poetry, you may wish to create class poems during your experimentations. A little later on, you may encourage your students to work alone, in pairs, or in small groups, to create individual poems similar to the poem or poems they explored previously. During experimentation, you will probably also want to emphasize the writing process: brainstorming for ideas, developing and organizing ideas, drafting, revising for content, and editing. If you are working as a whole class, use a chalkboard or a whiteboard while you are generating ideas. If your students are having trouble getting started with ideas, you might try one or more of the following ideas: • “If you look inside me, you’ll find…” (either about the poet or personifying an inanimate object or an animal, from that point of view; e.g., a crocodile’s viewpoint or the literal or figurative contents of a pencil or a computer) • “If I were…” or “I wish I were…” or “If only I…” • “What if…” (these can be about ordinary or personal hypotheticals, or about historical or scientific possibilities) • “The problem [or trouble] with…” • “What’s terrific about…” • “Gee, I was surprised when…” On another patch of chalkboard or whiteboard, work with your students to develop and organize your ideas. For instance, in coming up with a poem about wind, you and your students might sort your brainstorming into ideas about wind’s properties, what it does to objects (e.g., papers, leaves), what it does to people (tosses hair, makes goose bumps, etc.), and so on. Once you are content with your organization of ideas, transfer them to chart paper (or butcher paper). Write your first draft on a whiteboard (or chalkboard). Play around with the words, the format, the sequence. When you are ready to go to a more permanent form, consider using a pocket chart with sentence strips. That still gives you a lot of flexibility to revise the poem, playing around with the sequence and with individual words or phrases. Once you and your students are satisfied with your revised poem, transfer it to chart paper. Invite them to help you edit the poem, making sure that the line breaks, spelling, punctuation, and so on are the best they can be for your purposes. If your students are working in small groups or as individuals, you may want to introduce them to critics’ circles when they are ready to revise their works. A critic’s circle may include your entire class, small groups of students, or even student pairs or trios. At first, you’ll need to guide the critics circle closely, modeling how to be a constructive critic. The idea is that each poet takes a turn reading her or his poem aloud. After each poet reads, fellow poets take turns telling one thing about the poem that each listener particularly liked. Every listener can come up with at least one thing she or he liked – it may be a luscious word, an ear-pleasing phrase or alliteration or rhyme, a soothing or prickly or eerie tone, a fascinating or appealing topic, a well-structured format, effective line breaks, or almost anything else. For most poets, on most occasions, the positive comments constitute all of the feedback on the poem. If the poet requests help, however, she or he may ask fellow poets for suggestions for improving a particular aspect of the poem. For instance, the poet may ask for help with a particular word, phrase, or line, help in improving a rhyme or rhythm, help in shaping the tone of the poem, help in concluding the poem, and so on. At the poet’s request, the listeners may then offer positive, constructive suggestions for improving the poem. General comments such as, “I just didn’t like it,” or “I hated your phrasing,” aren’t acceptable for two reasons: (1) They’re hurtful and useless to the poet, and (2) they don’t teach the critic how to think critically about poetry. For the critics and the poets to learn the most, the comments must be highly specific suggestions for improvement. Initially, these critics circles may be a little rough, and they may require a lot of energy and guidance on your part. The payoffs for your effort are tremendous, however, as your participants will learn about how to create and revise poems, both as critics and as poets. When revising your poems, you may profit from listening to what a few children’s poets have said, quoted in Bernice Cullinan’s (1996) anthology, A Jar of Tiny Stars: Poems by NCTE Award-Winning Poets (Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press): • On choosing the right word – Eve Merriam (p. 33) said, “I’ve sometimes spent weeks looking for precisely the right word. It’s like having a tiny marble in your pocket, you can just feel it. Sometimes you find a word and say, ‘no, I don’t think this is it…’ Then you discard it, and take another and another until you get it right.” • On choosing one correct recipe for creating a poem – Arnold Adoff (p. 53) said, “I want to do more in my poems than just present facts or feelings or communicate. I want my poems to sing as well as to say.” John Ciardi (p. 39) agrees that with poetry, “maybe you can make language dance a bit.” According to Barbara Esbensen (p. 67), “Poetry should knock your block off.” May your students’ poems make the language dance as they gently, effortlessly knock your block off! Chapter 1 Math Introduction Too often, we view math narrowly as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Most mathematicians, however, view mathematics as the observation of patterns and the use of critical thinking to solve problems. The most encompassing topics of mathematics include the observation of patterns in shapes, sequences, sizes, and numbers. All of these topics interest poets, too. In addition, poets occasionally consider mathematical topics involving time, money, and other measurements and calculations. Geometry and Shapes Both mathematicians and physicists recognize the fundamental role of geometry in their fields. You don’t have to be a mathematician or a physicist to appreciate geometry, however. Students of all ages enjoy noticing the various shapes of the objects in their world, and observing how the shapes of things influence the way those things can move and can function in their environments. Immersion Immerse your students in poetry about shapes. For instance, following is a poem by Rebecca Kai Dotlich, regarding “The Shape of Things”: Here’s the story; story goes – circle wishes for a nose. And square, well she can strictly state, being perfect’s not all great But triangle is full of fun – “three sides are a gas!” then one by one, he sets them straight; (those grumbling kin,) “just learn to like the shape you’re in!” Write the first poem on a wall chart, butcher paper, a poster, a chalkboard, or a whiteboard. (More permanent surfaces are nice for you because you can accumulate a set of poems to use throughout the year; less permanent surfaces allow you to play with the wording, erasing, substituting, or adding words and phrases.) Introduce the First Poem. Read the poem aloud to your students, using your voice and gestures to highlight the drama of the poem. For instance, when using Dotlich’s poem, you can dramatically exaggerate the feelings of “wishes,” “not all great,” “a gas!” “grumbling,” and “like,” with your facial expressions, your mannerisms, and your voice. As you read the poem a second time, invite your students to read the final word in each line. For the third reading, invite them to read the entire poem along with you. If your students are accustomed to reading poetry, you may want to encourage individual students or student duos or trios to read or act out the poem. Invite responses to the first poem. After you have introduced the poem, ask your students to respond to three kinds of questions: a viewpoint or empathy question, a language question, and a poem-structure question. If you are working with children six years old or older, have your students work alone, in pairs, or in small groups, and have them respond in writing to the three kinds of questions. (For these older children, you may want to use the accompanying worksheet, to make things easy on yourself.) If you are working with preschool children, carry out this activity orally. Carefully gauge their interest and attention, and perhaps just ask one or two kinds of questions if their interest appears to flag. In addition, invite your students to draw a picture of the three main shapes, adding facial expressions to show the mood of each shape. Insert worksheet “The Shape of Things” here The examples given here use Dotlich’s “The Shape of Things” poem for each of the three kinds of questions. 4. Viewpoint or empathy question. For a narrative poem, ask a question that stimulates your students to imagine themselves in the situation described in the poem. If the poem doesn’t tell a story (such as a descriptive poem), encourage your students to imagine themselves as an aspect or object in the poem. Example: Ask students, “Have you ever wished you looked different than you do? What would you change about the way you look if you could?” “In what ways do you think that you ‘are a gas!’? What do you like about how you look or about who you are?” 5. Language question. Ask a question that prompts your students to think about the language of the poem. Example: “The word ‘kin’ means people who are related to you, who are in your family. What are some other words that have to do with family?” “How do people sound when they are ‘grumbling’? How do people feel when they are making grumbling sounds? What are some other words that mean something like ‘grumbling’?” 6. Poem-structure question. Ask a question that challenges your students to think about the structure of the poem and about how the poem might be different if it were changed in some way. Example: Ask, “How well would the poem work if the triangle was unhappy with its shape, and the square and the circle were pleased with their shapes? How could we change the poem to work in that way? How else could the poem be changed?” Now that your students have a new angle on shapes, you may want to try sharing the following shape-ly poems, which particularly appeal to students. Poetry for preschoolers and beyond • “I Am Running in a Circle,” by Jack Prelutsky. See p. 18 in Ciardi, John. (1962). You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You. New York: HarperCollins. • “Shapes” by Shel Silverstein. See p. 77 in Silverstein, Shel. (1981). A Light in the Attic: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein. New York: Harper & Row. Poetry for older students • “Geometry” by Rita Dove. See p. 90 in Thompson, Eileen (compiler). (1987). Experiencing Poetry. New York: Globe Book Company, Inc. Introduce the next poem. Choose one of the preceding poems (or another shapes-related poem you enjoy). Display the poem you chose in some manner (e.g., whiteboard, pocket chart). Expressively and dramatically read the poem aloud to your students. (For instance, if using Silverstein’s poem, dramatically exaggerate the fall of kerplunk! With your gestures and your voice.) Read the poem a second time, encouraging your students to read the final word in each line with you as you read. Read the poem a third time, prompting your students to read the entire poem along with you. Invite student solos, duos, or trios to act out the poem while the rest of the class reads it aloud. (When using Silverstein’s poem, you may need to remind students that they must fake – not actually carry out – striking a fellow student in the back.) Invite responses to the poem. Again, invite students to consider three types of questions in responding to the poem (or poems) you choose. The examples given here pertain to Shel Silverstein’s “Shapes” poem, but you can come up with the same types of questions for any shapes poems. 1. Viewpoint or empathy question. What would students think, or how would they feel if they were inside the poem? How would they view the world if they were one of the objects or persons described in the poem? Example: For Shel Silverstein’s “Shapes” poem, you might ask students, “Tell what you think and feel as you read this poem. What would you think or feel if you were the triangle? What if you were the square? What about the circle? 2. Language question. Encourage students to think about the words and the wording of the poem. Example: “Choose some words or phrases you particularly like (or dislike) in the poem, and write them down. Tell why you do (or don’t) like them. How do they make the poem work (or not work)?” 3. Poem-structure question. Challenge your students to think about how the poet structured the poem. How might the poem be different if its structure were changed in some way? Example: “Tell how the shape of each shape affects what happens in the poem. How well would the poem work if the circle and the triangle switched places in the poem? How else could the poem be changed? What do you think?” If you are working with children six years old or older, have your students respond in writing (alone, in pairs, or in small groups) to the three kinds of questions. If you are working with preschoolers, ask the questions orally, while you closely monitor the students’ attention span and interest level. As needed, limit the questions to just one or two, and then encourage your students to draw a picture to show what happens in the poem. EXTEND YOUR STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM. As long as your interest and your students’ interest continues, use additional shape-related poems to repeat this process of introducing your students to poems and then inviting them to respond to the poems. In addition, reinforce your students’ awareness of shapes, acquired through exploring the poem, by setting up a shapes-oriented mathematics learning center: • For preschoolers, you may simply offer a wide variety of puzzles for students to use, including a full range of possibilities, from simple inlays to somewhat complex jigsaw puzzles. • For students in the primary grades, you may use more complex jigsaw puzzles, or you may wish to have students create their own puzzles. If so, set up a learning center, using the Learning-Center Task Card, “Puzzling Shapes,” as a guide. Learning-Center Task Card, “Puzzling Shapes” Objective Explore shapes by creating your own jigsaw puzzles. Materials • A variety of old magazines (e.g., National Geographic, People) • Toy or educational catalogues • White glue (in small bottles or in empty yoghurt containers with Q-tip-style cotton swab applicators) • Pieces of cardboard or other stiff paper • Scissors • Crayons (or primary pencils) • Envelopes Directions 1. Choose an interesting picture from a magazine or a catalog. 2. Remove the picture from the magazine, being careful not to tear it. 3. Write your name on the back of a piece of cardboard. 4. Mount your chosen picture onto the front of the cardboard, using the white glue. 5. Set your mounted picture aside for a day, to let the picture dry fully. 6. When you return to this center, cut your mounted pictures into distinctive shapes. 7. Label an envelope with your name and a description of the completed picture. 8. Store your puzzle pieces in your labeled envelope. To extend students’ awareness of shapes across the curriculum, try the following activities in the areas of art, music and movement, science, social studies, and literature. Art. Have students play with the shapes highlighted in the poem through an art activity. For instance, make shape collages using triangles, circles, and squares. Shape collage I Supply (or have students cut out their own) tissue-paper circles, triangles, and squares. Each shape should be about 2-4” wide. Have your students use starch as an adhesive to apply overlapping layers of the shapes into a piece of construction paper or newsprint. Shape collage II Provide (or have students cut out their own) small (~1” wide) construction-paper circles, triangles, and squares. Have your students use paste as an adhesive to cover a piece of paper with shapes, making collages resembling mosaic-tile decorations. Music and Movement. Invite your students to make the shapes with their bodies – alone, with a partner, in small groups, or as a whole class. Sing songs that highlight shapes. For instance, invite students to work with you to create new lyrics for a familiar song. That is, use a familiar tune, but create new lyrics for it, focusing on shapes. (These new lyrics carried aloft on old tunes are often called “piggyback songs.”) For example, modify the lyrics of “The Wheels of the Bus G Round and Round” to be “The circle’s shape is round, round, round… all through the town.” “The triangle’s shape has three big points, three big points, three big points…” “The shape of the square has four equal sides…” Science. Experiment with wheels, square blocks, and triangular blocks, sliding or rolling them down ramps (inclined planes) of various degrees of slope. Ask students, “Which shapes slide down the fastest?” Encourage them to experiment to see how the degree of slope affects the speed of movement. Social Studies. Relate the shapes to aspects of the social-studies unit under study. For instance, if studying American families, have your students categorize furniture and other household objects according to their shapes. If your students are studying people in places that aren’t part of the “carpentered world,” ask them to consider why houses are or are not rectangular in construction. Have your students create models of homes of differing shapes, such as hogans and teepees. Literature. Read books about shapes, such as the following: • Carle, Eric. (1974). My Very First Book of Shapes. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company. • Giesel, Theodor (Dr. Seuss). (1973). The Shape of Me and Other Stuff. New York: Random House. Exploration: Shapely (Concrete) Poems Draw several concrete poems on wall charts or on poster paper. Concrete poems have words and letters that form a distinctive visual shape or pattern, which usually highlight or reflect an aspect of the poem or the subject of the poem. For instance, draw “Squares” by Douglas Florian. See page 62 in Florian’s 1994 book, Bing Bang Boing (New York: Puffin/Penguin). Insert “Squares” here After you’ve whetted their appetite with “Squares,” tantalize your students further with additional concrete poems, reading the poems aloud and then reading the poems with your students. Florian, arguably the master of the concrete poem for young readers, has three more concrete poems in his Bing, Bang, Boing book: “Seashells” (p. 74), “The Incredible Shrinking Poem” (p. 92), and “Ping-Pong Poem” (p. 33). He also has two vividly graphic concrete poems – “The Inchworm” (p. 14) and “The Whirligig Beetles” (p. 22) – in his 1998 book, Insectlopedia (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company). Once you wear out Florian’s assortment, you may want to try some of the concrete poems in the delightful poetry book compiled by Michael Rosen (1985/1993), The Kingfisher Book of Children’s Poetry (New York: Kingfisher Books, Grisewood & Dempsey): “[I want a small piece of string],” by Remy Charlip (p. 48); “Mosquito” by Marie Zbierski (p. 217); “The Honey Pot” by Alan Riddell (p. 160); “Playing with Words” by Michael Rosen (p. 161); and three poems by Robert Froman: “[Read up and down]” (p. 84), “Superstink” (p. 84), and “Friendly Warning” (p. 85). If your students just can’t get enough of concrete poems, you might also want to try the following poems: • “Mirror” by Guillaume Apollinaire. See p. 28 in Thompson, Eileen (compiler). (1987). Experiencing Poetry. New York: Globe Book Company, Inc. • “Sometimes Poems” by Judith Viorst. See pp. 36-37 in Viorst, Judith. (1981). If I Were in Charge of the World and other Worries: Poems for Children and Their Parents. New York: Aladdin Books, Macmillan. • “Poem on the Neck of a Running Giraffe” by Shel Silverstein. See p. 107 in Silverstein, Shel. (1974). Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein. New York: Harper & Row. By this time, your students have been thoroughly immersed in concrete poems and are ready to explore these poems as a distinctive form. As a class, using a chalkboard or a whiteboard, create a concrete poem that complements a theme or unit of study in your curriculum. For instance, if animals were a subject of study, you might create a concrete poem highlighting the shapes of the animals being studied. If you were studying plants, you might create grassy poems, bushy poems, tree-shaped poems, or even tulip-, orchid-, or daisy-shaped poems. If you were studying the Revolutionary War era, you might create a horse-shaped poem to commemorate Paul Revere’s ride, or spectacle-shaped poems to memorialize Benjamin Franklin. Given a little prompting, you and your students will come up with ingenious shapes for almost any unit of study. Model with your students the concept of creating a rough draft and a final draft of your poem. After you and they have created your preliminary poem, have your students help you edit it, modifying both your word choices and the shape of your poem. Once there is consensus that the poem is complete, copy it to a wall chart or poster. Using the wall chart, choral read the poem. EXTEND YOUR STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM. To expand your students’ awareness of shapes across the curriculum, try the following activities in the areas of art, music and movement, science, social studies, and literature. Art. Have your students cut around the edges of art paper (construction paper, manila paper, or newsprint) to create the same outline shape as that of the class poem. Invite students to depict one or more important features of the object being shown. For instance, for the animals unit, have students depict the chosen animal’s habitat and preferred foods on the outlined shape of the animal. For a unit on American history, have students depict particular events associated with a particular historical figure. If you wish to encourage small-group cooperation, distribute butcher paper, and have the students cut an outline, as before. Then encourage the group members to discuss what features or events to depict and to collaborate in depicting each element. Music and Movement. Invite your students to move as the object of study moves. For instance, if animals are being investigated, have students move as various animals would move. If Paul Revere’s ride is being studied, students may gallop in a circle around the edge of the classroom. Play suitable instrumental music to accompany the rhythms of the movements: (For instance, use “The Flight of the Bumblebee” to accompany insect movements; use “William Tell’s Overture” to accompany horses galloping.) Science. Have you ever wondered how to fit as many things as you can into as small a space as possible – such as when you need to pack a tiny suitcase to go on a trip or you have to pack all your belongings into a few boxes? Scientists who study physics (e.g., spacecraft design) and biology (e.g., embryological development) wonder about size, space, and shape problems, too. Set up a learning center that poses the problem of packing a lot into a finite space. Offer a medium-sized cardboard box and a huge number of objects of various shapes and sizes. Invite students to try to arrange the objects in the box in a way that fits the maximum number of objects into the box. Many scientists are also fascinated with observing how bubbles form, the shapes they take, and the ways in which bubbles combine, expand, and burst. At a learning center, or at a table in a corner of the playground, encourage students to explore the shapes they can form with bubble solution. (A little dish soap in a lot of water does the trick!) In addition to the standard plastic wands, try offering a variety of shapes, formed with wire coat hangers, plastic-coated wires, or other objects. Prompt your students to observe how the shapes of things affect their functionality. For preschoolers, sand, dirt, and water are always intriguing materials. Add to these materials a wide assortment of household objects (e.g., forks, spoons, cups, plates, eggbeaters, whisks, sponges). Invite students to study how the shape of each object influences how easily, and how well the object is used. Pose a set of tasks to perform, and have students experiment to see which object shapes perform each task most effectively. (For instance, how do forks, spoons, whisks, and cups compare for mixing ingredients? How do they compare for transferring liquids from one container to another?) For older children, have them compare animal shapes with the animals’ modes of transportation (e.g., snakes vs. eels vs. fish; spiders vs. insects vs. birds; frogs vs. rabbits vs. kangaroos; monkeys vs. apes vs. humans). Have students work together to create a mural on butcher paper, showing creatures that move mostly in water, on the land, or in the air. (Provide encyclopedias for them to use as models for drawing pictures of each creature, or supply old National Geographic magazines or other sources of pictures for them to cut and paste onto the mural.) Social Studies. Relate various shapes to aspects of the social-studies unit you are studying. For instance, if you are studying a historical period (or a geographical region) prior to the widespread development of paved roads, encourage your students to think about how useful (or not) wheeled vehicles would have been. What modes of transportation might be more useful in an environment without paved roads? Have students create a mural, showing various kinds of transportation that can be used in places where there aren’t many paved roads. Literature. Another shapes-oriented book that particularly appeals to young readers is Charles Shaw’s (1947) It Looked Like Spilt Milk (New York: HarperCollins). In addition, offer students a variety of books about your current unit of study. For instance, if your students are studying animals, they may enjoy the following books: • Barton, Byron. (1989) Dinosaurs, Dinosaurs. New York: HarperCollins. • Boynton, Sandra. (1993) Barnyard Dance. New York: Workman Publishing. • Pandell, Karen. (1994). I Love You, Sun; I Love You, Moon. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons. • Wildsmith, Brian. (1967). Wild Animals. New York: Oxford University Press. Experimentation: Creating Your Own Poems With and About Shapes By now, your students are ready to create their own concrete poems to accompany specific curriculum content and particular curriculum activities. First, review with your students the characteristics of a concrete poem. (That is, words and letters form a distinctive visual shape or pattern; the poem’s shape highlights or reflects an aspect of the subject of the poem.) Next, brainstorm with them possible topics for their own poems, listing as many as possible on the chalkboard or whiteboard. As an example, suppose that you were studying animals with your students. Use the class poem or another animal-shape concrete poem to review the characteristics of concrete poems. Invite students to compare and contrast the shapes of animals to depict and describe in their concrete poems. For example, what would a concrete poem about a frog look like? How would it differ from a concrete poem about a tadpole? Have students brainstorm possible topics for animal-shaped concrete poems. Remind them of poems such as “Mosquito” and “Whirligig Beetles,” which depict the shapes of the animal’s movements, rather than the animals themselves. If you wish to highlight the relationship between animals’ shapes and their modes of movement, you may wish to encourage students to choose a variety of animals, ensuring that the class’s assortment includes insects, birds, fish and other water dwellers, reptiles, amphibians, and hopping, trotting, and strutting mammals. Instead, you may prefer to let students choose whatever animals they wish to for their first attempt, then have them work in small groups to create category-specific concrete poems as their second attempt. Encourage your students to begin creating their own concrete poems. For students ages six and older, invite your students to work alone, in pairs, or in small groups, to create their own concrete poems. For preschoolers and other students who are not yet writing for themselves, have each student draw the shape of the poem on a large sheet of paper. On a separate sheet of paper, have the student dictate to you (or a parent volunteer or a teacher aide) her or his poem. Once the full poem is written, as dictated by the student, copy the words to trace the outline drawn by the student. If your classroom is short-handed (and whose isn’t?), you may prefer to send home the accompanying worksheet, so that the child can create a concrete poem with her or his parent(s). Insert Worksheet “Shapes” (concrete poem) by Douglas Florian about here After your students have first mastered geometry, they’re ready to tackle their second math topic: sequences. Sequences Sequences are clearly vital to mathematical procedures such as performing long division or figuring out how to solve equations. Before students are ready for such complex sequences, however, they need to have myriad experiences with sequences at a more accessible level. Poetry (and its companion art, song) offers a particularly delightful way in which to investigate sequences. Immersion Children particularly enjoy iterative songs and poems such as the traditional song, “I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly.” It has been illustrated and written out numberous times over the decades. For instance, following is a relatively recent version: G. Brian Karas (III.) (1980/1994) I Know an Old Lady (New York: Scholastic). This particular sequence poem lends itself particularly well to a rebus wall chart. (Such a chart uses pictures or symbols in place of some words or syllables.) The basic versus are as follows: • I know an old lady who swallowed a fly. / I don’t know why she swallowed the fly. / I think [or Perhaps] she’ll die. • I know an old lady who swallowed a spider. / That wiggled and wriggled and tickled inside her. / She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. / I don’t know why she swallowed the fly. / I think she’ll die. • I know an old lady who swallowed a bird. / How absurd! She swallowed a bird. / She swallowed the bird to catch the spider… • I know an old lady who swallowed a cat. / Think of that! She swallowed a cat. / She swallowed the cat to catch the bird… • I know an old lady who swallowed a dog. / What a hog! She swallowed a dog. / She swallowed the dog to catch the cat… • I know an old lady who swallowed a goat. / Right down her throat, she swallowed the goat. / She swallowed the goat to catch the dog… • I know an old lady who swallowed a cow. / I don’t know how she swallowed a cow! / She swallowed the cow to catch the goat… • I know an old lady who swallowed a horse. / She died, of course! Before you introduce the poem, write the verses on a series of wall charts or posters (using rebus versus, as appropriate). If you’re cramped for space at the front of the room, write out the verses on sentence strips, and use a pocket chart to display one or two stanzas at a time. Once you’ve sung or said the first verse of the poem to the class, invite the students to join you in singing or saying the remaining verses. After the old lady and the sundry animals in her belly have been kicking around in your head for a while, you may wish to try out some different iterative sequence poems. It’s no accident that many traditional poems and songs include such sequences, as children of all ages enjoy the rhythms, the predictability, and the rhymes of such poems. Just a few you may enjoy are as follows: • “Combinations” by Mary Ann Hoberman. See p. 275 in Hall, Donald (compiler). (1985). The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America. New York: Oxford University Press. • “Fiddle-I-Fee” (Folk Song). See pp. 171-174 in Chase, Richard (compiler). (1956). American Folk Tales and Songs: A Treasury of Lively, Old-Time English-American Lore. New York: New American Library. • “Hush Little Baby” (Traditional). See p. 29 in Strickland, Dorothy S., & Michael R. Strickland (compilers). (1994). Families: Poems That Celebrate the African American Experience. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press. • “This Is the House That Jack Built” (Traditional) • “12 Days of Christmas” (Traditional) EXTEND YOUR STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM. To expand your students’ awareness of sequences across the curriculum, set up a mathematics learning center focused on sequences. At this center, offer a variety of sequence activities. For preschoolers, appropriate items include nesting materials (e.g., bowls, pans, cups) and stacking materials (graduated cylinders or cups). For students ages six and older, picture-sequence cards, word-recognition cards (highlighting letter sequences), and simple games (highlighting turn-taking and sequences of instructions) help to reinforce sequences. In addition, try the following activities in areas of art, music and movement, science, social studies, and literature. Art. Have your students make a collage depicting the sequence of animals described in the “I Know an Old Lady” song. This will require a great deal of mathematical thinking: They will need to figure out the proportions to use in order to fit each animals inside the next, yet have the largest animal be small enough to fit on the page. That is, students must draw and then cut out a very tiny fly, which fits inside a pretty small spider, and so on, until they draw and cut out a horse large enough to hold the other animals, yet small enough to fit onto the page. You may want students to work in small groups to achieve this challenging feat. For preschoolers, a more suitable task may be simply to draw one or more of the animals from the song. Music and Movement. Have your students sing the song and make the appropriate animal motions for each animal. Once they have developed evocative actions for each animal, encourage them to dramatically enact the entire song. Science. Have your students carry out some simple, safe scientific experiments or cooking experiences that require them to follow a few different sequences of steps. For instance, try making colored hard-boiled eggs in at least two different ways. Egg-Coloring I. Bring in hard-boiled eggs, and have your students color (dye) the eggs, then draw on them with crayons. Egg-Coloring II. Have your students draw on the hard-boiled eggs first, and then dye the eggs. Egg-Coloring III (for older students only). If you have a hot pot or a hot plate available in your classroom, have your students draw on the uncooked eggs with crayons first, then color (dye) the eggs. Next, you (or an aide or a parent volunteer) hard-boil the eggs in the hot pot or in a pan on a hot plate. Which sequence of steps works best? As a class, or in small groups, have students draw charts showing the different sequences they tried. Egg-Coloring IV. If you’re really feeling adventurous, have students compare the effects of drawing with crayon on still-warm (but not boiling hot) eggs, on room-temperature eggs, and on cold eggs. How does temperature affect the students’ drawings? Egg-Coloring V. If eggshells crack you up, you may want to try some even fancier variations for dying eggs, using natural plant dyes: Boil the eggs in a large pot containing yellow-onion skins, to dye the eggs pale yellow, or try boiling them with beets, to dye them reddish-purple. A more expensive (and messier) experiment is to dye them by boiling them in grape juice. Okay, that’s it! Any more egg-foolery might scramble your brain or fry your mind. Social Studies. Relate the “Hush Little Baby” song to the unit of social studies currently being studied. For instance, if students are studying about families, have students discuss what the daddy in the song is trying to say to his little baby. Do mommies have those same feelings for their babies? What is the same about mommies and daddies, and what is different about them? Do all families have both mommies and daddies? Can some families be just a grandma and a child or just an uncle and three children? What different kinds of families are there? What are some of the similarities about all these different kinds of families? Literature. Read books that highlight sequences, such as the following: • Tolhurst, Marilyn. (1990). Somebody and the Three Blairs. Great Britain: All Books for Children, The All Children’s Company, Ltd.; New York: Orchard Books; Scholastic. (There are also many other delightful variations on the Goldilocks and the Three Bears theme, which you may want to use.) • McCloskey, Robert. (1948/1968). Blueberries for Sal. New York: Viking. Exploration: Adding and Inserting Verses, Varying Sequences As a class or in small groups, take any of the aforementioned sequence poems, and explore them, adding, inserting, or varying the poems’ sequences. Once you feel that your students are comfortable with modifying existing poems, give them a poem starter, and have them work with you to create a new sequence poem. For instance, see page 42 of Susan Milord’s (1995) Tales Alive! Ten Multicultural Folktales with Activities (Charlotte, VT: Williamson Publishing). Use this as a model to create a building rhyme (along the lines of “I Know an Old Lady Who” and “This Is the House That Jack Built”): This is the boy who wanted a drum, A drum he could tap with the end of his thumb. This is the wood he found by the road, The wood wasn’t that much of a load For the boy who wanted a drum, A drum he could tap with the end of his thumb. This is the… You may find it easier – or just more interesting and fun – to build a sequence poem using a piggyback song tune as the basis for your poem. For instance, the tune for “Here We Go ‘Round the Mulberry Bush” (also know as the tune for “This Is the Way We Wash Our Clothes”) readily lends itself to a sequence poem. Your students may also enjoy adapting “Hush, Little Baby” to making loud sounds, such as “Shout, giant toddler, scream lots of words; Mama’s gonna buy you some squawking birds.” Experimentation: Creating Sequence Poems Across the Curriculum If you work with preschoolers, have your students continue to work with you to create sequence poems as a group using piggyback songs. If you work with students ages six and older, have your students create their own sequence poems that accompany specific curriculum content and particular curriculum activities. For instance, in math, invite small groups of older students to create a sequence poem about how to do long division. In science, you might encourage students to create a sequence poem about how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. (For ideas, see Eric Carle’s [1969]. The Very Hungry Caterpillar [New York: Putnam & Grossett].) For literature, write a sequence poem about story events, such as the sequence of events in “The Three Little Pigs” or in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Sequences are intrinsic aspects of music and drama, so these curriculum areas offer natural opportunities for creating a sequence poem. Patterns: Poetry Forms Why was Lewis Carroll (author of the Alice in Wonderland stores), a mathematics professor at Oxford in England, captivated by poetry? Carroll even created several nonsense poems that say absolutely nothing, yet they still superbly preserve the syntax, rhythm, and rhyme structure of a realistic poem. Nonsense verse describes fantastic topics, illogical events, paradoxes, or bizarre/odd juxtapositions – often written with neologisms, nonwords, or rare words. Carroll’s nonsense poems show this mathematician’s love of poetic patterns, his relishing of the pure joy of creating patterns through poetry. Probably the most famous of these nonsense verses – and an excellent tool for introducing students to the delights of poetry patterns – is Carroll’s “Jabberwocky,” an excerpt of which is presented here. (For the full poem, see p. 50 in Elizabeth Hauge Sword and Victoria Flournoy McCarthy [compilers] [1995] A Child’s Anthology of Poetry [Hopewell, NH: Ecco Press].) Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll ‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. “Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The Jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch! … “And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” He chortled in his joy. ‘Twas brillig, and the slighy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. Write at least two stanzas of the poem on a wall chart. On a separate sheet of chart paper, or on a chalkboard or whiteboard directly alongside the wall chart, divide the space into two columns. At the top of one column, write the words, “Rhyme Pattern.” Teach your students the convention of using lowercase letters to show the rhyme schemes for the verses you have illustrated. Have them tell you what the rhyme scheme is. In this case, the pattern you are going for is abab, cdcd,… efef, abab. At the top of the second column, write the words, “Number of syllables.” Next, have your students count the syllables they pronounce in each line. Write down the number of syllables for each line of the poem. (In this case, most lines have eight syllables.) If you want to introduce your students to poetry terminology, you might mention that poetic beats are the poetry’s meter. In your early invitations to poetry, however, most students may not need to learn this term. If you are working with older children, you can further extend this discussion to consider rhythm. On another large sheet of paper (or a new space on the board), write the heading, “Rhythm” or “Stress Patterns.” Use the poetry convention for noting the stress pattern, using / (or ‘) for syllables that are stressed (given extra emphasis) and ~ (or ~) for unstressed syllables. Have the students describe to you the stress patterns for each line. (For your information, the name of the pattern Carroll used is “iambic,” going da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, da-dum, but your students probably don’t yet need to know this term.) The pattern your students suggest should look something like this for each line of the poem: ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ /. Next, have your students find other poems in poetry books you have on hand (or flip through this book to find other poems). Have them dictate each new poem to you as you copy each onto chart paper or onto a white- or blackboard. Make columns next to each poem, and have the students work with you to figure out the rhyme, meter, and rhythm patters of these new poems. If they happen to choose free verse (unpredictable rhymes and rhythms) or blank verse (predictable rhythms and slightly offbeat rhymes), still have them work with you to figure out the pattern of each line. Have them tell you that there is no predictable pattern, and then explore with them why a poet might choose to write a poem in that format. Immersion: Couplets, Quatrains, and So On Perhaps the simplest pattern to learn is the couplet, a two-lined form of verse (metered poetic language, as opposed to prose). Specifically, a couplet is a rhyming pair of verse lines that have the same meter. A couplet may appear solo, but it usually appears as a short stanza within a longer poem, or even more commonly forms part of a poem’s sequence. Commonly, a couplet is a closed couplet, in which the end of each pair of lines is also the end of a sentence or clause (or at least phrase). Introduce the patterns in couplets with Laura E. Richards’s “Eletelephony.” See pp. 165-166 in Donald Hall’s 1985 anthology, The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (new York: Oxford University Press). Use the same method of introduction you have used with earlier poems (i.e., read aloud to your students, then have them join you in reading). Eletelephony by Laura E. Richards Once there was an elephant, Who tried to use the telephant – No! No! I mean an elephone Who tried to use the telephone – (Dear me! I am not certain quite That even now I’ve got it right.) Howe’er it was, he got his trunk Entangled in the telephunk; The more he tried to get it free, The louder buzzed the telephee – (I fear I’d better drop the song of elephop and telephong!) Countless other poems with couplets are available. For instance, your students would probably enjoy any number of Ogden Nash’s humorous couplets about animals (several are noted in the science chapter in this book). In addition, some examples of couplets may be found in the following classic longer poems (also available in Donald Hall’s 1985 book, The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America): “The New-England Boy’s Song about Thanksgiving Day” by Lydia Maria Child (p. 38) or “The Bells” by Edgar Allan Poe (p. 71). EXTEND YOUR STUDENTS’ KNOWLEDGE ACROSS THE CURRICULUM. To expand your students’ awareness of how the patterns in poems link to other mathematical patterns, set up a learning center focused on patterns. At this center, offer various pattern materials, such as attribute blocks, pattern blocks, tangrams, beads with strings, and Unifix cubes. For preschoolers, encourage your students to explore their own self-devised patterns. For children ages six and older, offer pattern cards for students to match the patterns they make to the patterns on the cards. (Be sure to allow students of all ages at least a little time to freely create their own patterns, as well.) In addition to these math activities, several other activities may help you to link Laura Richards’s “Eletelephony” poem to other areas of the curriculum, such as art, music and movement, science, social studies, and literature. Art. Have your students illustrate the poem, showing the poor elephant and telephone intertwined. For a craft activity, have your students create paper-bag puppets of elephants, to use for role-play of Richards’s poem. Music and Movement. Have half of the students move around the edge of the classroom as if they were elephants, stamping out the rhythm of the poem while the other half of the class choral reads the poem. Then have your students switch roles. Science. At a learning center, set out an assortment of old, defunct telephones, and encourage your students to take them apart and put them back together. Supply screwdrivers and additional tools, as needed (and appropriate). Alternatively, you might offer students the materials to make string-and-can telephones. (Juice cans and regular cotton string work quite well, and an ice pick does nicely for the teacher to use to poke the needed holes.) Once the telephones are made, your students can use these to explore how sound travels better through solid objects (e.g., string and the ground) than through the air. (Remember those old Western movies where the native scout puts his ear to the ground to hear the villain’s horse coming?) (Note: The string has to be taut if your students are to be taught about sound vibrations.) Social Studies. Invite your students to discuss experiences they have had that are similar to Richards’s elephant: The more they struggled to untangle themselves from difficulties, the more trouble they had. What did they do to finally disentangle themselves from the problem? Have students work together to solve brain teasers or riddles or other puzzles, such as those in Ronnie Shushan’s (Ed.) 1978/1985 book, Games Magazine: The Book of Sense and Nonsense Puzzles (New York: Workman Publishing). See also Richard Lederer’s (1996). Puns and Games: Jokes, Riddles, Tairy Fales, Rhymes, and More Word Play for Kids. Chicago: Chicago Review Press. (“Tairy Fales” are delightfully spoonerized fairy tales.) Literature. Read books about elephants, such as the following: • Miller, patricia K. (1963). Baby Elephant. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. • Quigley, Lillian. (1959). The Blind Men and the Elephant. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Once your students are comfortable with exploring couplets, you may want to introduce them to quatrains. A quatrain is a four-line poem or a four-line stanza within a longer poem, in which a pattern of rhyming and meter are observed. Countless examples of quatrains fill the literature. Robert Frost’s poems elegantly illustrate the quatrain. For instance, see his “Stopping by Woods,” in Frost’s (1916/1971) book (edited by Louis Untermeyer), New Enlarged Anthology of Robert Frost’s Poems (new york: Washington Square Press). Just in case you want to know some of the shorthand terms for describing poetry, here is a little poetry terminology. Don’t worry about memorizing these terms – and you surely don’t need to have your students learn these terms now. The most common quatrain pattern is iambic pentameter (five beats – stressed syllables – per line: ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ / ~ /), with the same number of beats per measure, in the rhyming pattern abab. Other patterns include alternating tetrameter (four beats) and trimeter (three beats) lines, with abcb or abab rhymes; trochaic (stress pattern of / ~, as in apple) meter, with aabb; and iambic tetrameter with abba. Additional superb sources of splendidly patterned poems include the following: • Amery, Heather (compiler). (1988). The Usborne Children’s Songbook. London: Usborne. • Cole, Joanna, & Stephanie Calmenson (compiler). (1990). Miss Mary Mack and Other Children’s Street Rhymes. New York: A Beech Tree Paperback Book. • Fujikawa, Gyo (III). (1968). Mother Goose. New York: Platt & Munk, Grosset & Dunlap. • Goode, Diane (compiler). (1989/1996). The Diane Goode Book of American Folk Tales & Songs. New York: Dutton, Puffin/Penguin. • Hudson, Wade, and Cheryl Hudson (compiler). (1995). How Sweet the Sound: African-American Songs for Children. New York: Scholastic. • Schon, Isabel (compiler). (1983). Dona Blanca and Other Hispanic Nursery Rhymes and Games. Minneapolis, MN: T.S. Denison. Exploration: Finding the Patterns in Poems Fool around with couplets and quatrains as a class or in small groups. Use poster charts and wall charts of various examples of each form. Have students find the patterns, underlining the stressed syllables, counting the syllables in each line, and guessing the rhyming schemes. Encourage students to investigate these poetry forms as a means of expressing what they have learned in other content areas, such as science or social studies. Experimentation: Creating Patterned Poems Across the Curriculum If you work with preschoolers, your best bet may be to help your students create couplets and quatrains through piggyback songs, creating new lyrics for familiar songs. If you work with older students, together you may be able to come up with various patterned poems that accompany specific curriculum content and particular curriculum activities. For instance, in math, how might you create a patterned poem about solving a really tough problem? In science, your students might write a patterned poem about sleek, slithering snakes. For literature, try writing a poem about story characters. For drama, what about acting out a couplet or quatrain? For music, how about creating piggyback songs, such as the frog’s song, “If you’re hoppy and you know it, jump and hop” (to the tune of “If You’re Happy and You Know It”)? Poems for Specific Math Content In addition to applying mathematical skills and observation to poetry, you and your students can study other mathematical content areas through poetry. Following is an assortment of poems suitable for mathematical topics such as time, measurement, arithmetic, and money. Time: Hours and Seasons Several poems about time may be found in Michael Rosen’s (1985/1993) anthology, The Kingfisher Book of Children’s Poetry (new york: Kingfisher Books, Grisewood & Dempsey): “The Clock on the Wall” by Samih Al-Qasim (p. 166); “Ecclesiastes 3:1-8” in the Bible (pp. 36-37); “I Don’t Like My Brother in the Morning” by Keith Ballentine (P. 30); and “My Paper Route” by Troy Vacciano (P. 201). Two other timely poems may be found in Beatrice Schenk de Regniers’s (1969) compilation, Poems Children Will Sit Still For: A Selection for the Primary Grades (New York: Scholastic Book Services): “What They Said” (a German nursery rhyme), translated by Rose Fyleman (pp. 15-16); and “I Met a Crow” by John Ciardi (p. 97). Two others may be found in Eileen Thompson’s (1987) anthology, Experiencing Poetry (New York: Globe Book Company, Inc.): “Daybreak in Alabama” by Langston Hughes (p. 114) and “Knoxville, Tennessee” by Nikki Giovanni (p. 118). The following poems also reinforce concepts of time: • “First” by Douglas Florian – See p. 7 in Florian, Douglas. (1994). Bing Bang Boing. New York: Puffin/Penguin. • “Rhinoceros Stew” by Mildred Luton – See p. 24 in Prelutsky, Jack (compiler). (1991). For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. • “Daylight Saving Time” by Phyllis McGinley – See p. 41 in Prelutsky, Jack (compiler). (1983). The Random House Book of Poetry for Children. New York: Random House. • “I Must Remember” by Shel Silverstein – See p. 14 in Silverstein, Shel. (1974). Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein. New York: Harper & Row. Other poems related to time include seasons poems, such as those found in three poetry books compiled by Paul Janeczko: • (1981). Don’t Forget to Fly: A Cycle of Modern Poems. Scarsdale, NY: Bradbury Press. • (1985). Pocket Poems Selected for a Journey. New York: Bradbury Press. • (1983). Poetspeak: In Their Work, About Their Work. New York: Bradbury Press. Speaking of seasonal poems, be sure not to neglect Maurice Sendak’s jubilantly poetic (1962) Chicken Soup with Rice: A Book of Months (new York: Scholastic). For additional poems about time, use some of the holiday-related poems available, such as those in Jack Prelutsky’s books of original poems: • (1977). It’s Halloween. New York: Scholastic and Greenwillow Books, William Morrow. • (1982). It’s Thanksgiving. New York: Scholastic and Greenwillow Books, William Morrow. Measurement Douglas Florian has written a few poems about measurement, including “The Inchworm” (p. 14) from his 1998 Insectlopedia (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company). Two other poems about measurement can be found in his 1994 big Bang Boing (New York: Puffin/Penguin): “Tall or Small” (p. 85) and “Inch by Inch” (p. 96). Various other well-known poets have measured their talents for this topic: • “I’m Not” by Judith Viorst – see p. 25 in Viorst, Judith. (1981). If I Were in Charge of the World and Other Worries: Poems for Children and Their Parents. New York: Aladdin Books, Macmillan. • “Measurement” by A.M. Sullivan – see p. 23 in Prelutsky, Jack (compiler). (1983). The Random House Book of Poetry for Children. New York: Random House. • “Ounce and Bounce” by Jack Prelutsky – see p. 47 in Prelutsky, Jack. (1984). The New Kid on the Block. New York: Greenwillow Books, William Morrow. • “One Inch Tall” by Shel Silverstein – see p. 55 in Silverstein, Shel. (1974). Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein. New York: Harper & Row. Arithmetic, Counting, and Numbers A pretty prolific poet who has probably produced the greatest number of number-related poems is Shel Silverstein. Assuming that I have counted correctly, he published four in his 1981 book, A Light in the Attic: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein (New York: Harper & Row): “Eight Balloons” (p. 58); “How Many, How Much” (p. 8); “Homework Machine” (p. 56); and “One Two” (p. 102). There were three in his 1996 book, Falling Up: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein (New York: HarperCollins): “The monkey” (p. 40); “Allison Beals and Her 25 Wheels” (p. 98); and “Keepin’ Count” (p. 131). He included two in his 1974 book, Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein (New York: Harper & Row): “Wild Boar” (p. 68) and “Eighteen Flavors” (p. 116). Another book containing a few number-related poems is Donald Hall’s 1985 compilation, The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America (New York: Oxford University Press). The number-related poems herein are “Singular Indeed” by David McCord (p. 242); “Too many Daves” by Dr. Seuss (p. 254); and “Cardinal Ideograms” by May Swenson (pp. 269-270). Other number-related poems may be counted as follows: • “Centipedestrian” by Douglas Florian – see p. 63 in Florian, Douglas. (1994). Bing Bang Boing. New York: Puffin/Penguin. • “About Feet” by Margaret Hillert – see p. 122 in Prelutsky, Jack (compiler). (1983). The Random House Book of Poetry for Children. New York: Random House. • “UR 2 Good” by Michael Rosen – see p. 161 in Rosen, Michael (compiler). (1985/1993). The Kingfisher Book of Children’s Poetry. New York: Kingfisher Books, Grisewood & Dempsey. • “Arithmetic” by Carl Sandburg – see p. 99 in de Regniers, Beatrice Schenk (compiler). (1969). Poems Children Will Sit Still For: A Selection for the Primary Grades. New York: Scholastic Book Services. • “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman – see p. 290 in Sword, Elizabeth Hauge, & Victoria Flournoy McCarthy (compiler). (1995). A Child’s Anthology of Poetry. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. • “Eliza’s Jacket” by Calef Brown (B-PBOS, 13th poem) In addition, you may wish to use one, two, three, or more of the countless counting poems that have been numbered to children through numerous centuries. Money Shel Silverstein also accounts as one of the most valuable poets in writing about money. You can find his “Big Eating Contest” on page 52 of his 1996 book Falling Up: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein. You will find three more money-related poems in his 1974 book, Where the Sidewalk Ends: Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein: “Smart (p. 35); “The Gypsies Are Coming” (p. 50); and “For Sale” (p. 52). Three other poems may be found in Jack Prelutsky’s 1991 compilation, For Laughing out Loud: Poems to Tickle Your Funnybone (New York: Alfred A. Knopf). He included two poems by that world-renowned highly prolific poet, “Anonymous”: “I Wish I Had A Nickel” (p. 31) and “Raising Frogs for Profit” (p. 70), as well as “News Story” by William Cole (p. 33). In addition, you may wish to use “Honey Bear” by Elizabeth Yang (p. 29) in Michael Rosen’s 1993 anthology, Poems for the Very Young. New York: Kingfisher Books, Grisewood & Dempsey. Chapter Two Social Studies Introduction For young children, social studies begins with learning about themselves and the people in their immediate environment. Gradually, they broaden their social sphere to include learning about their community, their country, and the wider world. Their appreciation of biography starts with observations of themselves and the people whom they know well; their understanding of history begins with the stories of heir own past behavior, family anecdotes, and vignettes shared on the playground and at the dinner table; their view of geography begins with their home and the places they visit with their families. Similarly, their grasp of culture (anthropology) and society (sociology) begins by observing how other people in other places have similar needs, wants, and activities to their own: Other people eat food, wear clothes, live in homes, love their families, and celebrate special occasions, although they may fulfill these needs and wants and carry out these activities in somewhat different ways. Families Children’s first social interactions occur within their families, and their first social understandings arise within the family context. Hence, a good place to begin their study of social knowledge is with the study of families. Immersion The first people children get to know are the people who love and care for them. A lovely poem to begin exploring children’s ideas about families is Ysaye M. Barnwell’s poem (and song) “No Mirrors in My Nana’s House.” The following excerpt from Barnwell’s Poem captures a young girl’s warm feeling of being loved and of seeing the world through the eyes of those who love her: There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house no mirrors in my Nana’s house So the beauty that I saw in everything the beauty in everything was in her eyes like the rising of the sun … There were no mirrors in my Nana’s house no mirrors in my Nana’s house The world outside was a magical place I only knew love and I never knew hate and the beauty in everything was in her eyes like the rising of the sun … Advance Preparation. If possible, obtain a copy of the children’s picture book with accompanying compact disk (CD) for Barnwell’s poem: • Barnwell, Ysaye M. (1998). No Mirrors in My Nana’s House. New York: Harcourt Brace. The book’s lush, colorful illustrations gaily show how a young girl sees her own beauty reflected in the loving eyes of her grandmother. The accompanying CD includes two versions of the poem: (1) a reading of the book by the author, and (2) the group Sweet Honey in the Rock singing the lyrics and tune written by the author. Whether or not you have the book available, prepare a wall chart (or an overhead transparency) with the foregoing excerpt from Barnwell;s poem. On a second wall chart, write the title, “How It Feels to Be Loved.” Immerse: Introduce the Poem If you have the book and CD available, play each version of the poem (the song and the reading). If the book is not available, begin by reading the poem aloud to the children once. For the second reading, invite the children to join you in reading the poem aloud. Explore the Concept Ask questions to extend your students’ understanding of the poem. • Poem-structure questions. What pattern does Barnwell use for her poem? Where does Barnwell use repetition? Ask the children to opine why the author repeats some words and phrases, but not others. • Language questions. Explore with the children some words that they can use in place of the word “beauty.” Try using the words they suggest in the poem. In addition, invite them to help you think of a different simile, to substitute for “like the rising of the sun.” • Viewpoint or empathy questions. Encourage children to think about the people who love them. Brainstorm with them how being loved affects them and the way they see the world. Write their answers on the chart titled, “How It Feels to Be Loved.” Extend knowledge across the curriculum. Reinforce your students’ awareness of loving relationships, acquired through exploring the poem, by setting up a people-oriented social-studies learning center: Offer a wide assortment of people puppets for children to use to explore family situations. In addition, to extend students’ awareness of social studies across the curriculum, try the following activities in the areas of music and movement, art, science, literature, and math. Music and Movement. One of the many traditional songs reinforcing the theme of familiar love is “Hush Little Baby,” which may be found in either of the following books: • Brandenberg, Aliki. (1969). Hush Little Baby: A Folk Lullaby illustrated by Aliki. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pantheon. • Strickland, Dorothy S. & Michael R. Strickland (Eds.). (1994). Families: Poems That Celebrate the African American Experience (p. 29). Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press. In addition, you may wish to encourage students to come up with piggyback songs that fit this theme. For instance, the song “The Wheels of the Bus” readily lends itself to verses on family members (e.g., “the baby on the bus goes waah, waah, wahh”; “the grandpa on the bus goes ‘there, there, dear’”). Art. Invite students to create pictures showing themselves with a special loved one. Encourage them to depict themselves as seen through the eyes of this person who loves them. Watercolors lend themselves well to impressionistic images of people in loving relationships. You can have students work in pairs, with each student having her or his own paintbrush and large piece of paper but sharing a set of watercolors and a jar of water. Science. In Barnwell’s poem, the author says her nana’s house has no mirrors, so she sees herself reflected in her loving nana’s eyes. To stimulate students’ interest in reflected light and in mirrors, set up a learning center to investigate reflections and mirrors. Provide an assortment of reflective surfaces, such as mirrors, aluminum foil, and chrome or stainless-steel kitchen tools (spoons and spatulas are particularly interesting). If possible, locate the center near an outlet so that you can include a small lamp, as well. If not, a small flashlight or two might be helpful (although they can be distracting if too bright). If students show great interest, add prisms, transparent and translucent plastic objects, and other objects that refract, reflect, distort, shade, and otherwise manipulate light. Literature. Read one or more books about parental love, such as the following: • Greenfield, Eloise. (1991). My Daddy and I… Village Station, NY: Black Butterfly Children’s Books, Writers and Readers Publishing. (Illustrates a warm father-son relationship.) • Joosse, Barbara M. (1991). Mama, Do You Love Me? San Francisco: Chronicle Books. (Shows a loving mother-daughter relationship in the Aleutians.) • Munsch, Robert. (1986). Love You Forever. Willowdale, Ontario, Canada: Firefly Books. (Spanish version: [1992]. Siempre Te Querre. Describes a warm mother-son relationship across the life span.) Another way in which to extend students’ understanding of themselves and others is to read one or more books about children’s emotions. These days, there are many excellent books about children’s emotions, including books about emotions in general and books about specific emotions. Two with universal appeal are: • Modesitt, Jeanne. (1992). Sometimes I Feel Like a Mouse: A book aobut Feelings. New York: Scholastic. (Describes a range of feelings a young child experiences.) • Viorst, Judith. (1972). Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. New York: Aladdin/Macmillan, Scholastic. (Spanish version: Alexander y el Dia Terrible, Horrible, Espantoso, Horroroso. Humorously shows how Alexander’s day goes from bad to worse.) Finally, you may want to read a book affirming each child as a unique individual, such as: • Simon, Norma. (1976). Why Am I Different? Morton Grove, IL: Albert Whitman & Company. Math. As a math activity, explore the patterns in a song about parental love. In choosing a song for this activity, you may use “Hush Little Baby” or other songs described in the preceding music and movement activity. Alternatively, you may want to use the following book: • McMullan, Kate. (1996). If You Were My Bunny. New York: Scholastic. (Describes how various whimsical animal parents lovingly help their children to sleep at night.) In that book, the author creates new lyrics for five traditional lullabies (“Hush Little Baby”; “Rock-a-Bye, Baby”; “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”; and two others). For whichever song (or songs) you choose, invite your students to help you map out the rhyming patterns in the song. You may extend their understanding of patterns by posing a problem for them to solve as a class: What would be an additional verse or two that would follow the same pattern? Exploration Advance Preparation Prepare three wall charts: On one chart, write Lisa Bahlinger’s poem “Night Song” (see below); on the second wall chart, write the poem “Families, Families” (see below); which I wrote with my mother, Dorothy Strickland, and which appears on page 5 of • Strickland, Dorothy S., & Michael R. Strickland (Eds.). (1994). Families: Poems That Celebrate the African American Experience. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press. On the third wall chart, write the question, “Who belongs in a family?” Night Song by Lisa Bahlinger Daddy’s in the kitchen with music turned low dancing cheek to cheek with Momma, he twirls her slow to a warm night song I hum along – we belong. Momma’s golden hair spills down Daddy’s coffee skin. Together, dark and light like the moon in the big-armed night to this laughing song sing it loud and long – we belong. We don’t have to look the same we’re just glad to be a caramel, coffee, cream together forever family and the warm night song runs deep and strong – we belong. Families, Families by Dorothy S. and Michael R. Strickland FAMILIES, FAMILIES All kinds of families. Mommies and daddies, Sisters and brothers, Aunties and uncles, And cousins, too. FAMILIES, FAMILIES All kinds of families. People who live with us, People who care for us, Grandmas and grandpas, And babies, brand new. FAMILIES, FAMILIES All kinds of families. Coming and going, Laughing and singing, Caring and sharing, And loving you. In addition, if a whiteboard or chalkboard is unavailable, post blank chart paper on which to write. Gather language experience paper and appropriate art materials for depicting family members of various realistic skin colors, including an assortment of colorful implements, such as crayons, felt pens, chalk, or pastels. Immerse: Introduce the Poem Read the Bahlinger poem aloud to the children. Using a chalkboard, whiteboard, or chart paper, have children help you find and write down all the color words that Bahlinger used in her poem. Invite students to add to the list other color words to describe skin color. When they get stumped on color words, invite them to think of things that have skin-tone colors, such as cinnamon and chocolate, graham crackers and milk, and to list those words. Read the poem a second time as a choral reading, with the children. Explore the Concept Point out Bahlinger’s concluding line, “We belong.” Using a blank wall chart (or whiteboard or chalkboard), write down students’ suggestions for an alternative closing line to describe their own families. Jot down each student’s “family motto.” Distribute language-experience paper and the art material. Invite the children to depict their own extended families, blending colors, as needed, to truly show the skin colors of their diverse families. Beneath the illustration, have students briefly identify the members of their families and write a brief motto for their own families. You may wish to conclude the activity period at this point, introducing the next poem in a subsequent class period. Immerse: Introduce the Next Poem Using the wall chart of the “Families, Families” poem as a guide, read the poem aloud to the children, then invite them to choral read the poem with you. Explore and Extend the Concept Using the wall chart titled, “Who belongs in a family?” encourage the children to identify the kinds of people who make a family (aunts, cousins, stepbrothers, half-sisters, etc.) and to brainstorm the kinds of actions (eating, playing, doing chores, etc.) or characteristics (big, little, happy, sad, angry, forgiving, etc.) that make a family. Encourage children to think of various family forms (e.g., a grandmother and grandson; a three-generation household with cousins, aunts, and uncles under one roof; a two-mother family; and so on). Experiment with Writing Poems As a whole class, create an original poem that follows the pattern of the “Families, Families” poem. If their ideas start slowing down, refer to the students’ ideas about what characterizes a family. Experimentation To further investigate familial love, have your students explore three poems about the ways in which parents show their children their love. Advance Preparation For each of these poems, you may wish to create a wall chart, so that the children can look at the poem while you read it, they can choral read the poem with you, and they can look at the poem while discussing with you particular features of the poem. First is an excerpt from “Those Winter Days” by Robert Hayden, on page 113 of: • Sword, Elizabeth Hauge, & Victoria Flournoy McCarthy (Eds.). (1995). A Child’s Anthology of Poetry. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco Press. The second poem is “Warmth” by Richard Furst (Grade 10) from page 37 of • Lyne, Sandford (Ed.). (1996). Ten-Second Rain Showers: Poems by Young People. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. Third is an excerpt from “Our Mom’s a Real Nice Mom But She Can’t Cook” by Judith Viorst, which may be found on pages 58-59 of: • Viorst, Judith. (1995). Sad Underwear and Other Complications: More Poems for Children and Their Parents. New York: Altheneum Books for Young Readers. Those Winter Days by Robert Hayden Sundays too my father got up early and put his clothes on in the blueback cold, then with cracked hands that ached from labor in the weekday weather made banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him. I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking. When the rooms were warm, he’d call, and slowly I would rise and dress, … Warmth by Richard Furst (Grade 10) I walked through the empty kitchen to the door, to leave the warmth of home for the bitter-cold anxiety of a Monday at school. Ducking the old dogwood outside, I heard a familiar call, and turned to see my mother waving me off to school, sending me a small fire to keep my heart a little warmer. Our Mom’s A Real Nice Mom But She Can’t Cook By Judith Viorst Mom’s mashed potatoes taste like dirty socks. Her instant oatmeal tastes like instant box. And if she made a pound cake, And she dropped it on your foot, You’d think that it was half a ton of bricks. … Mom’s macaroni’s mush, and though she tries, She wrecks all roasts, incinerates French fries. And when they give out ribbons For Worst Meat loaf in the World, We guarantee that she will win first prize. Mom looks up recipes in every book. She took some lessons once. They never took. She’s kind to kids and animals. She smiles more than she scolds. She reads us books at bedtime. Plays Go Fish when we have colds. She’s good at fixing leaks And changing tires on our Olds, But all her casseroles turn into gook. Our mom’s a real nice mom but she can’t cook. Immerse: Introduce the Poems Invite your students to explore each poem with you, following more or less this procedure: • Read the poem aloud to the students. • Choral read the poem with the students. • Discuss with the students how each parent showed love. Write the students’ answers on a wall chart (or whiteboard or chalkboard). Keep this chart posted, so that you may add to it later, and students may refer to it later, as well. Explore the Concept After you have introduced all the poems, ask questions to extend students’ understanding of the poems. • Viewpoint or empathy questions. Invite the students to add to the list of how parents show their love, suggesting ways in which their own parents (or grandparents, stepparents, foster parents, etc.) how their love. • Language questions. Using Viorst’s poem as a model, invite the students to play with similes, suggesting what various kinds of foods taste like. As needed, prompt them with openers such as “Her brownies are hard as a…” “Her gravy is as runny as…” “Her eggs are as…as…” Texture and smell adjectives yield particularly revolting results. Once you get your students started on this exploration, they’ll have great fun coming up with truly disgusting similes. Be sure to make notes on these similes, which your students can use later on. • Poem-structure questions. With your students, figure out the rhythm pattern (counting syllables or stresses for each line) and the rhyming scheme (using matching lowercase letters to signal the lines that rhyme) in the first two verses of Viorst’s poem. If you and they are up to the challenge, tell them that the Viorst excerpt is missing two middle verses, and invite them to join you in creating another verse to two for the middle of the poem. Refer back to their list of disgusting similes, completed earlier, as an aid to creating these verses. Extend Knowledge Across the Curriculum If your classroom can accommodate it, reinforce your students’ awareness of family relationships by setting up a dramatic-play social-studies learning center: offer as many props and costumes as you have room to provide for children to use to explore family situations. As appropriate, invite your students’ parents to contribute items for use in the center (e.g., outgrown clothing, duplicate kitchen items). In addition, to extend students’ awareness of social studies across the curriculum, try the following activities in the areas of math, science, music and movement, art, and literature. Math. For one thing, you can invite your students to figure out the pattern in the last verse in Viorst’s poem. (Count syllables, figure out the rhyming pattern, etc.) Another idea is to make “mom-proof” fruit or vegetable salad that even Viorst’s “Mom” couldn’t ruin. Use a graph to highlight the counting and measuring involved in this activity. Science. Study the families of other animals, such as fish, chicks, or small mammals. If possible, observe these families directly. (It is often possible to borrow animals from the Humane Society, local museum of science or natural history, or other animal-friendly organizations.) If not, observe videos, recorded television shows (e.g., from Discovery Channel, public television, or Animal Plant, if available), or at least picture books showing how baby animals are helped to survive. In addition, you may want to include any of a number of books with poetry on animals and animal families. Two of the most delightful such poetry books focus, respectively, on insects and on penguins: • Florian, Douglas. (1998). Insectlopedia. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. • Sierra, Judy. (1998). Antarctic Antics: A Book of Penguin Poems. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company. (Both “Regurgitate” and “My Father’s Feet” show some of the ways in which animal parents care for their young. “Regurgitate” seems to have particular appeal for young boys!) Music and Movement. Invite your students to join you in pantomiming and singing the words to “Miss Mary Mack,” in which the title character asks her mother for fifteen cents to see the elephants jump the fence. After playing out the verses they know, invite them to add verses, asking their father, uncle, grandma, and other family members to see other sights or to do other things. Ella Jenkins performed two versions of the Mary Mack song on her You’ll Sing a Song and I’ll Sing a Song album (also available on cassette tape or CD, available from Smithsonian/Folkways Records or from Educational Activities). In addition, this verse (and “Poor Mom!” another verse that lends itself to family fun) may be found in: • Cole, Joanna, & Stephanie Calmenson (Eds.). (1990). Miss Mary Mack and Other Children’s Street Rhymes. New York: A Beech Tree Paperback Book. Art. Set up a learning center at which students can create their own family portraits, using either collages (for older children) or stamping (for younger children). Collages may be made by cutting out family-member silhouettes from various skin-colored construction papers, supplemented with crayons (for adding facial features, clothing, and contexts). Stamping may be done with purchased stamps (from educational-supply, art-supply, or toy stores), used with washable-ink stamp pads, or with handmade stamps (cut from flat sponges, foam rubber, or even lengthwise halves of potatoes), used with skin-tone tempera paints in shallow containers (e.g., Styrofoam meat trays or frozen side-dish trays). Literature. Read books about the many ways in which people live in families. The following books are just a few of the many excellent children’s picture books on different kinds of families and family situations: • Barron Books on “The Family” (four book set) (1985; Eng. Trans. 1987), Woodbury, NY, Barron’s (Spanish versions available): Rius, Maria & J.M. Parramon, Children (Spanish: Los Ninos) and Grandparents (Spanish: Los Abuelos); Vendrell, Carme Sole, & J.M. Parramon, Teenagers (Spanish: Los Jovenes). • Curtis, Jamie Lee. (1996). Tell Me Again About the Night I Was Born. New York: Joanna Cotler Books, HarperCollins. (Describes evry step of how the parents of a young child went to adopt her the night she was born.) • DePaola, Tomie. (1981). Now One Foot, Now the Other. New york: Scholastic. (Describes the changes in how families love and care for one another across the life span.) • Gilman, Phoebe. (1992). Something from Nothing. New York: North Winds Press; Scholastic. (Describes how a Jewish boy’s grandfather shows his love for his grandson through making and modifying a baby blanket through the years.) • Schuchman, Joan. (1979). Two Places to Sleep. Minneapolis, MN: Carolrhoda Books. (Describes a child’s adjustment to having his parents divorce and live in separate houses.) In addition, many poetry books include poems about families. Following are just a few of the many poetry books with family-related poems: • Hall, Donald (Ed.). (1985). The Oxford Book of Children’s verse in America. New York: Oxford University Press. Two poems of particular interest are “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes (p. 247) and “A Lesson for Mamma” by Sydney Dayre Cochran (pp. 158-159). • Strickland, Dorothy S., & Michael R. Strickland (Eds.). (1994). Families: Poems That Celebrate the African American Experience. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press. • Thompson, Eileen (Ed.). (1987). Experiencing Poetry. New York: Globe Book Company, Inc. Three family-oriented poems are “First Lesson” by Philip Booth (p. 59), “Everybody Says” by Dorothy Aldis (P. 25), and “Legacies” by Nikki Giovanni (p. 61). In addition, you may find several other family-oriented poems in the following books: • “Kidnap Poem” by Nikki Giovanni, on page 23 of Strickland, Michael R (Ed.). (1997). Poems That Sing to you. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press. • “Into Mother’s Slide Trombone” by X.J. Kennedy on page 57 of Strickland, Michael R. (Ed.). (1997). My Own Song and Other Poems to Groove To. Honesdale, PA: Wordsong, Boyds Mills Press. • “What Dads Do” by Judith Viorst on page 62 of Viorst, Judith. (1995). Sad Underwear and Other Complications: More Poems for Children and Their Parents. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers. One more book bears mention here because it incorporates both poems and stories suitable for young listeners (and is edited by an important member of my family): • Strickland, Dorothy S. (Ed). (1982/1999). Listen Children: An Anthology of Black Literature. New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, Random House. (For instance, see these poems: Dudley Randall’s “Ancestors,” Lucille Clifton’s “Listen Children,” Harriet Wheatley’s “My Pa Was Never Slave,” and Margaret Walker’s “Lineage”; see also stories by Virginia Hamilton, Kristin Hunter, and Maya Angelou.) Experiment with Writing Poetry. If you work with prereaders, have your students work with you to create a list poem. Start by inviting them to list things they know about families. What distinguishes a list poem from a mere listing is the use of concise, powerful language and effective line breaks. (A highly stylized list poem is “Families, Families,” shown earlier in this chapter.) As you write the items your students suggest, model using concise language and effective line breaks. If you work with older students who read and write, invite your students to create their own poems bout their own families. For most students, the list-poem format may still be the best choice for writing their own poems. In guiding your students to write their own list poems, encourage them to use concise language, stripping away extraneous articles, adjectives, and other words. You may also need to guide them regarding how to use line breaks well, to make the poem easier to read aloud. Instead of the list poem, some older students may be eager and ready to write poems continuing the theme and format of the Viorst poem. A few other students may wish to write free-verse poems similar to the Hayden or the Furst poem. If they are highly motivated to follow these more challenging formats, great! If not, however, list poems offer a very accessible format for beginning to write poetry. As your students complete their poems, invite them to form critics circles for sharing their poems. Critics circles may involve pairs, trios, or slightly larger groups of students, who take turns reading their poems aloud to one another. After each poet reads, each member of the circle tells the poet one thing he or she especially liked about the poem (a juicy word, a pleasing phrase, an interesting topic, and appealing tone, etc.). If your students already have experiences with critics circles (or similar feedback groups), they may, as appropriate, also make one suggestion for improving each poem. It takes a lot of work to foster helpful critics circles, ensuring that all comments are positive and constructive, but if you decide to use them, they yield great benefits, both for the poets and for the critics. Friends and School Increasingly, even very young children are expanding their social world beyond the family, to include friends, neighbors, schoolmates, and teachers and other people in their preschool and school environments. Advance Preparation Prepare two wall charts (or overhead transparencies): On one, write Risa Jordan’ poem “Friendship”; on the other, write the heading, “What Friends Do.” Jordan’s “Friendship” poem may be found on page 11 of: • Moore, Helen H. (1997). A Poem a Day: 180 Thematic Poems and Activities That Teach and Delight All Year Long. New York: Scholastic Professional Services. Moore is an accomplished poet in her own right, and many of her own poems on friendship (e.g., “To a Friend,” p. 11; and “The Fight,” p. 12) and other subjects may be found in her resource book. Friendship by Risa Jordan A friend is a person who wishes you well. And keeps all the secrets that you like to tell. Friends share their toys and their storybooks too, Friends can be older or younger than you. Friends can be real or made up in your mind, But they’re always thoughtful and always kind. Friends can live nearby or very, very far, But your friends are your friends, wherever you are! Immerse: Introduce the Poem Using the wall chart of the “Friendship” poem as a guide, read the poem aloud to the children, then invite them to choral read the poem with you. Explore the Concept. Invite your students to brainstorm with you various things that friends do with and for one another. What are some of the characteristics of their own friends? What do they like about their own friends? In what ways have they been good friends to other people? Who can be a friend? Record their responses on the wall chart, “What Friends Do.” Literature. To further stimulate their thinking about friends, you may want to read one or more books about friendship, such as the following: • Keats, Ezra Jack. (1968). A Letter to Amy. New York: HarperCollins. (Describes Peter’s efforts to invite a friend to his party.) • Lobel, Arnold. Lobel’s Frog and Toad books beautifully illustrate the many complications, difficulties, and enjoyments of having a good friend. All are published in New York, by Harper & Row: (1976), Frog and Toad All Year; (1970), Frog and Toad Are Friends; (1971/1971), Frog and Toad Together. • Viorst, Judith. (1974). Rosie and Michael. New York: Aladdin/Atheneum. (Describes a boy and girl’s friendship.) You may decide also to read additional poems about friendship. A book with a wealth of such poems is: • Thompson, Eileen (Ed.). (1987). Experiencing Poetry. New York: Globe Book Company, Inc. Some of the poems addressing the theme of friendship include those by Langston Hughes (pp. 97, 102), e.e. cummings (p. 52), Judith Viorst (p. 95), W.S. Merwin (p. 96), Richard Wilbur (p. 97), Walt Whitman (p. 103), and May Sarton (p. 104). Finally, three books edited by Paul Janeczko (published in Scarsdale, New York, by Bradbury Press) include many poems on relationships with family members and friends: (1881), Don’t Forget to Fly: A Cycle of Modern Poems: (1985), Pocket Poems Selected for a Journey; (1983), Poetspeak: In Their Work, About Their Work. For many children, their pets also play important roles in their lives, akin to their relationships with family and friends. You may want to include books, poems, and activities related to pets when addressing the themes of family and friends. Experiment with Writing Poems. With your students, review the Jordan poem, highlighting the couplets (rhyming pairs of verse lines) pattern she used. Refer next to the wall chart you have created, listing multitudinous things that friends do and characteristics of friends. On a whiteboard or chalkboard, invite your students to create two or three couplets about friends. If you are working with preschoolers and other prereaders, continue creating couplets as a class. If you are working with older students and other readers, invite them to create their own couplets, working individually, in pairs, or in small groups. Extend Knowledge Across the Curriculum. Extend the theme of friendship across the curriculum by fostering cooperation in various classroom activities. Encourage students to continue to think both of things friends do and of characteristics of friends, and add their ideas to the growing list you have posted on a wall chart. Cooperative activities can be employed in math and science, music and movement, and art. Math and Science. A particularly enjoyable math and science activity that reinforces cooperation is to make butter. • Note. It takes a while for butter to form, so introduce this activity at the beginning of a class period, and have your students do other things before and after they take their turns helping to make the butter. Be sure, however, to allow time at the end of the period for the students to sample the butter and the buttermilk they make. Pretty much all you need is a two-cup liquid measuring cup, a sturdy airtight translucent plastic container that can easily be grasped by students, enough paper cups for every student, 1 cup of cream (must be whole cream, not half and half or some other substitute) for every 12 or so students, some butter knives, and something onto which to spread butter (1 graham cracker per student works quite well). Have one or more students measure the cream into the sturdy container. Have each student in the class take a turn shaking the container vigorously. If you have a small class, students may need to take multiple turns shaking it. Eventually, the butter will separate from the buttermilk. Have the students measure the buttermilk in the liquid measuring cup. Work as a class to figure out how much butter they have, given the amount of buttermilk they have. Ask how many students want to sample the buttermilk, and count up the number of cups needed for those students. Divide the buttermilk into the correct number of cups. (Watch for students who have milk allergies.) Portion out the butter, and spread it onto graham crackers (or some bread squares or some other spreadable surface). If possible, schedule a chance for students to wash their hands. In any case, invite everyone to enjoy the buttery snack your children cooperatively created! Music and Movement. Use a cassette player or some other device to play Israeli hora music (or some other cross-cultural traditional music that has an intriguing rhythm). Have students form a long line, grasping one another’s shoulders or waists or holding hands. As the music plays, encourage the students to wind the line in and around one another, inventing their own patterns and dance steps. If your classroom cannot accommodate enough space for everyone to participate in the line (and you cannot go outside for this activity), encourage the nondancers to keep rhythm, either by clapping or by using rhythm instruments. If you have no way to play any music for your students, play another cooperative music-and-movement activity, such as singing and moving to the “Hokey Pokey.” The idea for the “Winding Game” and other cross-cultural children’s games may be found in: • Duckert, Mary. (1993). A World of Children’s Games. New York: Friendship Press. Art. Set up a learning center for creating a mural showing some of the many things that friends do. Make accessible a long sheet of butcher paper, either posting it at the bottom of a wall or laying it out on a long table (or perhaps even in an out-of-the-way section of the floor). Offer crayons or felt pens for children to draw their depictions. Alternatively, offer an assortment of outdated people-oriented magazines and children’s catalogues, and invite students to cut out pictures showing friends doing things together. Have them paste those pictures onto the butcher paper, then draw contexts around the pictures. Extend Understanding Through Poetry. School is one of the first places where children begin to expand their social world beyond the family and into the community. Encourage your students to expand their social awareness of the school environment by introducing additional poems about school in particular. The following poems offer distinctive (and often humorous) views of school: • “First Day at School” (pp. 129-130) and “The Lesson” (pp. 127-128), both by Roger McGough, and “My Teacher” (p. 107) by Deepak Kalha in Rosen, Michael (Ed.). (1985/1993). The Kingfisher Book of Children’s Poetry. New York: Kingfisher Books, Grisewood & Dempsey. • “First Day of School” by Judith Viorst (p. 12) in Viorst, Judith. (1995). Sad Underwear and Other Complications: More Poems for Children and Their Parents. New York: Atheneum Books for Young Readers. • “And the Answer Is…,” “Recess Rules,” and “Book Report” in Shields, Carol Diggory. (1995). Lunch Money and Other Poems About School. New York: Scholastic, by arrangement with Dutton Children’s Books, Penguin. (This book offers various other poems about school, as well.) • “Today Has Been Turned Upside Down” by Anthony Jaecks, Grade 5, and many other poems by young children and adolescents, in Lynne, Sandford (Ed.). (1996). Ten-Second Rain Showers: Poems by Young People. New York: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. The Community, the Nation, and the World Immersion: The Community Once children enter school, the school offers both a means of expanding their social world through peers and friends and a means of discovering their community, their nation, and the wider world, through field trips, books, lessons, and activities. Invite your students to start looking beyond the classroom and the schoolyard to notice the other people in their community. On a series of wall charts (or on a long roll of butcher paper), invite students to brainstorm with you all the things that they can see about people. For instance, how do people look? (Notice general physical features such as head, arms, legs; distinctive features such as skin, hair, and eye color and the shapes of people’s bodies and body parts.) How do people move? (Notice movements such as strutting, strolling, skating, and bicycling.) What do people do? (Notice activities such as reading, sleeping, eating, etc.) In essence, you are constructing a resource, which they will use late for creating a poem. Once you are satisfied that your students have brainstormed as many observations as they can, use the accompanying worksheet to immerse your students in Lois Lenski’s “Sing a Song of People.” Insert worksheet “Sing a Song Of People” about here Advance preparation. Duplicate enough copies of the worksheet for each student to have one. In addition, if you are working with younger children, copy the worksheet onto a transparency, for use with an overhead projector. Gather appropriate art materials for drawing, such as crayons, felt pens, or colored pencils. Introduce the Poem. Distribute the worksheet, for use as a whole-group activity. Read the poem aloud to the children, having the students follow along on their own papers (or looking at the overhead transparency). Have the students follow the first set of directions with you, marking off the four-line stanzas with their pencils as you do so on the transparency. Invite the children to join you in choral reading of the poem, highlighting the rhythm and rhyme structure of the poem. Explore the Concept. If you are using this worksheet with older students, read over the directions with the students, ask students whether they have any questions about the directions, and then invite the students to work in pairs or in small groups to complete the worksheet. If you are working with younger children, have the students follow the directions with you, as you fill in the worksheet on the transparency. 1. Poem-structure questions. What pattern does Lois Lenski use for her poem? Look at each of the poem’s four-line stanzas, and count the syllables (or stressed syllables) in each line. How many syllables are in each of the four lines of each stanza? Which lines rhyme? 2. Language questions. What word does Lenski use more than any other? How many times does she use it? Why does she use it so many times? What other word (or words) could she use instead? 3. Viewpoint or empathy questions. Look at the people who are around you right now. What are they doing? How do they look? Extend Knowledge Across the Curriculum. In addition, reinforce your students’ awareness of people, acquired through exploring the poem, by setting up a people-oriented social-studies learning center: • For young children, set up a dramatic-play learning center, offering an assortment of community-helper props and costumes. (For instance, include a mail-carrier’s satchel, a firefighter’s hat, a police officer’s badge, a doctor’s stethoscope, and a librarian’s stamp pad. Don’t forget to include family-oriented costumes and props, as well, such as a baby doll and stroller, a father’s jacket, and a mother’s coat.) Younger students need more realistic props and settings to facilitate their play, as they have fewer experiences and less rich cognitive schemata on which to draw when they are role playing various interactions with people in their community. • For older students, set up a learning center in which students can use either puppets or figurines to role play various people. The figurines may be wooden or plastic, such as those that are used with Legos, wooden blocks, or other construction toys. Include both community helpers and family members in the assortment of people. As children develop and mature, they are better able to draw on their experiences and imagination to role play assorted interactions in the community. Therefore, although realistic props may still enhance the experience, they are less important for older students than for younger ones. To extend students’ awareness of social studies across the curriculum, try the following activities in the areas of literature, music and movement, art, and math and science. Literature. Read any of the myriad books available about people in a community, such as these two: • Cowen-Fletcher, Jane. (1994). It Takes a Village. New York: Scholastic. (Describes how a village helps out when a big sister loses track of her little brother.) • Raskin, Ellen. (1996). Nothing Ever Happens On My Block. New York: Scholastic. (Shows the incredible goings-on around a boy who complains that nothing exciting ever occurs.) Music and Movement. Try using the tune for the nursery rhyme “Sing A Song of Sixpence” with Lois Lenski’s words. (It actually works quite well.) With your students, invent some additional verses to use with this tune. In addition, sing one or two traditional songs that highlight community works, such as “The People on the Bus” and “This Is the Way We…” (to the tune of “Here We Go ‘Round the mulberry Bush”). Invite your students to make up additional piggyback verses to these songs and to add their own hand or body movements to accompany the songs. Art. Invite your students to work in small groups to create minimurals, based on the pictures of people they drew on the Lenski worksheet. If your classroom setup allows it, have your students use bold tempera paints to create their minimurals. If not, have them use felt pens and crayons. If your classroom space allows it, post each group’s minimural on your classroom walls, thereby creating one large mural of people in their community. Math and Science. Read the classic story “Stone Soup” to your children. One of the many sources for this enchanting story about community cooperation is: • Brown, Marcia. (1947/1975) Stone Soup. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, a division of Macmillan. (Spanish Edition: [1991; translated by Teresa Mlawer]. Sopa de Piedras. New York: Lectorum Publications.) If you don’t have accss to any resources for the story, you can tell the story in simplified form, perhaps using flannel-board pieces, as available. Basically, a poor stranger enters a town, and it seems that no one will feed the stranger. The stranger then asks to borrow a pot in which to cook “stone soup” and offers to share the stone soup with whoever will provide a pot. Someone does, and soon, other villagers start noticing the stranger cooking the stone soup. They ask what’s going on, and the stranger says he’s cooking stone soup – but it would taste ever so much better if only it had a carrot (or some other food item). A villager offers a carrot in exchange for partaking in the stone soup once it is cooked. Pretty soon, the stone soup contains contributions from everyone in the village, and everyone indeed enjoys sharing the delicious stone soup. Send a note home with your students, asking their parents to contribute inexpensive food items for your class’s stone soup. (Give them at least a week to get the items. You’ll probably end up with lots of potatoes, carrots, and celery.) Once you have all the needed items, you’re ready to make your stone soup. Bring a large electric crock-pot, some bouillon cubes, some herbs, and some paring knives and cutting boards to school. With your students, make a wall-chart graph (or a recipe list) of the items you will put into the stone soup. Have a teacher aide or a parent volunteer supervise pairs of students as they wash and cut the food items. Toss those items into the crock pot, add the seasonings and bouillon (and anything else you want to add, such as stewing tomatoes or tomato sauce), and turn on the pot. If you have leftover raw vegetables, that’s fine. Set them aside, for comparison later with the cooked items. At the very last, place a small, clean stone into the crock pot. Bear in mind that the soup will take many hours to cook, so you may want to plan for this to be a two-day project. Be sure to take appropriate safety precautions with the crock pot and with the cooked soup. As with any cooking projects, be careful with electrical appliances and water, and exercise extreme caution with any hot liquids and vegetables once they have been heated. Invite all students to taste the soup, but don’t push anyone to have any who truly doesn’t want any. (Very rarely does a student completely refuse to have any at all! As always, however, be alert to potential food allergies.) This activity is particularly good for reinforcing the notion that a community of people can accomplish a great deal when they all work together. Exploration: The Nation Introduce A Poem Make a wall chart for three verses and the chorus of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” (Note. You may want to write the refrain [chorus] on a separate chart, so that you can refer back to it each time you return to it.) This Land Is Your Land by Woody Guthrie Refrain This land is your land, this land is my land, From California to the New York island; From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters, This land was made for you and me. As I was walking that ribbon of highway, I saw above me that endless skyway; I saw below me that golden valley; This land was made for you and me. Refrain I’ve roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts And all around me a voice was sounding: This land was made for you and me. Refrain When the sun was shining and I was strolling, And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling, As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting: This land was made for you and me. Refrain If possible, introduce your students to Guthrie’s song by sharing with them Kathy Jakobsen’s elaborately illustrated book depicting his song: • Guthrie, Woody. (1956/1958/1998). This Land Is Your Land (ill.: Kathy Jakobsen; scrapbook test: Janelle Yates; tribute text: Peet Seeger). Boston: Little Brown. In any case, go over the lyrics of Guthrie’s song as a poem before introducing it as a song. Explore the Concept. Explore the ideas introduced in Guthrie’s poem through cross-curricular activities in music and movement, math and science, art, and literature. Music and Movement. Sing Guthrie’s song once all the way through. Sing it a second time, clapping hands (or using rhythm instruments) to the rhythm. Sing the song a third time, making up hand motions to accompany the actions described in the song (e.g., fingers “walking” and “strolling”; ringers pointing to “you and me”). Math and Science. Prepare a dish using a recipe that involves food items from across the United States. Possibilities include a diverse array of pizza toppings, sandwich (or cracker) spreads and fixings, or cracker (or chip) dips. Art. Make magic pictures of scenes from America’s landscape. Have students use crayons darkly and thickly to create a colorful page of multicolored crayon work. Provide black tempera paint for each student to completely coat the crayoned page with black paint. After the paint has dried, invite the student to scratch out (using the blunt end of a paintbrush or some other implement) a picture of some scenery (trees, desert-scapes, mountains, oceans, etc.). By scraping away portions of the black paint, they reveal the colorful crayon beneath. These pictures look gorgeous when they are completed, almost regardless of what your students scratch out. Literature. Read other books about people and places, such as the following: • Coles, Robert. (1995). The Story of Ruby Bridges. New York: Scholastic. (Tells the true story of the six-year-old African-American girl who desegregated New Orleans schools.) • Shapp, Martha and Charles. (1962). Let’s Find Out About Houses. New York: Franklin Watts. (Describes many kinds of houses in many kinds of places.) • Sweeney, Joan. (1996). Me on the Map. New York: Scholastic, by arrangement with Crown Publishers. (A great introduction to geography for young readers.) Another classroom resource you may want to subscribe to all year long is National Geographic World magazine, published for young readers by the National Geographic Society (which also publishes atlases and other books suitable for every age level). In addition, many other poems have been written about American history and about famous Americans, and they may be found in almost any book of poems for young children. Among the famous Americans who are often praised in verse are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and Paul Revere. You may want to seek out these poems when you are addressing specific times and events in American history. Finally, you may enjoy getting additional ideas from the following resource, which offers literature-based curriculum ideas, divided into sections on picture books, story books, and chapter books: • McCarthy, Tara. (1992). Literature-Based Geography Activities: An Integrated Approach. New York: Scholastic Professional Books. Experimentation: The World Extend the Concept. For most young children, an understanding of the world beyond their own country is foreign. For them, the key to broadening their understanding of other people in other places is to link novel aspects of those experiences to familiar ones. For instance, everyone enjoys eating, although different people eat different kinds of things because they live in different places and have different kinds of foods available to them. Everyone enjoys celebrating special occasions with music and dance, but different people have different ways of celebrating. Everyone has a home, but… you get the idea. Hence, you may want to try introducing your students to cross-cultural appreciation through a few cross-curricular activities. Following are some activities that may foster some cross-cultural appreciation in your students in the areas of music and movement, math and science, art, and literature. For additional ideas, you may enjoy the following teacher resource books: • Two thematic units by Teacher Created Materials (Huntington Beach, California): Native Americans, Primary (1991) by Leigh Severson and Friendship, Primary (1991) by Janet Hale. (This publisher also produces many thematic units for grades 4-6, including “Ancient Egypt: Literature-Based Activities for Thematic Teaching, Grades 4-6,” and units on ancient Greece, Native Americans, and other cultural and historical themes.) • Four nation-specific thematic units for grades K-3 by Creative Teaching Press (Cypress, California), including three by Karen Bauer and Rosa Drew (1994) – Kenya, Mexico, and Japan – and one by Sara Griffiths Butler (1995) – Brazil; this “World Neighbor Series” also includes books on China, Germany, Vietnam, and the “global village.” • Milord, Susan. (1992). Hands Around the World: 365 Creative Ways to Build Cultural Awareness & Global Respect. Charlotte, VT: Williamson Publishing. In addition to the hundreds of daily activities, this book provides lists of additional resources and some comparative cultural views on topics such as growth and development, ending/beginning a year, wishes and superstition, and many more. Music and Movement. Although many poems about the wider world may be too sophisticated conceptually or linguistically, many folk songs (poetic verses set to traditional tunes) are highly appealing and accessible to young children. Invite your students to sing folk songs from around the world. For instance, some of the folk songs of Mexico and Latin America are peppy, fun songs to sing, such as “La Cucaracha,” “Las Mananitas,” and “De Colores.” Also, Jose Marti’s ballad for Cuba’s liberation, “Guantanamera,” has become almost an international anthem. Several suitable songs (with additional curriculum ideas) may be found in: • Downs, Cynthia, and Terry Becker. (1991). Bienvenidos: A Monthly Bilingual/Bicultural Teacher’s Resource Guide to Mexico & Hispanic Culture. Minneapolis, MN: T.S. Denison. Several albums of multicultural and cross-cultural music include the following: • Emilio Delgado’s Fiesta Musical: A Musical Adventure through Latin America for Children, in English and Spanish (1994, Music for Little People) • Ella Jenkins’s albums I Know the Colors in the Rainbow (Educational Activities) and Multicultural Children’s Songs (Ages 3-8) (Smithsonian/Folkways, 1995) • Family Folk Festival: A Multi-Cultural Sing Along (Music for Little People; includes Pete Seeger and many other singers and songwriters; available on audiotape cassette or CD) • Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Gift of the Tortoise: A Musical journey through Southern Africa (Music for Little People; available on tape or CD) • Tom Wasinger, The World Sings Goodnight: World Lullabies Sun in Native Voices (1993, Silver Waves Records and Amnesty International, available on tape or CD) In addition, recall the Duckert book, mentioned in the preceding section on friendships, which you may use as a resource for cross-cultural children’s games. Math and Science. Make a dish using a recipe that involves food items from around the world. For a very simple, no-heat recipe, offer plain or vanilla yoghurt with an international assortment of toppings or mix-in items. Encyclopedias offer a good resource for finding out the national origins of various fruits and other foodstuffs. In addition, you may find numerous ideas for toppings and mix-ins listed on page 29 of: • Cook, Deanna F. (1995). The Kids’ Multicultural Cookbook: Food & Fun around the World. Charlotte, VT: Kids Can! Williamson Publishing. In addition, a picture book about an Indian folktale beautifully illustrates the power of mathematical exponents: • Demi. (1997). One Grain of Rice: A Mathematical Folktale. New york: Scholastic. Art. Numerous resource guides offer suggestions for making a wide array of art projects to foster cross-cultural appreciation. One possibility is the crayon-relief activity described in the Learning-Center Task Card, “People I Love,” which you may use as a guide for implementing this activity. Essentially, crayon relief is the method used for making batik cloth (an Indonesian method of textile design). If you have any samples available, you may show students clothing or cloth that has been decorated via the batik technique. Essentially, batik is cloth for which wax (like the crayons) traces out a design, and then the cloth is covered with (or immersed in) a dye solution (like the paint solution). Learning-Center Task Card, “People I Love” Objective Explore family relationships by depicting an interaction with beloved family members Materials • Dilute solution of tempera paint • Thick paintbrushes • Crayons in a variety of colors • Manila construction paper or newsprint Directions 1. Use crayons to draw a picture of yourself doing something you enjoy with the people you love. Sign your name and today’s date in crayon. 2. Once you have completed your drawing, paint over the entire sheet of paper with the dilute tempera paint solution. 3. Put the painting in a place where it can dry. 4. (For older students: On a separate sheet of paper, write down what is happening in your picture. Once the paint is dry, staple or tape your description to your picture.) Other art projects may include masks, costumes, paper dolls, decorative and useful musical instruments, murals, weavings, pottery and other clay objects, woodworking, beadwork, and jewelry. Two resource books with a wealth of cross-cultural art activities are: • Ritter, Darlene. (1993). Multicultural Art Activities from the Cultures of Africa, Asia and North America, Grades 2-5. Cypress, CA: Creative Teaching Press. • Ryder, Willet. (1995). Celebrating Diversity with Art: Thematic Projects for Every Month of the Year. Glenview, IL: GoodYearBooks, Scott Foresman. Literature. The Creative Teaching Press “World Neighbor Series” books also provide lists of suitable books for each country covered, and Ritter’s book on art also provides comprehensive lists of appropriate children’s literature from Africa, Asia, and North America. A few books not included in these lists are the following: • Armstrong, Jennifer. (1993). Chin Yu Min and the Ginger Cat. New York: Crown Publishers (Dragonfly Books). • Baumann, Hans. (1985). Thank You, Brother Bear. New York: Philomel Books, Putnam; Scholastic. • Cha, Dia. (1996). Dia’s Story Cloth: The Hmong People’s Journey of Freedom. New York: Lee and Low Books. • Collins, Stanley H. (1997). Ananse the Spider: Why Spiders Stay on the Ceiling (Sign Language Literature Series). Eugene, OR: Garlic Press. (Written in American English, with American sign-language translations. Also available in sign-language versions: Coyote and Bobcat, a Navajo story; Raven and Water Monster, a Haida story; and Fountain of Youth, a Korean story.) • Jaffe, Nina. (1995). Older Brother, younger Brother: A Korean Folktale. Puffin Books, Penguin Books. • Johnson, Tony. (1994). The Tale of Rabbit and Coyote. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, Putnam & Grosset; Scholastic. • Myers, Walter Dean. (1995). The Story of the Three Kingdoms. New York: HarperCollins. • Slobodkina, Esphyr. (1940/1968). Caps for Sale: A Tale of a Peddler, Some Monkeys, and Their Monkey Business. New York: Scholastic. (Spanish version: Se Venden Gorras: La Historia de un Vendedor Ambulante, Unos Monos, y Sus Travesuras.) In addition, be on the lookout for numerous books by Aliki Brandenberg (often cited simply as “Aliki”), Tomie de Paola, Gerald McDermott, and Robert San Souci. Each of these authors has written several books of folktales from around the world. Also, UNICEF (the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) publishes many wonderful books containing children’s stories from around the world, and the following books offer several folktales from various cultures around the world: • DeSpain, Pleasant. (1993). Thirty-Three Multicultural Tales to Tell. Little Rock, AR: August House Publishers, a Merrill Court Press Book. • McCarthy, Tara. (1992). Multicultural Fables and Fairy Tales: Stories and Activities to Promote Literacy and Cultural Awareness, Grades 1-4. New York: Scholastic Professional Books. • Pellowski, Anne (Ed.). (1993). A World of Children’s Stories. New York: Friendship Press. Experiment with Writing Poetry. Briefly review the format of Woody Guthrie’s song with your students. Invite your students to create additional verses to his poem, using the following refrain (adapted by Shari Hatch): This world is your world, th