Literary Bingo

Last year the library came up with a cool Bingo challenge for teachers with all kinds of book genres to try and if you got a Bingo you were put in for a prize at the end of the year.  This year the challenge is slightly different, the squares have specific book titles that the library has to offer for us to read!  Go Kerri!

So I have been reading, so far, an amazing book called Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt.  It tells the heartwarming story of a middle school girl who struggles with reading and writing, and she tries to hide it, with behaviors and other strategies.  She gets a  new teacher who is really smart and cares about her success and is also studying special education so he helps her to find out about how she can learn to read better.  It turns out she has dyslexia!  She gets help and it is still a long road, but it turns out that her hard work makes all the difference in her success.  I highly recommend this book.  Here is an excerpt that I loved!

"Everyone is smart in different ways.  But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will spend its whole life thinking that it's stupid." I think hard about that.  Could it be that simple? 
A mind movie flickers in my brain of an angry fish at the bottom of a tree, banging on the trunk with its fins and coplaining that it can't climb it.
I think of a turtle making a sandwich. 
A snake playing the violin.
An elephant knitting.
Penguins playing basketball.
An eagle scuba diving. 
But mostly I hope with every tiny bit of myself that Mr. Daniels is right about all of this. "

I was asked yesterday to describe Faure's music.  Gabriel Faure? How do you describe this feathery, light, cool, warm but not overly passionate music?  All these words came into my head..impressionistic, harmonically accessible without being neo-classical, forward-looking in terms of the rhythmic and musical structure, but not taking too many risks in terms of the harmonic structures.

It feels like being inside an impressionistic painting, never gives you too much emotion, always challenges you to listen closely because he makes a point of never overstating anything.  His music is not physical or highly emotional, it is more psychological and very intellectual, without being difficult to connect with.  Faure is the beginning of the impressionistic French movement, along with some other of his contemporaries.

 I highly recommend his songs which fly around everywhere and challenge the flexibility of the singer, but are also good for vocal students learning all the important skills of control and breath development.  My favorite songs of his are "En Priere", Chanson D'amour, and my favorite of all time, "Le Secret". Le Secret by Gabriel Faure, sung by Barbara Bonney

Happy New Year, and Happy Listening!!  Let me know what you think of this song, in particular!

Advisory gingerbread houses

Today is the last day to enter your gingerbread house in the first annual gingerbread contest in York Middle School, sponsored by the library staff.  Your entry had to reflect the homes of literary greats.  Therefore, we had people building the cornucopia from the hunger games, there was the grinch who stole Christmas, there was the Wizard of Oz with the rainbow and the yellow brick road, there was Rapunzel's castle, and my wonderful, thoughtful advisory did the three little pigs and the big bad wolf that would blow all the houses down.  They built the hay house out of saltines and covered them with raw spaghetti, they built the stick house out of graham crackers and pretzels, and then they built the brick house out of graham crackers and twizzlers.  There were also many small marshmallows that we put on the ground for the snow, and marshmallows around the edges of the houses to show some snow around all of them.  They also built a beautiful garden patch with skittles, and made the pigs and the wolf out of large and small marshmallows, held together by raw spaghetti pieces as well.  In the end, it was impressive!

The most impressive part of all of it, was how well they worked together.  They thought of the ideas themselves, and we voted on the gingerbread house theme so it was using the democratic process.  The students in my advisory wrote lists of what people needed to bring to work on this project during advisory times.  They doled out the work, so that everyone who wanted to played an important part.  They never shamed or made people feel guilty if they didn't want to participate, and because of it, eventually, everyone did at least one small job.  We had a little workshop going next to my desk for weeks, and I was relieved and thrilled when it was all completed and I was able to bring it up to the library for the display!  How wonderful!  

It showed me that these children are very good at conceiving of a project, problem solving, and working together to complete something that means something to them.  There is a prize of a cocoa party in the library, but for me, the prize was everyone working together, happily boys and girls gluing marshmallows down, and twizzlers on graham crackers and patiently waiting for things to dry so they could continue the process.  Congratulations to my advisory and thank you to the library staff for giving us a fabulous project to work on during the holiday season!! 

Gingerbread house video from the library! ENJOY!!

Jaguar Team Questions about "Farewell to Tarwathie"

I  noticed this week that when the Jaguar team answered questions that they had prepared for the class, they always refer back to the text, or the lyrics to the song.  When I visited the Harkness table a few weeks ago, I noticed that this was one of the expectations each day.  They are all expected to back up their answers with ideas from the text, the story, the inferences in the text.  They always share their answers with quotations from the book.  This is impressive, and it is now showing up in music class when we have these discussions.  We may not have the big table, and I don't have someone charting the course of the discussion and making sure that everyone is sharing ideas, at least a few times every session, but the rest of the method has become almost ingrained in the students' thinking and this is very exciting. You can tell that the conversation is much more animated, and the students are more and more involved and in charge of their own learning. Here are a few questions from this team that we entertained yesterday in our class discussions:

Who hunts beautiful, gentle creatures?
Were they hunting the whale for money or for food?
Are they scared or frightened?
Is their spot for hunting a whale a good spot or not?
Are they frightened or excited?
Did the crew like telling the people about their adventures?
Is this a different time signature?
Who sings the song?
What is the perspective of the song?
What is the song about?
Is the song happy or sad or both and why?
What are the instruments that are played in this song?
What did they use the whale for?
How old is the song?
When the writer was writing this song what was he thinking about?
Is his wife the whale?

I want to publicly thank my colleague Mr. Beaumier for introducing our school to this thinking and discussion process, and I look forward to having more interesting discussions beginning with questions generated from the class.  More soon!

Questions about Tarwathie from another class..

I really appreciated some of these questions so I wanted to post them on this blog to share..I hope you enjoy them-

Is the song in the only one perspective throughout?
What does the song mean when it says, "But there's no bird in Greenland to sing to the whale."?

What does the singer mean when he says, "The longer the absence the more loving she'll feel?"

The singer mentions many unpleasant things about Greenland, why do they still choose to go there?
Is the singer afraid for his life?
What emotions are present in the song?
Why is the voyage to Greenland so dangerous?
How does the music and instruments in this song affect the feel of it?
Does this song take place before it was illegal to hunt whales? Are they hunting illegally?
What will the men use the whale for once they catch it?
Based on the lyrics, how long will the person be gone?
Who is the singer's lass? How is she feeling when the singer leaves? Is she afraid for his life?
Will they go back to their homeland?
Why is it 3/4 time?

I love that question, Why is it 3/4 time, because there is a real reason for this.  It is the feel of the boat as they are singing, which causes it to be in 3/4 time! Hope you enjoy these questions, they made for a very rich and developed discussion that afternoon.  Very exciting, and less about me, more about them, always what I want to feel. Making progress, one day at a time.  Thank you for listening.

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Farewell to Tarwathie

Judy Collins

Farewell to Tarwathie
Adieu Mormond Hill
And the dear land of Crimmond
I bid you farewell
I'm bound off for Greenland
And ready to sail
In hopes to find riches
In hunting the whale

Farewell to my comrades
For a while we must part
And likewise the dear lass
Who first won my heart
The cold coast of Greenland
My love will not chill
And the longer my absence
More loving she'll feel

Our ship is well rigged
And she's ready to sail
The crew they are anxious
To follow the whale
Where the icebergs do float
And the stormy winds blow
Where the land and the ocean
Is covered with snow

The cold coast of Greenland
Is barren and bare
No see time nor harvest
Is ever known there
And the birds here sing sweetly
In mountain and dale
But there's no bird in Greenland
To sing to the whale

Quest for Questions

Today we discussed a song from Scotland called "Farewell to Tarwathie."  This is a song about the whaling industry from the nineteenth century.  Last year I wrote a blog about my discussion with the class about the difference between the original version of the song and the version recorded by Judy Collins in the 1970's.  Today I would simply like to post some of their questions that they thought of when I played the song for them.  We discussed many of these questions as well, and I was not always the one answering the questions that they asked.  It is the beginning of student centered learning while creating a safe place for questions to be asked by all members of the class.

What is the meaning of the song?
Where or what is Crimond, Mormond Hill, or Tarwathie?
Why does the singer keep mentioning the whale?
Is this song meant to be happy or sad?
What does "Signs of Time" mean?
Is this a pirate song?
Is it about love?
Is it about whales?
Are they going to Greenland?
What does Adieu mean?
Why do they want to hunt the whales?
Where was this song written?
What is the time period this song is from?
Where was this song written?
Why are they saying "Farewell to Tarwathie?
How old are they?
Do they have families?
Do they all die in the end?
Do they plan to fight each other?
Is Tarwathie a real place?
What is a comrade?
What is mountain and vale?
What is seedling?
What is whale hunting?
How old is this song?
How long of a sail will it be?
When is this in time?
Is the crew all men?
Are they Dads and Moms?

What I notice is that these are still all factual questions with one correct answer, or maybe two.  But the questions did generate some real discussion, where we talked about whaling and it was directed about their knowledge and adding to their knowledge instead of lecturing.  I have never been one to lecture anyway, but I have spent a lot of time manipulating the discussion to go the way I want it to go, so I am going to continue to experiment with this technique and see if it doesn't continue to generate more student centered discussions rather than teacher directed discussions.  I will be back with more soon.
Corries Farewell to Tarwathie

El Condor Pasa

Today I worked on teaching students how to ask more thoughtful, probing questions to help discussions be more educational and inspiring.  My learning targets were "I can discuss and sing a song from the Andes Mountains" and "I can talk about how questions can be useful or probing or thoughtful or instead, factual."  I chose to work with a song called "El Condor Pasa" because there are a few different interpretations of this song, and it also has many questions embedded in the song itself.  It is a song about love, and it is compared to a condor flying through the air, and how it comes and goes.

I had the students listen to the song and study the lyrics while they listened.  What is the meaning of the song?  That was the "Do Now" .  Then I talked to them about the learning targets, and reminded them of the questions we asked ourselves and answered for "The Magic Flute".  The students remembered that well, and they talked about the questions they had asked.  I got them to understand that most of these questions were "factual" questions with only ONE answer to them. Who is Pamina for example, or what happens to the queen at the end of the opera?  Do we have another type of question we can ask?   How about a question with more than one answer to it?  We had a few questions that were more factual questions about the song, like where did it come from, and why was it in Spanish, and what were the instruments that were played in it.  The tables turned when a student asked, "What inspired the composer to write the song?"  We kept on with this idea, and it is more of a process than I ever imagined.  There is a lot of Metacognition that is required for this exercise, yet if they begin to understand it better, then I will teach less, and they will learn more.

We sang the song after this, and we discussed the differences between sections A and sections B.  These were interesting questions, because there was room for interpretation, and some opposite ideas.  Some students thought the first section was happier, but some thought the second section was happier.  If you are to look at this song from a completely musical perspective, the second section is in major and higher on the staff, so it sounds happier.  Also, it is questionable as to whether the first section is happier or sadder..the story is about nostalgia, where we feel happy about the past but we also feel sad that we have lost the love we had.  The second section is both happy and sad, because the question is: Will love come again? We don't know.  Just holding opposite ideas in one's head at the same time is a complicated, and perhaps too sophisticated idea for this age group, but if I don't ask for it, I cannot expect to ever find it from these students?



My realization is that the idea of generating questions from students is a metacognitive experience.  It is not something that can be mastered or even attempted in one lesson, and it is something that I am even more intrigued by as I continue this quest for teaching and learning, thinking and singing, reading and dancing, all in one class experience.
El Condor Pasa the ultimate version