Small Moment Stories

March 7, 2020 was the last time I went out for a meal with friends.Yeah, I know about outdoor dining, igloos, and tents, socially distanced tables, etc. I just have been afraid to try any of it. Not judging those who have made it work for them. Just not for me. Yesterday though, hubby and I met an old friend in sunny Orlando, and sat at a very distanced picnic table at an absolutely adorable little breakfast/lunch spot called Eola General. It was delicious in every way - a delicious lunch and an afternoon filled with delicious gifts of the soul. 

My mind is filled with the precious moments of today, precious moments of the past, and the promise of more precious moments to come once enough of us get vaccinated. As I dozed on and off in the car on the way home (Hubby driving, not me!), my teacher brain traveled back to that time when I convinced my sweet students that every lesson that we shared together and the time we spent learning it was like opening a precious gift. Yes! They bought it! Of course they did, because I believed in it so much myself, and they could tell. You know yourself that's how anything that you teach works. If you're really feelin' it yourself, it's easier to bring your learners along with you. We had a song to describe what we were feeling from the creative mind and studio of Lessia Bonn. Here's a little video about it that we collaborated on: Gift in This Present 

Moving from the simple thoughts of just spending an afternoon with a friend, and how precious these small moments in time are, my teacher brain circled back to teaching kids to write personal narratives by capturing and writing stories about those small moments. As "March is Reading Month" is upon us, along with "Women's History Month", and following "Black History Month", along with the uproar over newly discovered issues with Dr. Seuss, I am thinking this: How about a Faith Ringgold author study?

Faith Ringgold, artist, author, teacher, and woman of color, wrote twelve children's picture books, about small moments that stayed close to the heart and small, to small moments that became monumental ones. My favorite way to study and take mentorship from Faith Ringgold is through the Quilt Story. Ms. Ringgold combined her love of art, storytelling, and fabric design in her quilt stories. Tar Beach is a perfect place to start. It's a quilt story based on a small moment from Ringgold's childhood. The story takes place on a rooftop summer night in New York, when, as a child, Faith dreamed that she could fly. A delicious memory!

Faith Ringgold holds a special place in my heart because, in her promotion of her soon to be published (at that time) My Dream of Martin Luther King, she visited a library not too far from our school. My students were invited to present their small moment quilt stories that they had created to her. She celebrated and treated them like real authors along with the parents and teachers who attended. 

If you have ever browsed in Rainbow City Learning, you may have noticed a quilt activity or two (or twelve). It's an activity for individual or group participation that my students have loved over the years. Class created quilts make awesome displays in the classroom or hallway. I am currently working on a clickable online version as well. Stay tuned! (Join my mailing list for an upcoming free sample!) Translating a quilt activity to a story quilt is an easy leap to make. Here is a quick teacher created tutorial that you can show to your students: Small Moment Story Quilt. A story quilt basically has two elements: a central image showing a small moment and the story told in words around the border. Second and third graders should be able to write a few sentences around the border; I expect a few paragraphs from fourth and fifth graders. An alternate way to create the quilt square is to place the text in the center square and then pictures around the border. 

Here's a quick link to some of Faith Ringgold's books (not an affiliate). I was surprised to see just now that the winter of 1998 was the time that my students met Faith Ringgold. We had been creating those story quilts since school started in the fall of 1997! The years have slipped by in an instant! Yet another reason to collect as many precious moments as you can! Some of the teaching days and weeks are long, but the years just slip through your fingers! 

A few more resources that I found to bring the magic of quilt stories to your students:

Anchor Books for Small Moment Writing

Mentor Texts for Teaching Small Moments Writing

Whitney Houston: One Moment in Time

Big Love, Small Moments (I thought this one was PERFECT!)

Faith Ringgold reading Tar Beach

Learning Art Through Faith Ringgold's History

Getting to Know Faith Ringgold

A related blog post about using the "Gift in This Present" theme can be found here: The Gift of Time

Happy March, everyone, however you choose to celebrate it! 

For more teaching inspiration for February/March, check out the amazing Teacher Talk blogs below. If you would also like to be a part of Teacher Talk, we are a group of teacher bloggers who share posts that are heavy on the ideas with just a little selling of our educational materials at TeachersPayTeachers.com.  For more information about joining The Best of Teacher Entrepreneurs Marketing Cooperative, go to https://bit.ly/3o7D1Dv.  Feel free to email me at retta.london@gmail.com if you have any questions. 

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3

Telling Our Stories

Who tells your story? Your parents tell it back to you at first, all the tender and embarrassing moments that you were too young to place into accessible memory at the time.  For most of your life, you tell your own

stories: to new and old friends, sometimes to strangers, to those who already love you or who may be falling in love with you, to your own children and grandchildren. After you are gone, your stories are held by those who knew you best: siblings, children, grandchildren, friends, former students, and former colleagues. If you have kept and left diaries, generations to follow in your family will come to know you as if you walked the earth together. If you become famous your lifetime, future biographers will tell their own versions of your story.

Eliza Hamilton tells us Alexander's story, as well as her own, in the Lin-Manuel Miranda song from the play "Hamilton". I know you've been singing or humming it to yourself since the first line of this post. Right? Eliza asks us, "And when you're gone, who remembers your name? Who keeps your flame? Who tells your story?" She also tells us, "I put myself back in the narrative." That line turns our teacher brain right away to personal narratives, often the first writing genre we try to teach, drawing from personal experiences, the stories our students love to tell. They love to tell their stories orally, yet are often more reluctant to start writing them down. We all know the experience: a flurry of raised hands, one child is recognized to speak, and the response begins, "Once....." Uh oh, not an actual answer, but a story. What do you do? Honor the need to tell our stories, or try to swing the focus back to the standard that must be taught in that 40 minute block? Not an easy choice, yet one that each of us makes several times at least every day. I have been guilty so many times of not only telling my own stories, but of allowing more than one student to get personal with their responses. The challenge to me as an educator was always how to draw the connecting lines so that the time spent will be meaningful in advancing the lesson for all.

Teacher Takeaways

I've been spending way too much time on ZOOM lately, and I don't have a class of students to meet with. Two ZOOM meetings and a Facebook Live each day for three days in a row this week made me feel your pain even more strongly, teachers. I applaud you and pray for you. One of my Zoom calls this week was a meeting of the three congregations affected by the Tree of Life mass murders two years ago. They were meeting to discuss a new book filled with narratives written by those who were either directly involved, or were close to the area or to the victims of the tragedy. My uncle is a survivor of that horrific attack. He deals with the after effects every day, and when he told me about the book and the meeting, I asked if I could attend. The book is Bound in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy, edited by Beth Kissileff and Eric Lidji.

I was drawn to this topic at first because of my family's connection, but as I looked inside the book, I noticed that one of the writers had once, long ago, been a third grade student in my classroom. Of course I wanted to see how his writing had improved since third grade! I ordered the book on the spot! Listening to the writers as they read and discussed excerpts from the book, there were so many teacher takeaways. Two takeaways stood out from all the rest to me as a teacher. Neither was new to me, yet their importance surged in my mind, given our current situation in this age of the pandemic. One is the cathartic nature of just being able to tell your stories. The second is the way the same story is different when told by different people. Each of these, I believe, is important enough to make telling our stories a vital part of our teaching practice this year.

A Catharsis

Kids need to tell their stories. It's a release and a relief. Emotions are running strong right now for all of us. Stuffing our feelings deep inside isn't healthy, and storytelling can be a release. Kids need to be scaffolded into this practice. Start by honoring those responses that start with, "Once...". Plan for lots of short story responses in your morning meetings, and in the first moments of your lessons. Don't let the pandemic and our "new normal" be an elephant in the room beyond the screen. Bring it forward and encourage your students to talk about it. Becoming comfortable with talking about it can become a comfort with writing about it.

Text to Self becomes Text to World

Beginning with these mini oral histories and moving to journal entries, you are well on the way to longer, more traditional personal narratives. As kids start writing in journals, we need to be accepting of short answers as well as longer ones. A good way to ease reluctant writers into the practice is to allow drawing, diagramming, and even stickers to help fill the page at first. Most kids enjoy sharing their journal entries aloud. I wouldn't require it, but gently encourage it whether in small focus groups or with the class as a whole. An online bulletin board would be a great way to anonymously share some journal entries with the rest of the class. 

As you begin to teach personal narrative writing, journal entries that your students have been collecting are a gold mine of topics and prompts for writing. Kids can mark pages that they choose for future narratives with yarn, ribbons, string, sticky notes, or stickers that extend beyond  the page.. (Try sticking a second sticker to the back of the extended sticker to make it a little more long-lasting.) If you are collecting journal entries to show growth through the year as writers, journal entries paint a pretty accurate picture.

As I mentioned in my second takeaway above, writing about the same topic or event will look very different and unique from writer to writer. Many interesting and valuable lessons for writing can be drawn from this. Point of view, compare-contrast, even the basic elements of introduction, plot, characters, problem, and resolution will look different from student to student. The global lesson from this may be that it indeed matters very much who tells our stories.

I started a list of discussion/writing prompts to get you going, if you'd like to explore this more with your students. Just click below, and it's yours! (Background by Workman's Wonders on TpT)

For more ideas for moving from storytelling to journals to personal narrative writing, I hope you'll take a look at some of these classroom-tested resources from Rainbow City Learning! Just click here for the "Telling Our Stories" resource group.

Whatever your story, I wish you peace n the days ahead. Be well.

For more teaching inspiration for November/December, check out the amazing Teacher Talk blogs below. If you would also like to be a part of Teacher Talk, we are a group of teacher bloggers who share posts that are heavy on the ideas with just a little selling of our educational materials at TeachersPayTeachers.com.  For more information about joining The Best of Teacher Entrepreneurs Marketing Cooperative, go to https://bit.ly/3o7D1Dv.  Feel free to email me at retta.london@gmail.com if you have any questions. 

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2

Distance Learning or In Person - The Buddy Bench

Teachers. We are tired! What a few months we've had, and what an amazing job you all have done, rising to the occasion of teaching from a distance! And now, the waiting game has begun. Will the new school year find us back in our classrooms, or will we be squares on ZOOM, or will we be expected to manage a hybrid practice? If you are tired, and need to lie down for awhile or go for a walk, I get it. Do that. Come back when you need this!

I believe that you are going to need this at some point though. More challenges lie ahead, and as my teaching colleagues have heard me say so many times through our years together, "I have an idea!" I'm embarking today on a blog series focusing on what lies ahead. The overarching theme is "Distance Learning or In Person?". Each new post will try to answer that question so that we can approach some important learning community issues in both ways. I hope you'll find this series helpful as you begin your new school year!

The Buddy Bench
What is a Buddy Bench? This concept has been around since 2013, when a second grader came up with an idea for lonely kids at recess time. The Buddy Bench doesn't even have to be an actual bench, but it does have to be an agreed upon meeting place. When a child sits on a Buddy Bench, it sends a signal to others that he/she/they would like to interact with someone. This could mean just talking or joining in a game. It's a great way to promote inclusion and to build empathy. I'm all for anything we can do to build these kids up from the inside out. The Buddy Bench is relationship and SEL magic!

The secret to success with your Buddy Bench is to discretely teach what it's all about and to model using it. When we installed one at my school, I discovered that the very kids who needed it most in order to find companions at recess were the kids who lacked skill in interpersonal communication. (Anyone surprised?) That's when I developed a set of cards that could be laminated and left at the Buddy Bench to serve as conversation prompts. You can make your own or find them here, but the important thing is to practice using them. Select a topic and try a model discussion. The topics on my cards all center on finding some common ground on which a friendship may be built.  What are your favorite kind of movies? Music? Ice cream? What do you like to do best at recess? What's your favorite joke? You get it, right?

The Buddy Bench in Normal Times
In normal post pandemic times, your Buddy Bench will be a fixture on your playground. Our PTA even added a second one right outside the office for indoor recess. Kids will use it to signal that they would rather not spend  recess alone, and other kids will join them. They will find something something to chat about, and may move on to a soccer match, a jump rope game, or a race around the track. They may even find a quiet place under a tree to read a book together. As a teacher (or recess supervisor), you need to kind of watch the bench out of the corner of your eye. If a kid has been sitting there for too long, either encourage a child (that you have pre-arranged a buddy position with) or go and sit there yourself. Start up a conversation. No one wants to put himself/herself out there as being all alone, and then stay that way.

My favorite nine year old told me today that the Buddy Bench at his school is just a place to throw your coat if you get too warm at recess. He went on to say that since everyone at his school is already such good friends with everyone else, the Buddy Bench isn't used anymore. My dad had an expression for that which, in translation, means, "It should always be so." I swear I heard his voice telling me that when I heard about this repurposed Buddy Bench! My wish for you is that yours becomes a coat holder as well!

In any case, your Buddy Bench should become a familiar sight and a familiar concept to your students. It's their signal to be good people and to include others whenever possible. How lovely to sit on the Buddy Bench on a perfect Spring day and chat with a new found friend! Sigh.

The Virtual Buddy Bench
At the beginning of a new school year, if we are still delivering our lessons remotely, kids within their new virtual classrooms will still need ways of getting to know each other. By making a virtual version of the Buddy Bench in their online learning environment, you will be adding in an important social-emotional component. You might also get better attendance (all other things being equal) at your online live lessons if the kids know each other in some way and look forward to seeing each other online. If you are setting up breakout groups in Google Classroom, it will be easier to group kids who know each other. We've all known for a long time that kids are more likely to participate in groups if the other people in the group are people that they enjoy being with.

To create a virtual Buddy Bench, the easiest (and most fun) way I could think of was to start with one of those Bitmoji Virtual Classrooms that all the cool kids (in teacher form) are creating. It's a compelling landing page for all of your online lessons, activities, and assignments to be linked to. Add a clip art Buddy Bench to your main page as shown in the first image below. When students click on the Buddy Bench, the link should take them to an activity page like the second image. They can find the prompt of the day or week on the Buddy Bench page. They will "write" their own short response on a virtual post it note and drag it to the virtual bulletin board. Too many students? They can drag notes to the white board and to cabinets.

Once all student responses have been collected, you can use them to group kids into breakout rooms for further discussion, or just discuss the responses at your next online meeting time.

The Socially Distanced Buddy Bench
If the miracle that so many have been wishing for occurs, and you find yourself back in your real life classroom, social distancing will be a must. Your socially distanced Buddy Bench can be set up as a center, as pictured in the second image above. Students should visit the center one at a time, carrying their own sticky note pad and pen. Remember, you don't need an actual bench. For a socially distanced situation, I would use a single chair or desk. Students could also write their responses to the buddy prompt at their own desk, and then place it on the bulletin board or white board when it is their turn at the center. Morning Meeting is a great time to share and discuss some of the responses.

Hope you'll find some of these suggestions helpful as you head back to school. You can get the prompts that I created by clicking on the cover below. Blank clipboard pages are available to create your own as well! To add them to your virtual classroom, just do a screen shot of the prompt that you want to use. I am working on a Google Slide version and will come back here to edit once it is ready!

If you like the virtual classroom backgrounds used in this post, you can find them and so much more to design your own virtual classroom settings at Glitter Meets Glue on TpT!

Check back here soon for the next in the series Distance Learning or In Person - What Are the Rules?

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