During my 25+ years in the field of education I’ve encountered teachers and administrators throwing around the phrase “growth is not robust” over and over and over again. This euphemism breaks my heart. They are referring to our children after all!
I’m thinking of a young person who became my student when she was in the 10th grade. When well-meaning colleagues found out, they called to give me a heads up: “She’s a nice enough person, but growth is not robust and I’m certain she will not amount to much. Kim, you are a saint for taking her on.”
A saint? Really?
In my eyes, this young person was seeded with ideas that simply needed encouragement, cultivation, to blossom. The end of the story is that she went on to win a National, Scholastic Arts and Writing Award the very next year for a really brilliant poem she composed. I called my friend and gently broke the news: Growth is robust.
All it ever takes for people to write an idea is:
1) a listening ear; 2) ENCOURAGEMENT; and 3) an invitation to SHARE.
Here is a little secret that I share with my writing students:
Sinking your teeth into a marshmallow is like biting into a cloud!
Let’s make marshmallows! Before we do, let’s ask a beautiful question: Where did the idea come from? Marshmallows, after all, are not naturally occurring.
If we want to encourage our children to engage in the work of writing their ideas, sharing stories of successful idea-making is a terrific inspiration.
Did you know that this treat has a long, sweet history?
Begin by teaching your children that marshmallow is a plant. It has a scientific name: Althaea officinalis. You might point out that scientific names are capitalized differently than names of people. Only the first name is capitalized. It got its name because it is a “mallow” plant and grows in marshy areas. Marshmallow sprouts light pink flowers and grows very tall.
Next share a bit of history. As early as the 9th century, Greeks used marshmallow medicinally by making a balm from the sap. They discovered it soothed wounds, stings, and tummy aches. Later the Romans discovered marshmallow worked well as a laxative. By the Middle Ages, marshmallow was a treatment for a wide variety of ailments including insomnia! But it was the ancient Egyptians who made a sweet treat by combining marshmallow sap, honey, and nuts. The French took it from here. Their concoction was still semi-medicinal (used often as a throat lozenge), but interestingly it was also advertised as anti-aging cream! Eventually, through France, marshmallows landed as a sweet indulgent treat.
Marshmallows arrived in the USA in the 1800s. And we can thank the Girl Scouts for S’Mores.
Before you begin to cook, share this amazing fact: We consume 90 million pounds of marshmallows every year!
Here is a simple recipe:
For the syrup: Combine in a saucepan with a candy thermometer: 3/4 cup Water + 1 1/4 cup corn syrup + 3 cups sugar + pinch of salt
For the body of the confection: In a heavy-duty mixer, sprinkle 3 tablespoons gelatin over 3/4 cup water
NOW:
Let the gelatin dissolve in the water in the mixer with the whisk attachment ready to go.
Boil the syrup mixture to 240 degrees. Immediately pour the syrup slowly into the mixer. Increase to high and beat until very thick!
Add flavoring—a tablespoon of vanilla, or 1 1/2 teaspoons of almond or peppermint. Here you can be creative!
Now pour the marshmallow mixture into a greased with spray oil 13″ x 9″ baking pan. At this point you can sprinkle sparkle sugar to decorate. Let set overnight.
Turn pan over onto a large cutting board heavily dusted with powdered sugar. Cut the set marshmallow into cubes. Roll each cube in organic powdered sugar—you will need about 1 cup.
Even if you have never made marshmallows from scratch, remember the kitchen is a classroom. Enjoy the adventure creating this campfire friendly confection!
In the kitchen, reading and writing and thinking is delicious!
Once upon a time we had a little wooden step stool in our kitchen that my four would climb up to help me stir up whatever was cooking. In the kitchen, everything your little ones are learning is applied—counting, fractions, addition, subtraction, reading, writing, sequential thinking and so much more. In the kitchen, children experience the complexities of chemistry. They will witness right before their eyes the difference between a mixture and a compound. They will watch matter change right before their very eyes! Like magic, chemical reactions lead to yummy treats!
Let’s talk kitchen words: measure, cup, spoon, knife, pan, water, sugar, butter. Encountering words in the realm that they belong is an excellent opportunity for students to put their language arts skills to task. I used to make moveable labels on 3 x 5 index cards and place them on kitchen nouns. After cooking (and clean up!) I would have them draw pictures on the back of the cards so they could have fun reading and spelling words using the moveable alphabet. The kitchen list of words is endless and will provide your little ones hours of academic fun. One word that is very important in the kitchen is dozen. This wonderful word is also an important mathematical concept introduced in kindergarten.
About a dozen years ago, Sara wrote her first post. She imagined cooking from scratch akin to educating a child. This brilliant extended metaphor rings true all these years later:
I believe every child is like a blank recipe card and that our job as educators is to teach them how to bring their unique spice to a bland world. Each child possesses a unique cabinet brimming with flavor. One might be like chili powder (which you really need to make a good pot of chili), another cinnamon mixed with sugar, yet another oregano (which gives a great background flavor to many dishes).
And she left us with a brilliant question:
What if our job is to challenge our children to explore the potential of their flavor? Let’s help our children develop their unique recipe for life.
Play is an opportunity to practice new academic skills.
Play is an opportunity to foster independence.
Play is an opportunity to grow confidence.
Kindergarten
Once students understand that each of the 26 letters of the alphabet have unique sounds that can be combined to represent the words we speak, they will be off and running! But this is just the beginning. Use the Hatchling Phonetic objects and corresponding deck for matching games. Utilizing the moveable alphabet, the possibility for “play” is endless. Children will quickly learn that they can check their work by simply flipping the phonetic card. That’s right, the teacher is built in, and this helps students confidently enjoy their important work.
1st Grade
By the time students have reached 1st grade, they are confidently reading and writing simple three and four-letter short vowel words with consonants, consonant blends, and digraphs—cat, mug, splat, chin, this, shop, and more. Again, utilizing the moveable alphabet, set up opportunities for students to independently practice the new phonics introduced each week, matching objects to cards and spelling the playful way. Children will have a longer attention span for this activity that is familiar from their kindergarten year. But even students new to Hatchling, will quickly catch on to the fact that they can check their work by simply flipping the phonetic card.
Second Grade
In the 2nd grade, students have been introduced to the whole of phonics, have spent many hours in playful, multi-sensory practice activities and are growing in their ability to apply newfound skills of reading and writing. During 1st grade students composed simple sentences—statements, commands, exclamations, and questions. They will have acquired a sizable sight vocabulary, words they were introduced to and practiced during kindergarten and 1st grade. Again, utilizing the moveable alphabet, set up opportunities for students to independently review using the phonetic objects and decks from Hatchling. If your student is jumping in to 2nd grade without having utilized Hatchling, we recommend using the moveable alphabet to practice making words. Whether you are a seasoned Blackbird user or new to our program, this is the year to begin our spelling program (it’s free!). Remember, 2nd grade is the year to settle in to ELA skills acquired during kindergarten and first grade. It is the year to begin putting it all together—reading and writing and thinking. This is the year to begin a word collection, the year to see just how wonderful a word can be!
Writing is an art that takes children on a journey through many, many years. We believe the best way to travel the path towards literacy is to PLAY—especially in the primary years of education! The road to mastery should never be arduous. Idea-making, after all is not boring!
The phrase “summer slide” is one of my pet peeves. This phrase (used for as long as I remember) describes the essential skills that are supposedly lost over the summer when children are out of school.
Summer is the time for hands in the sand, hikes on the mountains, digging into a city garden, swimming in the community pool, trips to the library. Summer is an extended time of experiential learning. And these experiences will provide fodder for learning all year long. These experiences will pay richly into your child’s fund of knowledge, the knowledge that sparks ideas. Think of summer as an opportunity to mostly unplug from electronics, to engage with nature, family, friends, community, and books!
Let’s talk learning loss. Being deprived of something is loss. When it comes to language arts, I’ve sadly crossed paths with scores of children struggling to write who have simply been deprived of the opportunity to imagine their ideas. Is summer the culprit? I think not!
Review Tip Number 2.
What is your BIG idea?
When it comes to writing: Form always follows function.
When learning an art form—and writing is an art form—the rule to follow is: form follows function. This means that language arts should not be approached or taught the same way that we teach math. We can not simply give our children a mountain of grammar, punctuation, spelling, and capitalization rules and expect them to compose their ideas eloquently. In this case we are giving children “form” (building blocks) without any concept of “function” (purpose). Function is key to using form effectively.
Without ideas, writing becomes a meaningless chore.
Before the pandemic, literacy levels were in decline. But global shutdowns pushed close to 1.5 billion students out of school. And these disruptions gave us all an opportunity to see that perhaps our approach to teaching language arts is broken. It gave us an opportunity to make a change. Truth is, on average nationwide, 66% of 4th grade children in the U.S. could not read proficiently in 2013, seven years before the pandemic! And children who do not read proficiently, do not write effectively!
Lacking basic reading and writing skills is a tremendous disadvantage. But lacking the ability to value ideas, well, that is tragic.
Literacy not only enriches an individual’s life, it creates opportunities for people to develop skills that will help them provide for themselves, their families, and humanity at large. Literacy is the ability to read, write, and think in ways that enable us humans to communicate effectively and authentically. Literacy helps us make sense of the world.
Tip Number 3.
Slide of Imagination
If we are to use an education phrase, let it NOT be the “summer slide” or the “COVID slide”.
Please let it be the: Slide of Imagination!
When children engage with ongoing spelling lists, endless grammar exercises, and cookie-cutter writing exercises, they will become exhausted and disheartened climbing an endless ladder.
When it comes to writing an idea, at first, children (even adults!) might see the blank page and feel a little frightened, like getting on a two-wheeler for the first time. But with a bit of encouragement: “You can do this!” the pencil in hand will begin to fill the page. The climb up will always be UP, but the slide of imagination will never disappoint.
Try this writing exercise (yes, you):
Look at the photo above. What did the little girl think climbing the ladder to the top of the slide? What did she think when she reached the top and looked down? What was going through her head when the photo was snapped?
You are seeing blank lined-paper, right? It’s not easy to begin, right? Is your imagination holding its breath?
Sometimes, in this moment, I give my students permission to pretend!
If I were in the room, teaching you, I might encourage you to dictate your idea so that your first draft would simply involve copy work. For reluctant writers, dictation is akin to training wheels.
When students are really intimidated by the page, I might offer a few “hooks” and let them choose how to begin. Here are some examples: At the top of the slide, she was so delighted by her favorite color that she burst into laughter. Arms up, feet down, head back, big smile, you go girl! She’s committed now!
Sometimes all it takes is getting a first sentence on board for the idea to flow.
Now it’s your turn. Write your idea. Write through all the stages: Idea brainstorming, first drafting, re-reading, editing, polished copy. And once you’ve completed this exercise, teach someone to write through the prompt. You can do it! You be a writing coach!
Encouraging your students to write their ideas is inviting them to climb the ladder into their imagination and slide into the art of writing joyfully.
Instead of worrying about catching up this winter, think about gathering around-the-campfire. Around the campfire we warm up, roast marshmallows, make s’mores, sing songs, and best of all, we share stories.
~Kimberly
GIVEAWAY(S)
Enter to win an easy light up fire pit built for the backyard and beyond from our friends at Solo Stove – plus, a Blackbird & Company Yeti Thermos (2 total)!
For those of you who are new to Blackbird & Company, and those who are seasoned users, pull up a log, and gather round the campfire!
During the month of January we’ll share stories and offer ideas to ignite curiosity and motivate enthusiasm as you and your students move into the long stretch of this coming school year.
Tip Number 2.
Begin 2023 by making the most important question the centerpiece of your approach to language arts:
“What’s your big idea?”
Valuing ideas is key to authentic writing . If your student does not care, then the pencil will reflect this fact. The act of writing will be boring. The simple truth is that, once a student develops the confidence to write an idea, the work of writing becomes an intrinsically valuable exercise. Our CORE Literature and Writing Discovery Guides challenge students to journal their ideas week after week.
Learning to Write Well! is simply-one-step-in-front-of the-other, I promise! If you partner with us and encourage your students to journal their way through six stories per year, you’ll be amazed by robust growth in your child’s ability to take an idea from a tiny seedling of imagination to a carefully crafted sentence, paragraph, poem, essay, and more.
There is NO substitute for consistently encouraging your children to write their ideas. No matter the level, kindergarten through high school, the long stretch of the school year is looming. We urge you to courageously press into coaching your child in the daily art of writing! Don’t give up! Come June, your students will have brought shape to significant original ideas as they moved through the CORE of our program!!! And, more importantly, they will have gained confidence in their ability to communicate. Writing an idea is genius.
GIVEAWAY(S)
Enter to win an easy light up fire pit built for the backyard and beyond from our friends at Solo Stove – plus, a Blackbird & Company Yeti Thermos (2 total)!
We want our students to read and write well. We want them to think creatively and to value their ideas.
Learning, no matter the subject, can be an awesome journey. The path can be filled with wondrous sights to delight the intellect and warm the heart .
But the opposite can also be true.
The opposite of an awesome journey would be an arduous one. The opposite of a path with wondrous sights to delight the intellect and warm the heart is one filled with brambles and thorns that discourage and weaken. On this journey, this path, learning is thwarted, the heart is discouraged, and some form of illiteracy is a common outcome.
Here are some literacy facts to ponder, some fact’s that we desire to change:
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2022
54% of adults have a literacy below 6th grade level
The state with the lowest adult literacy rate is California
In autumn 2020, research carried out by the Department for Education (DfE), the Education Policy Institute and Renaissance Learning found a learning loss of up to 2 months in reading in both primary and secondary pupils, based on STAR assessments of more than 400,000 pupils (DfE, 2021).
In October of 2020, an assessment of 112,000 children’s writing skills by No More Marking suggested that year-7 students were 22 months behind where they should be. (Christodolou, 2020).
Together we can do better! Right?
Learning to read and write and think is a lifelong journey.
We are creatures with an enormous capacity to enjoy and enact language.
Tip Number 1.
Enjoy the journey!
Join us ’round the campfire this month as we share tips to inspire happy learning and literacy.
As we look back on 2022, we Blackbirds are considering what is happening at large in the realm of literacy with a heart to help—one student at a time. Looking forward to 2023, the happiest news will be hearing stories of your students—your dear children—pressing happily into their important work, the work of becoming literate.
Read well! Write well! Think well! = Happy New Year!*
GIVEAWAY(S)
Enter to win an easy light up fire pit built for the backyard and beyond from our friends at Solo Stove – plus, a Blackbird & Company Yeti Thermos (2 total)!
One winter, long ago, we Blackbirds made a box full of snowball catapults to giveaway at a conference. When I came across a few remaining stragglers, I smiled to myself. “Just in time for December!”
So, I have have been a busy little elf recreating ONE HUNDRED catapult kits! ENTER TO WIN HERE & you might be the happy recipient of one of the 100 kits we have ready to mail off!
Of course, when I think “catapult” I think Leonardo DaVinci, polymath extraordinaire! What a persona to consider as we stand at the dawn of a new year. A bit of history:
You, of course know, Leonardo Da Vinci was a man who wore many hats: painter, sculptor, musician, engineer, father of flight, medical entrepreneur. But did you know that he was known to sketch mechanized throwing devices just for fun?
The catapult design, conceived and put to use many, many years before Leonardo, intrigued him. And so he went to the drawing board to do some tweaking.
Da Vinci recognized a simple fact that was likely overlooked by most: Gun powder was not 100% dependable! It just needed a bit of tweaking. And so he set out to refine the tool.
Da Vinci concocted two ideas: the single arm and the double arm catapult. The mechanisms he imagined would enable an increase in the throwing arm speed with ease. Like many of his notebook ideas, there is no historical record of the single or double arm catapult being employed but there are small scale and large scale models that have proved efficacy. More importantly, Loenardo’s tenacity to put his ideas to paper continues to inspire innovation. And this is worth celebrating!
For this reason, we will giving away one Leonardo DaVinci catapult kit in addition to the 100 Snowball catapult kits.
Fall is a cozy season. It’s the season of turning leaves ??, of imaginary forests and fairy stories, of bundling up with mugs simmering cider for long meandering walks, of collecting pinecones and spying animals readying for the long winter nap. Most of all, fall is the season of gratitude! And this means GIVEAWAYS!
TWO, to be exact…
ONE.
Recently we stumbled upon an amazing trilogy of board books created by artist and speech pathologist, Tabitha Paige, CCC-SLP designed to help little ones celebrate one of our very favorite things—words! These delightful stories will jump start the young child’s vocabulary and introduce them to early language concepts!
Lessons include:
Spatial Words: Follow along with Little Fox as he plans a surprise picnic for his friend Owl in A Trip to the Farmers Market.
Quantity Words: Follow along with Little Hedgehog as he helps his friend Squirrel search for missing acorns in A Trip to the Forest.
Colors and Counting: Follow along with Little Rabbit as she gathers wildflowers to cheer up her friend Mouse in A Trip to the Wildflower Meadow.
We love that this little set that captures the magic of language and offers practical tips for this most important pre-reading stage. Mostly we love that these books do this the beautiful way! These stories are a perfect opportunity for older siblings to read aloud to younger siblings.
TWO.
Puzzles are a perfect way to snuggle in to the coziness of fall. When we stumbled upon this puzzle, we thought: “HOW PERFECT!” Celebrating two of our favorite things, words plus the best technology when it comes to writing—the humble pencil. This promises to be an activity the whole family (and extended family too) will enjoy.
“If you want your children to be intelligent read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.”
~Albert Einstein
I recently came across some of my daughter’s old writing. I believe she wrote it when she was 12 or 13. She is now 15 and a sophomore in high school. She was answering the prompt: “Why is writing important?” She learned that writing is more than just words on a page, it’s how people express how they are feeling. She believes for writers it’s like painting a blank canvas.
Words help us learn and feel or maybe better said, to learn how to feel.
The other night I read to my son Grady before bed. We read one of Grimm’s fairytales, “Rapunzel”. Grady lay fully cocooned in his blanket, over his head, listening. As you probably know Rapunzel was taken from her family as a punishment for stealing the green, leafy, vegetable, rapunzel, from their neighbor’s garden. The garden belonged to a very powerful and wicked witch. The girl, Rapunzel was raised by the witch and was sent away from all people to live in a tower she could not escape, all alone. A prince heard her singing from the tower. He watched the witch visit her and saw her let down her long hair for her to climb. He did the same and soon after many months got to know Rapunzel and they fell in love. The witch discovered that the prince was visiting. She cut Rapunzel’s hair and then sent her far away, alone in a desert. The witch hung Rapunzel’s hair at the tower and let the prince climb up, but once he did, she was there to greet him. She scared the prince from the tower into a thorn patch far below, where the prince’s eyes were torn out. He wandered for years blind and alone until he wandered far enough. He found Rapunzel at last, drawn by her beautiful singing. This fairy tale ends well with the prince being reunited with his love, Rapunzel’s tears healing his eyes and them living happily-ever-after back in his kingdom.
Whenever I read Grimm Fairy tales to my children as they were going up, I always wanted to change what happened. I would naturally edit—the prince losing his eyes and wandering alone, the wolf eating Grandma. What I started to realize over time is that children, like being scared. But there is a difference being scared by books versus movies or television. With books readers can take it as it comes, with language aimed at a child’s imagination, suspense and simple elements building the world of the story. What if it’s actually important to hear that bad things can happen? We can feel pain. We can get hurt. We can become resilient human beings.
Sometimes in life, in many ways, we wander blind for a period before we find the good, before we can see.
I want stories to end well. I want to eliminate the scary in the world because I don’t want to acknowledge the fear, I feel for my children in the world we live in today. As my daughter wrote so eloquently, these stories have taught me how to feel.
I recently read an article about the importance of being scared. Einstein was quoted: “If you want your children to be intelligent read them fairy tales. If you want them to be very intelligent, read them more fairy tales.” The intelligence that Einstein is referring to is existential intelligence.
Existential intelligence is defined as the sensitivity and capacity to tackle deep questions about human existence, such as the meaning of life, why do we die and how do we get there. The skills are reflective, deep thinking and design of abstract theories.
I saw an interview with President Obama years ago who discussed his great fear for young people losing this ability to be deep, reflective thinkers. In our fast-paced world we are encouraging more and more people to skim through reading material on electronic devices and not to sit and contemplate deeper meaning in what they are reading. In retelling Hansel and Gretel, nearly a century later, author Neil Gaiman asserts:
“If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up.”
The great polish poet, Wislawa Szymborska, wrote a reflection on the first edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales which revolutionized storytelling:
“Children like being frightened by fairy tales. They have an inborn need to experience powerful emotions.”
Andersen took children seriously. He speaks not only about life’s joyous adventures, but about its woes, its miseries, its often-undeserved defeats. Andersen had the courage to write stories with unhappy endings. He didn’t believe that you should try to be good because it pays, but because evil stems from intellectual and emotional stuntedness and is the one form of poverty that should be shunned.
I have realized that throughout my life I have gone to great lengths to not feel or face fear. It’s not just the evil in the world but the great unknown. The what ifs. What if I am not smart enough, strong enough, talented enough, liked, or loved enough? What if I am not good enough?
Children’s author-illustrator Jon Klassen was asked how he comes up with ideas for his books? He says, “It’s just born of fear—of creating. It’s been a way of avoiding something I don’t want to do. And the solution to that avoidance lends itself to a story.”
My daughter went on to say that one of her favorite words she learned more about is the word, dumb. She learned it can mean temporarily unable or unwilling to speak. My daughter has a learning difference. She did not learn to read and write at the same developmental stages as her peers. She often felt dumb, as in stupid or foolish. My biggest fear was her feeling this way. So motivated to protect her and put her in her own tower far away, I kept her out of school and chose the path of homeschooling.
My fears came to reality as I realized I did not make her tower high enough.
The beauty in it all, like in our fairy tales that can be scary, is that we see resilience being born, we see paths that can have obstacles, we see hurts and feel fears. My daughter has been hurt, afraid to try, plagued by words. But she has also grown strong, wise, mature, forgiving and compassionate. Fear comes with gifts. Fear ear can bring us closer to faith. Faith brings hope, in the good, in mankind, in our individual skill sets. Fear and faith seem to go hand in hand and to be sheltered from one keeps us separate from the other. Today, I read to my kids the whole fear filled story of “Rapunzel”. I don’t have to fix stories for them, and I don’t have to fix life. Life is, we are in it right now, and I wouldn’t change a thing, because if I did, I wouldn’t be the person I am today and I happen to like me. Keep reading fairy tales and all stories that end in tragedy. Let your faith be bigger than your fear and enjoy the journey.
During the primary years, the journey begins…
For those of you who are new to Blackbird & Company, and those who are seasoned users, pull up a log, and gather round the campfire!
