On Tuesday it was nice and bright, not too windy--the perfect day for 1st grade geographers to go out on the playground, well away from the portable classrooms, in search of natural features and human-made features. After they completed their labelled sketches, I allowed them to play for a while, and encouraged them to play among the natural features--trees, stumps, raspberry canes, bushes, vines, tall dead grass--at the edge of the woodchipped playground and sports field, which was dotted with large muddy puddles. It took them some minutes to realize that there was fun to be had away from the "mungke bars," but soon they figured out quite a few things to do. One of my more reticent English learners provided the rhythmic backdrop to the children's efforts.
wood work
hup! hup! hup! hup!
one twig two twigs
three twigs four
throw them down and pick up sticks
hup! hup! hup! hup!
big stick bigger stick
bigger stick branch
help me carry this big long branch
hup! hup! hup! hup!
I got it I got it
we got it we’re strong
hup two three four carry this log
chuck ‘em down stack ‘em up
sticks and twigs
chuck ‘em down stack ‘em up
branches logs
hup! hup! hup! hup!
build a bridge across this bog
build a bonfire pile of wood
we did this work we did it good
hup! hup! hup! hup!
~Heidi Mordhorst 2011
all rights reserved
Later I discovered that a) despite the calculated distance, this important work disturbed all the 3rd and 4th graders in the portables who were taking their high-stakes state assessments and b) practically everything I let them do is not allowed at recess. I took some great photos of the kids working cooperatively to carry 15-foot limbs and lay them across the boggy spot on the field , but it's also not allowed for me to post them here...so here's a stock photo instead, which does not nearly capture the joy of this half-hour.
From Richard Louv's Last Child in the Woods:
"Countless communities have virtually outlawed unstructured outdoor nature play, often because of the threat of lawsuits, but also because of a growing obsession with order."
From Playing for Keeps by Deborah Meier, Brenda S. Engel, Beth Taylor:
"Leaving no time or space in education for children’s [creative] “playful” efforts to make sense of the world risks the future not only of poetry and science but also of our political liberties. The habits of playfulness in early life are the essential foundations upon which we can build a K–12 education that would foster, nourish, and sustain the apparent “absurdity” of democracy."
I wish you a playful day, and I'll see you over at Liz in Ink for the Poetry Friday Roundup.
The biting cold wind of middle age has swept in, and there is no doubt that my middle-aged brain can't do what it used to. I used to walk into a classroom each year and learn 25 names in 30 seconds; now I need nametags and at least 30 minutes, and the names I do know tend to hover tantalizingly just above my tongue at the moment I need them most. However, I've been noticing a different memory phenomenon that puzzles me a little.
I spent time this week in my daughter's fifth grade classroom talking about poetry as memoir. To mirror the young writers' process, I wrote a fresh new memoir poem for their critique. (I'm sharing below the draft I took in yesterday before their questions, comments and suggestions showed me many ways to improve it.) Once I got going on this poem, I had no trouble at all accessing strong physical and emotional memories of the way my friend and I played. I have deep wells of detailed memory from the years between 5 and 14--not comprehensive by any means, and only sort of chronological--which have fed my writing over the last ten years. But I just allowed my 25th college reunion to pass without me, partly because of a kind of embarrassment about what I don't remember (and what classmates I know seem to remember quite clearly and easily).
Is there really a difference between the way I experienced things at 10 and at 20 and then again at 30? Some difference in intensity, some difference in the quality or mode of recording memories at different ages? Or does it have something to do with writing itself? At 10 I was a writer, but by 15, even, I was recording my life in journals and poems and term papers and letters, and by 25 practically everything in my life went on paper somehow: lesson plans, travel packing lists, favorite songs, budgets....
Maybe it has always been, since 15, the way it is now: I write it down so that I don't have to actively remember it. I decided long ago that, after the kids themselves, our family diaries are what I'd take if the house were burning down. It's a good trick, but it makes me sad to think that in committing these experiences to paper I am perhaps erasing them from my mind.
Indians
We leap like deer
over the rushing sidewalks
of the Eastern Woodlands
"paying no heed to the biting cold wind,"
our oatmeal box quivers full of arrows,
our hair in brave braids.
First I must express right up top my gratitude to Kate Coombs at BookAunt, to Tricia Stohr-Hunt at The Miss Rumphius Effect and to Gregory K. at Gotta Book for their generous and careful attention to my work during this month of poetry festivities. Apart from anything else, I just love the feeling of being part of this community! Thanks to all who make it be.
My classroom is a little community in itself: surrounded by books (since it used to be the Reading Specialist's headquarters), I am one of four teachers who use it daily. I arrive as another, exemplary "Reading Initiative" teacher is finishing with her second-graders, and as I'm wrapping up my first-grade teaching session at 12:30, two ESOL teachers are preparing to conduct their small groups (often simultaneously!). We do pretty well at sharing our slice of real estate, and all this eavesdropping on other teachers is very educational. It's had other influences, too, and tomorrow morning I'll take the ESOL Praxis exam to become certified to teach ESOL as well as general education.
Meanwhile, as our public charter school Founding Group prepares for a Q&A session with the school district's review panel, I come to the section in our application on provision for students who are speakers of English as an additional language. Here's the poem by Gregory Djanikian that opens this section:
How I Learned English
It was in an empty lot
Ringed by elms and fir and honeysuckle.
Bill Corson was pitching in his buckskin jacket,
Chuck Keller, fat even as a boy, was on first,
His t-shirt riding up over his gut,
Ron O’Neill, Jim, Dennis, were talking it up
In the field, a blue sky above them
Tipped with cirrus.
And there I was,
Just off the plane and plopped in the middle
Of Williamsport, Pa. and a neighborhood game,
Unnatural and without any moves,
My notions of baseball and America
Growing fuzzier each time I whiffed.
So it was not impossible
On Tuesday it was nice and bright, not too windy--the perfect day for 1st grade geographers to go out on the playground, well away from the portable classrooms, in search of natural features and human-made features. After they completed their labelled sketches, I allowed them to play for a while, and encouraged them to play among the natural features--trees, stumps, raspberry canes, bushes, vines, tall dead grass--at the edge of the woodchipped playground and sports field, which was dotted with large muddy puddles. It took them some minutes to realize that there was fun to be had away from the "mungke bars," but soon they figured out quite a few things to do. One of my more reticent English learners provided the rhythmic backdrop to the children's efforts.
Wonderful poem, Heidi, had fun marching right through every line.
The "obsession with order" is quite disheartening. Nice to hear you sanctioned some important outdoor nature play time with your students. :)
I much sympathy for the 3rd graders taking high-stakes assessments. I have one of my own. He is taking the whole thing very seriously and has requested eggs for breakfast all week because they are brain food. That said, what craziness we are engaged in play in nature is not allowed at recess? I think the twig brigade had a very good experience. THey learned much about cooperation and physics and biology. I consider that valuable information.
It sounds like a fabulous recess!! Long live the the free stick brigade! I love reading your poem out loud and channeling that joy.
It's your birthday? Happy Birthday, Heidi! Our birthdays are only five days apart. Hope you have a playful year.
I'm just giggling to myself at the a) and b) endings to your story. We are sisters in accidental subversion and disruption. It's a long story, but I, too, disrupted a neighboring class during testing one year, and I, too, have utilized (against all/ignoring all "rules") the woods and wildness at the edge of the playground for play and learning. HUZZAH for play and learning!!!
First, Happy Birthday! (I think the comment I attempted to leave yesterday got swallowed in cyberspace.) Love your poem. LAST CHILD IN THE WOODS is part of the reason I posted a series of interviews with nonfiction nature writer friends on my blog last month. This month I'm doing a nature walk/poetry workshop with fourth graders - wish us luck! :0)
I just listened to two women in my handbell choir discuss education -- one works in a preschool after-care program, the other is a grandmother who was complaining that her granddaughter isn't "doing" anything in preschool: they just play. She's not even learning her letters or addition tables. She is 3. The aftercare woman agreed they should look for a "better" program. I could not contain myself and chimed in about the importance of play. They humored me.