Mrs. Hannon's First Grade Fly on the Wall 

At Easter we made Resurrection Sets and a Stations of the Cross book. What faith-filled students I have. We learned so much with these interactive, hands on activities. Children show so much of themselves through their drawings. Beautiful…

Aren’t they cute? This year, Mr. and Mrs. Tiger raised three owlets. I am looking forward to checking in with the live stream next year. We had such fun with our owl unit!

Over the years my students have lost a lot of teeth, but never five all in the same day and at school!

We sure have an amazing amount of talent in our students at St. Malachy. Some current and former students of mine and/or the school were involved in a production of a new musical, Grimm, with Hendricks Civil Theater earlier this year. It was great!

It has been awhile since I made this home visit, so it is a little challenging to remember much, BUT there is one thing I can remember. To Zachary, the highlight was being able to show me his collection of Skylanders (whatever they are really). I also had fun seeing Lindsay, Zachary’s big sister, who was also my first grade student. I love it when I have the whole family. Thank you for your hospitality!

Just so you know, I did google Skylanders. I gather that is a video game (c’mon Mrs. Hannon, get with the program), but I don’t dare to try to play or understand it all. All I know is I saw characters such as Big Bang Trigger Happy, Twin Blade Chop Chop, and Lava Barf Eruptor. Sorry Zachary, I am hopeless. It must come from having four daughters and no boys.  Before I published here, I did play a minigame online. I guess it is really no different than PacMan (I was a star at that back in the day) or Donkey Kong, or more recently, Candy Crush (which I have about given up on). P.S. Who introduced you to Skylanders? I bet it was your dad..haha!

 

I am not really a snob…at least I hope no one thinks that! I just posted a note on Facebook about some editing and grammatical errors I found when reading the introduction to the new Indiana State Standards. I don’t know why I enjoy editing/revising; I guess it is because I love writing so much (or I say I do…I have little time for actually doing it). I am just one of those people who notice errors easily, and writing comes easily to me. That may also be why it is one of my favorite things to teach. And…GULP!…I teach outside of the required standards. With Common Core, and similarly from what I can tell, with the new Indiana standards, writing is very limited.

My training has enabled me to teach personal narrative, how-to writing, nonfiction writing, poetry, all about writing, feature article writing, persuasive writing, and more if I can get it all in, which I don’t always do. I do make sure I get in the standards, but I go beyond that if at all possible. When completing my Masters fairly recently, I was invited to edit, along with others, a professor’s text which was a proud moment for me. I was even paid for it, not that this was important to me. I was also interviewed and there is a vignette in the book about my classroom work. If you are really interested in reading a textbook about using children’s literature to teach about social issues such as bullying, gender fairness, bigotry, marginalization of people, etc., check out anything by Chris Leland. Teaching Children’s Literature: It’s Critical! is the text I am referring to…or should that be “to which I am referring.” Ha! I am in the word cloud acknowledgements as well as the vignette. I admit it; I’m kind of proud of of this.

I have been trained for years and years on a workshop approach to teaching writing. A workshop approach allows each student writer to “process” in their own way. In the real world, not all people go through this process in the same way. Ask any published author or just a regular person like me, and you will find a myriad of ways a person goes about forming their ideas. For me, I do a lot of it in my head before I draft anything. Sometimes the whole assignment is formed, and then it is revised once I get that down. 

With young children, I like to allow them to find their way. They won’t find their way in first grade, or second grade, or even as high school students. It takes a long time to develop. And like anything, it will evolve along the way. It is really impossible to provide the setting for writing in a classroom. One of the things I teach my students is that writers need to have time to think, so if I observe a student doing so and not immediately putting pencil to paper, it is perfectly fine (and I can tell if they are really thinking). I teach my students that writers most often pull from their own lives, their own schema, and incorporate those ideas into their writing. One of the best things about writing workshop, is sitting to confer with a young author and asking “How are you doing today as a writer?” I don’t confer nearly enough, but this is also an opportunity for me to get to know my students really well. Oh, and besides teaching from a genre perspective, I LOVE teaching craft!

I also share many “stories behind the stories” of authors I have met or researched. I am a bit of an author stalker or collector. Through networking on Facebook or through many professional events I have attended, I have met a number. My huge wish is to have a visit from one to our school in the future. I intend to work on that to see if I can help make it happen.

Although I am a grammar snob, I wanted you to know that when it comes to the teaching of writing to first graders, I am not one of those red pen people. There is a great picture book about this very thing called The Little Red Pen by Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel. I look for the gems, not the mistakes. I also am happy to let my students use inventive spelling, while gently pointing out to them that they do actually know the word they spelled incorrectly. Conventions are extremely difficult for some first graders. In fact, they are difficult for some eighth graders. I know that some superintendents or principals would gasp at any student exemplar in the hallway which isn’t perfect. I just don’t get that; if you want to turn a young person off to fluent writing, and a love of writing, just start pointing out all of their mistakes. I will often return a piece of writing to a student and just say “See if you can make it better.” And any parent looking at “perfect” writing displayed in the halls of a school need to know it is fabricated. My favorite organization for this philosophy is the Indiana Partnership for Young Writers where I have received much training over the past 15 years.

I am kind of rambling here, but I will stop by saying, if you find errors in my own writing, I KNOW! I do it all the time, but unlike the DOE of the State of Indiana, I am not writing for public domain or publication (not yet anyway). It is always important to have fresh eyes look at your writing. It is difficult to edit your own writing. I would think that the DOE has plenty of fresh eyes around to take this on.

For years I have been reading Mr. Popper’s Penguins to my first graders. Although I prefer books, each year I wondered outloud with my students if it would ever be made into a movie. So I was very excited when I heard a couple of years ago that it would, finally, become a movie. I was much disappointed (as I should have expected) that it was next to nothing like the book. I wish it had been left in the setting of the 1930’s. The book does have some rather obscure vocabulary (even for me), such as “calcimine,” and other words which are challenging for first graders since the book is more suited for Grades 3-5 (if the student is reading independently). The responses to the book as shown below are proof that the students knew and understood what was going on. Reading aloud books of a much higher level than the students themselves can read is such a great tool for increasing comprehension and vocabulary, plus it is just plain fun. I remember reading such books aloud to my own girls far into the intermediate grades and beyond. You know they are engaged when they beg you for just one more chapter! There are not a ton of illustrations in this book, so their visualization of some of the story scenes are right on. We laughed and laughed over the antics of the Captain Cook and his “family” and it is always kind of sad to close the last page of such a wonderful story. Here are their favorite parts of the book:

When Captain Cook says “Gook!”

When the penguin was in the ice tub.

My favorite part was when Mr. Popper got Captain Cook (“Ork!”).

The penguins with their eggs in the ice box.

Going down and up the stairs (“Gaw!”).

When the refrigerator guy came over.

It was when the penguins went on (the stage).

“Ork!”

Mrs. Popper playing the military march.

When Mr. Popper said goodbye to Mrs. Popper.

I like when Mr. Popper put holes in the ice box.

My favorite part is when they slid on their bellies.

This is when the penguins surprisingly appeared from beneath the stage, making the opera singer suddenly screech in the middle of a song. (when the lady screamed)

When they had to eat lots of beans (between the house painting season being over for Mr. Popper, plus the expense of providing for the penguins, yes the Popper family subsisted on beans).

 

Back in February I put up a piece of chart paper where students could share their thoughts and questions. We aren’t always able to investigate all of these questions, but this is a great way to discover your children’s interests and and learn more about the way they think. It also helps them become aware of their own minds — metacognition. Sometimes we can actually find the answers, and sometimes we can’t, but we just keep thinking. I wonder why Pluto is not a planet anymore (poor Pluto), and I wonder what heaven looks like (me too). Great questions, boys!

 

Making inferences seems one of the most difficult things to teach young children, even though they do it all the time but don’t realize it. It is hard to step away from straight question and answer format. Making inferences, like many other reading skills, involves risk taking, and we are often not sure of ourselves enough to say what we think. It makes us vulnerable. We fear being wrong or making a mistake. It works the same way with children. Once inferences can be recognized in reading, it will be easier in the future to in a way that we can have our readers make inferences. That is what “show, don’t tell” is all about. Here was an activity from earlier in the year where I emptied my purse and had the students tell me what inferences they could make about me based on what was inside. This was a lot of fun! Imagine seeing into your teacher’s purse (as you may expect, I made sure it was cleaned out!).

Since life got in the way a bit for me in March and April, I have more posts to write and pictures to share. I will try to catch up on what you have missed over the next few days (and possibly into the summer since there is much to accomplish). Please look around and catch up if you can..fun stuff!