The University of Whatif

I feel like such a geek writing so frequently! But if I don't write now while I remember most of the things I want to say, then I might forget to mention them. Earlier this week I read some information about kina to the class. This was out of role but could easily have been as professional development. The only reason I did this as a class activity was to make sure that the children who struggle with writing would have the chance to take enough notes, and I could stop and start, clarify meaning, and help them out with spelling, as well as draw big diagrams on the whiteboard to show the body parts of a kina.
They got the hang of just recording key words, some chose to draw little pictures instead of words, and I did remind them that these note taking skills probably won't apply in the real world anyway, as everything is recorded and posted online these days. (Kind of like the irrelevant shorthand/typing class I took in 3rd form at High School, I was great at shorthand, hopeless at typing. No one uses shorthand anymore, and if I had to wear a bib to cover the keyboard when using this laptop, I'd be in trouble. I still type with 2 fingers. And I look at the keys.)
The diagrams of the kina, top and bottom, provided much interesting discussion. The mouth is on the underside, and the bottom is on the top. Only I had to label such parts correctly. So anus was written neatly on the board. That was ok, until one little darling asked what an anus was. We do cover all of this important stuff in health. Obviously he had forgotten. Another child replied and said it was where you poo out of. This had the class in fits of laughter. Then someone said, "imagine if we pooed out of our heads!" Imagine indeed. It would be a rather messy business I am sure. I tried not to laugh because poo isn't really funny, but I must admit I couldn't help but have a little giggle too.
Yesterday we set the classroom up like a lecture theatre, and we attended a lecture about kina. Jessie AKA Professor Stephens, delivered the lecture (from information I had given to her earlier to read) and the class added to their previous notes. This worked beautifully.

Awesome note taking during Professor Shephen's lecture!

The Professor makes notes on the board

Regan is invited up to answer questions about what kina tastes like, which he did willingly.

Today we received an imaginary email giving us details about the assignment that is to follow the lecture. The criteria match the ones we have for report writing as a school, funny that! Each criteria is worth 10 points, plus they receive 20 points for attending the lecture, so they should all pass. I made it as real as I could, with a cover sheet, criteria and grades, student name and ID etc, and due time and date. Then I set up a box at the front of the room to post the assignments. We are so keen to get 'A's that we had to begin immediately. I can't wait until Tuesday when they are all in!

Diagrams are looking good!

Using graphic organisers to plan ideas for writing reports

Paper war!

Presentation is everything!

And finally, some gorgeous bugs, complete with information and life cycles, ready to send to Tales Up from the entomologists in the science lab. We actually learnt quite a lot about insects when we created our own, and it was a lot of fun.

This is the best work I have ever seen from Jacob. He even gave it a latin name. So impressed!

Macaroni Beetles and Book Bugs

I need to write today because a lot happened, but not the way I had intended. I'm okay with things not going according to plan, although sometimes I have to bite my tongue, and sometimes I have to remember that I am not one of the children and start putting in my 2 cents worth.
This morning we started with a school journal article from back in 1994, a long time ago I know, and pretty ancient stuff for the children who weren't even born yet. We read an "article" about the macaroni forest in the middle of the North Island, which is where macaroni trees grow. The macaroni beetle comes out once a year when it hears the strands of macaroni scraping the ground because they're so long, and they eat the centres out of the strands to create tubes, cutting them off every 2.5cm for air. The macaroni dries in the sun and the people who wrote the article go in by helicopter and shovel it into bags, seal them up and sell it.
Children often believe the article, until it mentions the chocolate biscuit forest at the end. But my class today were quite fascinated with the whole idea, and only one out of the 21 children knew how to make pasta and what was in it. So after ensuring everyone understood it was all fiction (even though it was an article) I shared an April Fools Day joke that I read about online. Apparently back in 1957, the BBC broadcast a story about a superb growing season for pasta crops in some area of Switzerland. The following day they had a huge amount of people phone in asking about how they too could grow their own pasta producing tree, and so the BBC continued with the joke, telling the callers to plant a sprig of spaghetti in a tin of tomato sauce and hope for the best. The children in my class though this was hilarious, especially since they now knew where pasta really comes from.
After morning tea, I asked my colleagues to meet me in the waiting room upstairs, in role as authors. I entered the room as Mildred in a state. There were moths and bugs in my hair. I was doing a great job of carrying on like I do when I think there really is a bug in my hair (I don't know why this freaks me out so much) and my colleagues eventually calmed me down, enough for me to inform them that when I went into our bookstore, bugs were everywhere! And they had eaten all of the books! And I held my hands out and showed them the remains of a few books (my hands were actually empty) and my colleagues played along and were all devastated. Until one of them reminded us that we were rich so it didn't matter about the money, and we could print more copies. So I said that I feared one or 2 had escaped! This lead to a massive discussion about the Queensland fruit fly, with images and news reports shown online. Interestingly enough, the class were quite concerned about this and I did consider investigating further. Anyway, after much time had passed, they decided to brainstorm ideas on what to do about our situation with the book bugs.

Some interesting ideas, most came up "with call the exterminator," then with more creative ideas.

This group were still coming up with solutions when everyone else had exhausted all possibilities!

Drawing is a good way to get your ideas down, better than writing sometimes!

Isn't this a most gorgeous, humane idea! Sophie decided we could capture them and put them in a box and the box could have a slot in the top and could act as a shredder, since the bugs like paper so much!

Vacuum them!

The final photo shows that this group thought we should find out more about the bugs. Since we were all too scared to go downstairs and check the bookstore, we phoned a group of entomologists.
We went out of author role, and into scientist role, and we were suddenly entomologists working in a lab. Well the children were, Mildred stayed behind and made the phone call.
I wish I'd recorded it because it was really good, and the children all bought into it. I'm not sure what Shelley thought when she came in to get one of the children for reading. I was hiding behind my desk on the floor, speaking with a panicked, high pitched voice, while Jessica took the call in the lab. I asked questions about the bugs and the rest of the scientists helped answer them. Reassured that they would send me relevant facts, information and diagrams about book bugs, and knowing they weren't poisonous, I hung up. Only for Izzy to call me back to inform me that there actually was one type of book bug that she had discovered that was poisonous. Oh dear.
She tried to calm me down by saying that I would probably be ok, and when I asked her how I'd know if I'd been poisoned, she told me that I'd get black spots on my skin.
Of course, the temptation was just too much. I'm sitting there, behind my desk, a vivid marker within easy reach...
I emerged from behind the desk with big black spots all over my cheeks.
This is where the day went totally away from my plan. I was told to call the hospital, told to call an ambulance, four lovely boys arrived going wooo ooo wooo ooo (meant to be ambulance noises) told me to get in, opened the doors and all, and drove me across the room to the hospital, which was where the hospital people were. We knew this because they answered the hospital phone. After being fake injected with a pen, fake medicated with another piece of stationery, and given glue stick to rub over my face, (which I did because I was already covered in black vivid so why not) I was pronounced cured.
The scientists spent the rest of the day drawing diagrams of their book bugs. None are complete yet but the ideas are super and draft copies include life cycles, invented names, predators, prey (besides books) and body parts that match those of real insects, with a few modifications. I'll post the photos when they are finished.

Some Things I was Thinking About

I'm on release, so I thought I'd use the time to just put down a few things that I keep meaning to say, but then I forget to!
First of all, even though I have been trying to keep the business side of things up to date on the blog, I haven't been including all those little drama games and moments, but we are doing them!
A few weeks ago I had another class join us for the morning, and I took them all (45 kids) outdoors for a few games. It was the perfect opportunity to try out some of the games I had seen online, and we managed to fill in an hour just like that! It's not just that the games are fun, the discussion that follows is often quite amazing. For example, we played a game called "There is Only One Liar" or something like that, and it all went according to plan (except for the child who thought they had been tapped on the shoulder). After they kids realised they had been tricked by me, they started to talk about who they thought was "in" (in the first round it was no one, in the second round it was everyone). I expected that. What I did not expect was that they would start to discuss why. Comments like, "I thought it was so and so because they looked away/ were fidgeting/ smiled/ looked guilty..." And from that particular game we could see how gestures, body language and facial expression are sometimes very important in drama activities.
Expression came up once again while creating freeze frame images relating to the book "The Mayor's New Clothes" and the children were keen to show emotions such as pride, shock and embarrassment when they presented them to the class. We also had a pretend photographer. It turns out that this is a much sought after position, so we had to take turns at being the photographer, pretending to view the image through the lens, click at the right moment (even though the presenters were perfectly still) wait for the polaroid image to print out and wave it around for a bit, then hold it up for the class to view. What a long process! Finally, the class would try to match the exact point in the story to the imaginary photo. Again, the reasons why they thought what they thought came up. Pretty cool when you have kids justifying their ideas without any prompting!
And one other thing, I have been reading Ken Robinson's book Out of Our Minds (to myself, not the class!) and it is pretty good. I can so relate to a lot of what he says and some of the information has made me think more than I usually think, which is quite a lot anyway.
I also wanted to share this quote I came across in Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts (again, I did not read this to my class but to myself) "anything that can be put in a nutshell should remain there" and this is something to think about too! Also, it was a really excellent book. I think that is all I had to say.

Gianni Amarmy

Yes, I know it is an unusual name. Last year my company dealt with Greta Gridcen, an anagram of Greeting Card, so I thought I'd do the same this time, hence Gianni Amarmy. I will leave it for the class to solve. I think they will if I give enough hints. Last year it took them a whole term to realise it was an anagram!
I know we don't actually have to produce something for Mantle of the Expert to be successful, but I just have to! I can't not! This is such a cool opportunity to create a real thing, that is professional looking and well researched and full of the super creative ideas that the children have, and we really are making a book. And we would have made one anyway, even if the children hadn't been asking about making one, because why not? We are authors!
Gianni Amarmy has written to the company with a request (yes, the commission) for a children's picture book to be written and illustrated, about the sea urchin, kina barrens and marine reserves. His letter was delivered by the postie - she actually came into the classroom to deliver it to Mildred and the kids were all stunned, they were like, "that's our postie" and, "how did she know where Tales Up was?" and, "how did she know we'd be here in What If?"
And I was like, "Wow, I know! Amazing! She must have seen our advertising or something," while thinking how funny my class are.
So before opening the letter they had already decided that it must be from Chris Gurney, but changed their minds when I pointed out that we haven't sent our letters to her yet. They struggled with the fancy old fashioned font I used on the envelope (one I reused as it already had a postmark and stamp on it) so I read the return address out to them. Gianni Amarmy? Who could that be? Does anyone know a Gianni Amarmy? Hamish thought his next door neighbour might be called Gianni, or something like that. So we all sat around the conference table and took turns at reading the lengthy letter with old fashioned language that we had to keep stopping and looking up in the dictionary to decipher (words like peruse and entrepreneur) and eventually figured out that no, it couldn't be Hamish's neighbour. We voted on whether or not to go ahead with the commission. Regan said, "well, it will be our first real client so I think it would be silly to turn him down," and for those of us that know Regan, I was pretty pleased with him speaking up like that. So the class voted unanimously to go ahead with it, and then they started planning the illustrations for the main character. A kina.

The letter from Gianni, I'd include the real copy but it is very long and waffly!

A cute little kina is created!

Some illustrators like to work on the floor in our company.

As you can see, we have been working on shading with our sketching pencils in art, so many of the kina are shaded, because they are like a squashed sphere, and we know how to shade a sphere and a cube so far!

Note that the draft has arms, and the other one does not!

Every sketch needs a sun, so you can figure out the light and shadowed areas!

And Jacob's ideas have no shading, one looks like a hairy Jack Skellington, and the other like a bearded golliwog, but he was fully focused the whole time, and I am proud of him for persevering!

And after all of that, I had a child ask me if the letter was real. And being the lovely, patient, caring person I am, I said, "What do you think?" No, I didn't really, although I admit I felt like it. I also remembered how important it was to reinforce the difference between real and pretend and so we went over looking at the What Is / What If world on the board and the 3 clicks I had done prior to being in the imaginary company, and reminded them that even though the letter was a tangible object that we can touch and see, it was made especially for us to keep our pretending going. I'm nice like that. Sometimes.

Binding Books

We researched book binding. There sure are a lot of ways to bind a book! It was a company related task but we ended up pretending that we were from other companies, trying to sell our great book binding ideas to the remaining people who were still in the company. I don't know if that makes sense, but we did do a bit of swapping around roles during the session and it all worked out well.

The best way to find information!

Youtube clips show us step by step instructions

This group presented their original idea, without researching first. It involved a 2 step process - gather pages together, then staple! But they did their best with presentation, both oral and visual.

I really like how all of the people in a group are prepared to speak in front of the class.

25 pages of scrap paper folded neatly together result in a very untidy edge. We check out how much would stick out of the cover if we bind all of the pages together like this.

Creating "signatures" - 5 sheets of scrap paper folded together...

 points measured and marked on the fold at regular intervals...

holes created with an awl (we just used a big needle) and stitched together using saddle stitch...

to create a very lovely, tidy pile of pages. This is the method we liked best and will allow us to use either a hard or soft cover  if we ever publish a real book!

Another book binding poster, I just love the miniature example this group added to their presentation, too cute!

If we ever publish a real book... are we ever going to make a real book?... we should make a real book... we are authors, and we should make a real book... when are we going to make a real book? This is pretty much all I have heard from my 'colleagues' in our 'business' for the past few days. The time has come!

Writing to a Real Author

I am going to post the weeks events as separate posts because we have actually done quite a bit over the last few days. Perhaps because we aren't swimming every day due to chilly mornings, and less than half the class are bringing their togs (and yes I did take them out for a game of long ball instead... once) so we have more time in the classroom.
During a company meeting, Sophie informed the team that her Aunty Chris is a children's book author. We retrieved her books from the school library (Chris Gurney is the author of Little Red and the Cunning Kuri, The Little Blue Duck, Trev and the Kauri Tree...) and read them as a class in the What Is world. We discussed the fact that different illustrators drew the pictures for each book, and how the texts rhymes, and how the stories are based on famous fairy tales but with a modern and NZ theme. The children had lots of questions so I suggested we write to her and ask them. I know we could have just checked her out online, but this was a neat chance to try writing proper formal letters, with correct setting out etc, so they wrote their letters and they are all ready to send as soon as Sophie's mum gets the correct address to post them.
Sophie did bring in her signed copies of the books her Aunty Chris has given her as gifts, and we have read them and enjoyed them all. What was really amazing was that many of the kids in my class did not know the story of the Emperor's New Clothes or The Elves and the Shoemaker, two books that Chris Gurney has based her stories on. So I read the original story of the Emperor's New Clothes, and the class decided the Emperor must have had undies made out of the same invisible cloth as his clothes. Why oh why did I pick that particular book from the school library, when I had four different versions to choose from? I should have checked the illustrations at the end of the book before I read it to them!