At the start of the school year, teachers everywhere strive to build community. A sense of community is vital to our literacy classrooms, so we search for activities to launch the year that go beyond finding out each other’s favorite flavor of ice cream or favorite color (although we know those are important too!). Although we know the value of building community at the start of the school year, we’re also ready to dig into content.
In sixth grade, our very first mini-unit is writing “Where I’m From” poems based on George Ella Lyon’s poem of the same name. One of the reasons we choose this activity to begin our year is that it not only serves to build a sense of community but opens up other entry points for learning in our literacy classes.
The Literacy Work
We start by reading “Where I’m From” by George Ella Lyon aloud. Once we’ve read, we pause to think about what it’s about. In sixth grade, our students are generally able to recognize that this poem is a reflection on how our experiences shape us. We usually hear responses like these:
It’s about her childhood.
It’s about her memories.
We also hear murmurs of confusion about some of the language.
What’s this [pointing at carbon-tetrachloride]?
I don’t know what forsythe [sic] is.
Restoreth my soul?
We use those responses for our first minilesson.
When we listen to this poem (or any poem), we like to think about what images the words create in our minds. Even if you don’t know exactly what a Dutch elm looks like or what a forsythia bush is, you still get that image of being outdoors in nature.
After we model how words create images for us, we model for students how to read like writers by thinking about what kind of details the author used to create those images. So in the first stanza, when we see clothespins and Clorox, we talk about how George Ella Lyon creates an image of laundry not by telling us that her daddy was in the dry-cleaning business (which he was) but by showing us, by listing some concrete objects that readers might associate with laundry.
Students are then ready to try this work with a partner. By the end of the partner work, they’ve not only figured out something about the meaning, but they’ve also made a list of the types of details that George Ella Lyon uses.
Our list usually looks something like this:
Kinds of Details That George Ella Lyon Uses Everyday/concrete objects Specific names of people Specific names of places Specific names of things |
Structure
Once we’ve thought about the meaning, we take a look at the structure by looking for patterns in each stanza. This lets us start using the language of poetry right away, with words such as stanzas, line breaks, and white space.
In George Ella Lyon’s poem, some students theorize that Lyon has grouped lines together so readers move chronologically through her life. Others think that she categorizes by subject—like outdoor stuff and family. We’re not the authors of this poem. Although we can research the author and find out details about her daddy being a dry cleaner, as readers, we don’t know for certain what her intention is. The meaning we get from the poem depends heavily on the experience that we bring with us.
We also discuss structure on a sentence level by looking at things like sentence length, word order, and repetition.
Revision
We know that revision can happen throughout the writing process. Depending on the kind of writer we are, we may reread and revise after every page or we may draft an entire piece quickly and then go back to revise.
As teachers, we usually teach revision strategies after we think most students have a draft completed. With this poem, we like to show students how they can personalize their poems by including some very specific nouns. For example, instead of bleach, George Ella Lyon uses the word Clorox. Instead of just a tree, she names a Dutch elm. Depending on our students and what came up in our initial discussions of the poem, we might choose other revision strategies as well.
Here is a revision chart used for our most recent “Where I’m From” unit.
Grammar
In the middle of this unit, we give a quick parts-of-speech pre-assessment to see where our students stand with parts of speech. If they are still a little fuzzy on when to capitalize nouns, our revision lesson on general versus specific details guides us to talk about common versus proper nouns in an authentic way that ties into the use of common and proper nouns in the poem.
Writing
Our readers and writers collect lots of memories when they write their own poems. They are filled with the important people, places, and things in our students’ lives, so it’s only natural that poems also become one more source of rich writing ideas for our students. We model looking to our own “Where I’m From” poems for memories and writing narrative entries about these memories for our next writing unit on memoirs.
The Community-Building Angle
Throughout this process, there are many natural ways to build community. For example, once we’ve made a list of the types of details used by George Ella Lyon, it’s time to model how we brainstorm our own details. As we model using a chart like the one below, we think aloud about the items we’re adding to our chart, giving our students an opportunity to learn a little about us. “I’m going to write coffee under concrete objects. My father worked for a coffee company named Maxwell House, so I always remember him smelling like coffee when he got home from work.” This kind of narrative helps our students get to know something about their teachers and shows them what the details they choose can reveal about them.
It’s not long before students are sharing some of the things on their own lists at the end of class and learning new things about the person sitting next to them that they may not have heard before. Here’s a conversation that we overheard:
“Who’s Bella?”
“My dog that died this summer.”
“That’s so sad. I’m sorry.”
It was a simple exchange, but we know that these simple exchanges are revealing the important stories that make up our students’ lives. These exchanges give them an opportunity to bring another part of their lives into the classroom, and we feel successful about building community while already launching into the content that we want to cover.
Besides getting to know about each other’s backgrounds, this unit gives us the first opportunity to support students in collaborating with each other. As students work on completing their first draft, we work our way through the room, conferencing with individuals about making purposeful choices about structure. One favorite thing we do at this point is suggest peer conferences.
Recently, we conferred with a student who made some purposeful moves in the structure of her poem and was able to explain them. She had organized her poem so that each stanza highlighted a place that was important in her life. When we met with another student who seemed to have lots of details about different places but hadn’t given the order of the details much thought, we knew this was the perfect chance for a peer conference. Not only did this conference support the second student in considering structure, but it also gave these two students an opportunity to talk about the content of each other’s poems.
Once we edit, we’re ready to share and publish. We usually celebrate by sharing entire poems with table partners or sharing just a favorite line with the whole class. Either way, we allow students to explain, if they’d like, or to just leave others to their own interpretations. This celebration is another way that community is built within the class. Once we’ve celebrated, the pieces are the first ones displayed on our bulletin boards. We love seeing students stopping to read their own work and the writing of their classmates. In fact, we often find ourselves pausing during the day to enjoy some beautiful snippets of writing in the midst of all the back-to-school busyness.
We love using “Where I’m From” as an entry point for writers who may be rusty after a summer off. It allows us to teach valuable literacy lessons about details, structure, revision, and grammar with an authentic writing task. It also creates embedded opportunities for community building that give us all insight into some of the important people, places, and things that have formed our students. Lastly, this beautiful piece of published writing can be ready for back-to-school night.
Here are a few of our finished products: