Coming this APRIL: The Wonderful World of Phonics
Author: Kimberly
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.
Around the Campfire: Adventuring into a Story!
TIP #2
Unplug!
Increasingly in our world, we all know electronics have played a bigger and bigger role in our lives. With the advantage, comes a great deal of disadvantage we all are trying to mitigate, especially when it comes to our children. Blackbird and Company offers some terrific books that can take your students into the wonderful world of nature and adventure. While we, of course, strive to be outside in the great outdoors as much as possible—hands in dirt, feet on trails or wiggling into ocean sand—we can also inspire a love of nature and animals and a life of adventure through good books.
“We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them,” so says Bilbo Baggins. A touch of irony, of course, but also an invitation to tag along on the adventure about to unfold!
When it comes to novel adventuring, here are some of our favorites:
[Inside Cover, Flyleaf, Sara’s childhood edition]
Rascal by Sterling North
Follow along as Sterling and his beloved dog Wowzer find a raccoon kit in the woods and bring him home. You will have quite a vicarious adventure and meet many enchanting animals in this true story set in the back woods wilderness of Wisconsin. Hear what life was like for a very clever eleven year old boy at the end of WW1 who grew a victory garden and was building a canoe in his living room!
[Section 5 Project, inspired by The Wanderer]
The Wanderer by Sharon Creech
Sophie, who intensely fears the sea, journeys with three uncles and two male cousins across the Atlantic. The are racing to visit Bompie, Sophie’s grandfather, who is fighting for his life in England. Readers, too, are called to adventure: “The sea, the sea, the sea. It rolled and rolled and called to me. Come in, it said, come in.” Wander along with Sophie and Cody as they journal their way through fear and grief. This story is sure to inspire!
Banner in the Sky by James Ramsey Ullman
Rudi Matt, son of the famed mountain climber Josef Matt, lives under the shadow of the very formidable mountain his father perished on while trying to be the first to summit it. This is a gripping coming of age story, where Rudi defies his relatives and sets about to conquer the mountain even though no one believes the mountain can be climbed. It is high adventure and set during a different time in a different culture. There are heart pounding moments in this book where you will feel your own fingernails biting the rock face trying to gain purchase!
~Sara
January Campfire 2025: Be the Superhero
Back in January of 2023, we began the tradition of us teachers gathering ’round the virtual campfire to explore and encourage and inspire. It began like this:
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, as we begin our 3rd Annual Blackbird & Company Virtual Campfire gathering, the snapshot is not any easier to face:
“In the United States, 54% of adults read below the 6th grade level.”
How can we possibly make a difference?
We are so proud of our Blackbird & Company community!
YOU are making a difference!
YOU are the superhero!
YOU are inspiring your students to unplug and to pick up a book.
YOU are asking your students:
What’s your BIG idea?
And then, handing them a pencil and their student journal!
We’re here to support you to start the year off on the right foot, inspiring your students to read for purpose, write their IDEAS and DO well!
As a native Angeleno, born and raised in Los Angeles, California, with rampant fires raging so close to home, I hesitated launching into our virtual campfire tradition. My great-grandparent’s home—one of the homes in which I whiled away many years of childhood—though no longer part of our family, was lost. And the loss tugs at my heart.
In this home, my imagination thrived. Great-grandma Garnet Jewel had an old desk that belonged to her father, Great-great-grandpa Carlisle, who, lore has it, was an avid letter writer. This desk, chock-full of luxurious vintage stationary, fountain pens, and cancelled stamps, became a happy place for me since GG Garnet gave me free range of its contents. Behind the desk, built-in bookshelves were practically splitting with the weight of classics, including a complete red-linen collection of Dickens.
I’m so thankful for the freedom I was given to bring shape to my little girl ideas. I’m certain that this rich environment of great books and old-school technology—pencils and pens and all sorts of paper—inspired me to engage happily in the art of writing. I’m thankful for that childhood home that contained great-great-grandpa’s books and desk and utensils to write. Writing, bringing shape to an idea is no easy task. I’m thankful too for Charles Dickens who continues to remind writers of all ages that nothing is impossible when it comes to creating an idea:
“Consider nothing impossible, then treat possibilities as possibilities.” ~David Copperfield
The art of writing begins with imagination tied to knowledge and is brought into the world through a process involving a pencil and paper—brainstorming, drafting, conferencing, editing, and polishing a final draft. For some, the process is daunting. It’s our job to provide our students with a supportive scaffolding and skills to help them become successful writers.
TIP is #1
Writing an IDEA is a courageous act.
Remind your students that learning to write takes years and years and encourage them to enjoy the journey. Learning to write should be the stuff memories are made of, like my happy writing memories from childhood. Set up a cozy space, offer your students quality writing utensils—Blackwing pencils, Golden Bear Blue #2, and Faber-Castell.
Here, at the dawn of 2025, pondering the long stretch of the school year ahead, we applaud you Superhero Teachers! Inspiring your students to READ well, WRITE well and THINK well using our curriculum is a step in the direction of literacy. Stay tuned for more Campfire TIPS.
~Kimberly
Giving Wings to Haiku of Stars
Feeling crafty?
The best ideas begin with a book.
“Based on Eric Carle’s recollection of his grandmother’s way of drawing a star (directions included), this seemingly simple story also provides insights into an artist’s private world of creativity.” I remember reading Draw Me a Star aloud to my children again and again.
Building upon our last post: Haiku of Stars, why not craft a star to “house” the haiku. Hey, why not give it wings?
Little star in the night
glowing light, floating high
in a cobalt sky.
~Aylen
I wonder if there
are different types of vibrant
stars in other cosmos?
~Jude
Looking up into
the sky, something brilliant,
something like a giant star.
~Claire
~Kimberly