When this blog is quiet, you can be sure that it’s because Born to Read has been busy! Since my last post, we’ve worked with three different facilitators to present workshop sessions at three day-long conferences. We were disappointed that we had to cancel our own Born to Read conference, which would have taken place in May 2009, and we were thus all the more grateful for the opportunity to reach a total of around 100 conference-goers this spring.
The first conference was sponsored by Child Care Options RDC at Kennebec Valley Community College. Janet Lyons facilitated a 3-hour session on Peaceable Stories in which she gave copies of It’s Mine and When Sophie Gets Angry—Very, Very Angry… to each participant. She read Dudley Randall’s poem “The Ballad of Birmingham” as a way of starting a conversation about how peace and safety aren’t always where we expect them to be. (You can find the full text of this poem here.) Then she divided participants into three groups and assigned one of the “Reflective Questions for Educators” from the Activity & Resource Guide to each group.
The discussion of It’s Mine focused on vocabulary (quibble, bicker, defiantly, and peaceful) and emotional literacy. Janet also modeled a picture walk using Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad Are Friends to look at friendship from another angle. Participants made frog and toad puppets (with instructions from this website), and talked about how the activity could be adapted for different age groups. The discussion of Sophie revolved around how people get from anger to calm, with several participants recognizing that some of the children in their care need to actively burn off frustration before they can talk about what the problem is and how to solve it. There was also some discussion of Peace Corners (or Tables), and how adults respond to children who need space or activity in order to deal with their emotions.
More recently, Myrna Koonce led a session at Carelink RDC’s conference at the University of New England in Biddeford. Myrna and Janet had planned together, but their sessions wound up being quite different, because Myrna had twice as many participants and only half as much time! She introduced both It’s Mine and Sophie, and guided the group to look closely at the illustrations in the latter to see how Molly Bang’s use of color mirrors what is happening in the text. With both books, participants seemed to enjoy being broken down into small groups for discussion, even though the room set-up (a lecture hall) made it challenging. However, the room was transformed into a theatre when a few participants agreed to act out It’s Mine, and had everyone laughing at their dramatic characterizations.
Myrna reported a great participant-to-participant “aha” moment. Someone described a large cardboard box that’s designated as a quiet place or “peace place,” but wasn’t getting used by the children. Someone asked if she ever used it. “Oh,” she said, “I never go in there!” “Maybe if you use it,” her colleague suggested, “the children will follow.”
Reports on our third and final conference session, and the Peaceable Stories that took place last month, are coming soon!