Mother's Day and The Curious Garden

With Mother’s Day around the corner, our students have been busy painting flowers, crafting cards, and purchasing plants for the important women in their lives.

Art from Marcia Douglas' Kindergarten class

 

Lucky for these kids, we have a well-stocked garden on the school grounds and a teacher, Julie Castillo, who passes along her knowledge and love of plants. This week she introduced the students to “Lady Bug City” where the children went in search of a friendly ladybug or two.

After visiting the garden on Thursday, my students came to speech bubbling with information about their plant purchases so I chose a book to fit the theme: The Curious Garden by Peter Brown.

 

The book begins on a dreary note with a dreary, smoke-filled city.

“There once was a city without gardens or trees or greenery of any kind. Most people spent their time indoors. As you can imagine, it was a very dreary place.”

But a little boy in the story, Liam, loved the outdoors. He went exploring one drizzly day and discovered a “lonely patch of color” on an abandoned railway. The plants were dying and in need of a gardener. It wasn’t long before Liam became that gardener and the dying plants became a garden – a very curious one.

“Most gardens stay in one place. But this was no ordinary garden. With miles of open railway ahead of it, the garden was growing restless. It wanted to explore.

           

The tough little weeds and mosses were the first to move. They popped up farther and farther down the tracks and were closely followed by the more delicate plants.”

My students responded with enthusiasm to the story and they surprised me with gasps of wonder when I turned a page and they saw the transformation that plants made to a dilapidated building, an old wooden dock and a concrete parking lot. Lush greens spilled over rooftops and vibrant colors sprouted across the page. By the end of the story, there were no doubts – a garden can bring beauty even to the drabbest of places. This curious garden brought beauty to drab lives, too, as people of the town came out-of-doors and tended gardens all around the city.

On Friday, one of my autistic students showed me a three-inch manila envelope full of sunflower seeds she’d collected from our school garden. I assumed she was taking them home but after she left my room, I saw her outside the window, bent over my weed-filled barrel. She cleared out a mat of dried chickweed, emptied the envelope, and tucked soil around her gift.

Our Redwood students enjoy learning about plant life, insects, and gardening, but I think they are discovering something more – a variety of ways to bring beauty into our world.

Flying Lemurs and a Fabulous Librarian

Back in December, with the holidays rapidly approaching, our school librarian, Allison Brown, got busy and handcrafted holiday paper stars to raise funds for our library. She sold them at our school and around the community for just $5.

The money added up and soon she had a total of $1,160 dollars. With those funds she purchased 60 non-fiction animal books for the library shelves. To commemorate their arrival, Ms. Brown and children from three second grade classes gathered in front of our school for a photograph.  Each child is holding up one of the 60 brand new library books.

The students aren’t the only ones who benefited from Ms. Brown’s labors; I snagged one of the new books to use with a language group this week: Flying Lemurs by Willow Clark.

My speech kids were divided as to whether the animal was really cute or really ugly, but they all agreed the flying lemur, or “colugo,” was fascinating. To begin with, though they are called flying lemurs, they don’t fly (they glide) and they are not actually lemurs.

“They are called lemurs because their faces look like lemurs’ faces.”

This shy, large-squirrel-sized mammal rarely leaves the trees in the rainforest where they live. They simply glide through the air, moving from tree to tree. Their camouflaging fur looks similar to the lichen growing on trees in their habitat, but still, they have to keep an eye out for predators such as Philippine eagles. When I read the page about predators to a group of girls, they gasped in unison and Esmeralda pulled the book close, as if to protect the vulnerable colugo.

This book is peppered with new vocabulary words, all in bold print.

“Both kinds of flying lemurs are arboreal, meaning they live in trees. Just about everything they need is found in the treetops of the tropical rain forest habitats in which they live. Flying lemurs are nocturnal. This means they are active mostly at night.”

If a child misses the meaning of a word within the text, or simply wants to review a new vocabulary word, there is a handy glossary in the back of the book.

Our students are lucky to have a growing library. They eagerly file in each week to choose a special book to carry home. Some choose nonfiction, like Flying Lemurs, and these kids journey through the pages to places in the world they are unlikely to visit in person – or perhaps they will. Perhaps the book will ignite a dream and one day they’ll travel to new regions and new personal horizons. These children may become our future biologists, anthropologists or teachers. 

Some kids gravitate toward fiction and when they find a good story they often find a character who will become a companion, housed in their imagination for years to come. They may also experience the first stirrings of a desire to create characters and stories of their own. I’ve seen it repeatedly in my speech room. After listening to a good story, the kids often beg to write one of their own.

I’m grateful to Allison Brown who funded and selected the 60 new books now on our shelves. She continually finds creative ways to expand our library and introduce our students to great books. I’m also grateful to librarians, writers, parents, and teachers everywhere who instill a love of books in today’s children. We will all reap the benefits. 

Pirates vs. Cowboys, Learning & Laughing

Pirates vs. Cowboys brought some old fashioned fun to the speech room this week. My students have been in love with Aaron Reynolds’ storytelling talents ever since I read his book Creepy Carrots last October. This latest book has further established his place in their hearts. And the kids loved David Barneda’s engaging illustrations, especially the expressive pirate crab and cowboy cactus.

When Burnt Beard, the Pirate, swaggered into Old Cheyenne, the pirate-cowboy showdown began (and so did the student-giggles.) The kids had a hard time deciphering what those rascally pirates and cantankerous cowboys were trying to say to one another. It was no wonder that cowboy Black Bob McKraw didn’t realize he was not being insulted when Burnt Beard said,

 “Ahoy there, me hearties! Be ye knowin’ where we’d be findin’ a fair scrub and a swish?”

Black Bob rode up real close to Burnt Beard. “What’d you call us, ya yellow-bellied varmints?” was Black Bob’s reply. “Why don’t ya mangy hornswogglers beat a trail of dust right back out of Old Cheyenne!”

My students couldn’t figure out what those colorful characters were trying to say but they laughed at the sound of these words and then took a guess at their meaning.  We had a nice conversation about communication and the importance of the words we use.  When I read,

None of them cowboys spoke Pirate, and none of them pirates spoke Cowboy! And that’s a recipe for trouble.

Joden called out, “None of those cowboys.” And after listening to,

“You rootin’-tootin’ critters better head fer the hills, or yer gonna get horsewhipped and hogtied like there’s no tomorrow!”

Haley said, “That means get out pirates!”

This story may not model appropriate grammar or typical vocabulary but it inspired my students to notice both and it opened a good discussion on communication.  It also inspired some creative endeavors. In a kindergarten group, one student dictated his own story, full of thieving pirates, stolen animals, and a treasure – one puppy, bright gold, the color of a gold-covered chocolate coin. 

I asked a group of first grade students to replace “pirates” and “cowboys” with different characters and we had an enthusiastic brainstorming session. Before long, they began creating their own stories. Zayd told a tale of Ninja vs. Robots, Madisyn started one about Ballerinas vs. Fairies, and Joden (ever the comedian) began a tale of a Dog-person vs. Cheetah – “a big one doing the happy dance.” I’m curious to see how that one comes out. Actually, I’m curious to see how they all come out; they are off to a good start. I feel privileged to see such creative minds at work and to have the opportunity to introduce them to a good story, like Aaron Reynolds, Pirates vs. Cowboys.