The Grammar of Swooping Swallows

Photo by Jennefer Zacarias on Unsplash

Sometimes life sabotages the best-laid lesson plans. Sometimes it’s birds. And sometimes the interruption feeds back into the lesson and takes you good places you hadn’t even planned for.

The interruption was a pair of birds that had found its way into the hallway outside the room where I was teaching 4th and 5th grade language arts. I was just introducing the focus quote for this week’s work with sentence structure: “Dragonflies swoop” from Swamp Chomp by Lola M. Schaeffer. 

I asked students, “What do you notice?” Here are some of the observations they offered:

• Swoop is present tense. (Excellent connection to last week’s focus on verb tense!)
• Dragonflies is plural.
• Dragonflies is a compound word.
• It makes a really clear picture: what kind of bug and how it was moving.
• It’s a sentence. 

Ah ha! The other noticings are all excellent reader-writerly impulses, but this brings us to the focus for this week, and I ask the key question: “Is it? How do you know?” We actually had a bit of a discussion on this topic. A couple of students thought it was pretty sparse on information, but eventually a couple came up with the terms subject and verb—who or what does or is something, and what are they or what do they do?  

That’s when I spotted the birds in the hallway out of the corner of my eye. My first thought was, “Don’t say anything—the lesson will never get back on track.” My next thought was, “But no one else has noticed! Somebody needs to get those poor birds back outside as soon as possible.” So I mentioned the birds. Chaos erupted as every student in the room seemed to instantaneously teleport from their seats to the doorway. 

A moment later the principal appeared to chase the birds out, and I wondered if the class period were redeemable. That's when a student piped up, "They were swooping!" 

I said, "Yes, they were! And does anyone know what specific kind of bird they were? Like dragonflies are a specific kind of insect?" 

"Swallows!" 

"Swallows swoop!" Wasn't THAT fun to chant a couple of times! We got to explore not only the structure of a sentence, but also the sound of language and the power of specific nouns. All because a couple of birds flew into our grammar lesson. 

I’m really intrigued by the possibilities of this approach to grammar (with or without added swallows) using Jeff Anderson’s Patterns of Power curriculum (see this blog post for my initial overview). Last week was my first foray into it with 4th/5th grade (see this blog post). This week, we keep up the investigation of the choices writers make and the effect those choices have—grammar at the intersection of reading and writing. 

Oh, and my middle school version just arrived this week. I’m looking forward to beginning to implement it in grades 6 and 7 as well. 

How do you help yourself and your students pay attention to the choices writers make and their significance?

Staying Curious about Language

This curious little face recently turned 28.

 Quick—tell me right now: Is the book you are reading narrated in present tense or in past tense?

Stay with me for a minute—I haven’t totally geeked out. 

This question occurred to me because last week’s grade 4/5 inductive grammar lesson was on verb tense. I immediately assumed most stories are told in past tense, but I opened the book I was reading (When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller) to check, and I read, “‘You should stop the car,’ Sam says to Mom. Except Sam actually says this to her phone, because she doesn’t look up” (p. 2). 

I was in shock. Not only because it’s in present tense, but because I’d actually read that very paragraph to the 6th and 7th graders the day before as an illustration of how vivid verbs can paint a powerful image. The next sentence continues, “She’s sitting in the passenger seat with her feet slammed against the glove compartment, knees smashed into her chest, her whole body curled around her glowing screen.” Then I’d asked students to scan their independent reading books for a vivid verb to share. And I’d never even noticed the verb tense.

I decided to involve the 6th and 7th graders in some quick research, since that was my first period class. At the end of our initial 10 minutes of independent reading, I asked them to check the verb tense of their story: past or present. Sure enough, most of them were past. In fact, all but one. Some students thought theirs were in present tense, but on closer inspection, it turned out that while the dialogue was in present tense (“I love chocolate”), the tags (she said, he replied) were past. But one student still ventured that her book was written in present tense. I looked over her shoulder to verify: 

We pretend
the monsoon 
has come early.

In the distance
bombs 
explode like thunder,
slashes 
lighten the sky,
gunfire 
falls like rain.

It was, indeed, in present tense. It’s a novel in verse, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, a fictionalized memoir of the year her family immigrated from Vietnam to the US. It makes a certain kind of sense to have poetry in present tense. I wonder if more novels in verse are in present tense than prose novels. I'll have to check out that hypothesis via my classroom library when I'm back in my room on Monday. I wonder why those authors chose the immediacy of present tense for their novels when most authors choose past tense?

I’m so glad that trying the Patterns of Power approach to teaching grammar at the intersection of reading and writing is keeping alive my curiosity about language—the choices writers make and the effects those choices have. 

How do you sustain curiosity? What effect does it have to be the “chief wonderer” in your classroom?
 

Cultivating a Culture of Reading in Every Class as the Year Begins

This year will go down in my personal history as the year of my foray into elementary. Also of my year of implementing independent reading in all my classes. I have survived the first week of this historic year, and more than surviving, I'm pretty excited. I started last year implementing independent reading (with significant class time invested) in grades 6 and 7 English language arts (ELA). This year, I'm expanding it into grades 4 and 5 ELA and middle school advanced English as a foreign language (EFL). 

One benefit of starting independent reading on the second day of school (at least for the ELA classes): Because there’s little homework yet, some students had nothing else to do in study hall but read! A student asked me at the end of that second class what he was supposed to do with the book he’d been reading—give it back to me, put it in his locker, or take it home. I told him though he didn’t have to read again until the first 10 minutes of class the following day, it was always good to read (for all the reasons we’d just talked about). So it would be a really smart thing to take it with him and read any time he had time. The next day he came to class with a handful of pages left in the book. Many of the students in grades 6/7 as I looked around on Friday morning had clearly been reading more than just the 30 minutes of class time we’d had so far. In grades 4/5, when I came into the room Wednesday, many students were excitedly telling me how many minutes more than the required amount they’d read the previous night. 

Here's how I introduced it: I started not with the “you have to,” but with the vision of why. And I started curious and invitational—what did they already know about reasons for reading? Students brainstormed in their notebook all the reasons they could think of for reading. Then they shared with a partner and added new items to their list. Then I compiled all the students’ reasons on the whiteboard. Finally, I used 2 infographics to compare with our list and add any reasons no one had thought of yet. (Infographics from Kelly Gallagher’s work and from Kylene Beers and Robert E. Probst’s book Disrupting Thinking: Why How We Read Matters) 

I was very pleasantly surprised at how many reasons students came up with on their own. (I really wish I’d remembered to take a picture of the whiteboard at the end of one of those classes!) When I put up an infographic, the students were excited when it corroborated an answer they’d already come up with, and excited when a new answer emerged. I followed up with different activities for different classes—circle the three reasons that are most important to you right now, or tell a partner about a book you’ve read recently and which of these benefits you got from it. Then I posted the infographics permanently in the classroom. (See below for content.)

One benefit of designating the first 10 minutes of the period as independent reading: Students enter the room and begin to read, even before the class officially begins! 

Elementary is a little different. Though we are in person, we have a shortened schedule due to Covid-19 measures, so I have 35 minutes a day, and writing to do as well. But students were already accustomed to a required 10 minutes per day, 6 days a week (or 60 minutes per week) of required reading at home. I’m keeping that, and planning to also devote Fridays to all things reading (after the spelling test). 

Doing independent reading with EFL is also new for me, but it’s backed by research and authority. Stephen Krashen cites the research that independent reading supports second language learning (Free Voluntary Reading), and Larry Ferlazzo affirms that and gives strategies, resources, and examples from his practice (The ELL Teacher’s Tool Box and The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide). So I decided to take the plunge. A couple of students were already reading their own English books independently. For the rest, I provided quality English books at lower reading levels (“If you haven’t already read Charlotte’s Web, it’s a good book, and many native English speakers will have read it”), leveled books adapted for ESL (I was so excited to discover a cache of these at school, including one of my childhood favorites, Rosemary Sutcliffe’s The Eagle of the Ninth, which one student took, and a Bill Gates biography, which another student snatched up), and a variety of articles from Newsela that are current and relevant (for example, the Myanmar coup 2 months on and how people use online gaming to learn English). 

And so the experiment begins. It was a good first week. I’m sure excitement will wane, and I’m encouraged at the level of engagement so far. We still have to set goals and learn about reading strategies, and I’m really interested in seeing how it all develops.

 

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Note on infographic content:

• Beers and Probst infographic reasons for reading: Build knowledge, improve achievement, increase motivation, increase vocabulary, improve writing, build background knowledge, improve understanding of text structures, develop empathy, develop personal identity
• Gallagher infographic reasons for reading: Rewarding, builds mature vocabulary, makes you a better writer, is hard and “hard” is necessary, makes you smarter, prepares you for the world of work, financially rewarding, opens the door to college and beyond, arms you against oppression

Scouting Poetry for Inspiration

As I read through English teacher threads on social media, one thing that strikes me is that a teacher who is genuinely passionate about what he or she is teaching will probably communicate that to the students. Ditto for a teacher who's teaching content under constraint. One teacher says her students love a given book which she loves teaching; another says of the same book that neither she nor her students could get into it. 

That makes me a little nervous because while I am passionate about poems that I love, I don't actually love that many poems. (Shhh...I know...You may have never heard an English teacher admit that before.) But really: I've been on a poem-a-day email list for years, and I'll only love a couple out of each year. (I copy them out in a notebook I keep.) I had my favorites that I taught to high school for years, and now I have to find new poems for middle school. Ones that I love.

So I’ve spent some of my spring break hunting for poetic inspiration on a 6th and 7th grade level. Spring break here in Japan is three weeks—which seems like a long time, until you realize that’s all the time one has to gear up for a new academic year. And for a combination 6th and 7th grade class, that means all new content, since the rising 7th graders have already had the class once! That means is getting a new line-up for the poetry unit that starts the year. So I’ve been spending some time this spring break browsing the CommonLit.org poems for 4th through 7th grades. 

You know what I found? Some poems I love. And I fell in love with the power of language condensed into poetry all over again. Here’s an example.

Truth

Nikki Grimes

The truth is every day we rise is like thunder—

a clap of surprise. Could be echoes of trouble, or blossoms

of blessing. You never know what garish or gorgeously

disguised memories-to-be might rain down from above.

So look up! Claim that cloud with a silver lining. Our

job, if you ask me, is to follow it. See where it heads.

Besides being beautiful, this is a “Golden Shovel” poem. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because it was just invented in 2010. You take an inspiring line from a poem and turn it into the last word of each line of a new poem. The inspiration for “Truth” is the first line of “Storm Ending” by Harlem Renaissance poet Jean Toomer: “Thunder blossoms gorgeously above our heads.” That line itself grabs me in so many ways: I’d never thought of thunder blossoming. One, because it’s a sound, not a sight. And two, because it’s big and scary—not small and fragile. On the other hand, both thunder and blossoms start small, swell, burst, and fade in a short time.

“Truth” is about similar surprises, from the way the new day’s unknown events are described as “memories-to-be” to the internal rhymes tucked away inside the lines (rise…surprise…disguised). It’s decorated with alliteration: blossoms of blessing, garish or gorgeously, claim that cloud. As surprising and beautiful as a cloud’s silver lining—a dead metaphor startlingly resurrected. 

I discovered some more new poems to love like “Bird-Foot’s Grandpa” by Joseph Bruchac and “Eating Together” by Li-Young Lee. I was reminded of old favorites like “Mama Is a Sunrise” by Evelyn Tooley Hunt, “Dreams” by Langston Hughes, “The Creation” by James Weldon Johnson, “Gate A-4” by Naomi Shibab Nye, and “Knock Knock” by Daniel Beaty.

And I remembered that I want to introduce novels in verse like The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, and The Red Pencil by Andrea Davis Pinkney.

Now I have so much inspiration, I’ll have to prune. That’s okay—I’ve got a week, and I’ve got my poetry passion back.

How do you revive flagging inspiration? What poems do you love?

P.S. Another source of inspiration this break: got myself a bookshelf so I can take some of my books out of the moving boxes!