Imitation – Igniting Language and Inspiration

Imitation is one of the ways young children learn to speak. They hear sounds and echo them back. Of course, it is a lot more complicated than that, but without a model to follow, they won’t start talking. And it’s not just words they imitate – they imitate our actions too. Which reminds me of a story of my children as preschoolers. A good friend had been watching them for me while I ran to the grocery store. When I came to pick them up, she told me, “They played house while you were gone.”

My four-year-old had said to his brother, “You can be Dad and go to work. I’ll be Mom.” He then grabbed a book, sat on the couch and pretended to read.”

I was a little embarrassed by that story (but not much). It wasn’t my habit to sit on the couch all day with a good book in hand. I kept the house fairly clean and played with my kids regularly; but I also spent a lot of time reading with them. Maybe that’s what he was imitating.

It is not just children who learn by imitation, many artists have learned new skills by copying the masters and I’m sure there are writers who have done the same. In Mary Oliver’s, A Poetry Handbook, she devotes a whole chapter to imitation. She said,

“Every child is encouraged to imitate. But in the world of writing it is originality that is sought out, and praised, while imitation is the sin of sins.
Too bad. I think if imitation were encouraged much would be learned well that is now learned partially and haphazardly.”

I like her advice (and love her poetry.) I heard something similar in a writing class so I went to an old master, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and used his poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a pattern to follow. I started with a couple of stanzas and modeled mine after his. Here are Coleridge’s verses:

And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken -
The ice was all between.

The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!

And here are my stanza’s following his structure and tone:

But in the cloud, the misty shroud,
there grew a mournful sound;
a wind that breathed through wings to weave
a wailing all around.

The wind was on, the wind was in,
the wind was all between.
It whipped and crashed, and blew and lashed,
as scythe upon the green.

Once I wrote those stanzas a story started forming in my mind and so I wrote a whole poem based on Coleridge’s albatross. I won’t share the entire ballad because it is rather long, but this gives you an idea of the exercise.

Imitation is a good beginning for writing and for language development but I don’t want to stop there with my own creations. And I don’t want my students to stop there. When children rely only on verbal imitation they are using echolalia – an automatic response with very little meaning. I need to help them move past imitation so they can communicate their own thoughts, ideas and desires.

And if they imitate my actions, I’m thinking, sitting on the couch (or at my desk) reading a good book isn’t such a bad idea.

Imagination - A Key to the Door of Knowledge

A couple months ago, I heard a knock at my speech room door. Normally, kids don’t knock; they just charge up my ramp and burst in at their scheduled time. When I answered the door, one of my first-grade students was standing there, “Hello, I’m Jordan “two”, Jordan “one” had to stay home today. I’m new to this school.”

Of course I invited him in, and he invited me into his imaginary world and into his current internal story. He informed me that Jordan “one” had to stay home to take care of a visiting elephant – it had escaped from a zoo. Since the others in his speech group were away on a field trip, I had time to hear the whole story, help Jordan write it down, and introduce vocabulary such as “pretend” and “imagination.”

I think Jordan has a future in writing fiction but he struggles in school. He has a very difficult time listening and following directions. Once he told me his mind was “all buzzy” so he couldn’t pay attention in class, but I’ve noticed, when he begins to actually hear a story, or create one of his own, he focuses. Tapping into his imagination seems to help him become more receptive to new information.

Albert Einstein once said, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” That gives me hope for Jordan and others like him.

And speaking of imagination, one of the imaginative books Jordan loved this year was, Creepy Monsters, Sleepy Monsters, by Jane Yolen, illustrated by Kelly Murphy. He wasn’t alone - all of my speech students loved this story. It is written in verse and creates possibilities for vocabulary growth, rhyming, phonemic awareness and speech practice. The illustrations are adorable. When I read this one to my students, they inspected every monster on every page, counting monster eyes and legs. They laughed when they spotted items they could relate to – like backpacks, swing sets, and monster beds that were not much different from their own. The worms in the salad and sandwiches grossed them out but they wouldn’t let me turn the page – they were so engrossed!

When school is back in session in the fall, I hope I’ll hear another knock at my door, and when it opens, I hope it will open to a world of new stories.

Relatives and Road-trips

The word “relatives” came up in a story during one of my speech sessions and I asked my students if they knew what it meant. They didn’t so we discussed aunts, uncles, brothers, cousins . . .

A student interrupted me, “Don’t talk about cousins – my cousin moved away.” She buried her face in her folded arms.

Another child jumped in and said, “My six chickens’ birthday is August 7 – all of them. I don’t know why.”

Now I’m not sure where this came from. It was stretching the topic of “relatives” and one of the things we work on in speech is staying on topic, but I couldn’t resist asking, “So did they all hatch on the same day?” and he said, “no – they hatcheded on different days in June. I don’t know why their birthday is August 7. Do you know when mine is?”

He was disappointed I didn’t because he didn’t know either. I assured him I’d find out before I saw him next and then tried to rein this conversation in and return to the subject of relatives.

I had the perfect book for the topic, The Relatives Came by Cynthia Rylant, illustrated by Stephen Gammell. It doesn’t use the words “cousin,” “aunt,” or “uncle” but there are a multitude of them and they fill most pages so it was easy to introduce the vocabulary. This charming story tells of a rural family leaving their Virginia farm to visit relatives. 

The story begins,

“It was the summer of the year the relatives came. They came up from Virginia.”

     . . .

“They left at 4:00 in the morning when it was still dark, before even the birds were awake.”

They drove all day and into the night . . .”

When they arrived, “it was hugging time.”  And the hugs seemed to go on forever as the family passed each other around from one set of arms to the next. When bedtime came there weren’t enough to go around, so beds were shared and floor-space filled. Arms and legs draped neighboring bodies as they squeezed together to sleep.

The illustrations in this book are color pencil drawing with personality. They have warmth, humor, and joy – even the car looks exuberant about the trip.

I understand the feeling. I just returned from a fabulous road-trip to see my family and many of my students are doing the same. Some are traveling all the way to Mexico and others have relatives visiting them. I imagine we’ll have a wide variety of stories to share in the fall. And speaking of stories, if I ever find out why those chickens celebrate their birthday on August 7, I’ll let you know. (I’m hoping I’ll be invited to their birthday party.)

I’m away on vacation and will return to my regularly scheduled posting next weekend. But until then, I hope you'll enjoy a few quotes and photographs.

"The human soul needs beauty even more than it needs bread."

-D.H. Lawrence

From our garden to our kitchen table.

"A writer's brain is like a magician's hat. If you're going to get anything out of it, you have to put something in it first."
-Louis L'Amour

Bluff trail in Northern California

“The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading, in order to write; a man will turn over half a library to make one book.”
- Samuel Johnson

Reading by the river.

"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge."
-Albert Einstein

An evening view.

I hope you are able to surround yourself with beauty and a tall stack of engaging books. I also hope that we can all “awaken joy in creative expression” within our children, students, friends and selves. 

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.