Posted on Leave a comment

Around the Campfire: Kitchen Tales

Let’s talk kitchen literacy.

That’s right.

Think recipe for fun and for learning!

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

So this winter, let’s get cooking!

~Kimberly & Sara

Posted on Leave a comment

Around the Campfire: Slide of Imagination

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?

  1. Sometimes, in this moment, I give my students permission to pretend!
  2. 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.
  3. 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! 
  4. 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)!

ENTER TO WIN NOW

Posted on Leave a comment

Snowballs + Leonardo for all!

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.

**GIVEAWAY CLOSED**

And may you be inspired.

 

~Kimberly ❄️❄️❄️

Posted on Leave a comment

So much gratutide!

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.

XX GIVEAWAY CLOSED XX

Click here to check out our December Giveaway!

 

~From all of us at Blackbird & Company to all of you: So very thankful 🍂🍁🧡

Posted on Leave a comment

Written by Hand

Writing with a pencil by hand is a foundational skill. But it’s also a beautiful endeavor. I have fond memories of learning to form the ABCs. This work was quiet, slow, and mysterious. Yes, mysterious. My grandmother, who raised me, wrote little notes by hand and left them in various places around the house to my great delight. Her hand was one of a kind, a lovely extension of her loving self.  It was not like any other by-hand note I’ve ever encountered in life. That’s the thing about penmanship. Penmanship is personal.

Sadly, digital teaching tools have pushed handwriting instruction to the back seat. But writing by hand is multi-sensory, connecting hand-eye coordination and memory. Writing by hand, the art of encoding language, strengthens the ability to read (decode) language. Writing by hand slows us down so that we might engage with and bring shape to our ideas.

This past Sunday, January 23, was the birthday of John Hancock—the first person to sign the Declaration of Independence. I can see his strong, courageous calligraphy in my mind’s eye. His is the one famous signature that my elementary classmates and I committed to memory. So it is fitting that here at the end of January each year we celebrate the art of handwriting connected to this larger than life signature!

So at the dawn of 2022, may you pick up a pencil, craft your very own John Hancock, marveling at each individual stroke that defines your hand.

Want to learn more about printed letterforms?

Take a look at our free worksheet: Typography 101

Typography 101

Posted on Leave a comment

Da Vinci Summer IV: UNPLUG

Television from WaterhouseGuild on Vimeo.

Each poem is a one-of-a-kind collage of sounds that tickle the tip-of-the-tongue and a rhythmic hammering that sparks a tap-of-the-toe.

Poetry is a larger part of our world than we often admit. It’s the songs we sing, commercial jingles, rap, billboards, and YouTube. Poetry is headlines, Facebook, and blogs. Poetry is in great books and essays. Poetry is everywhere!

And so poetry is worth our while—worth reading, worth writing, worth speaking out loud, worth memorizing.

“Memorizing?”

This past winter, when I challenged my writing apprentices to memorize a poem, I had to endure another collective groan, “Noooo…!” And when I showed them the poem they would have two weeks to memorize, they went pale and were silenced.

The poem “Television” by Roald Dahl was the perfect poem for this project not only because we were exploring the theme “Unplug” in our writing workshop, but because if was long enough to prove the vast potential of their ability to memorize.

The lesson began, “Memorized poems fill the pantry of our imagination with food that is sure to sustain us in lean times. If you don’t believe, read Frederick, by Leo Lionni.”

I went on, “I know, these days we’re not used to memorizing long passages of traditional poetry. But, wait think about all the memorizing we do on a daily basis!”

We generated a list and I saw color return to their cheeks.

Row, row, row your boat…

The wheels on the bus go round and round…

Peter Piper picked a peck…

Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there…

I shared a story about my oldest Hannah being able to recite all of Beatrice Potter’s Peter Rabbit when she was three simply because I read it to her so often, “Memorizing is something you are equipped to accomplish!”

Still, I was struck by downcast attitude of my writing apprentices, as if this was the most arduous task on the planet. Can you say “Mountain from a molehill?” It was actually painful to watch them shilly-shally.

I’m happy to report that by the end of week one most of them found their footing. By the beginning of week two, they were having so much FUN that I announced we would be making a film of the project. We would turn Dahl’s poem into a documentary.

Here’s how I helped them break the memorization into manageable bits:

1. Begin with a close reading. This poem is a very long single stanza. Count the sentences in the poem. Translate each sentence into your own words. Write out each translation on a piece of paper.

2. Copy the poem, one sentence at a time and say the sentence slowly as you write.

3. Break the poem into small, manageable sections. Read and repeat one line at a time from a section without looking. Listen to the rhythm. Read the next line from this section, then repeat (without looking) the two lines. Continue on in this manner.

4. Once the entire poem is memorized, breathe life into your reading by going back to your close reading notes. Use your voice to add inflection.

At the end of the list I promised, “Soon you will not only have the poem memorized, but you carry the poem in your heart.”

And they did.

And they do.

So before summer slips too far away, plan an UNPLUG activity or two… and please, please, please, memorize a poem!

Posted on Leave a comment

Unplug! Take it Outdoors

Photo-2
Photo
During the course of our virtual traveling this summer, we decided to touch down in Times Square via a Ravensburger puzzle. The adventure took place on our dining room table until this past week when we decided some fresh air and bit of sunshine was in order.

We slid what little of the puzzle we had completed onto an unused presentation board so that it could be stored outside. The board allows us to leave the puzzle on the picnic table over night tucked safely from the family of four rambunctious raccoons and other neighborhood nocturnal wildlife who have adopted my boy’s ninja warrior pool as a watering hole—check out the foot print!

So with only a few days of summer left, unplug in the great outdoors!

– Kim

Posted on Leave a comment

Unplug: Wire Works

Wirering

Most of my boy’s friends are not only scheduled to the hilt with summer activities, the majority of their down time is spent video gaming or surfing the web.

My boys are embarking upon August charging ahead recklessly into the Unplug Challenge.

And guess what?

My boys are enjoying the plummet into low tech!

Today, unplugged is all about wire and divergent thinking.

Here’s what Sir Ken Robinson has to say, “Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity. I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking isn’t a synonym but is an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to questions, lots of possible ways to interpret a question, to think laterally, to think not just in linear or convergent ways, to see multiple answers, not one.”

So what can you make with a couple spools of wire?

– Kim

Posted on 2 Comments

The Unplug Challenge: Call for Ideas

Help us grow a collective “Unplug” list. Share your ideas on our Facebook page. Pass it on, and let’s see how long of a list we can create. If you have a longer story to share about “unplugging,” email it to us at takeflight@blackbirdandco.com and we may just feature it here on four&twenty.

Here’s one from my house:

Play a board game.

IMG_3217
IMG_3218
IMG_3219
My boys invited a friend to our house. Since the PS3 was off limits, they decided to play a board game. They were shocked to discover their friend had never played Monopoly, “No way.”

After a few minutes of indignant boy noises they, they stomped off to the game cabinet and passed on their wealth of knowledge in the most chaotic dissemination of Monopoly rules that I have ever witnessed. Midway through the game I brought them a bowl of popcorn so I could eavesdrop for a minute. The mock landlords were taking their jobs very seriously.

For the next couple hours my boy’s buddy was unplugged.

That’s the way with imagination.

– Kim

Posted on Leave a comment

The Unplug Challenge

IMG_3215
IMG_3189
IMG_3192
At first the Unplug Challenge gave me laryngitis. Seriously, the vibration of my vocal chords was a jumprope snapping, “No No No No No!”

The simple summer goal was to challenge my boys that low tech is fun. It began with a Victor Hugo quote posted prominently on the front of our refrigerator, “He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign.”

My plan was more like a nudge. So each morning I reminded my boys that it would be their responsibility to deny the technological progress of the 21st  century, dust off their imagination, and engage in endless possibility.

At first my boys were bored.

R-e-a-l-l-y bored.

I reminded myself that boredom might be just the garden for imagination to bloom.

And on it went, “Mom can I _____________________.?”

Each time the blank was filled in with a noun or phrase having to do with video games or the word-wide-web, the answer was an affirmative NO.

Guess what?

The Challenge is doing the trick! I’m witnessing the resurgence of imagination in my pre-teen and teenage sons.

This weekend boredom led Liam and Søren to rummage through our shed where they discovered our old inflatable pool. That gave them an idea.

Since the adventure was to consume most of Saturday and Sunday, I enjoyed the snapshots I encountered here and there.

To begin, blowing up the thing was quite a challenge. Think Home Improvement. Yes, they actually began trying to use Dad’s air compressor to inflate. Not bad. I didn’t have the heart to stop their Tim-the tool-man-Taylor technique. Instead, I steadied myself for the pop. Luckily the compressor and the pool were not compatible so we never got to that point. Next, they tried the bicycle pump. No luck. Now think Tale of the Three Little Pigs. Yep, old school. They huffed and puffed for nearly an hour. Sure enough I eventually heard the hose running and, donning their beachwear, the quick-change artists were splashing, which is about all that a big lumbering teenager can do in an inflatable pool. Or so I thought. Not long after a few rounds of splashing, I saw them rigging up a balance beam, adjusting the ladder.

“What are you thinking boys?”

“Backyard-Ninja-Warrior!!!”

Of course.

That’s when the fun got really fun—cannonballs from the ladder and walking the plank.

Suffice to say, my boys are enjoying old school activities, the kind that don’t involve watts or mega bites.

R-e-a-l-l-y enjoying, imagine that.

– Kim