Searching for Spring: A True and (Nearly) Digital Story

Yesterday we went to Weir Farm National Historic Site to search for signs of spring.

It's been a cold March.  (That's ice, in Guinea Pig #2's hand.)

We had to look pretty hard.  But we found a few things.

We saw some critter's house...

A few brave rhodie buds...

Some kind of larva eggs....

A bit of new growth...

A little skunk cabbage rising (double click to see it better)...

A woodpecker's lunch table...

And little yellow flag rising (on the far bank).

We found more signs in the gardens, where more sun reaches all the way to the ground:

Galanthus bank...

Daylilies and daffodils rising...

The nepeta is coming!

Primrose poking...

I dunno what this is.  Hydrangea, maybe?  Around our house, the deer eat the hydrangea down to bloody stumps, so I actually don't know what it looks like in bud.

And anemones.

No child left inside.

Tree-Huggers' Resource Guide:

National Park Service: Umbrella site for all national parks, historical sites, and recreation areas.  Searchable by park, geographic area, or type of site.  Many individual parks' sites are loaded with educational resources, including downloadable lesson plans on science- and history-related content and real-life kits that teachers can borrow for free.  Also excellent are the Parks'...

Junior Ranger Badge programs, which are extremely hands-on investigations of the science, history, and other aspects.  These are fabulous ways to engage kids more deeply into real-life park visits; many of the parks also have Web-Ranger programs, which are designed for kids to do remotely, either prior to a visit or as a way of studying the ecology or geology of remote parks they are unable to visit in person.

The Nature Conservancy:  Extremely well-run organization which supports conservation objectives through a wide range of initiatives, from direct management of protected spaces, through partnerships with national, state, local and non-profit organizations, partnerships with government agencies in countries as far-flung as Belize and Mongolia, to developing country debt swaps.  They partner with a number of eco-lodges in the US and abroad.  Their own, and their partners' (linked) websites are chock-full of information, including downloadable lesson plans.

Appalachian Mountain Club:  Venerable hiking club with local chapters throughout the Northeast; also runs several lodges, a string of huts throughout the White Mountains in New Hampshire, family adventure camps and much more.  Best source of hiking maps, detailed guidebooks and wilderness safety guides throughout the Northeast region.  

Sierra Club:  AMC's nearest equivalent in the West, albeit with a slightly different mission: significant environmental advocacy as well as hiking tours; also runs a lodge in California as well as camping trips throughout the Sierras.

National Audubon Society:  Not just for birds: state centers with hiking trails, education centers, day camp programs, field study programs, protected habitats and more (the Connecticut and Maine centers have great field trip programs); very informative web sites with maps, classification tools, and downloadable lesson plans; group programs and trips.

Wilderness Awareness School:  Informative website of non-profit naturalist center in Washington State, with links to day and overnight camps for kids, training sessions for adults, and home study programs.

Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv's passionate argument that today's kids are being deprived of their right to connect with nature and the implications of this alienation on their abilities to maintain attention, develop mastery, and find a sense of meaning and joy in their lives.

Visual Thinking

Guinea Pig #2 has been busy.

This is...

A topographical and historical  map of the island of Manhattan.

Made of (in case it isn't clear from the photo) plastic bottle tops.

Which my mother saves for him.  As is clear from the photo, she's been saving them for him for... a long time.

At my request, we keep the collection at her house.

Anyway, that's the landscape view.  

Here's a closeup (all photos taken by the Pig):

The blue represents the water, over which the Dutch traveled, to establish the New Amsterdam colony.

The red represents are the lowlands upon which the Dutch came (already inhabited, Guinea Pig #2 points out, by Native Americans).

The white represents the time after the colony was purchased by the British. 

The tall green ones are the trees alongside what is now Morningside Heights.

Here's the Pig's favorite vantage point.

(Dunno why, really.)

And the tall, multicolored columns are today's skyscrapers.

It's all very vivid in his mind.

And it brings vividly to mind a passage in Learning Outside the Lines, in which Jonathan Mooney describes how he uses color -- color highlighters, colored post-it notes, colored index cards, and ultimately colored LEGOS -- to organize his thoughts before writing.

I can't, honestly, say that I get it.

But... vive la difference.

Maple Syruping: A True and (Nearly) Digital Story

Today we took the Pigs to the North Hadley Sugar Shack.

To Make a Gallon of Maple Syrup...

This is the basic overview.

That's right, 40 gallons of sap to make one single gallon of syrup.

(No wonder it costs so much at Whole Foods.)

Throughout the Pioneer Valley, little tin cans can be found, hanging off trees...

... and if you look up close, you can see the sap dripping in.  One.  Drop.  At.  A.  Time.

Collection trucks ply the valley, and empty into a tanker like this one....

... which is connected up to a hut that does a rough filter....

... before it feeds into the Sugar Shack.

The operation uses a whole lot of wood.

The boiling vats are kept roaring all day and all night for the three to five weeks each spring and fall that the sap is running.

Maple syrup is maple sap, boiled down.  For a long time.  That's the whole recipe.  (The sap is 98% water.)

The process generates a lot of steam.

After it's boiled down to syrup, it's piped out through a simple filter (the stuff that gets bottled and sold is filtered an additional time).

Then the customers get to drink shots of pure syrup.

(No kidding.  I couldn't make that up.)

(And I tell ya, it's delicious.)

Another part of the operation makes the syrup into maple sugar....

... and maple candy...

.... but the main event is still the syrup.

Worth the wait.

(Yes, those are chocolate pancakes, beneath that lake of maple syrup.  We were with the grandparents, what can I say.)

And just to keep us all honest....

Here's another way to document the process, and reinforce the Lessons Learned:

This booklet was hanging off a hook, nailed into one of the beams holding up the Sugar Shack's roof.

It's made of laminated construction paper.  Each page is a crayon drawing made by a different member of a kindergarten class that took a field trip to the Shack.  At the end of the school year, the teachers donated it to the owners.

You know what?  It gets the job done too.

Podcasts, Storytelling and Some Things that Never Change

Podcasts

Yesterday, the Pigs and I worked on podcasts.  Turns out podcasts are like stories on CD, only you make them yourself, on your laptop.

We started with the Mayan folktales linked in the Digital Parking Lot.  I read them out loud straight off the website, and each Pig chose one.  We talked about what changes we thought would make them better as oral tales, then I rewrote them.

Then Guinea Pig #2 narrated the stories into GarageBand, a program which evidently came installed on my Mac (ya see, I am starting to avail of a fuller range of its capabilities) through the built-in microphone.  We added some jungle sounds straight off the Mac; and we're good to go:

[well, evidently I'm not good to go, when it comes to uploading the files.  They appear to be in m4a format, and that evidently is not the format that Blogger prefers.  I expect Jennifer has some sort of magic wand that can be waved...  

post script: well, no, having read Blogger's helpful Help article, it appears that I need a place on the web on which the podcasts sit -- Blogger doesn't itself hold audio files.  Well, believe me, if I could figure out how to put the %4#@! things up on my *&$75%1! WEB SITE I'd have gone there first.  Someday.  Soon.  But trust me, the podcasts themselves are... terrific]

I'm a big time believer in audio stories and audio books.  They enable kids to "own" stories years before they can read; and even once they can, they can listen to books at higher reading levels than they're at.  Audio books build vocabulary, visualization capabilities, aural comprehension, and attention span.  Listening together in the car is a shared pleasure (one year, my son and I listened to the entire unabridged Hobbit and Lord of the Rings on the way back and forth to his school.  Over a hundred hours all in.  It went a whole lot faster.)

Podcasts allow you to make your own audio stories, without much hassle.  The Pigs and I selected, rewrote, and recorded these three in one afternoon; once I worked out how to use GarageBand I did another one with my mother in less than an hour.  Guinea Pig #2 was particularly taken with the project; he has significant language related disabilities (and also, perhaps because of them, particularly loves to listen to stories on CD).  I was able to put the ones he recorded on his iPod, again without undue difficulty.

Two thumbs up.

Storytelling

Much of the reason that podcasting was such an easy sell for the whole extended family is that the technology is such a direct and natural fit with storytelling.  And storytelling is a pretty big deal around here.  We read stories, we listen to stories on CD (and more recently, on iPod), we talk about stories, we tell stories to each other, the kids tell stories to us.

In Pig #1's Quaker school, they do a storytelling unit every fall.  Each kid, from second grade on up, selects a story and memorizes its "bones."  They practice telling, shaping, pacing, emoting.  Lat year the redoubtable Jim Weiss came and did a day-long workshop with them.  The unit culminates with Storytelling Night, in which all the kids' families come and watch them.

It's extraordinary to see what they can do.

Some Things that Never Change

 

We happen to be at my parents' house for the weekend, and as I began my re-write of the Mayan stories above, Guinea Pig #1 disappeared for a moment, then came back bearing this book:

It's entitled How to Tell Stories to Children, by Sara Cone Bryant.  I didn't provide my usual link to Amazon, because it was published in... 

1905.  

Here's the flyleaf:

Mary Jane Stewart Bates, of the beautiful handwriting so typical of her day, is not a member of my family, on any side.

The dedication of the book is this:

... which actually made me tear up, a little bit.

And it got me onto an extended backstory-telling of my own, of who the author was, who the author's mother was, who Mary Jane Stewart Bates was, and how this book made its way to my mother's house.  

Where, it turns out, my own daughter spied it on the shelves, several years ago, and read it, cover to cover.  Because, you know, she tells stories herself, to her siblings at home and to the larger audience at Storytelling Night.

"It's worth reading, Mom," she said earnestly.  "There's a lot of good stuff in there."  (The apple clearly doesn't fall very far from the tree.)

And she's right.  (She usually is.)

Here's the Table of Contents:

As is clear from the table of contents, the fundamentals of storytelling haven't changed much in the last 103 years.  Or the last 1,003 either, for that matter.  

She says a lot about internalizing the story, knowing it in your bones, making it your own and telling it from your own soul.  She talks, too, about pacing and voice.  About choosing your story based on your audience.  A lot of the same stuff that Jim Weiss talked about, in my daughter's school.

But more fundamentally, she makes perfectly clear what stories are for.  On page 3 she states clearly that although stories are often vehicles for conveying moral messages, or life lessons, or information about one subject or another, "its part in the economy of life is to give joy... To give joy, in and through the joy to stir and feed the life of the spirit: is not this the legitimate function of the story in education?"  

Quite so.

UDL Revisited

Earlier tonight, we took the Guinea Pigs to a production at a local playhouse of James and the Giant Peach.

We go pretty regularly to various productions at this and several other local playhouses, and when I ordered the tickets several months ago, I didn't much focus on the details of the write-up.  I rather came late to the Roald Dahl party -- he wasn't very well known, back in the day when I was myself a tot.  I read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I remember the Oompa-Loompas' song to Mike Teavee making an impression, even then.  That was about it.  But when Guinea Pig #1 was nine or so, she ripped through about ten Dahl books in straight succession; and shortly thereafter Guinea Pig #2's teacher read Peach aloud in class; and over the years I've read Matilda and Elevator to one or the other of the younger Pigs.  And everyone's a fan.  So when I saw the Peach production on the Playhouse schedule, I just clicked through cheerfully without much thinking.

I didn't really notice, for example, that this particular production was being put on by the Signstage Theatre, from Cleveland.  

In Signstage productions, about half of the actors are speaking and about half are deaf.  Each character has a voice -- sometimes the actor's own; sometimes another actor's piped in from offstage or even spoken by someone else onstage.  Any time there are any spoken words, somebody on stage -- not necessarily the character who's got the action -- is signing what's said.

It sounds a little complicated, but it worked.

The kids were riveted.  Not just mine; throughout the place.  Which was, by the way, packed.

And it was fascinating.  Before the play began, kids throughout the theatre were poring over the program and signing their names out by letter, using the sign alphabet that had helpfully been printed in it:

Once the show began, kids stared rapt at the signing actors; some of them, including my son, unconsciously moving their own fingers to mimic the actors' movements.

After it was over, we headed next door to Paul Newman's restaurant for dinner, where there were a handful of other families whose kids, like ours, were still clutching their programs and signing out "secret codes" to each other.

Pretty neat.

It reminded me of two other things, which combined with the Signstage experience morphed into a little Education of Pam unit on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles enacted for the deaf population yield benefits to the population at large:

The First Connection: On our trip to Florida last month, we took the Pigs to a Polynesian Luau at SeaWorld.  (You know... geography lesson.)  We were seated next to a delightful young woman who turned out to be a deaf interpreter ASL Interpreting Services.  She was scoping out the luau because she was going to be interpreting it a few days later, for a conference that planned to attend the show.

A conference of...

dentists.

One of whom, evidently, was deaf.

It turns out that she does a great deal of "show" work; that a lot of entertainment businesses  go out of their way to make their shows accessible to the hearing-impaired.  She spoke particularly highly of Disney, which evidently is known throughout the deaf community for having interpreters available for all its shows, for providing interpreters for the duration of any Disney cruise on which there is even one hearing-impaired passengers, and for training interpreters to be truly integrated into the song-and-dance revues, rather than merely standing to the side signing the language.  Which in turn brought to mind:

The Second Connection: More years ago than I care to recount, here, one of my college friends rounded me up to attend a concert by the a capella group Sweet Honey in the Rock.  (If you're not familiar with their music, follow the links out to their recordings, or follow the message from founder Berenice Johnson Reagon to her site, to hear clips.)

Check out the woman dressed in black, second to left.  Shirley Childress Saxton.

She doesn't sing.

She signs.

She's been a member of the group for... well, that was more than twenty years ago.  It's a small group.  She doesn't sing.

Why, I wondered, as they first came on stage, regal, straight-backed, dressed in bright African robes and towering hats; and she took her position and started signing, would a deaf person come to a concert?

But after I'd seen about two songs, I got it.  You'd come to see this group.  Precisely because it is accessible.  Saxton is a wonder.  It's an a capella group.  The women aren't singing the same words at the same time.  Saxton has to pick out one line that she's going to follow, and it's fascinating to watch -- she doesn't necessarily pick out voice carry the melody, or the loudest voice, or the voice whose lyrics are moving the most.  She doesn't stay with the same voice throughout a whole song, either.  She signs phrases, following this singer for a bit, then moving over to the next, then coming back.  Occasionally she just opens and closes her fist, in time with one of the thrumming, wordless, vocalizing parts that are keeping the beat.

All the while, she's swaying, leaning in and away, sometimes watching the singers, often looking out at the audience.

Poetry in motion.

Literally.

I wish I could put up a video clip; sometimes words really don't do it justice.

P.S.  Check out Roald Dahl's own website for loads of book-related games, fun facts, biographical tidbits, and lesson plans on the books for middle school teachers.

Tableaux

The very first activity we did in Educational Technology was to make what Professor Langran called "tableaux."

The only time I'd ever come across this term before was in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth.  In the novel, the Gilded Age New York society ladies, always casting about for suitable diversion, briefly lit upon the idea of tableaux vivants, or selecting key moments in classical history or famous plays or great works of literature, and enacting the selected moment.  They would create elaborate costumes and erect complicated settings, and then ensconce themselves into specially-built platforms, surrounded by frames and covered by heavy velvet curtains.  Ladies of means would throw large Tableaux Balls, in which the entertainment highlight would be when the party-goers would assemble before these platforms and admire the women as the curtains opened, first on Cleopatra and her asp, here; then on the drowning of Ophelia, over here; then on Delilah cutting the hair of Samson, over there.  The assembled audiences would clap, and at one such party they actually rated the tableaux and the top performer got a prize.

Like so much else that Mrs. Wharton wrote about, this evidently was actually a fad, for a brief phase in Mrs. Astor's New York.

Tableaux vivants were only briefly in fashion, but the concept of selecting and illustrating a single pivotal moment of a longer text is very old indeed.  Artist have been doing it for millennia.  Note that the Delilah link above routes to an earlier painting by Rubens.  And here is Millais' Ophelia; and here is Artemesia Gentileschi's*  Cleopatra.  And, to link over to projects that I'm working on elsewhere, here is Gilgamesh slaying the Bull of Heaven; and here is Isis sheltering Horus from Seth's wrath.

Long before I ever came to Educational Technology, I've been interested in this.  Of the whole story of Narcissis, which moment did Caravaggio choose to paint?  Of all the Divine Comedy, which was the moment that Botticelli chose?  Out of the whole Genesis creation story, which is the specific moment that Michaelangelo chose for the Sistine Chapel?  Why that moment?  Given the moment these artists chose, and the illustrations they produced to give form to that moment, what can we infer about their understanding of the text?  How can looking at these works of art inform our own reading?

I've always been particularly interested in this approach as a means of giving focus to stories in the Bible, which have, of course, served as artistic inspiration for centuries.  The Guinea Pigs and I have often, therefore, looked at artists' renditions of Torah and Bible stories we read.  Over the years I've collected a number of books that make this linkage easy...

...by providing the text right alongside great works of art illustrating what I'll now call tableaux from the story.  But we also do it a number of other ways too; we've collected a great number of postcards which the Pigs pass around; I scoop up old editions of Janson's at our library's annual used book sale and (gasp!) cut up them up for the prints; and we also use regular art books propped up into cookbook holders.  One way or another, we look at what artists have done to select and illustrate a particular moment.

And then sometimes, if time and interest levels allow, we do our own illustrations: 

Susanna at the Well

by Guinea Pig #1

Moses Hears the Burning Bush

by Guinea Pig #1

Samson Pulling Down the Walls

by Guinea Pig #2

It's a really great activity, having kids choose what they consider to be the "critical moment" of a story and then doing something to demonstrate their understanding.  It forces them to listen to the story carefully and actively.  It keeps them focused on the text, and gets them to consider "what is important in the story?" as opposed to the much easier question (that far too many schools spend far too much time on) of "how do I feel about the story?"  It assesses their comprehension of the story.  It's fun to do.  And it creates a record (we put the drawings into a pretty leather binder, which they like to look back on) which in turn reinforces the stories and the learnings.

Doing it Digitally

Recently, we tried digital tableaux at home.  The festival of Purim is coming up, so we dusted off our favorite retelling of the Esther story:

After we reread the story, the younger Pigs each chose what they considered to be the most important moment from the story.  (Guinea Pig #1 considers herself too old, these days, to engage in dress-up and re-enactment.  Sigh.  Perhaps I'll leave a copy of House of Mirth on her pillow...)

This is the moment that Guinea Pig #3 chose:

The Pig Speaks:  "I chose the moment when King Ahasuerus chose Esther to be the new queen and he put the crown on her. I chose it because it was really good for the Jews that he chose Esther, and so that feels good for me."

This is the moment in the story that Guinea Pig #2 chose:

The Pig Speaks:  "I chose the moment after Esther walked through the seven gates and the King lowered his scepter to allow Esther to speak.  The palace rules were, if he hadn't lowered his scepter, then Esther would be killed.  I chose this moment because I remember the first time I read this story, I was scared that she would die."

It may not be theology, but it's enough to be getting on with.

Anyway, I'm not throwing the art books or the Prismacolor pencils away, but I can see some real advantages to doing tableaux digitally:  

• It's really quick (better, maybe, for a classroom).  
• It generates no mess (better, maybe, for a classroom).  
• By middle school, many kids have worked themselves into a belief that they are not "artistic" (a whole 'nuther subject), which can serve as a barrier to drawing and illustrating.
• It's really, really easy to pop those tableaux pics onto a class blog, if you happen to have a class blog.  Which then serves as a built-in record and a means of reinforcement (not to mention, communication to parents).

And... I just discovered this benefit today, as I put the pictures up: 

• It's very easy to search on line for great works by other artists, to provide a comparison tableaux that illustrates the same text.    (I recommend this site).   Much easier than the post-it note, accordian file, and a-whole-lot-in-my-head system that we use around here.

And  finally...

• Pulling up an Internet file and looking at a painting projected onto a screen (to view aforementioned great works of art serving as tableaux for the same text) may be better for a full classroom than the passing around of a 4x6 postcard, or peering at the book propped up into a cookbook holder, that the Pigs and I do here at home.
  

Resources:

Esther's Story, by Diane Wolkstein, illustrated by Juan Wijngaard.  The best of several retellings of the Esther story, narrated in Esther's voice in the form of a journal.  It appears, sigh, to be out of print.  I hate that.

Queen Esther the Morning Star, by Mordecai Gerstein, is probably the best substitute, though it's for slightly younger children and doesn't have the wistfulness or the undercurrent of fear that makes Wolkstein's version so appealing.

The Illustrated Hebrew Bible, edited and adapted by Ellen Frankel.  I have given this beautiful book to countless bar and bat mitzvah kids over the years.  It keeps wandering out of then back into print, in apparently ever-declining-quality bindings, so buying used is probably a good idea.

Stories from the Old Testament: With Masterwork Paintings Inspired by the Stories.  Out of print, though there are a couple of copies available used through this link.

Women of the Bible, edited by Carole Armstrong.  Also out of print (what can I say), though well worth the $2 for which it's currently available used on Amazon.

Listen to Her Voice, edited by Miki Raver.  This one's still in print.  Both it and the prior one focus only on the stories in which women appear.

*  Mostly-unrelated sidebar:  Please wander around this quite terrific site devoted to the life and art of Artemesia Gentileschi, an extraordinary artist whose name would without doubt be far better known had she happened to have been born a more-favored gender.  Guinea Pig#1 and I did a unit on her a few years ago, and I wish we'd had a resource like this at the time.  It took us weeks to get one art book from interlibrary loan.