Poetry Friday, "Neither Rain Nor Sleet"

 

         Poetry Friday is with Laura Purdie Salas, at her blog, Small Reads for Brighter Days, here.  Don't miss her sharing of another part of her new book, We Belong out very soon! Thanks for hosting, Laura! 

        Wishing you all a warm and cozy weekend, with at least a few poems that make you smile. It's been snowing again, after sixty degrees early in the week but today, more sun! I hope you've stayed safe and mostly cozy! 

         The last time I shared my lovely postcards, I lamented about the late or missed mail and all that postal workers have to do, even in a snowstorm! It has improved! 

Looking around, I found a sort of poem here, from Mental Floss. It is a history I did not know. No matter what you and others may believe, this is NOT the motto of the USPS, and was written in ancient times. 

          From the article: While the Postal Service has no official motto, the popular belief that it does is a tribute to America's postal workers. The words, thought to be the motto, are chiseled in gray granite over the entrance to the New York City Post Office on 8th Avenue and come from Book 8, Paragraph 98, of The Persian Wars by Herodotus. During the wars between the Greeks and Persians (500-449 B.C.), the Persians operated a system of mounted postal couriers who served with great fidelity."  

Neither snow nor rain

 nor heat nor gloom of night

 stays these couriers 

from the swift completion

 of their appointed rounds.

             Thanks to those whose beautiful creations have inspired and made me smile. It is lovely of Jone MacCulloch to manage this exchange for those of us who signed up. Thanks, Jone, for all the 'smiles' I find (finally) in my mailbox. Here are pictures from Jone, Robyn, and Carol V. I am grateful to each one of you, delighting in your fabulous creations.

Two Who Persisted

    Visit Alyson Beecher on Wednesdays for Non-Fiction Picture Books at Kidlit Frenzy.  From Alyson and others, you will discover terrific nonfiction picture books!
       

              I know that many are talking about this book. I feel that every teacher should share this with their middle grade and older students, or every parent should share with their even younger children, bit by bit, then researching more about those people that Schomburg learned about, those whose "works", first writing then art, he collected during his entire life. Carole Boston Weatherford uses Arthur (born Arturo) Schomburg's own words as an opening quote: "The American Negro must remake his past in order to make his future. . . .History must restore what slavery took away."
        I became angry as I read this book, so filled with bits of historical figures who were never written about in my own years-ago history textbooks. Oh, I may have heard a little about Fredrick Douglas or probably George Washington Carver, but few others, until I got to college. Yet even then, there were limits. Carole Boston Weatherford has chosen to write Schomburg's story as a timeline, telling of the first spark that made him curious and determined. A teacher told him that "Africa's sons and daughters had no history, no heroes worth noting." He did not stop searching and learning, first enthralled by an early almanac written by Benjamin Banneker, self-taught inventor, astronomer, and draftsman. The book is a sort of list, and shown beautifully with Weatherford's descriptions through the years of Schomburg's studies, are Eric Velasquez's illustrations. He shows Schomburg aging but surrounded by those very heroes and the artifacts representative of what they created, which his teacher said did not exist.

Non-Fiction PBs Plus #MustReadIn2015

I'm glad to be back to share this Wednesday  to Alyson Beecher's Non-Fiction Picture Book Challenge at her blog, Kidlit Frenzy.  Because of this meme, I discover many great titles to find and read. I can't buy them all, and am lucky to have a good library that nearly always has the books I request. Here are a few books with stories and illustrations that just might become favorites of yours. 

        Thanks Alyson!

         Some of us check in periodically with Carrie Gelson of There's A Book for That to share what we've read from our "must read" lists. We started these lists because in the excitement of newly published books, other books get left behind and don't get read. These books are worth a read, but keep being pushed aside. Sorry to say that in this past period I've only managed to read one of the books on my list, but it was a terrific one: The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel (click for my review) by Deborah Hopkinson.  And, I'm reading another, Blue Lily, Lily Blue by Maggie Stiefvater. I hope to do a lot of catching up this summer!

          Here are the non-fiction picture books I'd like to share this week:

Learning history by imagining

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life has begun a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which can connect to all teachers.    This summer, think about connecting with us and sharing what social studies lessons you use or want to use that also includes language skills like writing or public speaking, certainly research, and especially from first person accounts.  It's challenging and fun to connect.

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     One of the important lessons in history is to use a good imagination.  One must imagine things from the written word, even though others have created movies as their vision of historical persons and events, and one can view those, too.  Even with the visual, we still must use our own creative minds to try to see the past for ourselves.

Learning History by Talking

Tara Smith at A Teaching Life has begun a new meme, Social Studies Wednesdays, which can connect to all teachers. Please join her by posting your blog with ideas of work with students.  

Wouldn't it be great to have interviewed this woman?

             Sometimes people ask me what are my favorite assignments and I'd like to tell you briefly about one.  As the years pass, older people leave us, and I believe we educators are missing opportunities for students to meet elders to discover their lives when they were young.  Beginning experiences in interviewing help students' confidence, so the very first day, an assignment is to interview a classmate for the class scrapbook.  This scrapbook is a record, a history of this year's class.  There is a group that is in charge of creating the actual book's design, but everyone has a chance to add to it.  By pairing up students for interviews on the first day, they have the opportunity to meet a classmate they might not know so well, a good first step in talking with someone 'almost' new.

Telling all of our stories on Thanksgiving

Tuesday Slice of Life is at Two Writing Teachers

  

John Two-Hawks is an awarding winning Lakota flute player.  He says:

"I cannot tell you the dreamy Indian story of your imagination simply because I am not imaginary - 
and my story is no dream...."

      Happy Thanksgiving everyone.  I am grateful for this community that helps me be a better teacher.  Thank you for your support this year and your kind comments.  I am grateful!

As Thanksgiving is upon us in a couple of days, I am reminded of my time in the classroom and the importance of sharing important truths with my students.  It’s a lovely thing to say thanks for our blessings, and I do.  I feel I have many and am forever grateful.  In my years in the classroom I developed a number of traditions to help students both to celebrate and to learn about the real history of Thanksgiving.  Although we are often proud of those we call pilgrims, in the spirit of the learning all the stories of our American history, I also wanted my students to understand that Native Americans, most especially the Wampanoag, the Native Americans who helped the early colonists through that first hard winter, are still here, still living in the United States, and living their lives as they have for 350 years.  I experienced the story firsthand with my students when we visited the Plimoth Plantation a few years ago.  It’s a wonderful place to experience history as ‘first-hand’ as one can get without the availability of time travel.  There is where we met the Wampanoag, spoke with them about their journey in history, and began to understand that for them, our Thanksgiving is not a day of celebration.

Plimoth woman

There is a new documentary out, which details a recent venture of saving the Wampanoag language.  It is titled “We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneânby” and tells the story of Jessie Little Doe Baird, a Wampanoag Indian who began to search for pieces of the language that hadn’t been spoken for 100 years.  You can find an article about it and a brief film clip here.  Her daughter is the first native speaker in seven generations to speak the language!  I share this story, in addition to sharing an article by Susan Bates, called “The Real Story of Thanksgiving” and one by a teacher, Chuck Larsen, titled “Introduction for Teachers”.  Both are here.  It is important to me that students learn the stories that have often been omitted, and to question and explore history instead of accepting every story as the only one.     

Wampanoag exterior

Because my school does acknowledge and celebrate Thanksgiving as part of our heritage, I also held other activities with students.  One year we created special thank you proclamations (art and words), and presented them to the special someone at the Thanksgiving table.  Another time we wrote and shared the exercise of answering this question:  If you could invite five people to your Thanksgiving table, whom would you invite, who would be the guest of honor, and at that dinner, what words would you say to them?  Various people were among the invited, like grandparents who had died before the students had met them, favorite cartoon characters, best friends who had moved away, along with famous people like Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Neil Armstrong, and on.  After completing the exercise, we shared our writing on the day before the Thanksgiving break.  And beautiful, serious, along with tongue-in-cheek words were written.  Often on that day we have visitors, because many relatives visit at this time, so we share with them and ask them to share one person they might invite.  It is a rich experience to hear the array of people chosen, and even more exciting to hear the words chosen to say to the invitees.

Last, during the days before the holiday, we created a thank you wall, on which we posted notes of thanks to people in the school, and notes of gratitude for both people and things in our lives.  It was good to see the enthusiasm for this in the class and from our viewers. 

I know that we cannot review parts of the past as responsible researchers without some regret, but we can use this lesson that any study of past times is a way to research for truth from all the relevant viewpoints.   We can teach our students to write stories from their research in order to imagine standing in others’ shoes.   Instead of ignoring that wrongs were done in the past, we can look for those things done right, and be thankful for that.  As well, we can continue to give thanks that people all over the world are trying to learn how to live together in peace.

When my students celebrate Thanksgiving with their families, my hope is that they are richer for their knowledge.

wild turkeys

ready for pies?