Writing

Our winter theme is expanding in literature as well as in real life here in New England. From blogs containing twelve episodes of Frozen to Owl Moon to the recent Blizzards of 2015, we have chosen two versions of the same story reflecting a winter theme.

The Snow Walker
(On My Own History)

By Margaret K. Wetterer and Charles M. Wetterer (Authors)
Mary O'Keefe Young (Illustrator)
Carolrhoda Books (Lerner)
Minneapolis, MN: 1996
ISBN: 978-0876149591

The Snowshoeing Adventure of Milton Daub, Blizzard Trekker
(History's Kid Heroes)

By Margaret K. Wetterer and Charles M. Wetterer (Authors)
Emma Carlson Berne (Adapter), Zachary Trover (Illustrator)
Graphic Universe (Lerner)
Minneapolis, MN: 2010
ISBN: 978-0761361947

Snowy evenings often inspire poets, musicians and writers. One that I love is Robert Frost’s famous poem entitled Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. I have a beautiful copy of this poem with illustrations by Susan Jeffers. This poem happens to be an exemplar poem listed in Appendix 2 of the Common Core State Standards. The last page of the book has a note written by the illustrator about her mother, an artist, who would take her daughter for walks on snowy evenings: “My mother’s favorite thing to do was simply to walk outside and look. She was a painter and my first painting lessons came from her. They were really lessons in looking. She would ask me: What is the color of the tree shadow? Is it blue? Blue- green” Violet? She was teaching me to paint what I saw, not what I knew. What I knew would never be enough.” Color often is a clue to the author’s, poet’s or illustrator’s theme. Robert Frost’s poem, so beautifully illustrated in this version, reminded me of Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and illustrated by John Schoenherr, due to similarities of the winter night’ setting, the owls and the mention of colors...

Maryellen Rooney Moreau presented last weekend at Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking Providers’ Conference in San Francisco. In 2003, Winner stated: “Perspective taking is needed for social interaction, academic success and personal problem-solving as an adult.” Social Thinking, the work of Winner, heavily focuses on perspective-taking. Maryellen’s presentation, meant to exemplify this statement, was called Let’s Think About It! Perspective-taking And The Thought Process Of Opinion/Argument Using The Story Grammar Marker®. In her presentation she covered the following topics:

• Narrative development in relation to perspective taking
• Speaking and listening Common Core State Standards and narrative development
• The role of mental models and social emotions in perspective taking
• The Situation Model and the Story Grammar Marker®
• Critical thinking and its relation to perspective-taking and argument
• The shift to Expository text structures in ELA due to the Common Core State Standards
• Thinking about, planning and writing opinion & argument

When asking a child how he or she feels or asking how they think a character feels, the answer is often happy, sad or mad. Occasionally you could get an answer like "scared." MindWing Concepts' manuals for Braidy the StoryBraid® as well as It's All About the Story portray the 6 universal feelings (right). We encourage children to use synonyms for these "feelings" words that also indicate the degrees and nuances of happiness, sadness or anger that they themselves or a character might be feeling. Below are lists of synonyms for the six universal feelings.

MindWing also created an 18"x24" Feelings poster and a Feelings mini poster to help to inspire the use of different emotion words for when children are telling or writing a story, to make the "feelings" more explicit. But, not all "feelings" are the same.

In an article called "Picturebooks and Emotional Literacy" in The Reading Teacher, the author explains that "although there are emotions for all shades and degrees of joys, sadness and anger, it is problematic to create a universal facial expression for envy or pride" (Nikolajeva, p.253). These emotions can be called social emotions. "Unlike basic [universal] emotions, social or higher cognitive emotions such as love, guilt, shame, pride, envy and jealousy are not innate, or least considerably less innate than basic emotions and may be culturally dependent" (Nilolajeva, p.252).

StoryBird is very helpful for using technology to develop story telling and story writing skills. However, while providing artwork and a very simple platform for adding text, it does not provide the narrative structure necessary for writing the actual text of the story. Using Story Grammar Marker, students can have the structure to know what parts go into the story. The Common Core State Standards call for the blending of narrative and expository text in lessons as well as integrating technology and multimedia. The following lesson demonstrates it...

‘Tis the season! No matter what one’s religious beliefs are, the holiday season involves giving, and this is a context that is ripe for critical thinking, description, perspective-taking, and social scripts.  It can be quite difficult to engineer learning situations in which children are giving each other actual gifts, what with the need for stores, money, and the fine-motor aspects of wrapping.  However, technology can cut through some of that sticky tape for us and provide us with a virtual-gift-giving activity!

I first learned of the Gift Wrap App (FREE for iPad)...