I have a calendar hanging on my closet door that I use to plan my outfits each week. (Yes, I do. Because I love clothes. I love to shop. I love to get dressed. When we got to the part in the story when Adam and Eve found out they were naked, I screamed – internally of course because I’m shy – “FINALLY. Now they can GET DRESSED.”)
This weekend, I read on Sunday’s spot on the calendar that, “Daylight Savings Ends.” The statement made me sad. No more saving light, I thought as I pulled a summer dress off a hanger. No more evening runs when Jesse gets home from work, I decided while I layered a red cardigan over the dress. It’ll be months before we meet friends at the pool and share beers and so many laughs while our kids swim and the music plays on and on, I considered as I pulled out a pair of turquoise cowboy boots and a matching necklace from my closet, and placed them where my dress was. I surveyed what I’d done, and satisfied, I wrote the items down on my calendar on the day when light can no longer be saved.
Here’s a round-up of the stories that were not saved, and instead, set loose in the library this month:
K-1: The Bumpy Little Pumpkin by Margery Cuyler. We learned that pumpkins come in many shapes and sizes – just like us.
Can You Make A Scary Face? by Jan Thomas. Not just for Halloween, this book is perfect for any time of year. It’s about pretend, it’s about decision-making, it’s about following directions, and it is loads of laughs. Nobody will be able to sit still (and they’re not supposed to) during this story. My only suggestion, don’t read it before bed. You’ll make the process ten times longer because your children will be wound up.
Laura Numeroff’s 10-Step Guide to Living with Your Monster. We made our own guides for living with monsters, and drew our own after reading Numeroff’s fun story.
Wee Witches Halloween by Jerry Smith. A bunch of witches go to school to learn to be scary, and it doesn’t work out so well for them. They’re just too cute. After I read this story, I handed out a color-by-number witch coloring page.
Pick a Circle, Gather Squares: A Fall Harvest of Shapes by Felicia Sanzari Chernesky. Here’s a beautifully illustrated story that shows a little girl and her dad traipsing through a pumpkin patch, and along the way, there are a variety of shapes to spot: triangles, circles, rectangles, diamonds, hexagons, and even hearts. It’s a treasure hunt of shapes, if you will. After we read the story, I found a DIY jack-o-lantern using only shapes from Make Learning Fun the students could work on.
2-3: We read Cam Jansen and the Mystery at the Haunted House by David A. Adler during October. Before I started reading, we had a conversation about the difference between being scared, and standing in a mystery. We decided that when you’re only afraid, you just bolt. You need to get out of wherever you are. But if you’re in a mystery, and this is my favorite response from a second grader, “you can’t figure out something right now, but you will stay there until you do.” We might be afraid, but we can still look around. May it always be this way for these growing up students (and for us, too).
My favorite lesson with these grades happened when they came into the library, and I told them there was a folder taped shut and marked, “Top Secret” on my computer. It was addressed to their class. “Should I open it?” I asked.
“YES!!!!”
Inside, was a letter from one of the characters in the book asking the class to please help solve this mystery at the haunted house. I opened up the folder and out came torn pieces of paper with sentences on them. I read a few of them out loud, and said, “You guys. These are clues! I think we need to put them in order!”
So we did. We huddled up around the floor and taped the pieces of paper in order of how we thought they should go.
It was the first time in a few years that teaching felt like play.
4: We are reading The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch, and Save Me A Seat by Sarah Weeks. I’m turning some of the 4th grade reading standards into questions for students to answer after I read. I think I can do better with the 4th grade classes, but until I think of something different, I figure I can’t go wrong with reading out loud and asking questions.
5: We are plugging away at Armstrong and Charlie. This past week, we had a discussion about swear words in stories because there are a handful of them in this this one. It was an interesting conversation, and I think the 5th graders handled it well. We talked about what swearing revealed about the character who used those words. We talked about the difference between humor and put-downs. I think this book handles race, equity, friendship, and growing up so well, and I’m glad I get to read it with this group of kids.
In one part of the story, a character is introduced, and she is riding a skateboard. The narrator watches her, and while he doesn’t say it, readers can tell he’s curious about her. We read another part of the story that day where an adult tells Armstrong, the other narrator, to “be who you are, and not who others expect you to be.” I thought these two scenes paired together would be interesting to play around with, so I am having the 5th graders design a skateboard that reveals, in all symbols, who they are, what others expect them to be, and what happens when these two images merge. I want to challenge this idea that we should only always be who we are, because what’s the fun in that? What if someone sees something in us that we never realized we had? What if we don’t always know who we are, and we depend, at times, on those we love and respect to help pull something out of us?
I told them the story about when I went scuba diving, and how afraid I was, and also, how hard learning scuba diving was for me. I didn’t expect I would be able to do it, but nobody in my group gave in to my idea of what I believed I was capable of. And when I finally did jump into the Great Barrier Reef, and held on to my instructor’s hand for dear life, the group of swimmers stayed with me the entire time. They couldn’t leave me even if they wanted to. We had to stay together. I told the 5th graders I wanted to say I was sorry that everyone had to stay with me, but I couldn’t because there is no hand signal for I’m sorry. You have one for “shark,” and “I’m OK,” but there’s no place for apologizing in that eternal body of water. I realized that day how much I say I’m sorry, and even though I was still terrified, those few moments underwater were the most freeing for me because I couldn’t apologize even if I wanted to. I would’ve never learned that if I hadn’t jumped into that water against my expectations.
I’m not sure we can really save light, or even if we should. It seems to me light, like stories, is a tad too wild to be contained anyway. I wondered about this over the weekend while I considered what else there was to do with the warm weather items in my closest.
Besides, I’d like to figure out what it is the dark has to offer.
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