Lynne Dorfman and Rose Cappelli use My Many Colored Days, Color Me a Rhyme, and My World of Color, along with other poetry books to help their students think about and make connections to colors in their own poetry. These poetry books help children think about colors not just as something they see, but something that also involves smells, sounds, tastes, and feelings.
In Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature K-6, Lynne and Rose share a poem created by a group of third-grade students about the color purple.
What is Purple?
Purple is a violet singing a sweet, sleepy lullabye.
It is the taste of grape jelly spread on warm wheat toast.
The purple smell is the night sky on April Fool’s Day.
Medicine trickling down your throat is a purple feeling.
Purple explodes in your mouth like Fourth of July fireworks.
The full moon on a misty May night has a purple glow.
Purple is a forgetful two-year-old with a mind of his own.
It is the shy feeling that hides deep inside your heart.
Also check out Lynne and Rose’s new book, Nonfiction Mentor Texts: Teaching Informational Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-8.
May 15th, 2009
During his visits to classrooms around the country, Jeff Anderson often notices a shift in tone when teachers talk about editing and grammar. “I’ve been in classrooms where teachers are doing a lot of great things with writer’s workshop and craft lessons and then they get to editing and they say, ‘Okay, guys. We have to prepare for the test and so now we’ve got to do some editing.’ It sounds like ‘take your castor oil,’” says Anderson.
And the typical editing activity isn’t much more inviting. In the classic daily oral language drill, a teacher puts up a sentence filled with errors and students shout out all the things that are wrong with it. Again, Anderson wonders about the messages that students are taking away: “The brain absorbs the patterns it sees all day; I don’t think it’s a good idea to look at bad patterns.” Instead of leading students on a scavenger hunt for errors, Anderson posts a wonderful mentor sentence and invites students to notice its characteristics and then to imitate its structure. When students immediately start shouting out errors they see in the mentor sentence, Anderson slows them down. “Wait, wait. This year I’m going to put up sentences that I like, that I love, and let’s see what we notice about them.”
Anderson demonstrated the activity in a recent webcast with a group of a dozen teachers and staff developers from around the country. You can listen in to the 45-minute webcast and see Jeff’s slides by clicking here.
May 22nd, 2008