Speak Well, THINK Well

Last weekend my husband and I went for a drive. We followed the directions given to us and started out just fine - heading east. But the road took us around several bends, up a hill or two and through a tunnel of overhanging branches and so when we came to a Y in the road we paused (not long enough as it turned out) and checked our notes, which read, “Turn east at the Y.” As I said, we were heading east when we started and now as the road split sharply to our right and sharply to our left, we had no idea which way was east. Well, that is not exactly true. We had an idea, just not the right one (even with a 50-50 chance of choosing correctly.) Eventually we made it to our intended destination but the experience reminded me of a seminar I listened to recently.

A friend of mine, Sandy Glickfeld, heard Stanford cognitive psychologist Lera Boroditsky speak at a conference a couple weeks ago and had high praise for her presentation. When I heard the subject matter I was intrigued. So I googled Ms. Boroditsky and found a link to “The Long Now Foundation” with her seminar entitled, “How Language Shapes Thought.” It was fascinating. One of the stories she told was about a small Aboriginal community, Pormpuraaw, located in northern Australia, where the people have a great sense of direction (unlike the people in the paragraph above.) She told of asking a five-year old girl in the village to point north, and the child did so, accurately, with no hesitation. That skill was common to the whole community. Ms. Boroditsky made the same request to a group of distinguished scholars at Stanford University and they pointed in all possible directions. That made me feel a little better about our experience at the Y in the road.

The reason for these vastly different abilities, according to Lera Boroditsky, is language. In Pormpurraw, people use direction words such as northeast or southwest instead of the terms left and right. So they might say something like, “Put your name in the northwest corner of your paper, just south of the date.” Of course the students would all need to be facing the same direction for those instructions to work. (This wasn’t one of Ms. Boroditsky’s examples but you get the idea.)

She did say, “in Pormpuraaw one must always stay oriented, just to be able to speak properly.”  No wonder these people had a great sense of direction. But the interesting thing about this story, and others she told, was, as Ms. Boroditsky pointed out, when you teach people a new way to talk, you teach them a new way to think. The Pormuraaw people didn’t just learn the vocabulary for north and south; they developed an intuitive knowledge about where those directions were. In Russia, where they have more than one word for the color blue, they actually perceive the different shades of blue more rapidly than English speakers. And that made me think about some of my students who struggle with their native language. How does this struggle affect their thinking?

Most of my students wouldn’t have the slightest idea where North is on our campus but that knowledge is rarely required of them. They are, however, expected to understand prepositions, multi-meaning words, sequencing words and directions like, “Before you open your book, put your name on your paper in the upper right hand corner.” Some language-delayed kids listening to those directions would be as lost as my husband and I at the Y in the road.

I found Ms. Boroditsky’s seminar fascinating and also very encouraging. If by teaching kids a new way to talk, we are teaching them a new way to think, then speech therapy can have a huge impact on their lives. So too, does children’s literature, which introduces new words, concepts and builds language skills on so many levels.

My hope is to teach my students new vocabulary so when they look at the world around them, they can actually perceive the different shades of blue, understand prepositions so they know where they stand in the world, and give them a strong language foundation so when they come to a “Y” in their path, they’ll be equipped to understand their choices.

Lovable, Laughable Language & a Look at a Book

Earlier this week I recorded a language sample of one of my students to check on her progress and set new goals. If you are not a speech therapist you might not know this is a common way to assess a child’s language skills; it is a nice supplement to standardized tests. I listen to the child’s grammar, vocabulary, observe whether they use language in a socially appropriate way, and often I’m very entertained in the process.  

Like this week when a kindergartener told me, “I goed to the field trip and then I saw a dragon this tall.” She held her hand about two feet from the ground and added, “A real huge one. It flies. It blows hard. It breathes fire. And then I saw a turtle. It was this tall.” Once again, she held her hand about two feet from the ground. I think the turtle and the dragon were related. I wish I could have gone on the field trip!

Another student told me, “I’m gonna move and when I do, you’re gonna have to build a robot ME cause you’re gonna miss me,” and he was right.

Speaking of missing, the same student told me, “I miss Bob the dog, he’s in heaven now. He died when he was 91, in 1491. I’ll never see him again. He’s wrapped in my frog blanket. He was yellow.” It was a tender moment so I didn’t question the year of Bob’s birth. But the student went on to tell me about his own. “Did you know I was born on my birthday? March 9^th is my birthday and I was born on it.”

These students keep me entertained, enchanted and encouraged by their growth and willingness to work on speech sounds, vocabulary and our pesky grammar. And speaking of grammar, I just finished reading Inside Out & Back Again, by Thanhha Lai. This middle grade novel, written in verse, tells the story of ten-year old Ha, who, with her family, flees Vietnam as Saigon falls. The struggles she went through to assimilate into the small Alabama town were due in part to her struggles in learning a new language.

“First Rule

Brother Quang says

add an s to nouns

to mean more than one

even if there’s

already an s

sitting there.

Glass

Glass-es

All day

I practice

squeezing hisses

through my teeth.

Whoever invented

English

must have loved

snakes.”

Later, when she tries to understand our use of plurals she says,

Third Rule

Always an exception.

Do not add an s

to certain nouns.

One deer,

two deer.

Why no s for two deer,

But an s for two monkeys?

Brother Quang says

no one knows.

So much for rules!

Whoever invented English

should be bitten

by a snake.”

I don’t want to leave you thinking this book is entirely about our English language. It is a beautifully written story based on the Author’s own childhood experiences. It is filled with humor, anguish and inspiration.

“Our lives

will twist and twist,

intermingling the old and the new

until it doesn’t matter

which is which.”

In her author’s note, Thanhha Lai said,

“At age ten, I, too, witnessed the end of the Vietnam War and I fled to Alabama with my family. . . . So many details in this story were inspired by my own memories.

            . . . What was it like to live where bombs exploded every night yet where sweet snacks popped up at every corner? What was it like to sit on a ship heading toward hope? What was it like to go from knowing you’re smart to feeling dumb all the time?”

At the end of her note she asks, “How much do we know about those around us?

            . . . I hope after you finish this book that you sit close to someone you love and implore that person to tell and tell and tell their story.”

And that is why I love working in my chosen field; of course I want to help my students succeed in school, but I also want to help them succeed in life, and to be able to tell their own stories.

Moose Goes to School

I fell in love with Moose when I read his book. Some might say “Z is for Moose” is actually Kelly Bingham’s and Paul Zelinsky’s book but I’m afraid Moose took it over. 

Initially I thought this story would be too confusing for my younger students who are struggling to learn the alphabet but I soon discovered the story is rich with possibilities not just to entertain, but to teach. The book started out like many alphabet books, “A is for Apple, B is for Ball” but Moose took center stage on the “D” page and it took my Kindergarten students a few minutes to realize he didn’t belong there. After we tried calling him Doose, they understood and they thought it was hilarious. Next we tried to figure out who should be strutting their stuff on that page (they didn’t see the duck who had been shoved aside.) We came up with several options: dog, dinosaur, dolphin, dancing dishes.

This book created so many learning opportunities. Besides introducing the alphabet and encouraging phonemic awareness, it was a great tool for sequencing and predicting. When Moose was on a rampage, frightening an owl, squishing a piece of pie, scattering its contents across a two-page spread, scrambling the letters, decimating words, the kids thought he was “crazy-mad”. Then they set about trying to figure out what letters he had destroyed by reviewing the sequence of the alphabet. By the end of the story, the kids decided Moose deserved to be on every page and so we started our own alphabet book, designed entirely for Moose. From Athletic Moose to Zany Moose, the ideas practically bubbled up from my students: “Fantastic Moose”, “Needy Moose,” “Pizza-delivering Moose,” “Quarreling Moose” to name a few.

This was a natural vocabulary building activity. When one student suggested “Bashful Moose” we talked about what that word means and decided it didn’t quite fit his personality so we changed our page to, “B is for Bashful Moose – NOT!”

One of my first grade students illustrated the first page. Take a look at Athletic Moose:

Those two round things at the bottom of the page are trampolines in case you can’t tell.

When I was carrying “Z is for Moose” into the teacher’s room, one of the Kindergarten teachers looked at the book and said, “Isn’t that confusing for the kids?”  By the time I finished sharing what my students had been doing with it, she told me she planned to steal my idea. Steal away! I hope this book makes its way into classrooms everywhere. F is for Moose – he is one Fantastically Fun teacher!

"Holler Loudly" in the Speech Room

A few weeks ago, during School Library Month, I posted about our elementary school library and shared a few pictures in hopes of generating support to keep ours open and healthy. Thank you all who responded to that plea! One response we especially enjoyed was a care package full of books from author Cynthia Leitich Smith. She included one of her own and I held onto it long enough to introduce it to my students before passing it on to our librarian.

School librarian, Allison Brown showing Holler Loudly to students

This rollicking fun picture book is about a child with a voice larger than the state of Texas where the author lives. His parents, Mama and Daddy Loudly, named him Holler because he cried so loud.

“So LOUD that the pecans fell from the pecan trees and the prickly pear cacti sprouted more needles. So LOUD that every hound dog in the county rolled up his ears and tossed back his head to bay. So LOUD the armadillos woke from their naps and the turkey vultures dropped their feathers.”

Talk about a whopping good tall tale – Holler Loudly is so GOOD that the pages practically turn themselves. So GOOD that the words flew out of the book and painted pictures in the minds of my students. So GOOD that the kids decided they’d write their own tall tales – and that’s no exaggeration (the last part anyway).

Holler’s voice is loud enough to take the roof off his house, send a catfish soaring and cause a hog stampede at the state fair. The illustrations by Barry Gott capture the mood perfectly and enhance the humor with cows and cars flying through the air on the wind of Holler’s voice. There’s a nice twist at the end of the book when his voice stops a tornado from destroying the town.

This was a fun book to use in speech. It gave the opportunity to compare and contrast, practice speech sounds, introduce new vocabulary words, and discuss pragmatics (the social use of language such as appropriate volume). When I showed my students Cynthia Leitich Smith had signed our book, they looked incredulous. Suddenly they understood the author was a real person. And if one real person could write a book so could another, even if that person was only five years old. I suggested we write the author a thank you note; they thought it was a nice idea, but first, they wanted to write their own books. All three students in this kindergarten group scrambled to gather their supplies. They folded, colored and wrested a few words onto their pages while dictating tales more elaborate than they were ready to write on their own. Their stories were so cute they could charm the chalk right off the chalkboard and set the desks to dancing!

Thank you Cynthia Leitich Smith for the care package and for the wonderful story.

The Cheshire Cheese Cat and other May Musings

Did you know May is Better Speech and Hearing Month? The purpose is to raise awareness about communication disorders and to promote treatment. I’m a speech therapist and I think our profession is worth celebrating; however, I’m not sure everyone would see it that way. Take for example, David Sedaris. In his book, Me Talk Pretty One Day, his description of speech therapy was anything but pretty. I cringed (and laughed) when I read his description of the “agent” coming to take him away,

“My capture had been scheduled to go down at exactly 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon.”

The agent, if you haven’t already guessed, was his speech therapist coming to his fifth-grade classroom to take him out (not as in “rub him out” although the humiliation may have made him feel that was her intent). David went on to describe his hilarious, if somewhat painful, memories of speech sessions. He had a lisp and so he pronounced “s” as “th.” Besides embarrassing him, his speech therapist had him read, “childish s-laden text recounting the adventures of seals or settlers named Sassy or Samuel.”

Ooh, that hurts. I hate to admit it but I’ve been guilty of inflicting my students with plot-less stories, just to give them a lot of practice pronouncing their target sounds. But that was a long time ago. I have since discovered an abundant supply of fabulous books to read, filled with whatever target sounds I’m looking for. For example, if I had a fifth grade student with a lisp, I could open The Cheshire Cheese Cat: a Dickens of a Tale, by Carmen Agra Deedy and Randall Wright. On the very first page there are plenty of “s” sounds for practice.

            “He was the best of toms. He was the worst of toms.

Fleet of foot, sleek and solitary, Skilley was a cat among cats. Or so he would have been, but for a secret he had carried since his early youth.”

Look at all those “s” sounds - and what a delightful way to practice them. The first lines of this book drew me in immediately with its nod to Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. I am a fan of Charles Dickens, animal stories, humor and good writing, so this book was a hit with me right from the start. I haven’t had the opportunity to use it with my students yet, but I have “great expectations” for doing so.

The secret Skilley hides is his extreme fondness for cheese; and he does not eat mice. These qualities lead him into a unique relationship with the throng of mice who inhabit Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese, a pub which is a gathering place for famous authors in 19th-century London. One of these authors is Charles Dickens himself. In this story, Dickens is struggling with a severe case of writers’ block. Eventually, he is assisted by Pip, a literate and literary mouse. This romping tale is full of adventure and challenges. The tension builds when a conniving cat arrives and the alliance between Skilley and the mice grows strong. The story has twists and turns, plots and subplots, and captivating characters. Described as being suitable for children age eight and up, I think Dickens’ fans of all ages will enjoy the humorous use of familiar lines and phrases. In one conversation, Skilley and Pip spoke of “our mutual friend;” there was “artful dodging” of passing cabs; and when the barmaid renames the conniving cat, Oliver, it brought “an unwelcome twist” to the story. 

I’ve solved the problem of plot-less stories in speech sessions. I don’t use them. And I’d never intentionally embarrass a student when I escort them to speech. The younger ones are thrilled to go. In fact, the difficulty comes with telling the other students why they don’t “get” to go to speech. Older students require a bit more subtlety. Fortunately, they don’t need me to come knocking at their door. David Sedaris’ humorous essay should be required reading for speech therapists. It’s eye-opening to see our job from the other side of the table!

From My Pocket to Theirs

Thursday was “Poem in your Pocket” day and we decided to celebrate in a big way in the speech room. (That is a very large paper pocket in case you can’t tell.) I filled it with poems for my younger students and they were delighted to dig around and find a special poem - and to make it their own.

They added a few decorations and tucked their chosen poem into their pants pockets. Of course they didn’t stop there. They added more poems to the paper pocket, hoping to fill it to overflowing.

Poems are a wonderful way to introduce new vocabulary, rhyming, humor, and even speech practice with the catchy lines kids love to repeat. There are many entertaining books of poetry for children but this week I especially enjoyed introducing my students to Book Speak! by Laura Purdie Salas, Illustrated by Josee Bisaillon.

My students were drawn to this book from the moment they looked at the cheery cover. They immediately wanted to hop a ride on the hooked-handle of the umbrella. And when I turned to the poem, “Calling All Readers” they were entranced by the illustrations and the words,

“I’ll tell you a story.
I’ll spin you a rhyme.
I’ll spill some ideas-
And we’ll travel through time.

Their ideas spilled out in a rush: places they’d travel, which balloon (or dragon) they’d ride, and what they’d see. This book is full of poems about books and it made me want to spend this weekend curled up with some of my favorites, which is what I plan to do once I finish this post.

Poetry month is drawing to a close but there will be no shortage of excellent children’s books to read. Last Saturday I attended the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference in Rocklin, CA. It was wonderful day. As usual, I came away with fresh insights and inspirations for my own writing and was introduced to books that I’ll soon be using with my students.

I hope you have found more poems to love during this poetry month. And I hope you remember to remove them from your pocket before laundry day!

Spring Break!

Mine officially started on Monday of this week when my husband walked out the door to go to work, and I didn’t. The first thing I did to celebrate my vacation was to gather an armful of flowers from our garden and place them on my coffee table. Take a look:

The second thing I did was grab my backpack chair, fill its oversized pocket with books, put on my hiking boots, and head to Big River. It is a short seven-minute drive from my home. Here is where I settled for a time of reading, writing and contemplation:

The second day I met a friend for breakfast and the meal was almost too pretty to eat, almost. 

It was big enough to share and have leftovers, but we didn’t. We didn’t have leftovers that is - we DID share.

My husband took off the last half of the week so we could travel to the wine country for a stay in a Bed & Breakfast. We spent our mornings and evenings sitting on the deck enjoying the pastoral view, reading, chatting, and writing.

Yesterday morning, sitting behind that coffee cup you see above, I reread poems from a book by Mary Oliver and that reminded me of a poetry exercise I learned in a writing class. I enjoy the way it helps me feel the rhythm of language used by poets I admire. If you’d like to try it, start with a line or stanza in a poem and exchange each word with another of your choosing, using the same part of speech, noun for noun, verb for verb. Here is one I wrote yesterday using four lines from Mary Oliver’s poem, Lightning:

Her words:

            The oaks shone

            gaunt gold

            on the lip

            of the storm before

            the wind rose,

My words:

            A rock glistened

            sharp silver

            in the gaze

            of the morning after

            a cloud passed,

You get the idea. If you or your students try this exercise, I’d love to see what you write.

Now back to my Spring Break. You know that hike I took on Day One? You saw the relaxing spot I found, well I had passed it about five minutes into my hike, but did I stop? No. I kept hiking, searching for the perfect place - tree branches to hang over my chair, enough sunlight filtering through to keep me warm and light my book but not too much glare, close enough to the river to hear it rippling, and far enough from the trail so I wouldn’t be interrupted by other hikers. I wasn’t asking for much! Now my chair has two padded shoulder straps but after 45 minutes of hiking and searching, the padding seemed thin. Then there is the metal bar that gives wonderful support when I’m sitting, but doesn’t feel so wonderful digging into my lower back with the added weight of a small stack of books. I finally figured out I wasn’t going to find the perfect place so I turned back toward the pleasant place near the beginning of my hike. I had achy shoulders and a bruised back when I got there. I loved the hike but I loved the final destination even more.

We’ve left the trails and vineyards behind and now we’re in Roseville. I am attending a Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) conference today. I’ll write again next week but in the meantime, I hope you’re able to see your perfect/pleasant places, moments, and circumstances before you travel too far past them, and before you accumulate too many bruises along your path.