Picture Book Review: National Parks A To Z (Adventure from Acadia to Zion)

https://img.discountmags.com/products/extras/books/9781680515879_2de31fc.jpg

Gus D’Angelo has written and illustrate a picture book that is nearly perfect for this October’s Write Out project (learn more about Write Out, a partnership between the National Writing Project and the National Park Service, with events starting this year on October 8th and running for two weeks.)

National Parks A To Z (Adventure From Acadia To Zion) is chock full short explorations of various National Parks, fun illustrations and, as you might guess from the title, alliterations galore.

There’s a fun tone to the book, too, as D’Angelo brings readers into the parks through the use of creatures that live in those areas. So, we meet avocets in Acadia, bison on the Badlands, honus in Hawaii, weasels in Wind Cave, and so one.

But interspersed with the basic ABC format are small poems with environmental themes and informational texts about the National Park system, and native tribes whose ancestral lands form the borders of many park sites.

The result is a fascinating series of informational snapshots, making this book a rich resource for any elementary-level classrooms, and the book could provide a way to introduce the National Parks (and Write Out) for some further research and artwork, as D’Angelo’s illustrations are fun and filled with interesting elements.

Peace (and parks),
Kevin

PS — D’Angelo has a Mad Lib at his resource site as a PDF (along with some coloring sheets) and I converted his PDF Mad Lib into an online version, if you wanna play.

PPS — Today (Friday, August 25th) is the 107th birthday of the National Park Service.

Poetry: A Riff Off The River

Slumber Along

A friend – Willeena – has been sharing some lovely poems on X, tagging it with the #writeout hashtag (she and I and others are part of the team planning Write Out 2023 in October). Her poems are situated in nature, and she has been adding short videos, too, of where she is getting her inspiration. A poem she wrote yesterday inspired this poem of mine.

She wrote, as part of her poem:

Help them move
past the mirk and mire …

— Willeena Booker
https://twitter.com/WilleenaB/status/1693989524442055138

I took that idea and wrote my way forward.

Summer rains stretch
fingers into the bottoms
of the riverbed,

a weathered troublemaker
stirring up what’s long been
settled in

With eyes closed, then,
we slumber along
through cloudy waters,
dreaming of currents
and clarity

Then stuck feet find
a footing, and a hand
reaches from the shore –

Once more, your presence
provides ballast
in an otherwise
unbalanced world

Peace (and poems),
Kevin

Word Art Poem: Every Word Matters

Word Art Poem

I’m not sure this experiment worked but I was trying to write a small poem, with words that could potentially be used in any order, and no matter the order, the words would still become a small poem.

The reason for doing this is that I was curious about using a Word Art generator that lets you hover over words, which then animates the word above the image. I imagine someone making new poems from the words of the source poem.

Try it out: https://wordart.com/1juwyfcldkj6/word-poem

Here is the original poem:

scrambled
tandem
word
poems
becoming
something
random

Peace (and word experiments),
Kevin

Book Review: The Book of Hope (A Survival Guide For Trying Times)

“What gives me hope is that everywhere I go, young people filled with energy want to show me what they’ve done and what they’re doing to make the world a better place. Once they understand the problems and when we empower them to take action, they almost always want to help. And their energy and enthusiasm and creativity are endless.” — Jane Goodall, in The Book Of Hope (p. 115)

Douglas Adams sits down with Jane Goodall for a series of conversations over a span of time that make up the heart of The Book Of Hope (A Survival Guide For Trying Times) and Adams digs deep in his queries to Goodall into the quandary of being hopeful in a world where so much seems to be going off the rails — particularly around climate change.

Given Goodall’s long-standing work around nature and preservation, and how often she has had to confront the worst of humanity in the larger world to protect animals, her optimistic view that people can come together to make change, that there is still time to make a difference on climate change if we act now and with urgency, that we can learn and take comfort from the resilience of the natural world — that she continues to be hopeful in the face of all of the difficulties in the things she loves so passionately — well, that might be a path forward for many of us.

Right?

This book-length conversation is full of her stories (and Adams, too) that illustrate her thinking, but it also contains her observations of the ways hope can transform the world. She’s also bluntly realistic, understanding the challenges and the headwinds that always rage against change. Yet she seems willing to engage and to talk with and to argue against and to support anyone with a focused passion and conviction.

There are four main strands of inquiry of what hope is as Adams interviews Goodall here over the course of more than a year — and then with the interruption of the Pandemic that forced them to pause for a bit of time:

  • Amazing Human Intellect
  • Resilience of Nature
  • Power of Young People
  • Indomitable Human Spirit

The most powerful message contained in this conversation, I think, is this: every single person can make a difference, even if its a small step forward, but only if you find the agency to act on your hope, and your impact on the world gets magnified when you work with others. Hope without action is just wishful thinking, she suggests, and not very productive.

Or, as Adams puts it in his end notes:

“Hope is a social gift, one that is nurtured and sustained by those around us. Each of us has a web of hope that supports, nurtures, and uplifts us throughout our lives.” — Douglas Adams, The Book Of Hope (p.238)

Peace (and Hope),
Kevin

Blackout Poem: I Held The Book

Backout Poem: HP Lovecraft

This blackout poem was created as a morning assignment for the Daily Create. I don’t know much about HP Lovecraft (other than the name, and that his work was in the strange fantasy realm) but I found a collection of his poems (yep, strange stuff) and took a stanza into the Blackout Poem generator.

Peace (and the padding of unseen feet),
Kevin

Generative AI Presentation 3: Ethics, Policies and Reaching All Students

I did one final summer workshop presentation about the rise of Generative AI and the impact on schools. This one, like my last presentation, was with a group of school librarians, who were doing a week-long professional development around reaching all students, including those with disabilities.

My themes for this presentation centered first on the ethical considerations of using AI like ChatGPT and Bard, and then moved into how to begin thinking of school/classroom/libraries policies for students, and then ended with some ways that new AI-themed tools could help educators support students with some disabilities. I then provided a wide range of resources for them to explore and consider. (By the way, Eric Curts has done an amazing job in this area of inquiry, gathering resources on this topic.)

This is the third workshop I have given this summer (first with teachers in the Western Massachusetts Writing Project and then with another group of school librarians), and interest in all three has been very high by participants. We’re all wondering how AI is changing the educational landscape, and how we can adapt to meet the moment. Even for educators whose students are too young for ChatGPT or other tools, the interest is there to learn more.

I’ve tried to balance the concerns we all have with an open mind to the possibilities the AI might bring to the classroom. Threading that needle in these conversations can be tricky, but mostly, I have found, when educators learn more through discussion and explorations, the more open they are to considering the possibilities along with any pitfalls.

Our Western Massachusetts Writing Project is starting to plan a gathering of educators in the fall to do more of this work around AI, and I am likely facilitating part of that discussion with a professor from Westfield State University, our new home for WMWP.

Peace (and purpose),
Kevin

Music: Rhythms and Rivers

I was tinkering around with loops yesterday and began to imagine a river as I was working on this piece. Thus, the title — Rhythms And Rivers — and the image, generated by Adobe Firefly AI.

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

Poetry: Circumference and Radius

Circumference and Radius

This is another morning poem from a one-word prompt — “radius” — which had me sitting in quiet for a stretch, scratching my head about how to even begin. And then it took shape, so to speak.

Peace (and Math),
Kevin