Listen . . .

It wasn’t all that long ago I had a group of kindergarten students in my speech room and I muttered, “Now where’d I put my tea?”

           

One of my students who is always a willing helper (and has an extremely difficult time sitting still) hopped up, darted around the table, circled a standing bookshelf and scrambled over to my desk before I could explain, it was a rhetorical question. He bounced back to our group with my room key in his hand. “I found it!”

           

He looked so triumphant, I didn’t mention his error but let my tea grow cold and pulled out a listening game.

Listening is a prerequisite skill for speech development. Kids have to hear the difference between various sounds before they can pronounce them correctly. Listening is also critical to building vocabulary, sentence structures, and other language concepts. And some might say listening is a prerequisite for good writing. One popular piece of advice is to listen in on conversations and jot them down when you’re working on dialog. (You have to be discrete when you follow this suggestion.)

And what of poets? Don’t you believe when Longfellow wrote, The Sound of the Sea, he spent some time listening to it? Note the rhythm of the sea reflected in these lines - you can almost hear the rush of waves over the beach:

“The sea awoke at midnight from its sleep,

And round the pebbly beaches far and wide

I heard the first wave of the rising tide

Rush onward with uninterrupted sweep;”

I plan to keep teaching my students to listen for small differences, like the difference between “tea” and “key” or “thumb” and “some”. But my hope is they’ll listen for more as they grow older. I’m hoping they’ll listen to, and recognize, the beauty of language; the tone of voice, which speaks a warning or a warm welcome; nuances and subtleties. I’m hoping their listening skills will provide a foundation for good relationships – from political to personal.  

If you’d like to practice your own listening skills, take a listen to this 12-second clip from behind my back fence. The wind is rasping over the microphone on my iPad but you’ll hear birds chirping. Listen closely. There are sea lions barking in the background.

I plan to take a walk along the river today and listen to it lapping over the rocks . . . but hold on, my husband is about to walk out the door and he’s saying something. I think he’s looking for his tea.

Reading Fun to End the School Year

School is out! This week has been a whirlwind of activity – class parties, field trips and visiting pets. My speech groups ended last week so I had a chance to pop into a few classrooms and share a new book. I had a pleasant surprise on my doorstep Wednesday after school – Tons of Trucks, a new book by Sue Fliess, illustrated by Betsy Snyder. It arrived just in time to share with students before our summer vacation. It was a hit.

Courtesy of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

The rhythm and rhymes in this book are a pleasure to read,

 “Tons of trucks,
before our eyes,
in every color, shape,
and size!
Strong trucks
Big trucks
Scoop and dig trucks!
Old trucks
New trucks
ARMY CREW trucks.”

Every page has a moveable part: a flap to lift, a tab to pull (revealing top secrets in the army truck), and a spinning wheel to turn the tank of a cement truck. It ends with a hushed evening scene where sleepy travelers pull into a rest stop. Young listeners may find the restful ending a nice way to end their day.

I read this book to a few kindergarten classes and they were enthralled. When I asked the first class how they liked it, they gave a loud cheer. (That’s always a good sign even though it is not a behavior teachers encourage.) In the next room, the students said the book was “fantastic,” “great,” and they “loved it.” In the resource room, one student felt Buttons, the resource rat, should have a chance to see the book and so he did.

Abby thought Lucky, the goat visiting her classroom, should have a turn and so we took the book to room 44. She read to Lucky and a classroom of lucky students who were sitting at her feet.

We didn’t want to leave any visitors out and so our resource specialist, Beth Kirkley, read the book with Lucy on her lap. Look how captivated that puppy is!

This book doesn’t need cute kids and animals to make it adorable. It is that all on its own. The illustrations are bright and engaging. The opportunities to interact with the story made it all the more appealing to our students. For younger kids, it introduces vocabulary and concepts: shapes, colors, and contrasts such as “in and out,” “open and close,” “up and down” and others.

It isn’t easy to tell who is more excited about summer vacation, the students or the teachers (or maybe the class pets.) But we’ll all carry with us good memories of the school year and memories of some great books. I’ll be exploring more over the summer and when the students return, I’ll be ready with a truckload. Perhaps a haul truck, filled to the brim with books.

Multi-meaning words and idioms

A friend of mine once told about a visit she had with her grandchildren. Early one morning, while she was in the kitchen, three-year-old Rylan came in and asked her for some apple slices. His voice was bass-low and raspy so she said, “Rylan, you lost your voice. Where did it go?”  She turned back to slice his apple but soon noticed him wandering around the kitchen, head down, searching. When he lifted his face, she saw a tear coming down his cheek.

“What’s the matter, Rylan?”

More tears fell and he squawked, “I can’t find my voice.”

He was sure if he looked into all the corners, under the table or in the back of a cupboard, he was going to find it.

That misunderstanding might make us smile but children are not the only ones who get confused over language. A few weeks ago, one of my coworkers announced in the teacher’s room, her son had lost his first tooth. Most everyone in the room looked worried. Someone said, “How sad - he won’t be able to put it under his pillow.” His mom quickly explained that he still had his tooth and was now wearing it around his neck in a plastic tooth-shaped holder.

Multi-meaning words and figures of speech can bring to mind some unusual pictures if we misinterpret them. A second grade class put on a play this week and one of my students was extremely worried about performing. Before the play, I met him outside the stage door to give him a few words of encouragement. I had to stop myself from saying, “Break a leg.”

This year I discovered a great resource to introduce kids to multi-meaning words: Chopsticks by Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illustrated by Scott Magoon. It is filled with clever humor. My students didn’t catch all the word play, but they learned, and the story entertained us all. Take a look at a few quotes:

 “No one stirred, not even Spoon.”

“At first, Chopstick was just plain stumped.” (The illustration shows him standing on a cutting board that looks like a stump of wood.)

“Knife knew this revelation called for a toast.” (Knife is pictured holding a slice of toast.) “He was sharp that way.”

What a fun book – this one was a hit with my students and a good teaching tool “to boot.” (Don’t you wonder where that phrase came from?)

I know many school districts are already out for the year but we have one week left. As summer approaches I’m already making plans to hike a few trails, take a couple short trips and get lost in several good books. I just hope I don’t get lost on the trips or trip over the stack of books collecting next to my favorite reading chair.

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.