BBCo keeps student cognitively present….. comprehensively present … differs from spoonfed
Author: Kimberly
Moving BEYOND the Topic Sentence
Squirrels are everywhere. That’s for sure! Most young writers have had a squirrel encounter or two. Tapping into a rich storehouse of knowledge is a great place to learn to craft a HOOK—not a topic sentence, a HOOK! The best place to begin a writing lesson is to tap into what the writer knows and to read a book.
Nuts to You by Lois Ehlert is a gorgeous and simple story of a quintessential city squirrel who, naturally, zips mischievously through life. Told in lively rhyming verse with beautiful collage illustration, the book is sure to capture the attention of students. At the back of the book the author includes some terrific facts about squirrels. We chose five facts to focus on:
Five Facts About Squirrels
1. Squirrels are rodents
2. They have front teeth—incisors—that NEVER stop growing.
3. They live in big nests or hollow trees.
4. They have five toes on their front feet, four on their back.
5. Their bushy tail is as long as its body.
Often times, when facing the blank page, students are intimidated and resort to simplistic, and, well, let’s face it, BORING solutions! Young writers resort to what they have been taught: Open your paragraph with a topic sentence. This is not technically wrong. But we can BETTER equip them!
For example these perfectly fine topic sentence are boring:
Squirrels are cute animals.
Squirrels are everywhere.
And my least favorite topic sentence of all:
I am going to write about squirrels.
So how do we teach our students to make topic sentences sparkle and shine?
We teach the to transform the topic sentence into a HOOK!
To help them get there, I gave them a BIGGER squirrel fact: Did you know that squirrels are everywhere in the world except Madagascar and Australia? We looked at a globe together and marveled at this interesting fact!
Next, I asked them what kinds of noises squirrels make. I got some very fun responses, too! I told them that we writers like to create words that represent sounds and, when we do it’s called: onomatopoeia. They liked that word! Now it was time to craft a HOOK for our paragraph about squirrels.
“Let’s imagine what it would sound like if we could hear all the squirrels all over the world.”
We generated a significant list:
Barking, Chirping Squeaking Squawking, Whistling Scampering Scratching Gnawing Grinding, Rattling, Buzzing, Crying
Next I said, “Let’s include our BIG fact via an Em Dash,” and went on to remind them that this special punctuation mark helps the reader take a long pause while adding some important information to the sentence.
Now we had our fodder and were ready to craft a HOOK! Here’s were we landed:
They are chattering, chirping, squawking all over the wide world—everywhere except Madagascar and Australia.
That’s the way to open a paragraph about squirrels!
~Kimberly
Crafting a Wonder-FULL Sentence is Courageous
Staring down the blank page is a courageous endeavor.
Where to begin?
We say: Begin with a BOOK!
BIG ideas are sparked by knowledge + curiosity.
“All you need to do is write one TRUE sentence,” so said great American author, Ernest Hemingway. But what exactly did he mean? Let’s face it, accuracy of expression may be learned in a grammar book, but depth of expression begins when a writer decides to pick up a pencil and scratch an original idea onto a blank sheet of paper. The first, BEST lesson, is to teach your students that writing about wonder leads to wonderful writing.
Here are four ways to compose a wonder-FULL sentence about owls.
First let’s gather information.
When faced with the blank page, first things first, press into food for thought. For this lesson, we dove into Animalium for Kids, by Kate Scott and Jenny Broom. With over 160 specimens to explore in this wonderful biological compendium, we are narrowing our focus to Owls. We don’t need an exhaustive study here—this is a sentence writing exercise after all. We need just enough information to become curious and inspired to write. Getting ready to focus on composing even a single sentence requires gathering intriguing information.
The owl entry in this book is just enough to spark curiosity. After reading, focusing in on the amazing illustrations, sharing what we found amazing about owls—storing new facts in our memory, adding to our growing knowledge of owls—we made a list:
- There are two main families of owls within the order Strigiformes: Tytonidae (barn owls) and Strigidae (typical owls).
- Huge owl eyes are stationary, fixed in their sockets—no eye rolling!
- Owls can rotate their head 270 degrees.
Next, let’s review the four types of sentences:
Statements are declarative. Statements tell us something.
Are questions interrogative? (Yes.) Questions ask.
Commands are imperative. Commands demand action.
Exclamations are exclamatory! Exclamations roar!
Now, let’s get writing.
A our first attempt at “NOW, let’s write a statement together,” I listened and wrote the group consensus on the board:
There are two types of owls, typical and barn owls.
Here’s where writing get’s fun! Add details, rearrange, think about word choice to make the above statement a tale that will turn heads. Follow the W Rule:
WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY, to WOW the reader!
For this sentence, I had a basket of blocks all different shapes but only two colors that I poured out onto the floor, asking my students to quickly sort by color. We, obviously, ended up with two colors. Then I gave them another fact about owls—there are 200 species in the world—and asked them to help me add this detail to our statement. Here’s what the group came up with:
All 2 million owls in the world (200 species) can be sorted into two BIG piles—Strigidae (typical) and Tytonidae (barn owls).
Finally, let’s translate the statement to a question, command, and an exclamation:
Statement:
All the owls in the world (all 200 species) can be sorted into two BIG piles—Strigidae (typical) and Tytonidae (barn owls).
Question:
Isn’t it amazing that all 2 million owls in the world (all 200 species) can be sorted into two BIG piles—Strigidae (typical) and Tytonidae (barn owls)?
Command:
Please sort the 2 million owls, all the owls in the world (all 200 species) into two BIG piles—Strigidae (typical) and Tytonidae (barn owls).
Exclamation:
All 2 million the owls in the world (all 200 species) can be sorted into two BIG piles—Strigidae (typical) and Tytonidae (barn owls)—Wow!
There you have it, all four sentence types in one fell swoop! Once you’ve tackled this exercise a few times as a group, it’s easy-peasy to make it an independent activity—from gathering information to four TRUE sentences! Ernest Hemingway would be proud.
~Kimberly
Coming this APRIL: The Wonderful World of Phonics
Do your students shut down at the mention of reading?
Do they cringe when you gently hand them a freshly sharpened pencil, suggesting it’s time to write an idea?
Some students need a little extra support to unlock the code that is key to engaging in the act of reading and the art of writing. Our targeted and systematic approach will bridge the gaps. The goal here is for students to overcome challenges, and to ultimately enhance comprehension and spelling skills.
Reading is the act of translating code on a page to speech—spoken aloud or silently to one’s self.
Writing is the act of crafting code to a page in order to communicate an idea.
So let’s begin at the beginning:
Phonemic Awareness is the ability to hear and manipulate the individual sounds that make words.
Phonics is the relationship between the sounds we speak and the alphabetic letters or combination of letters that represent those sounds.
Morphology is the study of how words are formed and possess specific meaning.
Etymology is the study of word origins and the way meaning evolves throughout history.
Fluency is the ability to read fluidly and with expression.
These five elements of literacy are the foundation of our remediation toolkit.
Once the student has worked through the initial placement, the journey begins. From assessment, through instruction, to mastery—our toolkit will guide your students every step of the way and beyond.
Leonardo Coming Soon!
Look
Imagine
Create
“All our knowledge has its origins in our perceptions.”
~Leonardo da Vinci
Observation begins with a question: What am I seeing? In a world filled to the brim with stimulation, it is easy to take our senses for granted. Though we are usually quick to have thoughts on things that we taste and smell, sight (of all things) can often be overlooked. We see so many things on a daily basis that it’s easy to forget to stop and really look.
You might assume that this is true for things we only see once, but oftentimes this overlooking occurs with things we see on a daily basis. Think about the patience of your front door. It’s waiting every single day for a passerby. Surely you walk by it and through it several times a day. But when was the last time you truly observed your front door? Are there new cracks? Has the paint faded? Has the metal of the hinges or doorknob tarnished? Most of us probably couldn’t answer these questions without going to have another look.
Observation is not just for the artist making masterpieces or the scientist performing meticulous experiments. It is for us to better understand and know the world we live in. It is for us to learn to move past assumptions and fill our minds with sighted knowledge. Our world with is briming with sights to see, so let’s dive into the art of observation.
There is nothing like art-making to engage students in active learning. Leonardo da Vinci, the quintessential Renaissance Man, made over 13,000 journal observations during the course of his lifetime, and as he did, he not only gained an enormous body of knowledge, but also created masterworks and made significant discoveries that he generously shared with the world. His influence is far reaching.
In our brand new interdisciplinary 20-week unit, students will research the life of the extraordinary Leonardo da Vinci, taking notes along the way in preparation for the culminating biographical essay. They will also learn to slow into the art of observation via weekly drawing exercises. All of the exercises will be supported by online videos that can be accessed at the convince of the student. Watch our social media for our April website drop date.
Sentences are Poetry!
How do we get students excited to write a sentence?
I’d start the lesson with this whopping fact:
Every year more than a SEPTILLION snowflakes fall on Earth. Hundreds of inches of snow falls on the Sierra Nevadas here in California alone! Septillion is a cardinal number—a “quantity”—that’s represented by the numeral 1 followed by 24 zeros. One septillion is a very BIG number!
I’d follow this with some smaller, yet still amazing facts:
Snow is made up mostly of air:
Fresh snow contains a bunch of trapped air, which is why it feels light and fluffy.
Snow is frozen water:
Snow is simply water vapor that has frozen into tiny ice crystals in the clouds.
Snow can fall even when it’s not very cold:
As long as there is enough moisture in the air, snow can fall even at temperatures slightly above freezing.
Snowflakes are six-sided and unique:
Depending on the temperature and humidity, and because each falls through the air differently, they have unique patterns and six-sided shapes—needles, columns, and plates.
Close the lesson with another BIG fact:
The biggest snowflake, recorded in the Guinness Book of World Records back in 1987, was found in Montana. The snowflake was 15 inches in diameter and 5 inches thick! That’s one BIG snowflake! I’d likely mock up a way to help them see this fact:
Next, I would read some wintry books. Here are some favorites:
The woodland animals were all getting ready for the winter. Geese flew south, rabbits and deer grew thick warm coats, and the raccoons and chipmunks lay down for a long winter nap. Come Christmastime, the wise owls were the first to see the rainbow around the moon. It was a sure sign that the big snow was on its way.
Here we’d think about winter taking place in the natural world. We’d explore the four seasons, focusing in on winter. As the animals watch fall slipping away and prepare for winter, students will follow, learning important information along the way.
No one thinks one or two snowflakes will amount to anything. Not the man with the hat or the lady with the umbrella. Not even the television or the radio forecasters. But one boy and his dog have faith that the snow will amount to something spectacular, and when flakes start to swirl down on the city, they are also the only ones who know how to truly enjoy it.
Now it would be time to write: “This wonderful book begins with three short sentences.”
The skies are gray.
The rooftops are gray.
The whole city is gray.
These sentences have one word in common: gray.
We have set the stage, ignited curiosity, and offered some really intriguing fodder. Now I’d get into the lesson:
There are four types of sentences:
Declarative sentences give, or declare, information.
Imperative sentences give commands, make requests, or implore.
Interrogative sentences ask questions.
Exclamatory sentences express strong emotions.
Here I’d pull out another book. This one is a book of poetry, but not just any poetry, these poems are focused on the tenacious birds who stay put in wintry conditions.
We will read several poems together, learn about specific birds, then we will focus in on the blue jay. We will read about the blue jay in the appendix at the back of the book before focusing in on the poem. We will learn that these birds store up to 100 seeds and nuts per day in preparation for winter. We will learn about its tricky ability to hide the store and locate it easily when needed. We will learn about courtship and nest building and the raising of baby jays. This and more. And then we will read the poem.
First we will notice that the poem is two stanzas. Then we will notice something wonderful: All four types of sentences are woven here! We read aloud. As we read we hear the tight rhythm, we hear the perfect rhyme. Isn’t poetry grand?
But now it’s time to craft some snowy sentences, and before the magic slips away, I’d remind my students: Sentences are POETRY!
I would help my students get started (you can too!):
I’d write on the board: In winter…
I’d ask: “What next?”
The student might write:
In winter, animals are hungry.
I ask: Which animals?
In winter, chipmunks and owls and deer are hungry.
I ask: What will they do?
In winter, chipmunks and owls and deer are hungry, so they collect and store food away for the coming snowy days.
Now that is a sentence,” I say to them! That is a sentence that is like a poem:
In winter
chipmunks and
owls and
deer are hungry,
so they collect
and store food away
for the coming
snowy days.
~Kimberly
Words are Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!
To read is to imagine.
To imagine is to story tell.
To story tell is to write.
This last weekend we went and saw my son in a performance of Mary Poppins. He had been rehearsing for months and it was finally his time to “wow” the audience from the big stage. Everyone came armed with their role and their costumes and their props and their accents. The stage was transformed and we were transported to London in 1910. The main stars of Mary Poppins are of course, Mary Poppins and her magical chimney-sweep friend, Bert. But the story itself really centers around the father, Mr. Banks, who sees his role as a father as strictly providing and not in nurturing. As the musical performance played out, the audience experienced the magic, the struggle and the transformation in the family and especially in the father. Mr. Banks was no longer a 14-year-old boy, but a man struggling in his role of provider, husband, and father.
I reflected later that we as human beings need to share our ideas, feelings, and stories. I never could know how it felt to live and be the head of a house hold in 1910, in London. Things we will never experience, we can feel and learn through stories.
In Pages online, we read a terrific story during this last session with my middle school Level 3 students called Banner in the Sky. This book was about a boy climbing the highest mountain, the Citadel, in the Swiss Alps. It is a fictional book but based on real research and experience climbing. As we read, we were transported to these mountains, holding on for our lives, experiencing the harsh weather conditions and the strength of the climbers both physically and mentally. Before this book I had never pondered what climbers experience.
Books take us places we have never been to experience things we will never do.
Through books we get a glimpse of the past we never experienced. We learn about things we have never done. We ponder what things might be like in the future. In my Level 4 Pages class, we read The Giver—a book that talks of a newly created community where everyone lives in sameness, under a set of rules where the weak and rule breakers are sent to Elsewhere. Memories are too painful for people, so they are taken away and placed with one single person, a person separate from society, called the Giver. The book is set in an unspecified future with no exact date. This young adult dystopian novel was written in 1993 and has sparked questions about conformity, individuality, unexamined security, freedom and the importance of our past and experiencing pain.
Blackbird and Company has created curriculum to accompany the journey and adventure of books; comprehension, setting, plot, vocabulary, themes, motifs and symbols are covered. But we really dive deep when we ask the student or should I say the writer to write, their ideas, feelings, opinions, beliefs. Our prompts ask, what tricky or fearful experience have you encountered? How did you get through? What would you do if faced in the same situation as the character? What do you want to do when you get older? Who influenced you?
Suddenly we are telling a story—our story—we are the writer of our story!
To write, we need only to start with a word, a phase, then one true sentence. It sounds so simple, but the words we choose to use are important, meaningful. We can paint pictures with our words, create dramatic scenes, show painful, tragic moments, create laughter, and love. In the performance of Mary Poppins, one of my favorite scenes is when they sing the song, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious! Mary Poppins, inventor of this word, gets the whole stage singing her brand new magical word! Simply said, it is something to say, when you have nothing to say!
When you look up “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” (the magical word of Mary Poppins) in the dictionary, there it is, defined as: something extremely good or wonderful.
What a challenge that word would be to put in an essay, but much more powerful, might I say magical, than simply saying something is good.
Mary Poppins would say to our students: Learn words, words and more words!
By the age of 5 years old children recognize at least 10,000 words. By 10-years-old, children can speak and write an average of 20,000 words and learn on average 20 new words a day. They can also understand the fact that words have multiple meanings. A High school student may know anywhere from 25,000-50,000 words. When I looked up the average vocabulary for adults, it ranged from 20,000-35,000 words. Children double their vocabulary between 5 and 10-years-old, learning an average of 20 new words a day! But over 10-years-old, learning new vocabulary slows or even stops. An average teen or adult might just have a vocabulary of 25,000 words. That’s only 5,000 more than a 10-year-old, maybe staying this way for their lifetime.
We have moved away from books you hold in your hand and dictionaries you flip through. We’ve have moved to media. As a whole we have moved away from writing with a pencil and instead typing on the computer.
How do we inspire our students to read and to write and to thing? How do we keep them learning, and adding to their vocabulary? To become the communicators of the future? How do we inspire our students to be writers who express that wonderful one true sentence? To bring that idea, that feeling, that story to life? How do we make what feels impossible, possible?
Mr. Daniels, of Fish in a Tree, instructs the main character, Ally, to draw a line between the M and the P in that word impossible.
I M / P O S S I B L E
“So, now, Ally…….that big piece of paper in your hand says possible. There is no impossible anymore, okay?”
We can create possibility. We can create words and meaning. The possible starts with YOU. And the way I see it, with a good book and some time.
“In this world of words, sometimes they just can’t say everything.”
Or can they? I would like to find out!
~Clare
Around the Campfire: Make Reading a Gift
Add a happy surprise into your student’s reading tradition. Choose a dozen books that will be easily devoured. Wrap the books up this month and put in a basket or a reading nook for your reader to open, one each month in 2025! Make sure to vary the genre while keeping the reading level appropriate so that the reader will enjoy each monthly selection.
TIP #5
Wrap some books!
~Kimberly
Around the Campfire: Alphabatize
TIP #4
Alphabetize
I have such fond memories of alphabetizing words, dictionary in hand. I loved the way the dictionary was organized, unlocking the system on each page, the guide words at the top—the left word directing me to the word at the top of the left column; the right word directing me to the last word in the right column. I loved how the dictionary taught me that each word possessed a very specific pronunciation, history, and meaning. But most of all, I loved how the dictionary taught me to alphabetize.
Take the words: armor, arduous, architect
All begin with “A” so now what?
Go to the second letter.
“R” is the second letter in each word!
Now what?
Go to the third letter.
“M” and “D” and “C” come next. So when we alphabetize via these letters the order is as follows:
- Architect
- arduous
- Armor
With one word on the front of a 3 x 5 card, the definition on the back, the three words are filed behind “A” in the card file.
Building a rich vocabulary is a key part of growing as a reader and writer. As your students work through CORE Integrated Literature and Writing, Operation Lexicon, Hatchling, Earlybird, Research People and more, encourage them to alphabetize new vocabulary. This will not only help them move new words into long-term memory, but also into their spoken and written ideas!
~Kimberly
Around the Campfire: Make Some Mistakes
Who doesn’t have a memory of the classic pink eraser?
Back when I was in elementary school, the eraser was at once a tool for writing and a tool for printmaking—yes, printmaking! Essential tools were paperclips, stamp pads, and blank 3 x 5 cards in the back of my, now vintage, tin card file box, and a black-inky stamp pad. Somehow, there was always quiet time during my school day to imagine and create, especially in 6th grade when my teacher would put on Cat Stevens and let the whole LP play, both sides. I would carve little designs into my pink erasers with a paperclip untwisted to become an artist stylist. Once happy with the design, I would simply coat the eraser with inky black and stamp it on an unlined 3 x 5 card.
I have absolutely zero unhappy memories with erasers, quite the contrary! The color, smell, shape, feel of the pink eraser sparks all kinds of happy memories. Most important, I was not afraid to make mistakes as I learned to become a writer. The little pink eraser was by my side to help me alter mistakes. Mistakes in spelling. Mistakes in punctuation, capitalization. And more crucial mistakes too—mistakes in content.
TIP #3
Writers make mistakes!
Writing is a process that will always involve mistakes whether the writer is a student writer or a proficient adult writer. Each stage of the process is looking forward to the polished, final draft. Along the way, many changes will be made easily, thanks to the eraser.
- Come up with an idea.
- Write the idea.
- Re-read the idea.
- Make edits to the first draft—partner with the pink eraser!
- Polish the idea into a beautiful final draft.
The little pink eraser is the perfect partner of the pencil and has been for hundreds of years. We will always recommend student writers use the pencil as it is the best technology available to support learning this art form.