Slice of Life: Singing with the Band

Slice of Life 2011My new band is really coming together. We’re still working on a name (but have it narrowed down to some finalists) and we need some gigs down the road (our first outing may be a benefit concert at my school), but the rock and roll groove is there. We’re working on songs from Creedence, to Motown Soul, to The Outsiders, to some original stuff.

Mostly, I am the saxophonist, and one of the songwriters as we slowly mesh some original material into the mix.

Last night, our lead singer was absent and I had to step in and do the vocals, so we could at least practice through some songs (including a medley of Johnny B Goode, I Saw Her Standing There, Summertime Blues, and Runaway — way out of my range for most of those). Man, I’ve sort of lost my voice this morning and taking on that role of lead singer was more difficult than I remember it. It also brought me some renewed appreciation for our singer, who has a wonderful voice and a wide range.

It was fun, but strenuous, and I am going to need my voice today. If you see it, can you remind it to come back home. Thanks.

Peace (in the band),
Kevin

Scenes from the Digital Storytelling Project

Yesterday, we launched right into using iMovie for digital storytelling around narrative writing. I gave another brief overview of iMovie, which followed some visual tutorials last week, and then I turned them loose on the laptops for the rest of the period. For the most part, it was successful, with me jumping around the room, helping kids and kids helping kids (I always encourage them to help each other).

Every student was well underway with turning their narrative paragraph about a memory object into a digital story. Everyone had some sort of image (if they forgot a picture, they had to draw one) or they were taking pictures of their items (baseballs, trophies, stuffed animals, pocket watches, heirlooms, scrapbook pictures of pets, etc.) and they were layering their voices into the mix. The most difficult and time-consuming part of this project is syncing the time of the narration with the time of the photos.

Today, I will be showing them how to use Freeplay Music to add a soundtrack and my goal is to have them complete the bulk of the project today. My original intent was to have another full day tomorrow, but we have a field trip planned (the date got changed suddenly) so I am rushing them along a bit faster than I would have liked.

I am still mulling over how to share out the final projects, so they can view each other’s digital stories. I teach four classes, and friends want to know what their friends in other classes are doing. one option is to burn a DVD. Another is to use our class YouTube account and upload directly from the Macs into that account, and then create playlists. I am open to other options, if you have any ideas.

I want to emphasize that this began as a writing project — the narrative paragraph — with the digital story as a final step. The writing came first. Here is an example of the narrative paragraph from a student, which has become their “script” for the digital story.

I have only had one dog that I actually remember. Her name is Bella and she is five years old (her sixth birthday is coming up- April 1st). She is a black lab. We got her at a place where the owners (one of the owners was my soccer coach) kept having the mom dog give birth and then they would sell the puppies. So, she came from a big family. All her brothers and sisters were either black labs, yellow labs, or chocolate labs, and the mom was a yellow lab. We got her because my brother and I wanted a dog really badly. We kept asking and asking our parents if we could get a dog but they kept saying no. But finally they told us we were going for a ride to give my coach money that we owed her. When we got there we realized we were there to get a dog. My brother and I got to play with the dogs, but mostly the one that my parents had already picked out a few days back. When my parents were secretly there days before when they were deciding on what dog to get Bella (who had the name “no collar” at the time because she was the only dog without a collar) was on my mom’s lap and she started chewing on the zipper to her purse. At that time my parents knew that was the right dog to get. She is important to me because my family and I love her very much and I wish she would be able to live as long as I will. When I see Bella many memories from when we first got her (and other memories from after we got her also) come to mind. Now you have learned about the history of my dog, do you have any memories form an animal like mine?

Peace (in the story),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Wild Chives

Slice of Life 2011“Ahh. The first chives of spring.”

I was tossing the baseball around with my middle son, who is breaking in a new glove. The younger son was chasing the dog around the yard with a large stick in his hand, yelling out some sort of battle cry. The older son had bent down to pluck something off the ground. He popped it into his mouth and chewed slowly.

The chives are back.

Each spring and into early summer, our yard becomes a wild landscape of wild chives. When that first day of mowing the lawn arrives, the air will be sweet with chives. It’s enough to sometimes make you gag. A little bit of chives goes a long way. A lot of chives goes too far. The kids love to munch on the pungent weeds. I worry about what the dog has been doing, if you get my drift.

My son reached down to pluck another tender green shoot. The dog lumbered over and he fed the chive to the dog. Now, both of them were chewing, rather thoughtfully. The temperature here in Western Massachusetts is still hovering around the mid-30 degree mark, so spring is taking its time.

The chives tell us that we won’t have much longer to wait. I can smell it in the air.

Peace (in spring, please, come),

Kevin

Narrative Writing as Digital Storytelling

I’m pretty excited about today and tomorrow because my sixth graders are going to be using their narrative paragraph writing (they wrote about a concrete memory object that represents a strong memory) as the script for creating a digital story on iMovie. They are excited because they haven’t used the Mac cart much this year (the PC cart is in our room and the Mac cart is in high demand for the younger grades).

On Friday, I walked them through a bit on how to use iMovie. A show of hands indicated that only about 12 of my 80 students have ever used iMovie, so it will be a real experience for them. We have used PhotoStory3, the PC version of digital storytelling, so they have some understanding of the meshing of image, and narration, and music.

But iMovie is another level. It’s more sophisticated, but still, pretty easy to use. Lucky for me, I immersed myself in iMovie recently for a Digital Storytelling Workshop that I led. (see website resource).

What I worry about is whether they will remember to bring in their photos, or their flash drives, or the object itself (we will use Photobooth to take pictures, if we need to). They need to have their resources in order to begin the project and we only have the cart for a few days. We’ll see ….

What I like about the project is that it:

  • reinforces paragraph writing;
  • shifts from concrete to abstract;
  • gets at an emotional center for the students;
  • adds true voice to the mix;
  • allows them to use another technology tool for creative composition;
  • is limited in scope and therefore, is doable in short amount of time.

You can see my sample at the top of this post (about the tea cup). And this video collection is from a few years ago and they were done with Photostory. Pay attention to the voices. You don’t get that emotional connection with words on the page. That’s the power of digital storytelling.

Peace (in the story),
Kevin

March Book Madness: Septimus Heap

Here is another student project in my March Book Madness feature, which has been running all month to celebrate the reading we do in my sixth grade classroom. Here, my student reviews a book in the Septimus Heap series, called Siren, by Angie Sage. I know very little about this series, other than they have pretty cool covers. This student is an advanced reader and his glog about Siren shows good thought and reflection.

Peace (in the book),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Questions He Asks

Slice of Life 2011Today is my middle son’s birthday, and he has always had a very inquisitive nature (I once wrote a poem about him as a young child asking about God). Here, in no particular order, are some of the questions he has lobbed my way in the past three days.

“What if Gaddaffi bombs us?”

Here’s a question that I wish I would not be asked, but I can’t just ignore it, either. He reads the newspaper. He has some idea of the world. I tell him that Libya does not have the capability to bomb us here, and that we are participating in the no-fly zone initiative to save lives. I tell him he is safe. I am not sure if I put him at ease, though.

“Do you believe there is life somewhere other than Earth?”

I told him that I often wonder, given the size and scope of the Universe, if there might be some form of life somewhere. I don’t imagine it will be little green men, but maybe something. He agreed, and then rattled some statistics about how many adults believe versus how many kids believe (I think he heard it on the radio).

“If I get a scholarship to  a college for sports, but it is not the college that I want, can I turn it down?”

This still a number of years down the road, I assure him. Wow. I honestly tell him that it would be hard to say no to a free ride to college, and given our finances, it would be a difficult decision. He wants to go to LSU to play basketball. We can only hope some sort of academic and/or sports scholarships are in the cards.

“What is the meaning of life?”

I am not kidding. He asked this one morning. I was caught off-guard, but rattled on about love, peace, helping others, family and inner happiness. I sounded like a greeting card, I fear, but what could I say? That I have it figured out? I was honest, in that I don’t have it figured out.

I love this kid. He’s a fifth grader with a mind wide open.

Peace (in the questions),
Kevin

March Book Madness: I Am Arachne

Click to enlargeLast year, at our school, we had the wonderful illustrator and writer Mordicai Gerstein come in and work with kids around creating picture books. While he was here, he donated a few books for the library, and then the librarian in turn passed one of them along to me. It is called I Am Arachne, and Gerstein is the illustrator (and the writer is Elizabeth Spires). As part of my March Book Madness, I thought I would share some impressions of this collection of short stories inspired by Greek and Roman myths.

Told entirely in first person narrative, the stories here are a retelling of very famous myths and some not-so-famous myths. I did like that Spires began with the story of Arachne and Athena, and then used her very poetic touches to have Arachne begin to spin the stories for us. Spires must have some background as a poet because there are lovely sentences and passages here that really capture the characters in these tales. Long after you read the stories, you might still hear the voices of the narrators.

The 15 stories are short, but move along at a brisk pace, and this book would be a nice companion for a unit around Greek or Roman mythology (which is why the librarian passed it along to me.). Gerstein’s sketch illustrations are a nice complement to the stories, too. They are by nature, whimsical, and capture the mood of the stories.

Peace (in the myths),
Kevin

Slice of Life: Cool is the Way it Plays

Slice of Life 2011Last night, my wife and I went to a jazz concert that celebrated the music of John Coltrane. It featured tenor saxophonist Javon Jackson and beyond the drums was the legendary Jimmy Cobb, who has played with everyone from Charlie Parker to Miles Davis and more. He may be getting on in years but he can still kick it.

As I was listening, my mind drifted along with the music and this one line of words kept popping in my head. “Cool is the way it plays …” and this morning, I still had it there. “Cool is the way it plays ….” and as I was walking our dog, under the stars, this poem started to form for me.

I purposely tried to weave ideas in and around the lines, making an attempt to captures some of the ways I heard Javon Jackson play around with melodies and lines.

Cool is the Way it Plays

Cool
is the way it plays
on stage
the way the notes graze
against each other
in melodic memory
in harmonic time
in the rhythm of the line
is where the notes
dance
take chances, sometimes,
I’m out here alone –
in there
you’re trying to find
the hook, the head,
the crazy way I said
to listen to that sound
coming from that horn
as if it were some theme
I’d heard before
we were born
reminding us
to listen,
to listen,
to listen to the currents
weaving in and out
of each other –
Cool
is the way it plays
on stage,
Put away the rage
listen
relax
dance along the line

You can listen to the podcast version of the poem, too.

Peace (in the cool),
Kevin

March Book Madness: The Strange Case of Origami Yoda

This is part of my March Book Madness series, and although I usually feature student projects, today I am sharing out my own review of a book that a lot of my kids have read: The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger. And it won a Cybil Award this year, too.

I read this book yesterday, in between my wanderings as a proctor for our last day of our state testing. The book has been sitting on my desk for weeks now, and I have even used the how-to instructions in the back of the book to have our entire class create little Yodas that now decorate my whiteboard. (I meant to take a picture and forgot. It’s cute. All those little Yodas.)

The story centers on sixth graders, and one boy who declares that his origami version of Yoda gives advice independent of him. A kid asks, and the Yoda replies. The book is told from the viewpoint of one main character, but he has “assembled” it as a case book — with smaller stories from various characters — to determine if Yoda is real, or just a fake. The story moves towards the main character getting up enough nerve to ask a girl to dance.

What I liked here was the “voice” of the writing. It felt as if Angleberger really captured the voice of sixth graders, with all of their quirks and social awkwardness, and also, their ability to still believe in something that is clearly at odds with reality (a finger-sized Yoda who gives advice.) The plot weaves its way towards a nice ending that nicely ties things up.

The illustrations along the margins of pages was a hoot, and the use of things like text messages, notes from the principal, and more, added to the playful feel of the story. I wasn’t sure of what to make of the character of Dwight, whose Yoda is at the heart of the story. He is socially out of touch, great at math but little else, and often the brunt of cruel jokes and comments by others. Aspergers?

The Strange Case of Origami Yoda is strange, but entertaining.

Peace (of this I say),
Kevin

PS — Here, the author explains how YOU can make an origami Yoda. Give it a try.