Enrich Student Writing by Mining for "Gems"

     I fell in love with an image today.

     "They traveled in one group, like children inside a camel costume."  Something about this image in Meg Wolitzer's best-seller, The Female Persuasion, spoke to me.  (It didn't hurt, either, that one of the character's,"Dog," was affectionately nicknamed for his first spoken word.)  With one evocative simile, Meg Wolitzer convinced me of Greer and the dynamic among her friends.

     I'm sure you've experienced Book Love, too, that moment when a line or a character or even a picture hooks into the you of you and becomes an essential something you carry forever.  It's important for you to discuss this experience with your students.  The ones who have felt it will want to chime in. Those who have never even heard such a thing need to know it exists.  Once they do, not all, but some will want to savor the feeling themselves.

     Naturally, some lucky readers (including you and me) instinctively began mining these gems, these words and phrases and even illustrations, early in our childhood.

     To this day, I cherish the quirky bond between Jane, The Middle Moffat, and her friend, The Oldest Inhabitant, who is Cranberry's most senior citizen.  Reading about it calls to mind the relationships my childhood self embraced with my own beloved set of "oldsters":  Abu, Gikki, Daumie, PawPaw . . .

    "Kindly do not poke the Sally."  An unexpected, annoying touch instantly resurrects this quote from Shirley Jackson's Raising Demons.  Sometimes I even say it out loud, not caring one bit that the 'poker' won't "get it." It tickles my funny bone. It makes me happy. 

      Grok.  Karass.  Corduroy's fuzzy ears peeking out from under the bed sheets.  These words and images are for me and of me. They make me who I am.  And I know you have some of your own.

 

     Awareness of words and a love for them does not come naturally to everyone, but they can be cultivated in our students by having them create a page in their Language Arts journals designated for "gems." I first learned the practice of  mining book "gems" in a long-ago writing institute:  A "gem" is a turn of phrase that captures your fancy in the (self-selected) text you are reading.  You pause as you read (or after you read) to inscribe it -- along with the book's title and page number -- on that dedicated page in your journal.

     Collecting gems, as with any other worthwhile practice in the Reader/Writer Workshop, is a habit that must be ingrained through repeated practice.  Doing it as a "mini-lesson" will result in a one-and-done "activity."  (As are most "mini-lessons."  Do NOT get me started on "mini-lessons.")  You may have heard that one must repeat a behavior seven, eight times before it becomes a habit?  That's at least how many times your students must be instructed to jot down a "gem" they encounter during Silent Sustained Reading.  Some will take a while to warm up to the practice, so have your Immediate Enthusiasts share theirs with the class.

     Now for the "why" of mining for gems:

     Pablo Picasso is known to have said, "Good artists copy.  Great artists steal."  By way of explaining to your students that this is not an endorsement of plagiarism, give them an example of how they can obliquely insert gems into their own writing.  For example, in Paragraph Three of this post, I refer to books that hook into the "you of you," an indirect reference to an e.e. cumming's poem I read long ago, the title of which I've since forgotten.  But the phrase is a permanent part of me along with the feeling and the understanding it invoked.  

     Students who do not "grok" the concept of allusions will benefit from a lesson on how to embed direct quotes into their writing.

     Over time, your students' collection of gems will grow, as will their skill in using them to make their own writing sparkle.  And, if all goes according to plan, one day they'll start creating gems of their own.

JRR Tolkien's illustration of Smaug atop his pile of gems.

     The Sustained Reader, a blog devoted to promoting the use of self-selected text in an integrated Language Arts classroom, debuted on May 13, 2014, with its inaugural post "Let It Go".

        

Prose from the Pros: Putting Your Classroom Library to Work

     In February of 2017, I was thrilled to receive the news that my students had taken first place honors at both the seventh- and eighth-grade level in the Austin Daughter's of the American Revolution (DAR) writing competition.  I'm not gonna lie:  When my principal initially forced -- er, encouraged us to enter the competition, I was mildly annoyed by the amount of time that would be "lost" from my first semester curriculum.  Once we dug in, though, I was surprised by the number of target objectives that could easily be incorporated.  (I've typed them in boldface throughout this post.)

     The topic?  "Celebrating a Century:  America's National Park System."  In 1,000 words or less, our mission was to depict -- in journal form -- the wonders of one specific American national park.  Hmmm.  Not only did the prompt provide our research topic for the year -- SCORE! -- it required the students to create characters, advance a plot in journal form, and make lavish use of descriptive writing about the setting.  

     Reading and writing should be inextricably interwoven in the teaching of Language Arts, and it's important that we continuously find ways to wed our students' reading to their writing activities.  But that's not always easy (especially for novice teachers).  In the end, this DAR writing contest provided a beautifully authentic opportunity for the students to use their self-selected text as a resource material.  Even better, it enabled me and my students to experience the natural flow of an integrated Language Arts project.

     After the students had chosen the parks they wanted to research, we began to scour our home and class libraries for trade books set in locations with similar geographic features:  beaches, forests, deserts.  Unearthed gems were placed on a whiteboard tray for easy access.  Here are a few that we found:

     Whenever students encountered a great descriptive passage, they would mark the spot with a sticky note to facilitate easy access for their classmates.  Students were also offered the option to write out such passages and tape them to a collection of "Descriptive Passages From Books" posted on a window.

     During the pre-writing process of the "journals," passages that we found -- like the following excerpt from Peter Brown's The Wild Robot * --  provided the class with wonderful opportunities for collecting specific nouns, active verbs, and adjectives to describe the sights, smells, and sounds of nature. We also found an abundance of sentences to use for sentence modelling activities.  

     " . . . instead of crashing against the rocks, [the last crate] sloshed against the 

        remains of the first four crates.  Soon, more waves were heaving it up out of the water.

        It soared through the air, spinning and glistening until it slammed down onto a tall

        shelf of rock. The crate was cracked and crumpled, but the robot inside was safe."  

Sentences like these can also be used during the revision process for mini-lessons on incorporating sound devices like onomatopoeia and alliteration in prose.

     By reading and analyzing skillfully crafted text such as this, and using it to model their own prose, the students expanded their vocabularies and developed more sophisticated sentence structures without even knowing it was happening!  

     The added bonus?  Throughout this use of our classroom library, many students found titles they wanted to add to their "Books I Want to Read" lists in the back of their Language Arts notebook.  For example:  

Pax by Sara Pennypacker

Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk

Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer Holm

     If you are interested in learning more about using a "Books I Want to Read" list with your students, please visit these earlier posts from The Sustained Reader: 

• The Best Book List Ever!
• Starting the Student Book Buzz
• Using Book Trailers in Your Language Arts Classroom

Next Up:  Teach your students how to draw upon their reading as a means of enriching their own  writing in Enrich Student Writing by Mining for "Gems."

Feasting at the Poetry Buffet

     As a novice Language Arts teacher, I just wasn't comfortable with teaching poetry, and so, I did the least I could while adequately meeting the state standards.  As a result, my early students experienced only a few poems each year:  the poems found in their textbooks and maybe a few others I threw in.  My classes all read the same poem at the same time and then answered the same questions, thereby ensuring that everyone "covered" the required objectives.  While that approach got the job done, it also ensured an abundance of students would enjoy not even one poem they encountered in class.  And that is just wrong.

     During those many - too many - years of striving to appease the standardization gods, I noticed that a few of my students actually seemed to enjoy poetry, even some students now referred to as "emerging readers."  So, in an effort to spread the love, I scrapped everything I'd ever done in the past and created what I call a Poetry Buffet.  Yes, it's scary, but you can do it, too.

  

     When assembling a Poetry Buffet -- a wildly diverse collection of poems -- keep these three words in mind:  abundance, variety, and choice.  Just as a buffet table offers morsels that tempt even the pickiest eaters, your collection must be varied and visually appealing to as wide an array of readers as you are likely to teach.  At last count, my buffet consists sixty laminated pages, front and back, of illustrated poems, all gleaned from poetry collections like these:

     Don't let the word "children" scare you away from these amazing books.  The collected poems range from "just for fun" --

 -- to "perfect for cultural celebrations" -- 

-- all the way up to "challenging for Honors 8th Grade."  AND the accompanying CDs provide you with professional recordings of selected poems!

     On Poetry Buffet day, you will place two laminated sheets in front of each student.  As gentle music plays in the background, students answer the questions on teacher-made handouts, addressing the elements of poetry on which you want to focus that day.  When finished with the poems in front of them, they get up and move to work with the poems on another table.  Obviously, the process flows much more smoothly if you have at least one unoccupied place to which a student can move when he is ready.

    So often, students think they're supposed to learn a particular poem instead of learning the general elements of poetry.  For that reason, the handouts should require that your students answer the same questions about different poems they read.  For example:

• Is this a narrative poem?  Explain why or why not.
• Write an example of onomatopoeia and explain the sound it is trying to imitate.
• How many stanzas does this poem have?
• What lesson, if any, does this poem teach?

     How many poems should students analyze during the buffet?  As many as they are able to complete during the time you allot for the activity.  That's why you'll want to provide a stack of spares for your more advanced readers.  I really enjoy giving the students the ability to work at their own pace.  If you have any students obsessed with the notion of "fairness" -- (Hey!  HE only did two poems today!) -- you may want to let them know that they will ultimately be choosing one of their analyses to submit for a grade.  The kids who complete more analyses have a wider range of work from which to choose.  Also, my students' final assessment consisted of completing a similar handout, analyzing a poem we never studied as a class.  In theory -- and usually in practice -- the more poetry analysis practice they got, the higher their final assessment grade would be.

    As students move from desk to desk exploring the buffet, you circulate the classroom attending to these two tasks:  

1. Answering questions that crop up: "Mrs. McHale, can you tell me one more time what 'onomatopoeia' is?"
2. Making note of any poem that students just don't "get."

     I will never forget the day a very bright eighth grade boy read "How to Paint a Donkey" by Naomi Shihab Nye --

-- and his "take" on the poem was something like this:  "It's just a dumb poem about some dumb donkey."  While hilarious, his response made abundantly clear the fact that he (and probably the rest of the class) needed a great deal of practice with abstract inferential thinking!

     I try to do at least three Poetry Buffets during April, National Poetry Month, interspersing them with lessons that 1) address specific elements I want to teach or 2) give students the opportunity to analyze a specific poem in small, heterogeneous groups.  You may want to give students who like to read aloud the opportunity to present a poem to the class.  And, it is always fun to follow along  silently with celebrity recordings of famous poems, like this one:

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" as read by Christopher Lee

     After feasting at the Poetry Buffet, at least one student will develop a taste for poetry -- (It happens every year!)  -- so add a few volumes to your classroom library if you can.  Who knows?  They may whet your appetite for the genre, too!  

     You can find examples of Poetry Buffet ThinkSheets at TeachersPayTeachers.com:  Poetry ThinkSheets .  

      Reading and writing should be inextricably interwoven in the teaching of Language Arts, and it's important that we continuously find ways to wed our students' reading to their writing activities.  But that's not always easy (especially for novice teachers).  Our next post, Prose from the Pros: Putting Your Classroom Library to Work, show an example of how it can be done.