A Day of SMILE(S)!

February 13, 2012

A Day of SMILE(S)!

While working as a student teacher, I remember wondering why teachers constantly complained about never getting to teach anything they really wanted to. I couldn't understand how one could have 20-30 kids in a self-contained classroom for 9 months of the year without ever finding time to teach something of choice.

Well... I get it now.

It's not just the district-wide "program fidelity"policies that takes away from teaching choice topics.

It's not just the inordinately large quantities of time taken out of instructional days for testing and holidays and trainings.

It's also the short chunks of scheduling allotted to specific subjects, (i.e. 1.5 hours for language arts; .5 hours for ELD [English Language Development] or remedial reading instruction). But within those short chunks, nearly .425 of that time is spent redirecting less than desirable behavior, and trying to keep kids engaged in relatively dry material. On top of that, several reading, writing and language classes tend to get cancelled more often than anything else for additional testing time and other school events.

As I approach the final third of the school year, I'm left wondering why I haven't done any self-selected, creative writing projects with my students. I wonder why I haven't finished even one class novel with my Language Arts group. Each day, I carry my bag of creative writing ideas and activities to work with me, but I've never used any of it. Not even once.

My creative writing bag includes several lessons I've developed over the past few years. The bag currently contains: a pouch of random objects for writers to weave into their stories; a stack of black and white photos depicting children all over the world during the 1930's and 40's; a small white board; several pads of paper; ballpoint pens; some oil pastels and an envelope stuffed with some of my favorite opening liners written on strips of paper.

Here's one of the activities.

Despite my challenges with some of the realities of the teaching profession, I did accomplish something I'm really proud of this year. Here's the short-version back-story:

Around Christmas time, I stumbled upon the graphic novel SMILE by Raina Telgemier and fell in love with the story.

Over Christmas break, I devised a system for my classroom to try to encourage students to read more books.

I called the system The Reading Challenge. Basically, whoever reads the most books, and completes a brief book review card for each book read, wins a prize at the end of each month.

I came back from break, and introduced the system by modeling how to write a simple book review using the most recent book I'd read: (Smile) -for my example.

The whole class freaked out and needed to see this book immediately.

We started reading it the next day using the overhead projector. Shortly after that, my co-worker and literacy sidekick delivered a box to my classroom at lunch filled with an entire class set of Smile.

We read our books together at the end of class whenever we could make time, and we loved it.

We learned through the author's blog that she was coming to Santa Rosa in about a month!

I made fliers for all of my students about the event, and I offered a free homework pass to anyone who could attend. (It was a Saturday after all).

Last Saturday six of our students attended the event with their parents, dressed up and excited to be there. Seeing Raina in person, hearing her talk about her experience as an author/ illustrator and watching my students' excitement while waiting in line to get their book signed was by far my best moment as a teacher thus far.

Raina and her husband Dave Roman gave a FREE presentation about their work; how they came to be published authors; how they generate story ideas, and even how they met and eventually got married (excellent comics-inspired stories I might add). One of my favorite parts was when Raina told the audience about her first self-publication called Take-Out that she used to sell for $.25 a piece. I happened to catch part of it on video.

A most compelling part in the book Smile is of course, the gore at the beginning when she knocks out her two front teeth and discovers a puddle of blood under her face. During the presentation, Raina even showed us footage of her official dental records. Aaaak! The Real Deal!

I don't know how many of my students wrote: "I wonder if this is a true story?" in an assigned reading response to the book (even after we talked several times about it being an autobiographical account).

Finally, proof.

After the presentation, we gathered in the lobby to get our books signed, deliver some words of admiration to the authors, and take some pictures of this very proud moment for all.