Author: Kimberly

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Be a Sunflower

Van Gogh once said: “The sunflower is mine, in a way.”

For our the sixth breath of fall, we are inspired by sunflowers. And when I think of sunflowers, Vincent Van Gogh comes to mind. He left us with 11 paintings that house 87 individual flowers. Julia, our resident artist, was inspired to stitch a single flower in Van Gogh’s singular style for this closing prompt. Three Sunflowers in a Green Vase,  painted August of 1888, resides in a personal collection.

With 40 days left of fall, now’s the perfect time to download our FREE Autumn Artfest mini chapbook project, Six Breaths of Fall, and get the creative juices flowing.

 

~Kimberly

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It’s November, let’s be thankful!

Fall is a cozy season. It’s the season of turning leaves 🍂🍁 and curiosity inspired by the natural world, of bundling up with mugs simmering cider for long meandering walks. Can you feel the crisp air? Hear the crunch of leaves? Look up! The blues of fall are amazing! Fall is when we collect pinecones and spy animals readying for the long winter nap. Most of all, fall is the season of gratitude!

There are so many ways to demonstrate gratitude.

Pick up a pumpkin, a Sharpie, and set thankfulness into motion. You have all of November to scribble your messages. Maybe try a white pumpkin and fall-colored markers.

Be creative, but mostly: Be thankful!

 

~Kimberly

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First, Read a Book!

I’ve been asked more than once: Do I have to read the book?

My response? No—you GET to read the book!

Having homeschooled my four children alongside countless other children in my hybrid micro-school, I know “reading a book” sounds like an impossibility. It’s not.

First, read a book!

Ultimately,  to be the exceptional teacher I believed my children and my students deserved, I read some books! MANY books! And you know what? I was WOWed! Great stories are simply amazing!

I’m proud to report, I read alongside my children kindergarten through 12th grade.

I read on the beach in summer while my children made sand castles. I read at the park while they climbed up and down the slide. I read during swim lessons. I listened to a child read aloud here and there while I did dishes. And I enlisted Audible! You can do this!

What I decided, early on, was to become the teacher who is delighted to learn.

Blackbird & Company curriculum is designed to inspire children to read and to write and to think well. During the process of engaging with books, journalling their way through stories, and working through the process of writing original ideas, your students will gain skills and confidence.

So back to “Do I have to read the book? (Yes), ” and on to the the next step: Prepare to be a guide.

Next, pack a knapsack of tools!

The following “support materials” are NOT simply “extras” but, rather, tools designed to help YOU, the teacher, make the most of our ELA curriculum. You don’t need to be an expert or have all the answers tied up in a pretty bow. You need to be willing to teach, mentor, guide. Our support materials are not scripted. When it comes to the art of teaching, we left plenty of room for YOU—the teacher, to teach, to mentor, to guide. We have built into each student guide: pacing, a rhythm of routine, and simplicity that will allow YOU to actually teach.

Always begin at the beginning.

Get to know the student guides—begin with out CORE Literature and Writing units. Once you understand how these work, the APPLICATION materials will be a breaze to navigate. There is valuable information for YOU, the teacher, to implement alongside a mentor built into the scaffolding that will guide your students through the journaling, research, and writing.

Our TEACHING TOOLS are designed to give you space to confidently set learning into motion. Every element of our student materials is designed with purpose, our teaching tools are no exception. The following materials will help you create opportunities for your students to be curious, imaginative, and to develop the tenacity to bring shape to their ideas.

Teacher Helps: For our Kindergarten and 1st grade teachers we’ve created a Hatchling Teacher Helps that will support you through these crucial years. We’ve also created a slim handbook filled with strategies to support you, the teacher, with students utilizing CORE Levels 1, 2, & 3 (3rd grade through 8th grade).  This said, every single student guide contains its own pacing, information, and strategies to support your students well.

Answer Keys: English Language Arts is just that, an art form. As such, the majority of what your student journals and writes about is subjective in nature. Our blog contains many articles to help you edit student writing. We have created answer keys for the small portion of each guide that is answerable, or objective in nature. These can be downloaded and printed for FREE! Or, you can save paper / printer ink and simply access online!

Reader’s Guides and Seven Tips:  Leading young minds through literature can be intimidating—teachers are forced to ask the big questions, like, “What are the themes of this story?” and “How can we learn from these characters?” And that’s not even mentioning the pivoting we have to be prepared for when our students pull questions seemingly out of nowhere! Consider our Reader’s Guides are the helping hand we extend to, your, the teacher and parent-teacher as you read along your students.

Lesson Plans: Because each and every classroom is unique, be it a traditional seated classroom, a  hybrid micro-classroom, or a homeschool setting, our lesson plans are a great place to get started. We have created lesson plans for curated Grade  Level Collections and also for every single individual type of product for those who curate unique ELA collections.

Downloadable Materials: Print Shop is the place to discover some wonderful downloadable resources. From primary ABCeDarian projects to Writer’s Checklists to Cgaracter Trait cards to Reader’s Guides for teachers—the resources are rich.

Videos: We are constantly adding videos to support. From our Hatchling videos for Kindergarten and 1st Grade, to the Leonardo da Vinci instructional videos, to our most recent “How to Edit Student Writing” and more. Explore and check back often.

You don’t have to have all the answers. You simply have to be willing to be a guide, wandering with your students in the realm of wonder.

 

~Kimberly

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Shakespeare’s Yellow Leaves

Sonnet 73 by William Shakespeare begins like this:

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold

Sara’s beaded leaf is inspired by Shakespeare’s falling leaves. This is a wonderful time of year to help our students add to their fund of knowledge.

Why are leaves different shapes and sizes?

Why do leaves change color?

What exactly is photosynthesis?

All great questions to ponder in fall.  Step outside to observe fall in your neck of the woods. What do you discover about the leaves of October?

Download Six Breaths of Fall on printshop to create your own response to Shakespeare’s yellow leaves. Be sure to send us a photo of your work.

Click through to explore some more ways to leaves, here and here and here.

 

~Kimberly

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Combating: “I can’t!”

Fall for me is a time to reminisce on back-to-school. What motivates a student to engage in the work of learning? Long ago I wrote an observation of my youngest son engaging in one of our Level 2 Integrated Literature and Writing units.

What stood out to me as a mom and an educator is the fact that, after writing his way through the book, Søren created a culminating project that was conjured up in his very own imagination. Creativity is NOT extracurricular. Creativity combats the “I can’t” grumbles.

With our approach, each book is read and explored over the course of four weeks. During the fifth week, students develop a creative culminating project with options that provide a variety of ways for them to demonstrate deep understanding of the book. Students not only get a chance to demonstrate their originality, organization, clarity of purpose, and critical thinking skills, more importantly this culminating endeavor will allow them to show off what they have learned in their own, uniquely creative way.

 

~Kimberly

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By Hand is Beautiful

“Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun” is a tone poem by Claude Debussy that he later re-worked into a performance for two pianos. The work, as most of Debussy’s compositions, is impressionistic in nature. Think Claude Monet.

This week, for our fourth breath of fall, our resident art and music teacher, Master Taylor, offered this piece of copy to inspire BIG ideas. “Prelude to the afternoon of a faun,” when I explained the project to him, was the first thing that came to mind. It came to him lightening fast.

“My goal is to give my students the tools to assist in bringing their ideas to life through their art.” ~Master Taylor

There is a mechanics to art—a way to hold the pencil and how much pressure to apply. We are taught small finger movements to handwrite. In art we are taught to use the arm to assist in drawing a line as opposed to fingers. Wrist and arm movements can assist in making bigger lines. Learning the mechanics of art is skill learning. Music too involves kinesthetics. So does writing a word, a phrase, a sentence, even a poem. Taylor believes in slowing down or in his words, “settling down” into the process of art-making. As a teacher, his goal is to inspire students to make beautiful, important work that is authentic.

Notice the connection between writing and the arts?

According to Taylor, “S l o w i n g  down, doing less, doing it well. This all takes time. It’s all important. It’s your work.  It’s your idea.  It matters.”

Taylor here, for Six Breaths of Fall, did what Taylor does best, was inspired by music. Once upon a time Taylor wrote all of his compositions by hand. His idea here was to copy the first note of Claude Debussy’s composition, the jumping off place this week, and to photograph it on a pice of music he composed by hand with a pencil. Beautiful, right?

Six Breaths of Fall is an opportunity for students of all ages to be inspired by snippets of poems and music and visual art to craft and compose their own tiny ideas.  We want your work to be yours. We just want to support you in building your toolkit to get your idea where you want it to be. The possibilities are endless. Click through to get started!

 

~Kimberly

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Best Laid Plans

When it comes to back-to-school, sometimes even the best laid plans turn chaotic like an enormous pile of fallen apples!

And sometimes we hit back-to-school and realize our planning has, well FALLen short. Bad pun, but fitting.

When it comes English Language Arts—writing specifically—there is no getting around the pencil. It’s the best technology, after all. I’ve never hit fall as a teacher, without expending significant energy encouraging my students to do some heavy lifting!  Heavy lifting of the pencil, that is. I engage in this work because lifting the pencil is absolutely everything.

Learning to write is a long journey. We know this to be true. And, on this journey, there is NO better technology than the PENCIL.

When it comes to literacy, much of the exceptional work that your students will accomplish is subjective in nature tied to their ideas.  As students read great stories, they make observations. These observations will inspire ideas. Cataloging ideas in writing—pencil on paper—over time builds confidence, develops voice, and promotes perseverance.

The PENCIL enables student writers to engage the brain in multisensory ways. When we write we 1) HEAR the idea stirring in our mind; 2) We SEE the letters and words we are forming; and 3) We engage HAND-EYE coordination.

So here, as back-to-school toes its way into  October, reinvigorate your “best laid plans” by introducing the pencil as the star of the show

Here are some ideas to inspire PENCIL work:

Mastering the art of handwriting fosters the ability to concentrate, to contemplate, and to communicate confidently. Download our FREE handwriting worksheets here and here. Cursive is not only a beautiful art form, it is a skill that promotes concentration.

 

~Kimberly

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The Bird Who Sings at Night

While she formally published fewer than a dozen poems, Emily Dickinson wrote eighteen hundred over the course of her lifetime. The main reason more of her work went unpublished is largely because she chose not to. Instead, she left  her lovely poetry to the world in her own way—by hand.

“By hand” has grown scarce in education and culture at large. How many of us sculpt or knit or compose music, sketch in a journal, craft a poem—with pencil on paper? Too few!

Pencil, scissors, needle thread, canvas, fine paper, and a BIG idea. This is how I began to tackle the first page of Six Breaths of Fall—download for FREE here and join the making.

The Autumn Artfest is inspired by ephemera—a wonderful word to get to know. The definition we are looking for is: a publication designed to be short-lived. Here I return to Dickinson whose ephemera persists. Her little made by hand books, her fascicles, are collections of carefully curated poetry written on meaningful scraps, stitched together, and kept safe in a drawer—forty fascicles containing 800 individual poems!  Emily Dickinson’s work elevates the meaning of ephemera. Later in her short life, she began creating poems on recycled envelopes. There are in excess of 50 of these little gems. The prompt this week is a singular image one such envelope poem [A 320 (Fr1478A), ca. 1878]: One note from / One Bird.

Inspired by this nugget, I began stitching a little songbird. As I stitched slowly, the bird emerged and I once again thought of Dickinson, poem 314 (all her poems are numbered as she did not title her poems):

“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –
I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

 

I started with a sentence: Sun slowly sinking the sky her feathered song rises to greet the gloaming.

Next comes line break:

Sun slowly / sinking into sky, / her feathered / song rises to / greet the gloaming.

Sun slowly

sinking into sky,

her feathered

song rises to

greet the gloaming.

Of course this little poem is a nod to wonderful Emily and I will copy its final draft in pencil as my first entry into the Six Breaths of Fall tiny chapbook.

Now it’s your turn to get started. I can’t wait to see what you share. Send photos via our social media or to our email.  Let’s create together ephemera for the 21st century.

“Let’s strive together to part with time more reluctantly, to watch the pinions of the fleeting moment until they are dim in the distance & new coming moment claims our attention.” ~Emily Dickinson from the Preface of Envelope Poems.

 

~Kimberly

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Announcing: The ABCeDarian Journal

ABCeDarian Journal

We’ve created a wonderful journal with hand drawn pictures—yes, hand drawn with dip pen and ink—to guide little ones into the wonderful world of phonics. The alphabet is so much more than that catchy tune we learned as youngsters. I don’t know about you, but when I reach the end of the song, “…now I know my ABCs, oh how happy I will be,” I chuckle because something doesn’t quite add up! Singing the song is fun and all, but the English alphabet is so much more than names of letters. Each letter makes a unique individual sound, and in combination, well the possibilities are magnificent!

The 26 letters of our alphabet make the 44 sounds that, in combination, comprise every single spoken word! Let that settle in for a moment! Not so simple, right?

For this reason we’ve created the ABCeDarian Journal for your TK and Kindergarten students to move deeper into the wonder of the alphabet. The will learn to recognize each letter’s shape as they learn to form the letters.

 

More importantly, they will begin to learn about the sounds that each of the 26 letters make while strengthening fine motor and creative skills!

There are colorful stickers included, and, of course, we have all the add-ons you will need to engage your student—sand tray and alphabet stamps! Click through and get ready for fall!

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Learning with Leonardo

Look • Imagine • Create

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.

Learn to think and create. This 20-lesson interdisciplinary unit guides students into biographical research of Leonardo. Students will read to discover and write what they glean. Each week they will be guided through observational exercises and learn to draw from the Renaissance Man’s sketchbooks, encouraged each step of the way by our instructional videos that can be accessed at your convenience.

Your student will culminate with an original research paper, a sketchbook of warm-ups + drawings, a focused framable drawing, and a tool kit of skills.This unit is recommended for students 5th grade through adult!

Click through to see one week of the unit in action.

 

~Kimberly