Howling AAAWWUBBIS: Continuing the Experiment

I like counting the subordinating conjunctions on my fingers—helps me remember the 3 As and 2 Ws take all my left hand fingers!

A 5th grader greeted me wide-eyed with wonder as I entered the classroom one day this week. "I Googled 'AAAWWUBBIS,' and it came up! It's a real thing!" I told him I was honored he thought I was creative enough to come up with it all on my own.

If you’ve never heard of AAAWWUBBIS, then you’ve also missed out on the energizing experience of howling “Aaah-WOOOO-bis!” with a roomful of 4th and 5th graders. (The 6th and 7th graders let me howl on my own. Not quite as energizing. Funny thing, maturity.)

What is AAAWWUBBIS? It’s a mnemonic for the 10 most common subordinating conjunctions (see photo above). As we’ve learned in grades 4-7, If you start a sentence with one of them, you’ll probably need a comma. 

I’m continuing with my experiment using Patterns of Power (or POP) this year. It’s a daily 5-10 minute sequence of language conventions practice at the intersection of reading and writing, moving students from noticing a pattern writers use and what effect it has, to using it themselves. (For the 5 blog posts I’ve written so far reflecting on my implementation, see this link). After studying sentences starting with if, when, and as, I finally let students in on the secret that there are actually a whole bunch more words that, when starting a sentence with them, you’ll probably need a comma. Enter AAAWWUBBIS. 

Two things I added this term were a notebook element and a “tiny quiz.” Both of these ideas I got from colleagues on the Facebook group for Patterns of Power, and I'm forever grateful for that online support community. Each pattern we study includes the following:

• Notice (Day 1): A mentor sentence from a middle grades text that models the pattern. 
• Compare (Day 2): Adding a similar sentence to see how it is like and unlike the mentor sentence.
• Apply (Days 3-5): Using the model pattern, create a sentence together. Create a sentence on your own. Hunt and gather a sentence from another source.
• Edit (Day 6): Given 3 variations on the original mentor sentence, how is each different and what is the effect of that difference?

Then on Day 7, the “tiny quiz” is a 2-point quiz with a new sentence using the pattern that has one error in it. There’s a multiple choice array of possible changes, and an opportunity to write the reason for choosing that change.  

Day 1 of the current cycle we started by studying this sentence:
"Before she lost her nerve, she stepped over the invisible line and onto the trail." --Kathi Appelt and Alison McGhee, Maybe a Fox

Students noticed a lot of things. It’s about a girl (she/her). It’s in the past—both verbs—because in English you need to be consistent with the tense. (It’s a difficulty for many of my students because Japanese doesn’t really worry about tense until the very end of the sentence.) We also discussed the meaning of “to lose your nerve.” And students noticed the introductory clause and the main clause, separated by a comma.

When we got to Day 3, I wrote, “Before I lost my nerve, I…” and asked students to create a sentence that was true for them. My example: “Before I lost my nerve, I picked up the phone and answered in Japanese.” (I find speaking a foreign language in person much less intimidating because I have all the body language cues for back up.) One student called out, “I never lose my nerve!” I filed that insight away and replied, “Then write fiction.”

Yesterday was Day 5. I told the students to get out their POP notes AND the novel we’re reading, Adventures with Waffles by Maria Parr. “Oh!” a girl lit up. “This is the day to hunt!” Yes! They’re getting the pattern. This is the day they hunt for the pattern “in the wild”—their own independent reading book, another textbook, our writing mentor texts, or now, the novel we’re all reading together. Here’s the one I found: “When I’d finished, he laughed loudly” (Adventures with Waffles, p. 104). Every student had their novel open, searching, calling me over excitedly when they found one. 

Not all of the finds were clear cut. One student had a sentence that had a “but” before the “when.” A few had prepositional phrases. One had a simile the author had made a sentence on its own. All things I filed away to address next term, after Christmas. But I praised them for finding sentences that started with an AAAWWUBBIS word and told them to write what they found in their notebook. 

I told them we are becoming better writers and readers on step at a time: right foot—notice what good writers do—left foot—try it out in your own writing.

I’m such a big fan of consistency over time. I’m loving seeing students becoming more and more cued into the patterns—the patterns of what we are doing in class, and the patterns of what good writers do. 

I’m okay howling AAAWWUBBIS all by myself in 6th and 7th grade every so often. As long as it helps them notice how writers start sentences with subordinate clauses, and start doing it themselves. After all, the 4th and 5th graders will howl with me.

After the 5th grader clued me in to Googling AAAWWUBBIS, I found a chant. Maybe it will work better with some students than the 10 fingers above. I’ll have to try it  with the kids on Monday!

What experiments have you tried to see what actually helps students understand and purposefully use the grammar patterns of powerful writers?

For a Lifetime of Learning, Introduce Children to Books They Love

Why do I get excited about kids catching fire for reading? It isn’t that I think every adult needs to be a serial novel devourer. (Though it wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?)

It’s that I want kids to amass so much vocabulary, to become so familiar with such an array of syntax, to build so much background knowledge, that text becomes their native habitat. That it becomes like breathing—second nature. That what was an impermeable or semipermeable membrane between them and another person’s recorded thought or experience or discovery dissolves. It takes no effort—the recorded thought, experience, discovery of others is immediately accessible. All that is required to learn about the world and our neighbors in it is finding something to read. 

This week a Facebook memory came up from when I taught high school honors and AP English. I had explained a jigsaw activity. I provided 4 articles on a topic. Students were to pick the article that most interested them, read it for homework, and the next day they would meet first with students who had read the same article to clarify their understanding of it. Then we would mix groups, so new groups would have at least one person who could summarize each article for the rest of the group, and they could build a fuller understanding of the topic together.

One 10th grader asked, “Is it okay if I read all 4 articles?” That’s what people do for whom reading is as effortless as breathing, and who have also discovered that it fills a mental craving—curiosity—that is almost as compelling as the body’s need for oxygen.

Those were the students who would come to class having done extra research, expanding my knowledge about for-profit prisons or the musical Hamilton. Those are people who have tools not only to succeed in high school and college, but also to keep growing and learning as they are confronted with the challenges life throws at us. (I am currently reading Departing in Peace: Biblical Decision-Making at the End of Life with my husband, Hunting Magic Eels: Recovering an Enchanted Faith in a Skeptical Age with my daughter, The ELL Teacher’s Toolbox with some elementary EFL teachers, Becoming a Globally Competent Teacher with my secondary EFL department colleagues, While I Was Away to consider it for a grade 6/7 unit on identity, and One Crazy Summer just for fun.)

But I didn’t really put it all together until I moved back to middle school last year, and then to 4th and 5th grade this year. How does a 4th grader amass the amount of vocabulary, the syntax sophistication, and the background knowledge that will set him or her up to be that 10th grader, that adult, who naturally turns to text to satisfy curiosity, solve problems, and learn? Reading. Reading books that are so compelling or fun or interesting that the minutes slip by while the child forgets that her brain is examining new words, untangling new sentence structures, and building new knowledge. For my 4th graders that tends to be Diary of a Wimpy Kid or Sideways Stories from Wayside School. No problem. For my 6th graders it has become Hatchet or Refugee or The Ranger's Apprentice series.

Recently a 7th grader came into class waving the copy of I Am Malala she was reading. “Mrs. Essenburg! This connects with some of the stuff I was researching on my own last summer!” This student had come into 6th grade saying she wanted to read Harry Potter, but it was too hard. She then spent most of the year reading the Percy Jackson series. Now she’s reading Malala. And researching women’s education on her own. During independent reading time, I stopped by her desk for a conference and mentioned the TED Talk "Our Century’s Greatest Injustice" by Sheryl WuDunn. The next day she had a question about it.

“Isn’t learning cool?” I asked. “The way things you learn start connecting with each other?”

“Yeah,” she beamed back at me. 

Books: One Key to Fostering Empathy and Multiple Perspectives

“Some people really suffer a lot.” The 7th grader was reading Refugee by Alan Gratz in the 10-minute independent reading time at the beginning of the period, and I had stopped by for my weekly check-in. I asked, as I had each student, “What have you enjoyed about or learned from your reading since we last talked?” 

The student looked so sad, I wanted to gather her up in my arms and protect her from that knowledge. The point of view in Refugee rotates among 3 refugees at 3 different places and times: fleeing Germany in the 1940’s, Cuba in the 1990’s, and contemporary Syria. But I was also proud of her for embracing learning about the world with such an open heart.

Empathy and valuing our neighbors’ perspectives is a giant step toward emulating Jesus. If empathy is stepping into another’s shoes, Jesus did the ultimate job of that when he “became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood” (Jn. 1:14, The Message). Because Jesus took on the full human experience, from teething to puberty to death, we have a God who can “empathize with our weaknesses” (Heb. 4:15, NIV). And as recipients of that grace, that empathy, that compassion, we are empowered to empathize with the weaknesses of our neighbors who we seek to love, to live into their experiences: “Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering” (Heb. 13:3, NIV). 

I’m struck by all the other places empathy comes up. This week I was re-reading the first chapter of Becoming a Globally Competent Teacher to prepare for a book discussion with my department colleagues. What’s chapter one? “Empathy and Valuing Multiple Perspectives”--the first of 12 dispositions, areas of knowledge, and skills. “This fosters not only global competence but also trusting relationships among students and between the teacher and students. Consequently, students are more willing to take risks and consider perspectives they never thought of before” (21).

Books are one place where we learn about perspective taking and empathy. In last week’s blog I gave "17 Reasons for Children’s Books." Here are two of them:

• Books enable us to become someone else. They develop our ability to empathize and to feel compassion.
• Books can show us that most things can be seen from different points of view.

My middle schoolers have become so many different people in so many different times and places: a boy with a severe facial deformity (Wonder), a South Sudanese girl spending her day carrying water (A Long Walk to Water), and a Black boy in the US (Ghost Boys). And that’s just in their whole-class novels—not counting independent reading where they’ve been in Kenya, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea, Okinawa, Japanese-American internment camps…oh, just all over the place.

Reading is a key way to increase empathy and perspective taking. What do your students read? How does that increase their empathy and valuing of multiple perspectives?

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P.S. Six more resources on empathy:

1. "Reading Develops Empathy Even Better When It Is Targeted, Taught, and Assessed" (blog) 
2. TED Talk: "The Danger of a Single Story" (18:33) by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
3. TED Talk: "A Radical Experiment in Empathy" (17:51) A pretty powerful experiment, if you have the patience to sit all the way to the end.  
4. Brene Brown on empathy (3 minute video)
5. "6 Habits of Highly Empathic People" (Greater Good Magazine) 
6. All Learning Is Social and Emotional (ASCD book) “Developing and expressing empathy” is one of the practices for “Social Skills,” one of the 5 components of social and emotional learning (SEL). The other 4 are Identity and Agency, Emotional Regulation, Cognitive Regulation, and Public Spirit. The authors assert, “The ways in which teachers behave, what we say, the values we express, the materials we chose, and the skills we prioritize all influence how the children and youth in our classroom think, see themselves, interact with others, and assert themselves in the world. Their social and emotional development is too important to be an add-on or an afterthought, too important to be left to chance."