Mentor Sentences - Part II

Remember my mentor sentence from yesterday?

I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.

As promised: I asked my students if they would share some of their sentences. Not everyone was keen but here are some from the those who were:

I have abandoned the bloody shackles of prison and moped the land on long-forgotten charms. (Gab)
I have killed the anger inside of me and brought the best on I could be. (Jaz)
I have travelled the adventurous ocean of Atlantica and swam the darkest reefs with my sharp brown  spear. (Tiahnee)
I have sung the beautiful music of Australia and performed on bright-shimmering stages. (Sara)
I have surfed the light-hearted waves of shores and swum the waters on giggling-golden beaches. (Tayla)
I have left the tight hold of worlds and escaped the Earth on small-angel wings. (Avril)
I have caught the beautiful birds of Adelaide and brushed the clouds with the softest-white feathers. (Kyra)
I have driven the dry roads of Australia and jumped the jetty on sandy-wet beaches. (Nikita)
I have stomped the monster on Pandora and jumped off the castles on mountains. (Corey)
I have run the muddy track of Mount Magnificent and jumped the finish line on quivering legs.  (Riley) 
I have spun the sticky webs of spider and wrapped the flies on joyful webs. (Blaed)

I'm impressed. I hope their parents (with whom I've also shared this blog post) are too!

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 3.7 Engage parents/carers in the educative process 
Standard 5.5 Report on student achievement
Standard 7.3 Engage with parents/carers

Mentor Sentences

My husband dropped me to school today and, being the gentleman he is, he carried my book bag into my learning space. He has a sweet habit of letting the kiddos know he's been in the room in their absence by leaving a quote or powerful word on the whiteboard.  Today was no different, except that it was.  He wrote the first few lines of High Flight by John Gillepsie Magee, Jr and as I read them I realised what a gift my husband had left me. (He's a gem! Really!)

I found the rest of the poem and started our literacy block by reading it to the class.  It's a beautiful poem:

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth  

And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; 

Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth 

Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things 

You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung 

High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there 

I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung 

My eager craft through footless halls of air... 

Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue 

I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace 

Where never lark or even eagle flew -- 

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod 

The high untrespassed sanctity of space, 

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

 The discussion following my reading was nothing short of astounding. The inferring, visualisations to help clarify, the use of morphemes to clarify, identification of metaphorical language... I let them talk without interruption until I was asked what I knew about the poet. I shared the little I knew and this changed the discussion. They read even more into the poem and made even more inferences. The word 'prophetic' was even used!

That was just the start of our lesson. I then wrote out the first two lines (as one sentence) on an anchor chart and we talked about what we noticed. It was a pretty mechanically focussed discussion and that was OK by me. I have a few kiddos who need to review parts of speech.  We marked up the sentence and made a few more observations about the role of the co-ordinating conjunction.  It dawned on a couple of kids - after we talked about the co-ordinating conjunction and what the two simple sentences would have been - that a sentence MUST have a verb. Woah! Yes! They must. For some of my kiddos this was an earth shattering revelation. I can't wait to see how they transfer that epiphany.

I'm not actually sure about the adjectival phrase...

Any helpers?

We then had a go at verbally replacing a few of the words to form new sentences and talked about how we could use this structure or even just part of it in our own writing.   Tonight for home learning they are creating new sentences modelled on this mentor sentence. In hindsight we would have spent longer on this. Next week we will.

So, it wasn't what I had originally planned for this morning, but I am SO glad I threw away strayed from my lesson plan.  I've been reading about mentor sentences for a while now. I've been fascinated and inspired by some of the programmes I've read about and work samples I've seen, and whilst I'm not comparing this lesson to those, I am pretty proud that we had such a great lesson.   We will follow it up tomorrow to share some of the student created sentences and recap what we noticed.  Should be interesting!  I'll ask if I can share some of them here.

Do you use mentor sentences?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it.
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.
Standard 6 Professional learning.

Inquiring about Inquiry

I'm not sure about global trends but here in Australia we're all about the inquiry.  Which is great if anyone in the room understands what that means and I'll freely admit (now) that at the beginning of last year I wasn't 100% clear myself.  I asked a few questions of my colleagues and crammed in a whole lot of reading.  By the time I asked the original VRPs to come up with inquiry questions of their own I thought I was top of it. Well maybe not exactly on top of it. More like alongside. And so, alongside the VRPs I refined my understanding as they did.  

This year our teaching team has restructured the way we are teaching Humanities and Social Sciences    (HASS) to start the year learning inquiry skills (through 'action learning') as a priority.  Sounds obvious doesn't it?  Yes, well, moving along.  :\

For one legitimate reason and another the VRPs' HASS lessons have been largely scuttled so far this year. Time and energy for HASS?  There has been very little. From what I've seen though, this years' VRPs have been struggling with developing inquiry questions. So today I posed the question: "what is an inquiry question?" and asked them to spend ten minutes in pairs categorising a series of questions as inquiry or not. I did this on padlet.com (which as you know is one of my favourite web 2.0 tools) as you can see here:

Created with Padlet

Our action learning area is Asian geography... Can you tell?

Regrouping we discussed why each question is or is not an inquiry question.  You will notice that there are a couple of questions that weren't unanimous, and these prompted some rich discussions about the characteristics of inquiry questions.  

Having agreed on our list, everyone reviewed the questions they'd already posed.  They shared their review with a partner,  and had to justify their decisions. Along the way some wonderfully rich inquiry questions were formed. We quickly ran off copies or took photos on ipads/ipods of the list for everyone to take home as they were to pose a series of questions for home learning tonight ready for review and choice tomorrow.   I'm excited to see their questions tomorrow.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it.
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.
Standard 6 Professional learning.

What's Old is New Again!

I wonder if wandering through antique or collectibles shops is a fascination you're able to develop with age? It seems to me that people either love doing it - and always have - or hate it with a passion.  I'm lucky that my husband loves it as I do. (Or I made a good choice, either way.)  We have a few local stores to whom we willingly (and regularly) hand over our time and money.  It's a rare visit that I leave without finding something: whether an antique spoon or tea-cup (I collect both), a quirky book from the early 1900's (my husband collects those) or some ephemera to use in my Way Back Wednesday lessons.

Today was a little different. Today I found books for for ME. Well, for school but that's kinda the same thing right? 

The first pair are from 1955.  One is called The Ideal Book for Boys while the other is The Bumper Book for Girls. I haven't quite decided how I will use these yet.  Having skim read the stories I will probably ask the kiddos to work in groups and give each group a copy of one story from each book.  The language used, and the gender stereotyping is vastly different to the texts the kiddos currently read so after some initial analysis I'll also provide contemporary stories to compare and contrast.  The Australian Curriculum is quite explicit in asking for this kind of analysis, and the gender concepts that will be discussed will support many of the ideas behind our single gender programmes (e.g. boys don't have to be physically strong to have strength). 

The other three are from a 1960 Science Service series and are called Earth, Maps & Mapping and Crime Detection. These little gems will be used as part of our Science as a Human Endeavour learning about how scientific knowledge changes over time, and how science influences human interaction with each other and with Earth.  Oh boy are they perfect examples of how scientific knowledge has changed over time. In Crime Detection the 'hair & fiber' section makes no mention of DNA; in Maps & Mapping electronic computers are lauded as having brought much nearer the realisation of the dream of a truly accurate triangulation network of the entire world; in Earth we can learn of the world's smallest TV camera which is the size of a flashlight. 

 Some things never change though. 

"It seems  - but has by no means been proven - that the earth is getting warmer." (Earth)

What artefacts or ephemera do you bring into your learning spaces?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it.
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.

Writer's Notebook

Do you use a writer's notebook?  I'll be honest, I don't.  Yet.   Today, a colleague (Melissa Thiele) and I were lucky enough to attend a workshop entitled The Writer as Collector - Using a Writer's Notebook presented by Alan J Wright in collaboration with the Australian Literacy Educator's Association, and this is about to change.

I've been reading about, and wanting to use, writer's notebooks for quite some time now. Intrigued and inspired by the concept since first hearing of them, I've never taken the plunge because I've also been a bit confused.  How do they fit? I mean, REALLY fit without 'taking away' from all the other cogs in the wheel of our literacy block? 

This morning I found the answer: they don't take away from the other cogs. They have the power to replace many of them. Yes please, sign me up.

Alan's presentation was a well structured collection of stories, which was fitting considering the title of the workshop, and the intended learning.  Through his own memoir like tales and anecdotes from students and teachers with whom he's worked, Alan was able to share his passion for living the writer's life and carefully placed his writer's notebooks at the very heart of it. As participants we lapped it up, following him from spiders under corrugated iron to the aisles of K-Mart all while he demonstrated the value of writer's notebooks. All while he demonstrated how he lives the writer's life. And for me that was the central message: as a teacher of writing I need to be a writer.  

And so, I stopped at Officeworks on the way home. I have two potential books. My mind is already 'rehearsing' the first marks I'll make in my notebook. I'm excited!

Is it silly that I so love the look of the top
book that I don't want to cover it?
 It reminds me of my childhood pen pal.

Not just for myself though. As much as I love writing and look forward to growing as a writer personally, I am excited to share this tool with my class.  Not yet though.  As new (or potential) notebook users we discussed the 'how' of bringing notebooks into our learning spaces. There seem to be two main streams of thought: teacher as 'expert': developing a degree of comfort and familiarity with the process first and then using the teacher's notebook as a tool before students begin OR teacher as 'co-learner' alongside the students. Knowing myself and my students, I want to spend some time living with my own notebook before taking it into our learning space. 

Even before I introduce the notebooks to the kiddos there are so many simple and practical ideas I took from today that I can start using straight away.  Here are a couple:

• Presenting a beautiful/powerful sentence and asking how the author has used punctuation (or sentence structure etc.) to create that beauty/power. Can we use punctuation (or sentence structure etc.) the same way? What can we learn from the way the author has used punctuation (or sentence structure etc.)?
• Taking a piece of writing and replacing the 50c verbs with $5 verbs. E.g. Replace fall with plummet.
• Presenting a short passage of quality writing as a model and having a go at writing a piece in that shape/style/voice.

I have LOTS more to say about this workshop but not today; need to let it percolate a little first. I will share my progress with my notebook and, when it happens, my kiddos' notebooks. Who knows, they may even let me share some of their writing?

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teacher it
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning 

How Do You Use Twitter?

In the words of a dear friend:

"I do, very much, love my job. You are challenged, inspired, frustrated, intrigued, entertained, flustered, provoked, humbled and more….and that’s all within an hour!"

(Thank you Katie Havelberg.)

So, I'm really frustrated to been put back on the bench by my doctor. I want to be at school. I miss my kiddos and my colleagues. 

One colleague I particularly miss, because she moved school this year, is Aimee Lipczyk. Yesterday she tweeted that she was talking to her class about the benefits of Twitter and called for people to chime in.  I don't know how her lesson went, but with the plethora of ways to use Twitter in the classroom I can imagine.  

Twitter, like most social media platforms, seems to polarise people.  Love or hate, there is no middle ground.  There are no prizes for guessing on which side of the fence I fall.  So following the mini twitter discussion prompted by Aimee, I did a bit of digging to find what other people are using Twitter for in their classrooms.

Here are 28 of  some of my favourite uses - some of which I use, others new to me (but will probably show up in our learning space in the near future):

1. Networking with other classes.
2. Sharing on the spot learning with parents (and the world).
3. Live tweeting excursions or incursions. 
4. Connecting with authors.
5. Microblogging 'aha' moments.
6. Using hashtags to take learning deeper.
7. Summarising a lesson's main point in 140 characters or less.
8. Becoming politically active.
9. Using hashtags to facilitate research.
10. Sharing student/class blog updates.
11. Comparing global differences.
12. Finding a class for Mystery Skype.
13. Following the news.
14. Twitterchats
15. Creating a class Twitter newspaper with interesting retweets/#hashtags
16. Building a sense of community.
17. Running social action projects like #Socktober
18. Asking for expert opinions.
19. Connecting with professionals.
20. Writing serialised stories or poems.
21. Using a hashtag to compile resources.
22. Sending out inspiration into the world.
23. Hooking up with other classes around the world and using Google Earth. 
24. Shout out to the teacher's network for authentic data to share with students about current topic of learning.
25. Twitterpolls.
26. Keeping a research diary.
27. Making friends! 
28. Being involved in challenges like #Mathsphotoaday

A word cloud of these 28 ideas. Fascinating to see where the emphasis lies isn't it? 

How do YOU use Twitter with your class?

Note: @the67VRPs is our class twitter account.  (Please feel free to follow us.) I run it through tweet deck on MY laptop and always check it carefully before mirroring it to our TV so that I can be sure of the content/contacts etc.   The kiddos devise their own tweets from the account and name them so that if it's a direct conversation with a student from another class it can be tracked.   

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 4 Create and maintain safe and supportive learning environments
Standard 6 Engage in professional learning 
Standard 7 Engage professionally with colleagues, parents/carers and the community

Joining the Dots

Today I had the privilege of accompanying 18 of our senior students to a GRIP Leadership Conference.  These 18 students represent our three year 6/7 classes and were chosen following collaborative processes that involved identifying the characteristics and qualities we would like to see in our leaders.  I can't speak for the other two classes but in my class all (self-nominated) candidates gave short presentation to the other students about how they demonstrate the identified characteristics and qualities. Our choices were based on these along with our prior knowledge of the candidates.

Back to today...

Amongst the other things covered today was the notion that leaders stand up.  They stand up when there's an opportunity, for the right thing, others and themselves. Of course we unpacked what that all meant and then the presenters mentioned a few people who exemplify these things.   Imagine my absolute delight when one of the students from my class leant over and whispered to me:

"All I can think of is Charlie Perkins. He was a real leader who really stood up."

I still grin like an idiot when I think about it.


The first time she'd heard of Charlie Perkins was yesterday during our Way Back Wednesday discussion about the Freedom Ride of 1965.  It was the first time that nearly any of my class had heard of him or the Freedom Ride which surprised me considering the media coverage the 50th anniversary has received this week. His life story and the '65 Freedom Ride really captured everyone's imagination.  I think our discussion left most students with more questions than answers, and eager to keep talking to learn more.

And that is why we never miss WBW.

I'm always very careful in my choice of WBW topic, and some weeks I struggle to come up with something that ties in with our other learning areas. (This is one of my non-negotiables: it must integrate across our programme so that it isn't a stand alone lesson.) The 50th anniversary of this incredibly important event in Australian history was one reason I chose it this week. I also needed to start talking explicitly about the concepts of primary and secondary sources, perspective and contestability - and what better way than with an event that has primary sources from various perspectives and secondary sources that raise questions about the primary sources. The icing on the cake for me was Charles Perkins' brilliant example of leadership.

As teachers we all get a thrill from those moments when students join the dots and create a masterpiece. Today. Today that happened for one of my students. Even the memory of it thrills me.

This relates to the following Australian Professional Standards for Teachers...
Standard 1 Know students and how they learn.
Standard 2 Know the content and how to teach it.
Standard 3 Plan for and implement effective teaching and learning.