Fantastic Flowers as Mentor Text

Guest Post by Author/Illustrator Susan Stockdale

Let’s explore flowers that look like other things!

Fantastic Flowers celebrates 17 flowers from around the world that resemble objects, creatures and even people, from spiraling spoons to flying birds to sleeping babies. The rhythmic, rhyming text and bright, bold illustrations bring to life this dazzling display of surprising blooms. Fantastic Flowers encourages object identification and inspires children to observe nature more closely. Back matter provides information on the pollination process, color photos of the flowers (so children understand that they are real!) and a flower identification guide.

Before reading, show students the flower illustrations in the book. Ask them what they think the flowers resemble.

Writing prompts

• Write a paragraph about your favorite flower in the book, stating the reason you chose it.

• Select a flower in the book and generate two lists: one with adjectives (e.g. wild baboons) and one with verbs (e.g. skittering spiders) that describe it. Write a paragraph about the flower using your adjectives and verbs.

• Select a flower in the book and write a few sentences about it that integrates the information provided in the back matter, which includes the flowers’ common names, scientific names, native range (habitat) and pollinators.

• Create your own name for each flower, being as imaginative and playful as possible.

• Select two flowers in the book and imagine that they can speak. Write a few sentences imagining what they might “say” to one another in a conversation. For example, how might they compliment one another?

BIO: Susan Stockdale freelanced as a textile designer for the apparel industry before becoming the author and illustrator of 8 picture books for young children. Her books celebrate nature with exuberance and charm and have won awards from the American Library Association, Parents’ Choice, the National Science Teachers Association and Bank Street College of Education, among others. She lives with her husband in Chevy Chase, Maryland. Visit her website at www.susanstockdale.com. 

You Just Wait: A Poetry Friday Power Book

Guest Post by Janet Wong

Have you noticed an explosion of activity books in bookstores and box stores? Elaborate coloring books, clever creative journals, and books similar to those in the Wreck This Journal series? These books allow tweens and teens to interact in ways beyond reading—drawing in them, writing in them, and exploring their thoughts and feelings. Why do kids love them? Because they’re fun—and writing in them is an act of ownership.

For those of us who teach language arts: how can we take a middle school student’s excitement for activity books—and bring it into the classroom?

Sylvia Vardell and I are trying to do just that with our newest collaboration, You Just Wait: A Poetry Friday Power Book, published this month by our imprint Pomelo Books. It’s part activity book for tweens and teens; part verse novella; and part writing coach, combined in a way designed to gain the approval of both the school board and your favorite skeptical tween.

Here are the steps that we followed in creating You Just Wait. My part of the book came first.

—I took a dozen “outside poems” (“already-published poems” by eleven different poets, all found in The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School).

—I imagined how these outside poems could be woven together and wrote two dozen new poems that form a story featuring Paz, an Asian-Latina soccer player, her movie-loving cousin Lucesita, and Joe, Paz’s older brother, who dreams of playing basketball in the NBA. These new poems became “Response Poems” and “Mentor Text” poems as the book evolved.

Sylvia Vardell then added her magic touch. She:

—created twelve quick, creativity-spurring, PowerPlay activities;

—paired twelve Power2You writing prompts with my Mentor Text poems; and

—assembled twelve Resource Lists for writers (and readers) for the back matter of the book.

Here’s a look at PowerPack 5, one of the twelve PowerPacks in You Just Wait. You can find downloadable files at www.pomelobooks.com

We think we accomplished what we set out to do, but we’ll only know if we start seeing ragged, well-loved class sets of You Just Wait filled with scribbles. Send us your photos at infoATpomelobooks.com—we’d love to see them!

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Janet Wong is the author of 30 books including You Have to Write. She is the co-creator (with Sylvia Vardell) of The Poetry Friday Anthology series (www.pomelobooks.com).

Note: Some vendors such as QEPBooks.com are offering healthy discounts this month as part of the book’s promotional launch; please consider ordering some copies for your school. 

Get Hooked on Words: Kwame Alexander’s Booked

by Jacqueline Jules

Kwame Alexander, Newbery award-winning author of The Crossover returns to center stage of the children’s literature world with another winning novel-in-verse. In Booked, Alexander introduces us to Nick Hall, the son of a linguistics professor who, in Nick’s opinion, suffers from  chronic verbomania. Nick’s dad has a serious obsession with words and insists that his soccer playing son memorize the dictionary he wrote. Nick’s hilarious definitions such as “onomatophobia—noun: fear of hearing a certain word. DEAD!!!!!” will make middle school readers laugh out loud and inspire a new appreciation for the power of words. This book will make an excellent classroom read aloud and platform to discuss the inner meanings of words and how choosing the right word to describe your feelings can make all the difference. What’s more, the poetry is superb. There are so many ways this book can be used in the writing workshop classroom. I’ll list my top three below:

1.    Word Definitions—share Nick’s dictionary entries from Booked. Challenge your students to write their own creative definition of words. (ie: “wordbound: adjective: unable to find expression in words. Kinda ironic, right?”)

2.    Poetry Model/Mentor Text—Share “Texts to April” from page 232  which is a love letter from Nick to the girl of his dreams and a love song to poetry itself. “The poems were cool./The best ones were like bombs,/ and when all the right words came together/it was like an explosion.” Ask your students to write a poem in the form of a long text.

3.    What was in Mac’s Dragonfly Box? Booked ends with an unsolved mystery. Nick’s favorite adult at his school, the librarian, gives Nick his special Dragonfly Box. The last line is “You’ll never believe what was inside . . .”  Ask your students to write a story about what was inside the box, why it was a great gift for Nick and what Nick did with the Dragonfly Box after the novel ended.

Happy Verbomania!!

www.jacquelinejules.com

MENTOR TEXTS AND PLAYGROUND FUN

by Jacqueline Jules

At the last NCTE conference, I had the privilege of serving as one of the roundtable leaders for a session sponsored by the Children’s Literature Assembly called “Reading Poetry Across the Curriculum.” In preparation for my discussion, I came across some terrific mentor texts that could be used in a combination of ways in your writing workshop classroom.

The Fastest Game on Two Feet and Other Poems About How Sports Began by Alice Low is a delightful combination of history, poetry, and illustration. Many people know that basketball was first played with peach baskets hung on the wall. But did you know that some say soccer began as a kicking game with a skull found on an English battlefield? Alice Low introduces the history of popular sports with a nonfiction paragraph followed by a beautifully illustrated rhyming poem. Most students have a favorite sport and should be naturally curious about its history. Read selections from The Fastest Game on Two Feet to inspire your class to research the origin of a sport. Afterwards, they can write about it in both nonfiction form and poetry, just as the book models. Students might also enjoy creating timelines, also included in this book. This would make a good class project with each student contributing an illustrated page.

A Stick is an Excellent Thing by Marilyn Singer extols the joys of outdoor and imaginative play. Bring in a stick and ask students to brainstorm all the games it could be used for. The poem suggests using the stick as a scepter for a king or a magic wand. This book also includes poems on favorite pastimes like hopscotch, swinging, blowing bubbles, making pretend soup, hide-and-seek, and jump rope. Each poem does an amazing job of portraying the activity, making them terrific models of description.

Joy in Mudville by Bob Raczka provides a great opportunity to compare and contrast. This illustrated poem is a sequel to Ernest Thayer’s famous “Casey at the Bat” reprinted at the end of the book. After reading Joy in Mudville, your class can discuss how Raczka took a well-known story and continued it with a new character and different ending. Students can write their own story about Mudville and a sport of their choice. Or you could do it as a class writing project.

Students are interested in sports. They love playground time. Using texts that celebrate what kids enjoy doing most is a sure-fire way to provide high interest reading and inspiration for writing.

The handouts for CLA Master Class "Poetry Across the Curriculum" session at NCTE are posted online. I hope you'll check out these great resources. In addition to information about Poetry and Sports, there are poetry handouts for Science, Math, Social Studies, and Art.  

www.jacquelinejules.com

WRITING FROM A MENTOR TEXT

by Jacqueline Jules

Cover Art by
Katherine Janus Kahn

Long, long, ago, in a galaxy far removed from Smart Phones and the Internet, I was a college student taking creative writing classes. My first poetry writing professor gave us an assignment that helped me produce my first publishable poem. He told us to choose a favorite poem and try to imitate the cadence and style for a poem of our own.

This was the first time I had ever encountered an assignment like this. Mentor texts had not been a part of my earlier education and to my knowledge, not widely used in any classroom way back then.

My first task in this assignment was to choose a poem as my model. It had to be a poem I admired enough to try to imitate. The selection in itself is an important lesson for a young writer. Choosing a model means defining one’s tastes. It also means being thoroughly familiar with the poem—understanding its construction enough to recreate its rhythms in your own words.

After some soul searching, I chose T.S. Eliot’s "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." To read the poem, visit this link. 

I knew Eliot’s poem almost by heart, because I had written a term paper on it during my senior year of high school. The thesis of my paper was that Eliot’s poem could be appreciated without comprehension of the many literary allusions in his work. It is a stance I still abide by. While a footnoted copy of this poem enhances one’s appreciation for Eliot’s genius, the poem is still meaningful and extraordinarily beautiful all on its own.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” portrays a tormented man examining his life. He begins with “Let us go then, you and I/When the evening is spread out against the sky.”  It is never clear whether or not Prufrock is carrying on an internal monologue or talking to another person. But Eliot’s “you and I” along with a repeated two line stanza, “In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo” gave me an idea.  Instead of a name, I could give my protagonist a setting. I decided to write in the voice of a nameless young woman visiting a psychologist after a self-destructive experience. The full text of my poem, "You and I," is below at the end of this post. 

During the course of “You and I,” my protagonist reviews her year of sessions with the psychologist. I employ rhyme, just as Eliot did in “The Love Song” and vary the length of my stanzas for emphasis. My poem is significantly shorter than Eliot’s but it comes to an end with a few similar ideas.

Toward the end of “The Love Song,” Prufrock says “For I have known them all already, known them all.”  I use this idea when my protagonist says that she has told the psychologist all she can tell about her life: ”But we have done this all already/ done the childhood, mother, father, siblings,/defined the large and small defeats”

And Eliot’s lines “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices/Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” inspired my lines  “So it's time now/ Yes, it's time to test your doctor's license/ as we force these sessions to a crisis” in which my protagonist tells her doctor that she is ready to manage without therapy.

My poem, “You and I,” inspired other poems and eventually became the concluding poem of a thematic collection in the voice of an 18-year-old girl who travels from self-destructive behavior to a new acceptance of herself during weekly sessions with a psychologist. The power of a mentor text can motivate writers to create something completely original. Ask your students to identify a favorite poem and use it as a model for their own work. Try it yourself. It is a worthwhile writing exercise for writers of all ages.  

FIELD TRIP TO THE MUSEUM is scheduled to be published by Finishing Line Press in March 2014. To read sample poems and order online visit the Field Trip to the Museum blog 

YOU AND I

by Jacqueline Jules

(from the chapbook, FIELD TRIP TO THE MUSEUM)

We started off, you and I

with tissues pressed against my eyes

and you, stirring coffee, pretending surprise.

That's how we started, you and I.

In this room where the patients come and go

speaking of lives eclipsed, shadowed.

Do you remember? (Say you do.)

Our first hour conversation

my long list of agitations

and your knowing, nodding smile.

In this room which is carpeted, paneled, and square,

this room where I have come and gone and shared

the details of a cold November night,

the harsh glow of a bathroom light,

and bright red blood, a startling sight . . . .

But we have done this all already,

done the childhood, mother, father, siblings,

defined the large and small defeats,

traveled all those narrow, winding streets

which crisscross and finally meet

in the same small place of no retreat.

It wasn't you who saw me as a snail,

a slimy worm without a tail. It wasn't you.

So it's time now. Yes, it's time

to test your doctor's license

as we force these sessions to a crisis,

when, with a surgeon's sharp incision,

you will remove all self-derision

and present me with the lovely vision

of the person I have always longed to be.

Or does that job still belong to me?

www.jacquelinejules.com

ACCIDENTAL PLAGIARISM

by Jacqueline Jules

As part of a unit on following instructions, I read the picture book How To Lose All Your Friends by Nancy Carlson to a fourth grade class. Inspired by this amusing list of social mistakes, the students eagerly picked up pencils to begin their own how-to lists. The results we shared 25 minutes later were creative, funny, and highly original. Some of the students made a text-to-text connection to the middle grade novel, 101 Ways to Bug Your Teacher by Lee Wardlaw. Others wrote lists for annoying brothers or sisters. The two teachers in the room made up lists to annoy their students. Everyone had a great time.

Writing models also known as mentor texts are widely used in writing workshop. All writers benefit from studying and emulating the work of a favorite author. However, sometimes it muddies the waters between copying and doing your work. What do you say to a second grader who proudly shares a story entitled “Puppyzilla” with entire sentences lifted directly from Dav Pilkey’s Dogzilla?

It’s a delicate situation considering the young writer was encouraged to use Dogzilla as inspiration for her story. While students understand, even at a young age, that they shouldn’t copy answers on a test, the distinction between writing one’s own version of a story idea and plagiarism can be hard for young writers to grasp.

I tackle this problem by taking the student aside to compare the student’s work with the writing model. We identify sentences that were copied and acknowledge a mutual love of the story.

“You’re right! That is the best part of Dogzilla. But those words belong to Dav Pilkey, not you.”

Some of my own picture books were inspired by traditional folktales. I researched different versions of these tales in order to combine elements into an original synthesis. I also compared my own language to my sources to be sure I did not plagiarize by accident. Frequently, this pushed me to search for new ways of saying something. Writing models can provide both ideas for writing and a means for strengthening writing. Teach your students to carefully ask the following questions.

How is my story different from the mentor text? How is it the same? Have I used any of the same words? Could I choose words that sound more like me?

http://www.jacquelinejules.com/