Zoom In! Animal Insticts

In honor of Halloween I decided to become a spider.

I traveled from the drainpipe to the doorway...

and managed to find my way inside.

I took refuge in the coat closet...

but got too brave.

and finally met my match.

(In reality my husband does not condone actually smashing spiders.  

We are a catch and release family, but that picture wasn't as interesting.)

How Do I Love Thee? Abstracting

          My content area is poetry, so this module has been poetry overload!  When I think about what poetry really is, I would have to say that it is, at its essence, a way to express an idea.  What else shares this function?  What else expresses an idea known only to the author, but open to the interpretation of the person who reads it?  A painting can also reveal the feelings of the artist.  Like a poem a painting doesn’t reveal all that the artist was feeling.  Some of the emotions put into the artwork will never be known to the observer.  There will also be feelings that people will get from a poem or a painting that the artist never intended.  The understanding is in the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, and mind of the beholder.

Haiku:

The piece is revealed

What is veiled between the lines?

We may never know.

What's the Big Idea? Abstracting and Analogizing

          Abstracting is the process of looking at something in a different way.  It involves really focusing on the basics of an object or concept to get to the fundamental workings of it.  It might involve using one or more of the five senses that we wouldn’t expect to use.  For example, I know how a book looks and feels, but will I discover something new if I smell it?  Listen to the pages as they are being turned or listen to the book being dropped on the floor?  Picasso told us that we must see with our minds, not our eyes.  Truly getting to know to know the nature of something is challenging, but rewarding.

Abstraction can both come from and lead to analogizing.  When something is stripped to its core we are better able to see how it relates to something else.  When we are able to look at just one feature of something it becomes easier to compare and contrast it with other things.  Analogies are the relationships that two things have based on a single, basic characteristic.  Analogies are often confused with similarities.  Analogies, however, are relationships where no obvious similarities can be seen.  It is sometimes the functional resemblance that defines the relationship.

Children may be better than we assume them to be at creating abstractions and making analogies.  They are likely to have fewer preconceived notions about what things are supposed to be and the way things are supposed to work.  Without those walls to prevent them from seeing things in new ways, they may be better able to see things for what they might be.  When my kids were younger I would laugh when they would take something literally.  They still amaze me with their ability to really see things.  Although I will never know my students as well as I do my own children, I encourage conversations that will help me to see things the way that they do.  We often need to simplify things as teachers.  It is the nuts and bolts of things that make up the curriculum.  Students can help me to “remove all traces of reality” to find the “idea” of something.

Poetry, too, can show us the essence of something.  Abstract poetry uses rhythms, textures, and sounds to convey its message rather than (or in addition to) just words taken at face value.  It is sometimes way the words are printed on the page that tell us something about the author’s intention.  An excellent example of this is the poem by e. e. cummings from the chapter.  The way he organizes the words on the page lends itself to the way the poem is read.  Similarly, Gary Snyder used an analogy to Indian music to construct his poem “Burning the Small Dead.”  His poem used the ideas of melody and chorus to move the poem forward, and again the structure of the poem contributed to the feeling of it.

Zoom In!

Hot Chocolate

Broken down into its basic ingredients hot chocolate is cocoa, sugar, and milk or water.

The magic of hot chocolate however, is its ability to radiate heat throughout your entire body!

After a long afternoon out in the snow building snowmen or sledding until you can barely feel your toes and fingers, nothing warms you up as quickly and as thoroughly as hot chocolate.  It's like a warm blanket that heats you from the inside out.

Sometimes I think my kids play outside just so that they can have hot chocolate.  I can't convince them that you can drink hot chocolate without playing in the snow first.

What’s the Big Idea? Recognizing and Forming Patterns

          Patterns are everywhere and we experience them with all of our senses.  There are patterns in music, language, history and science.  By recognizing patterns we are able to find solutions to problems and sometimes identify problems that we didn’t know existed.  I often associate patterns with math.  Rarely does the word pattern come up when I am teaching other subjects, but it is just as important to the other disciplines and completely appropriate.  Helping students to see patterns in poetry, science, and history will help them to organize the material in their heads and hopefully help them to make predictions and imagine a different outcome supposing a certain aspect of the pattern was changed.  Once students are comfortable with recognizing patterns, they can more easily form patterns of their own.  In the chapter 7 there was an example involving a Koch curve.  Seeing the example, it was difficult not to play out the different variations in my head (and a few on paper).  Having simply been given the picture or description I may not have given it any further thought.  Knowing it was a pattern led my mind to consider what other outcomes this pattern could yield and what they might look like.  Isn’t that what we want from out students?  We want them to make connections and form patterns that will help them make sense of things.  In the process they may also show us new ways of seeing things.

            

          Before reading these chapters I thought about patterns as templates.  I imagined a teacher saying “Here is the pattern, now create something that fits this pattern.”  I had not considered that a pattern could be a scaffold.  After reading I can imagine a teacher saying “Here is the pattern.  What can you create with it?”  We can challenge our students (and ourselves) to question the pattern, alter the pattern, or continue the pattern.  I have already made some notes about how the concept of patterns can be applied to subject areas other than math.  In language arts I often use the word connection, which I believe can have a similar connotation.  I often ask them to connect something we’ve read to another story or event.  This is a way of recognizing patterns.  Asking students to form patterns is a bigger challenge. 

            

          Considering patterns in terms of poetry was not too big of a stretch.  Poetry almost always fits a pattern.  Some poets have said that it is a bigger challenge to write a poem that does not fall into a pattern.  Poems are also very conducive to creativity.  Just writing poetry in itself is an act of creativity.  The challenge then is to help students not only to recognize the patterns in poetry, but to form them for themselves.  Beyond that I hope to give them the opportunity and freedom to challenge the patterns.  In order to do that I will have to accept the same challenges for myself and the material I teach. 

How Do I Love Thee? Patterns

There are many patterns in poetry.  Poems by nature are based on patterns.  Poems can contain couplets, triplets, quatrains, quintains, sestets, or octets.  They can be written as haiku, sonnets, tanka, acrostic, diamonte, or open verse.  It has been said that even in open verse patterns are difficult to avoid.  Patterns can be found in word order, sentence structure, sound, meter, rhythm, stress, intonation, and even the way the poem is printed on the page.  

I always preferred the more structured poems when asked to write in school.  Poetry has never come naturally to me, so when I was asked to write a poem I always looked for a framework with which to build it.  Given an assignment to write about nature I would usually feel overwhelmed.  Writing a Haiku about nature, however, seemed more manageable.

Perhaps I could have played with poetry and challenged myself by changing the pattern of a poem.  For this assignment I decided to see what else changes about a poem when the pattern is changed.

I started with the poem Dreams by Langston Hughes. 

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

This is what it looks like when I changed the pattern to a Haiku:

Hold fast to your dreams.

Without them you cannot fly.

Life is frozen and barren.  

And an Acrostic

                                                           Do not let them go

                                                           Recession of hope

                                                           Emptiness and injury

                                                           Afraid to fly

                                                           Miles of barren field

                                                           Snow and frozen ground

And finally a Cinquain:

Dreams

Hold fast

Or don’t fly

Broken, frozen

Gone

Hidden Picture

This morning while making veggie bacon (or schmacon as my family calls it),

 I noticed a heart.

I'm sure you can see it, too, but just in case...

Have I horrified the meat eaters with these pictures yet?

I'm sure some of you are wondering how they get away with calling this bacon.

I love it!