Now don't think that I think I will blog every day --I don't see that in the future, but today's Jabberwocky Challenge warrants attention. From now until the play, each week students will do a mini-project focusing on a specified part of Lewis Carroll's book -- today the Jabberwocky. I showed students several Jabberwocky videos, including the Muppets and a college choir who sang the poem. They also saw a four year old reciting the poem ... rather humbling even for a 7th grader. The challenge was for students to develop their own "creature", give it a personality, a name, a story, and then construct a nonsense poem --Lewis Carroll style. The poem had to include nonce and portmanteau words just as he did. I, too, worked on my own version of the project --something I almost always do. I have found that kids cease wearing a path in the floor coming to ask you questions they already know the answer to when they see that you, too, are working. Besides, they enjoy seeing what the teacher makes. It is important for kids to see the teacher struggling somewhat; they have the misconception that teachers do everything effortlessly and perfectly. Anyway, I finished my creature and began working on my nonsense poem; I "thought-up" my word bank of nonce and portmanteau words and began writing. It was a little slow, but I was making progress when I met one of those writing roadblocks that is hard to get over. One of the students said, "Miss Hesse, do you know what you just said?" What? Did I talk out loud and not even notice?!!! She enlightened me: "I heard you saying something under your breath and then you said, 'This is hard!'" You know what? It was. They all laughed, seeing me as something more than a teacher; they saw me as a learner... teachers need Jabberwocky projects from time to time.
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AuthorPatricia Hesse --working with gifted students as young as 5 and as old as 18 for the past 24 years --remarkable kids! Archives
January 2014
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