Now I Can Teach Again...

Here in the great state of New York, we wind up our annual celebration of gauging student reading and writing abilities. It's like a marathon, the 3-day ELA event my students experience each year -- New York State testing. Ahhhh.... when I think of the hours of preparation, the anxiety of the children and the teachers, the dread while waiting for scores. It warms the heart. No child left untested.

Just to be clear, my little 10 year old friends (actually some are still only 9) still have baby teeth in their mouths, still believe in the Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny and Santa. They like to color and paste. They love to read, and they love to write, but they live in fear and trembling of those stinky state tests. It was three days of torture (90 minute sessions!) for my lil peeps to sit and read, write, and ruminate on whether this would keep them in fourth grade for another year. Kids do say the darnedest things!

Now that we have hopped over that hurdle (who knows what the tests will actually show or prove, probably not much that I didn't already know, frankly!), we can get back to the business of real reading and real writing in our real world. We can go back to enjoying what we read and write, without that sense of foreboding. We can't wait!

So, first on our agenda is a little teamwork. We will start writing a progressive poem tomorrow. I got my idea from a blog I follow, The Poem Farm, http://www.poemfarm.amylv.com/ written by my dear friend Amy Ludwig Vandewater. If you haven't been to her blog, you should visit. She is an AMAZING poet, teacher, mother, and friend. But before you go, let me tell you what my kids are doing tomorrow! We are writing a progressive poem. Actually we may write a couple of them.

April is National Poetry Month, but my students have been prepping for ELA. So... with ELA done, we can celebrate poetry in our class. A progressive poem is simply a group effort, a collaborative work. The exciting thing is that you don't really know how it will turn out until it's done. Have you ever done a progressive dinner? Kinda the same idea, only with words.

My students sit in groups of 6, at tables, and are very good at group work. I will give each student a sheet of pastel colored composition paper. (It could be plain, but I use colored paper, fun border paper, etc., whenever humanly possible.) Each student will compose a first line, then on my signal will pass the paper to the person seated at their left. That person will read the first line, then they will add the next line. We will continue passing the paper, with the next person adding lines until it finds its way back to the original author. Done! Simple!

The students can mix with friends from other tables and share their masterpieces. We will probably illustrate the edges and hang them up for the world to see. But that’s not all. We will finish our progressive work with a class poem. I’ll draw names to get a really random order. We will read our class progressive poem on the morning announcement next week.