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Mr. Stick's presence helps my students enjoy looking back through their writer's notebook for ideas for upcoming writer's workshops!
"Mr. Stick" Resources on this Page: |
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I can't draw, but I know for a fact that sketching my topics improves my thinking and my writing process. My students discover this too: Pre-writing is such an absolutely critical part of the writing process. I've come to believe that most of us do a a fair-but-nowhere-critical-enough job helping students understand not only its importance but also the variety of "shapes" pre-writing can take. In our classrooms, most of us teach things clustering, outlining, and/or free-writing, but these are simply the "tip of the pre-writing iceberg" of skills that can be classified as pre-writing.
Donald Graves--the great author/writing teacher--once suggested that, when the writing process is truly being honored, a student could very easily spend 85% of his/her time in the pre-writing stage alone. I always marvel at that lofty number when thinking about my own classroom's writer's workshop. I honestly don't believe I've ever come close to spending 85% of our instructional time in pre-writing with any of my best writing lessons, but I like keeping that number in mind when I challenge myself to do a better job with the work we do before composing actually begins.
I am so very devoted to writer's notebooks as the foundational tool for our writer's workshop because they offer that daily opportunity for my students to simply explore ideas and thoughts and words without worrying about structure or conventions. Weekly, I expect my students to talk to each other about writing that finds its way into their notebooks. Simply talking about what one might write about is a huge part of pre-writing; when students hear their own ideas out loud from their own lips, and when they hear one another's ideas during "notebook sharing," I see great ideas spark in their eyes during the exchanges. You really can't teach students to talk about potential writing in a meaningful way, but you can model it using your own writer's notebook stories(I'm assuming you're keeping one!), and you can faithfully provide them classtime to simply share their best ideas out loud with each other.
Talking about future writing is one simple way to move closer to that 85% that Donald Graves hinted about and--unintentionally--gave me a personal classroom goal. But how do you deal with that natural shyness almost every student shows when asked to share his/her ideas for writing with a peer? How do you move students from believing one of their own ideas is "stupid" to thinking the opposite because another student has said, "That's an awesome idea."
And along came Mr. Stick, an active member of my classroom since 1996! Ladies and gentlemen, in my classroom the answer to over-coming notebook shyness has been "Mr. Stick!"
He started out as our "margin mascot," a quick drawing I began asking my students to find time to do in that physical gap that naturally happens between some of their daily writing and the spiral binding that holds their notebook together. In the beginning, I required a facial expression that somehow related to what the students had written; I also strongly suggested that Mr. Stick be given a dialogue bubble that allowed him to make a comment about what was written by the student. It was a simple technique to help everyone begin including visuals so their notebooks weren't just block-paragraphs after block-paragraphs. I went out of my way to make it fun, which really helped "sell" the idea; my students did an awful lot of laughing at the Mr. Sticks I showed them as I taught the finer points of drawing a good Mr. Stick.
I then eavesdropped as students shared their pre-writing ideas, which I asked them to do at least once a week. Almost 100% of the time, as students flipped through their older notebook pages to find some idea to share, it was a Mr. Stick drawing from one of their margins that initiated the conversation. "Tell me about this one," students would say as they spotted a Mr. Stick that had caught their attention. These conversations--all part of pre-writing, if you ask me--improved over time. The students' efforts to make their "Mr. Sticks" look more appealing, well, it improved too.
Yes, Mr. Stick naturally evolved. It started when he began by leaving the narrow notebook margins to become more prominently featured alongside the students' writing. Many of my students liked the suggestion I made of drawing empty 3" x 3" boxes before they started writing, and then they would place a Mr. Stick illustration that matched where their pencils and minds had gone that during that session daily writing. A few writers began carrying their own sets of colored pencils, and several began taking their notebooks home to add finishing touches to the simple drawings. Color was never something we had done much with in our journals or notebooks, and now color was a common piece of every page; I believe color became a new challenge for them when I started showing them pages from journal- and notebook-inspired mentor texts, like those pictured at right, which I still show every class at the beginning of every new school year.
 And then something really huge happened that changed my practices as a writing teacher. It was something so obvious, but it honestly hadn't occurred to me to do it before: I created my own Mr. Stick-decorated journal that I could show my students in the Fall of 1998. I had journals and notebooks from college that I would sometimes show my students, but none of those featured the visuals I had begun requesting from my own students. Having my first authentic teacher-model of a journal made a huge impact--on both them and on me. And on Mr. Stick. The journal did very cool things with Mr. Stick.
It al came about this way: September of 1998, that was I first premiered my elaborate, Mr. Stick-friendly journal, which I I had created that summer. You see, I had won an educational fellowship from the C-SPAN cable network (thanks to some of my students' hard work and a contest I entered it in the year before), and for a month that summer, I worked in Washington, D.C., helping C-SPAN develop some online educational resources. It was an amazing summer to be in D.C., especially to someone who had never been there before. When they handed me an empty composition book on my first Monday there and said, "You have to keep a journal that documents your work," I asked, "Can I include visuals too? I'm not a very good artist, but I'd like to try something unique with this journal."
Wonderful things happened all around me while I was in this new-to-me place, and it was a perfect circumstance for maintaining a new journal. That was the summer of Monica Lewinsky, and I was a mere two blocks from the Capitol building when two security guards were shot and killed in a tragic attempt to attack one of the nation's Representatives. The picture (above--click on it or here to see it larger) comes from my journal, and the Mr. Stick sketch here has me and a fellow fellowship-winner, Bob, watching C-SPAN's coverage from that tragedy the next morning in the control room. I learned so much about skillful editing that day while I listened to the TV segment's director selecting from a variety of potential visuals as people expressed their emotions on a call-in program.
For the first time ever, I had a complete journal that I could show as my teacher model; it was the exact kind of journal I wished I had been given permission to create when my teachers required journal-keeping from me. My new journal's presence gave my students the permission I had never been given. That was the year I began seeing the best journals I had ever had from my own students...or from any other teacher's students. That winter, I was also teaching inservice workshops after school to my fellow teachers, and when I asked certain students if I might borrow their journals (we weren't calling them "writer's notebooks" back then...not yet) to show during one of my evening classes, they looked petrified that I might lose them if I took them out of the classroom to show others. Know this, I never did lose a single kid's journal, but I also never had students so dedicated to the journals they were keeping. and the pre-writing they were capturing on the pages. In just a few short years, with just a few strategies in place, my students' journals went from half-hearted attempts at pre-writing to treasured tools that proved they were thinking about important ideas.
It was that simple little stick man. He made our journal-keeping fun. Anyone could draw him. Everyone did. He helped us talk about our ideas for writing.
In my classroom today, with my fancy Interactive Smartboard and our wheeled cart of wireless laptops, we truly have an authentic writing environment that cost my district a pretty penny. I still marvel at how Mr. Stick--the simplest, cheapest technique ever to enter my classroom door--has made the biggest difference on my students as writers and thinkers.
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Mentor Texts that Encourage my Students to use More Visuals in their Notebooks and Journals:
If you appreciate the lessons I am posting here at my website, kindly consider using the links below to purchase any mentor texts I am recommending; a very small percentage of each sale from Amazon helps me keep this website free and on-line for all to use. Thanks in advance in helping me out! |
Amelia's 7th-Grade Notebook
by Marissa Moss
Moss's entire Amelia's Notebook series is a dream-come-true, skillfully showing how a young writer's combination of visuals, emotions, and words in a faux-composition book can--by itself--tell an interesting tale. Any of the books from the series will excite your students about keeping visual notebooks.
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Max's Logbook
by Marissa Moss
Moss went out of her way to create a boy's version of her successful Amelia's Notebook series. Although this book is charming, it didn't quite catch on, which has always made me sad. Still, my out-of-print copy of Max's Logbook sits proudly in my chalk tray, and it inspires my boy writer's with its use of "Alien eraser heads." Get a copy, if you can! |
Field Notes from Yosemite by Teresa Jordan
I had the pleasure of meeting this author, and I know she understands the importance of accompanying "journal thoughts" with visuals. Any book by this author you can find, get it!
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Original Resources my Mr. Stick Demonstration Lesson for the Northern Nevada Writing Project |
 At the University of Nevada-Reno, I proudly served as Director of the Northern Nevada Writing Project between 2003 and 2007. I say it a lot, and I often say it loudly, but I'll reiterate it once more: our NNWP provided me with the finest professional development experience of my teaching career; I became Director afterwards because I wanted to give back to this fabulous organization that truly changes so many teachers' practices. During their five-credit summer institute, which I took way back in 1996 as the very first class in my Master's Degree program, I learned the strategies that helped me truly believe I was a writing teacher, and I left that institute with the motivation I need to change my classroom into an environment that--first and foremost--developed critical thinkers who show what they know through writing.
As part of any Writing Project Summer Institute, each participant develops and presents a 90-minute demonstration lesson on a specific "best practice" related to the teaching writing; if a demonstration lesson is good enough, the NNWP will hire you to present it at future professional development opportunities in the area. The demonstration lesson I created during my institute focused on using word processing to make the writing process feel more authentic to students, which was still a fairly new idea back in 1996; sadly, I was never hired to present that particular demonstration lesson again, but that's okay. Two years later, however, my experiences with Mr. Stick and student journals had given me enough new materials to create an even better demonstration lesson for the NNWP. Over the ten years that followed, I presented my Mr. Stick materials close to a hundred times; it was such a popular session wherever I went, and teaching colleagues began calling me "Mr. Stick," which I kind of thought was charming. Kind of.
Our NNWP creates local teacher leaders by helping them develop the skills to effectively present demonstration lessons to each other; I was not a teacher leader until they brought me into their organization. Over the years, I have created and developed dozens of demonstration lessons for them, and doing so has made me such a better writing teacher; when you learn something well enough to teach it to another teacher, you have truly learned it at a very high cognitive level. I have created dozens of other demonstration lessons for the NNWP since introducing Mr. Stick, but the Mr. Stick materials will always hold a special place in my heart. They gave me my first experience with success as a professional development provider, which motivated me to become an even better teacher leader.
My Mr. Stick demonstration lesson was called "The Cave-Wall Journal" because I always felt the journal drawings were similar to primitive petroglyphs; you can see my Mr. Stick cavemen on the cover of my demonstration lesson's packet (above). My presentation taught my participants how to draw Mr. Stick, how to give him a face and a voice, and how to design journal assignments that were "Mr. Stick-friendly." During my 90 minutes, we analyzed many student samples of both journal pages and the portfolio pieces they inspired, and I finished my demo by challenging teachers to create their own "Mr. Stick journals," like the one I had that documented on my trip to Washington, D.C.
In 2008, I officially retired my "Cave Wall Journal" presentation so that I could begin focusing more on Mr. Stick as a character for my new writer's notebook, rather than my traditional journal. The new materials are being slowly posted on my writer's notebook resource page here at my website. Please be sure to check them out; my illustrated writer's notebook is one of the best teaching tools I have ever created to share with my students.
Just below, I happily share some of the most popular artifacts from my now-retired "Cave Wall Journal" presentation.
Resources from my "Cave Wall Journal" Demonstration Lesson, 1998-2008 |
Mr. Stick was featured in the NNWP's 2005 Writing Across the Curriculum Guide. This seven-page article--"Both Art and Writing Must Be Non-Intimidating"-- is what I wrote for that publication's "Journals & Learning Log Section." |
Here's the original PowerPoint Drawing Lesson I created (complete with the original sound effects, which I NEVER use in my PPTs anymore!); this showed my students how to draw Mr. Stick step-by-step. So many people asked me to e-mail them this one-slide demonstration, that I finally put it here on-line. Because I wanted it to keep its animation, I didn't post it as a PDF. If you modify this, please be sure to cite me as the original author. I appreciate it. |
My students learned to draw Mr. Stick using specific criteria in the first two weeks of school. This two-page document was a part of their notebooks, and we referred to it if a student suddenly forgot how to draw our "margin mascot. " |
If anyone knows the original creator of this fabulous face handout, please tell me! It was shared with me over e-mail with the instructions "distribute freely," which I have always done. This handout will make your Mr. Stick creations come to life as well as teach emotional vocabulary. |
Mr. Stick, from his spot in the journal margins, needed to say things about what the students had written. When my students needed assistance giving Mr. Stick more intelligent things to say, I gave them one of these Mr. Stick Bloom's dice, which they folded, taped, and rolled. |
Journal-Page Assignments from my Demonstration Lesson that I turned into Webpage Lessons at WritingFix |
Here's a Former Student's Journal Page:
The Cave Wall Journal Prompt
Click the image to be taken to WritingFix, where I have provided a write-up of this journal page assignment.
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Here's a Former Student's Journal Page:
Illustrated Vocabulary Pages
Click the image to be taken to WritingFix, where I have provided a write-up of this journal page assignment.
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Here's a Former Student's Journal Page:
Illustrated Note Pages
Click the image to be taken to WritingFix, where I have provided a write-up of this journal page assignment.
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Here's a Former Student's Journal Page:
Empty Box Before Writing
Click the image to be taken to WritingFix, where I have provided a write-up of this journal page assignment. |
Here's a Former Student's Journal Page:
Looking for Sets of Three
Click the image to be taken to WritingFix, where I have provided a write-up of this journal page assignment. |
Here's a Former Student's Journal Page:
The Board Game Summary
Click the image to be taken to WritingFix, where I have provided a write-up of this journal page assignment. |
Here's a Former Student's Journal Page:
The Haiku Summary
Click the image to be taken to WritingFix, where I have provided a write-up of this journal page assignment.
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Here's a Former Student's Journal Page:
Mostly Silent Storyboards
Click the image to be taken to WritingFix, where I have provided a write-up of this journal page assignment. |
My Students' Journal Pages Inspired Full-length Stories for their Writing Portfolios |
The goal of my writer's workshop was fairly simple: students were to write enough in their journals so that on designated workshop days, they could flip through their pages to find and self-select an idea they would be willing to take through the entire writing process. When a piece went through all steps of the writing process, it would go into the writing portfolio.
In my classroom, I expected students to go through this process ten times in a school year. 80% of my students' final grades were based on the pieces of writing in their portfolios. Writer's workshop was the most important work we did in class. Their writing ideas always began in their journals.
At right are some artifacts from my mythology class's writer's workshop. Here are two journal pages from two students, and the portfolio pieces they ultimately inspired. |
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Other Teachers Share their Mr. Stick Variations |
Geography teacher Jenn Wright shared with me this seven-page instruction manual that she uses to teacher her students to draw her Mr. Stick variation.
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Math teacher Holly Young had her students use Mr. Stick to help them process notes. Here, she required a "Mr. Stick Soap Opera Story Board" to teach radical numbers. |
Math teacher Holly Young also shared with me this page from a different student's math notebook. Here, students processed perpendicular and parallel line notes. |
Mr. Stick Uses Outside of the Journal |
My students loved Mr. Stick so much in their journals that they began asking if they could use him with their outside-of-journal assignments too. Of course, I said yes.
As I continued learning about better formative assessment techniques and differentiating sense-making activities, I began to create Mr. Stick examples for my other classroom strategies.
Mr. Stick's Vocabulary Sketch-n-Write has students define several related vocabulary terms in their own words on the right, then illustrate on the left with stickman-art.
Mr. Stick's Haiku Comic Strip has students summarize information from their notes in a haiku-inspired storyboard. |
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I hope you've enjoyed these Mr. Stick materials. If you wish to use them in your classroom or share them with teachers, you have my permission provided you keep any page citations intact. Thank you.
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Giving Credit Where Credit is Due...My Student & the TV Program That Actually Inspired How Mr. Stick is Drawn |
I happily give away so many ideas from my classroom at this little old website of mine. I hope you will always remember to give me credit for any idea you find here and share with others, including your students and their parents. I'm going to be a little blunt here, but I become a bit sad for our profession when I discover a teacher who is not only using my freely-posted resources, but who has also actually placed his/her name over my name on documents from my website, as if claiming the idea was originally their own. This has happened to me well over a dozen times since I began sharing my ideas on this website and on WritingFix.
Me? I try to always give credit where credit is due. I hope you do too. That's the act of a responsible educator.
That said, I must not claim that "Mr. Stick" was my own creation. Like I could really invent a stick-man, but allow me to direct credit where credit is duly due. Back in the mid-1990's, when Star Trek: The Next Generation was still running brand new episodes, MTV had a thirty-minute cartoon program called Liquid Television. Liquid Television was always on a half-hour before they aired the latest Star Trek: TNG episode. If I recall, this all happened on Wednesday evening, and I, therefore, had a Wednesday ritual that was rarely missed.
  On Liquid Television, they had many regular features, but one of my favorites was called "Stick Figure Theater." Each cartoon took a soundtrack (dialogue and music) from a classic movie (like It's a Wonderful Life), and they re-told the story with animated stick-people. These stick people had shoulders and knees, they had two-jointed arms and legs, they had simple but effective hands, and they had these facial expressions that were hysterical. I loved their faces the most; the stick-interpretation of Jimmy Stewart needs to have great expressions, and believe me, he did. Here is a You-Tube link to that I hope you are able to access to see what I mean.
I was teaching high school back in those days, and I had a cool, semester-long elective class that focused exclusively on poetry. I decided that year, we would read a poetry-filled Shakespearean play not normally studied at my high school: King Lear. After each act, my student poets had a choice to either summarize the act with a one-page write-up, or they could story board the act if they felt artistically motivated. Had I been one of my own students, I would have always chosen the summary writing over the art option; my older brother was a skilled artist, and his drawings always intimidated me to try drawing.
For the third act of King Lear, one of my favorite students of all time--Stephanie Perry (if you're reading this, Stephanie, contact me; I've been dying to know what you're doing now)--surprised me by creating a story board (shown here--click on it to see the amazing details!) that clearly showed she too was a fan of "Stick Figure Theater." I was so inspired by the quality and simplicity of Stephanie's Act III story board, that I forced myself to learn to draw stickmen in Liquid Television's style as well.
The next year, I started teaching all my students to draw "Mr. Stick" in their notebooks. I had begun my own Master's Program by then, and I was actually using Mr. Stick in my own night classes when I took my notes during lectures; the students loved to see my doodles alongside the notes from my own night-class, and it inspired them to "outshine" me with one of their doodles from my class.
Almost 15 years later, Mr. Stick is still a beloved character in my classroom. One of my whiteboards in class is devoted to the "Mr. Stick Metaphor of the Week," which has become my weekly reminder to the students that I want them to keep including a "margin mascot" in their writer's notebooks. My middle school-ers are starting to do very creative things with him, as you will see on this page. They always say, "But you draw such better Stickmen than I do, Mr. H.," to which I always say, "I just practice a lot. Keep practicing. You'll be amazed what artistic and creative skills you might have in you."
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Mr. Harrison's Favorite "Mr. Sticks" from my Students' Writer's Notebooks: 2011-2012 School Year |
So, it took them three months to figure it out, but my student writers have now discovered that there is a weekly "competition" for what I call the "Writer's Notebook Stick of the Week." This means that, while they are in the middle of sacred writing time and during my occasional notebook checks, I am actively seeking interesting pages where writers have created a healthy combination of a written idea with what I call a "Mr. Stick artistic attempt."
My 6th-8th graders sometimes thrive unexpectedly when they hear the word "competition." Winners receive little more than a special badge I have created for our classroom Edmodo site, the recognition when I show off the "Stick of the Week" Monday morning on my Smartboard, and their notebook page is photographed and featured here at this page, as you can see below. Students may self-nominate their own Mr. Stick pages, or they may nominate one another's pages, if they happen to see something excellent during share time.
In December, now that students have figured out this "competition" even exists, I have had an amazing number of students working hard to be chosen...so many, in fact, that I had to promise that there would be a "Stick of the Week" chosen even over the two weeks that we were out of school during Winter Break.
Below, I invite you to take a close look at the charming, Mr. Stick-inspired notebook work my students are doing during their daily ten minutes of sacred writing time. Below are this school year's awards for "Stick of the Week." Please remember that--at the end of the day--these pages come from writer's notebooks and are--officially--pre-writing. I do not hold spelling or other conventional issues against the students at this step of the writing process.
Our "Writing Trait of the Month" for September 2011 was idea development, and I purposely designed my September Bingo Card's center-square lesson to help students explore many ideas they might write about during our next nine months of Writer's Workshop. 7th grader--Emily--obviously has a knack for keeping art simple with this Alpha-Box lesson. Her drawing for "Parodies" and "Jester performing for a King Narrative " are simply delightful. As a die-hard zombie fan, my favorite, however, is the drawing of her crazy-eyed zombie for her "Undead Survival Guide." Thanks, Emily! Click on the image to be able to zoom in on her individual boxes! Trust me;the aforementioned boxes are worth zooming in on.
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One of my 8th graders--Matt--independently started looking through my writer's notebook, which is displayed in my class. He especially liked my Interesting-Sounding Character Names notebook prompt, and he created his own version of my teacher-model that can be found on that page.
Matt, this is an amazingly clever use of putting Mr. Stick in costumes. I think I like your "Stick Knight" the best.
Update: Matt is using his writer's workshop to develop the story of "Cowardly, the Knight," thanks to this notebook page. I can't wait to read the final draft after it goes through the entire writing process.
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Rianna is one of my 7th graders who is learning to "observe the world as a writer," and she is using our "Sacred Writing Time" to record those observations. I think this will be a completely fun topic for her to later explore during writer's workshop.
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Our "September Book of the Month to Talk about" is The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. We've been discussing the story of Theseus and the other thirteen Athenian youths who were sent to Crete to wander through the labyrinth with the minotaur, and we've been comparing this myth to Katniss's situation in the novel.
Here 6th grader--Mimi--has recorded and added captions to her favorite moments from the story of Theseus. Mimi, thanks for always taking your notebook home to add color to your pages. Your notebook is amazing!
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Each month, I am launching a "Gifted & Talented Writer's Notebook Challenge" for my students who are gifted and motivated; I certainly have an abundance of them this school year. If they finish early in class, I direct them to work on it, and it's purposely hard.
My September challenge was called "Homophone Comics," and 6th grader--Hannah-- created a page of four comics. By far, this one was my favorite from her collection. I always love to see Mr. Stick with wild and crazy hair. Hey Hannah, thanks for always caring about your writer's notebook entries!
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Our "Trait of the Month" for October 2011 was Word Choice. I sometimes encourage my students to put two random, interesting words together, then sketch or write about what comes to mind. My 7th grader, Garrett, has a sharp sense of humor; here is what he recorded in his writer's notebook upon putting the words vampire and gossip side by side . Hey, Garrett, I'll forgive your sometimes extra-chattiness if you keep coming up with original thoughts like this!
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We've been working on our personal recipe pages in our writer's notebooks--since it is the "center box lesson" in the middle of our October Bingo Card. One of my 7th graders--Sarah--took great pride in making sure her recipe for a "Perfect Cruising Day" caught my attention as I wandered the rows, checking their work this week.
Sarah, thanks taking such great pride in your notebook pages and your Mr. Stick drawings! You totally deserve the "Mr. Stick" Edmodo badge I am sending you this week!
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I collected writer's notebooks today (October 21), and I was struck by 7th-grader Ian's use of a circular frame on his personal recipe page (the center assignment on our October Bingo Card) to make his simple Mr. Stick drawing stand out. It's all about placement sometimes. I forgive those misspellings, Ian, and honor your natural sense of layout.
Ian, thanks for seeing the value of including the visual on your pages, and I appreciate your sense of design, sir!
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I normally don't want my students working for more than three days (10 minutes per day during Sacred Writing Time) on single entries for their writer's notebook, but I gave 7th-grader Gwen free reign to finish her "weird school day" comic she began last week. I'm not sure how many SWT sessions went into this, but I love how she tied one of her favorite topics--teddy bears--into this six-panel notebook comic. I'm certain if I ask Gwen, "Tell me how this can become a piece of writing during the next writer's workshop," that she'll have plenty of ideas for rough drafts from her. And that is the purpose of a writer's notebook!
Hey Gwen, you've gone to great efforts to give Mr. Stick your own personal style here...I appreciate your writer's notebook so much. Keep up the amazing work, and I hope this becomes a story for a future writer's workshop!
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Our trait of the month for November became organization after I noticed my students were having trouble with paragraphs. While checking writer's notebooks as my students practiced their paragraphing-planning skills last week, I noticed that 6th-grader Tayler had taken such great care while crafting his science-inspired recipe metaphor for the second page of his "Life is a Recipe" metaphor page. I just had to choose his recipe as last week's "Mr. Stick of the Week" award winner. Last month, our trait of the month was word choice, and you can see how this affected Tayler's creative use of kitchen verbs.
I also noticed Tayler was working on a third recipe for his notebook the other day. The first two recipes were required, but now he's taken a liking to the format and is using it to pre-write about his own ideas.
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Our "Writing Trait of the Month" for October 2011 was word choice, and our students were working on a "Human Impact on the Wetlands" Project. For our Recipe Metaphor task in our writer's notebooks (from our classroom's October Bingo Card of writer's notebook ideas) , I required my students to choose a science topic for the right-side of their two page spread. Many of my students--like 7th grader Julia here--created science-inspired recipes based on that project. You've got a great notebook, Julia! Thanks for keeping it so nice and thoughtful.
Julia wanted me to explain that the stickman looking over the wetlands on the right side of the page is crying two blue tears; her stickman does not have a lopsided nose!
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Our classroom "GT Notebook Challenge" for October 2011 was my Blueprint Storyboard assignment, which I was inspired to create after finding a great, wordless picture book this summer while visiting a book store in Ashland, Oregon: P.T.A. Night by Jeremy R. Scott. One of my goals with writer's notebooks is that, after students write/draw in them, I like them to explain what they've added and discuss their thinking that went into their entries. My students have such great conversations when they are explaining mostly wordless notebook entries (like the example above) to each other. A huge missing piece of the pre-writing step in writing is the "talking your writing ideas out loud before writing anything phase" (as I call it).
I received a lot of great storyboards from my students during October (click here to see them all), but I thought 7th grader Keely's use of Mr. Stick on her storyboard was particularly charming. Keely, not only are you a great writer (thanks to all those NNWP TWIST Camps, right?), but you are also a great storyboard designer. I can just hear you explaining all the stories in this storyboard out loud to your friends!
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After we read Poe's "The Telltale Heart" the week after Halloween, I challenged my students to write a first-person account using the voice of an incredibly guilty or incredibly mad (insane) person. Here, 7th-grader Conner, added a great Mr. Stick illustration after he did ten or fifteen minutes of free-writing in his notebook, using my challenge.
Conner, I honor your excellent attempt at putting Mr. Stick in a three-dimensional location. Your notebook is always a pleasure to look through, sir. Keep up the excellent work.
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Because of my abundance of Gifted & Talented students this school year, I have been developing a series of nine GT Writer's Notebook Challenges (one per month is the plan). I send the students the link over Edmodo, and they do it completely on their own for extra credit and a prize from Mr. Harrison. The November challenge was all about puns--Tom Swiftie puns, to be precise--, and I've been delighted by my students' ability to a) use puns and b) punctuate dialogue almost flawlessly. Here are the Tom Swift puns from Colette, one of my kindest 7th graders! Colette, you really mastered the concept of the pun with the four you turned in! Great work!
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The November "Writer's Notebook Lesson of the Month" from our classroom Bingo Cards was the "16-word Poem" lesson, which I adapted based on one my wife's best pre-writing lessons. Throughout the month, my students imitated one of William Carlos Williams' most famous poems and applied its structure to lessons they've been learning in math, history, and science.
7th grader Guillermo's cartoon to accompany his 16-word poem based on science lab safety just made me laugh out loud, so I have chosen it as the "Stick of the Week" for the second week of December. Keep making me laugh, Gil.
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Again, our November "Writer's Notebook Lesson of the Month" from our classroom Bingo Cards was the "16-word Poem" lesson, which I adapted based on one my wife's best pre-writing lessons. I believe W. C. Williams's original "So Much Depends Upon" poem uses simple imagery to capture a scene based on simple "life pleasures" that were personal to the poet; one of the four poems each student created had to do the same.
7th grader Wonje's cartoons to accompany her 16-word "life" poem--whether intentional or not--used the same simplistic technique the mentor text poet did with his words: nothing fancy, a splash of color, but a real message that life can be pleasurable. Nice work, Wonje!
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Our classroom's December "Writer's Notebook Gifted & Talented Challenge of the Month" was the "Artistic Neighbors and Angry Letters" lesson, which is based on one of my favorite mentor texts: When Pigasso Met Mootisse by Nina Laden.
7th grader Sarah's two-page illustration and detailed letter to "Mr. Mozart" had her practicing persuasive skills in a fun way, and I hope she's inspired to consider writing an expository piece about her chosen artist at a future writer's workshop.
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The December's "Writer's Notebook Lesson of the Month" from our classroom Bingo Cards was the "Personified Vocabulary Word" lesson, which really took off; click here to see some of the "runner's-up." Students had to create jobs, outfits, and/or personalities for some of the vocabulary words they were proud to already know.
7th grader Bree's two stick-figures in such peculiar (but appropriate) costuming really caught my attention! Bree, don't ever let your overly-creative side lose an argument to your logical side; I think your pictures alongside your writing here show off both sides of your abilities. And keep reminding me how to say that second word of yours correctly!
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The December's "Writer's Notebook Lesson of the Month" from our classroom Bingo Cards was the "Personified Vocabulary Word" lesson, which really took off; click here to see some of the "runner's-up." Students had to create jobs, outfits, and/or personalities for some of the vocabulary words they were proud to already know.
8th grader Isaac, one of my more competitive-minded students, really wanted to earn a "Mr. Stick of the Week" Award once he realized there was a weekly contest going on. I think Isaac wouldd make a great politician in the future; he truly campaigned for this page from his notebook after putting in some obvious effort and thought into the task.
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I was very lucky this year in that my teaching team's science instructor--Miss Maldonado--taught our students how to draw "Mr. Stick" before I had a chance to. She needed our kids to include an illustration during the first week of school, and so when it came time for me to need an illustration during the second week, they already knew what to do! I was so grateful.
I noticed this week that one of my 7th grader's, Del, had recently recreated that drawing lesson from the first week of school using original words. This "Anatomy of a Mr. Stick" page not only captures all the Mr. Stick essentials, but it now includes some original voice that only Del could have given it.
Thanks, Del, for having such a voice of your own! |
OK, this writer's notebook entry in your notebook totally charmed me. "Mr. Stick 101," eh? I hope someday I am really allowed to teach this class. If I do, this student will be one of my first guest speakers.
Here, 7th grader Jordan took ten minutes of sacred writing time to impress "the stick out of me" with his favorite ideas for Mr. Sticks in costumes and Mr. Sticks in a variety of other forms. If I had to chose a favorite, I think I'd have to settle on Merstick in the first row, but I also like how the Giant just takes up such a huge chunk of the page. I so appreciate proportion!
Hey Jordan, I know I stay on your case about keeping focused sometimes, but when you do stuff like this, I want you nowhere else but in my classroom. Thank you, young man. |
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