Literacy Now

What can you do with a single word?

Plenty.

For my latest children’s book, I gave myself the challenge of telling a complete story using only one word. I almost succeeded. On the final page, I needed to introduce a second word (and sharp-eyed students are quick to point out that there are four additional words used in the illustrations).

While working on the story I had great fun imagining all the ways that a single word, (in this case “moo”) could be depicted (Moo. Moo? Moo!), and how these variations could be strung together to form a story. Long before the book was published I began showing a dummy of the book with accompanying sketches to students during my author visits. When I did so, three things invariably happened:

1. Everyone (including the teachers) laughed.
2. The students spontaneously mooed along with me as I read the text.
3. At least one student would say, “You should write a sequel called Baaaa!”

My response was always the same. “No, YOU should write the sequel.”

And frequently, they did. At the end of the day students of all ages would present me with one-word books they had written during recess or free time. These miniature books, made from notebook paper folded in half, were filled with illustrations of animals having wild adventures, and each was composed of a single word. Some of the students had developed an entire series of books based on a single animal sound, starting with baaa, then moving to quack and meow, and finally circling back to moo again.

It made me happy that my silly book idea was motivating so many young people to write their own books. As a former elementary school teacher myself, I was also secretly glad at all these young authors were learning in the process.

What can students learn from writing a one-word book?

Plenty.

A one-word book is the perfect way to show how punctuation drastically affects the meaning of text. Beginning writers can practice using question marks and exclamation points to indicate inquiry and excitement:

Meow? Meow!

Older writers can experiment with more sophisticated techniques, using ellipses to suggest suspense:

Meow, meow, meow…

Or dashes to indicate an abrupt stop mid-word:

Meow, meow, meo-

And underlines to indicate emphasis:

Meow, meow, meow.

A one-word book also highlights the importance of visual clues in understanding a story. In the book MOO!, the illustrator Mike Wohnoutka creates a sense of danger and urgency on one of the spreads by focusing in on a close-up of the cow’s face, painting the background red, writing the word moo so large that it extends off the page, and slanting the entire composition at an angle.

Ask your students how they might use visual clues to make an animal look sleepy. Stir their visual creativity with questions like: What colors would best depict this mood? How would the animal’s face and body look? What type of line would be most appropriate for the illustrations: thick, thin, jagged, rounded? What size and style of lettering would they choose? How would all of these choices be different if they were trying to show an animal looking mad?

Understanding how an author/illustrator uses clues like these to convey meaning, and then practicing them in their own one-word books, strengthens students’ visual literacy, a skill needed when reading everything from graphs and charts to food labels and comic books.

Because a one-word book requires minimal spelling and vocabulary skills, even the youngest author can have success writing an entire book that they, and their classmates, can read and enjoy.

Finally, there’s one more benefit from having students write a single-word book. Along with being a way to reinforce skills and concepts mandated in curriculum guidelines, writing a one-word book is fun. Writing can and should be fun, and in my humble opinion, that’s justification enough for any writing project. In fact, writing a one-word book might be so much fun that your students will say, “Moo!”… or “Oink!” or “Roar!”

For a guide to using MOO! in your classroom, please click here.

David LaRochelle is a former fourth grade teacher who has been creating books for young people for the past twenty-five years. His other titles include IT’S A TIGER!, HOW MARTHA SAVED HER PARENTS FROM GREEN BEANS, THE BEST PET OF ALL, and 1+1=5 AND OTHER UNLIKELY ADDITIONS. The first picture book that he both wrote and illustrated, ARLO’S ARTRAGEOUS ADVENTURE!, was released in August. When he’s not writing, drawing, or visiting schools, David loves to carve creative jack-o’-lanterns, which can be viewed at his website http://http://www.davidlarochelle.com.

Ness, P. (2011). A monster calls: Inspired by an idea from Siobhan Dowd.  Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

Author Siobhan Dowd died from cancer in 2007 before finishing this book, and Patrick Ness completed it at the request of her publisher. The novel is a fantasy built on the unrelenting reality 13-year-old Conor O’Malley faces as his mother is dying, also from cancer. Set in England, the plot finds Conor virtually alone as he faces the looming catastrophe. He hates his grandmother for her bossiness and stubbornness even though she will undoubtedly inherit his care since his father has remarried and has a new wife and child in the United States. He is bullied at school and has shut out his former childhood best friend while the disease continues to ravage and waste the only person he really cares about. Many nights at exactly 12:07 a.m., a monster, apparently the yew tree behind the house, comes to him wherever he is. The creature is horrific and terrifying; he tells Conor a series of seemingly random bizarre tales and demands in return a story that must contain the troubled boy’s truth. Is the monster a frightening nightmare? Then what is the source of the yew berries and leaves left on his bedroom floor after a visit? Who destroys the grandmother’s sitting room in an act of violence? Who lands the school bully in the hospital after a ferocious beating?

A children’s story, but much, much more, Ness uses his skills to produce a staccato-like narrative that draws the reader into the compelling and tragic tale. The book could become maudlin, but humor seeps through the horror of both plotlines. Conor has to know his mother is dying, and all the last-ditch efforts being tried are not going to stop the course of the disease. The suspense is whether he can survive both terrors.

Dr. Judith A. Hayn is an associate professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

This article is part of a series from the Special Interest Group Network on Adolescent Literature (SIGNAL). If you are interested in other books like this and ways to include them in your curriculum, join SIGNAL. 

“To read well is to take great risks, to make vulnerable our identity, our self-possession.” This is a quote by George Steiner. He goes on to say that the task of the literary critic is to help us read as total human beings. I feel the same might hold true for writers. To write well often means to take great risks and make vulnerable our identities. Sometimes we must lose our self-possession in order to write as total human beings. We must, in short, slip out from the comfort of our own skin and inhabit others’.

It is somewhat ironic that in the past few years to write as a total human being I have had to slip out of my own skin and into the feathers or pelts of animals for my fantasy series about owls The Guardians of Ga’Hoole and then The Wolves of The Beyond. Oddly enough, I found this tremendously liberating. To do this, I would first have to learn all about the habits, habitats, and behavior of a particular animal.  You see, even though this is fantasy, if I am to move the reader to a state of willing suspension of disbelief, there must be a compelling veracity about the animal. And yet at the same time I am telling a story in which I want an emotional resonance that is deeply human.

A recent article in the NEW YORK TIMES addressed this question of perspective, pondering how Woody Allen could write such great roles for women. Cate Blanchette, the star of Woody Allen’s recent film BLUE JASMINE, spoke of Allen’s ability to capture the voice of women. “Often you can write more closely about your own perspective and experience of the world through a character of a different gender,” she said.

Well for me it was writing from the perspective of a different species.

THE EXTRA (Candlewick) is a different kind of story entirely. It is not fantasy at all, but historical fiction. THE EXTRA tells a story that fell between the cracks of history during the Nazi Holocaust. It is not about a Jewish girl, but a Roma (Gypsy) one. It is based on a true story about how Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl, went to an internment camp where gypsies were held as prisoners and took several of them to use in a movie she was making.

It might seem odd that as a Jew, and one who has lost distant cousins of my generation in the holocaust, I would choose to tell a holocaust story from a non-Jewish perspective. Indeed in a book that has no Jewish characters. Three years ago, in my book ASHES which is set in Berlin in the early 1930s during the rise of Hitler, I made a similar decision. I told the story from a gentile girl’s perspective. I felt that I could write a more powerful story if it came from an unorthodox angle.

I think the best Holocaust novel I ever read was SOPHIE’S CHOICE, which was narrated by a gentile man. So why did I find this gentile voice so moving? It is mysterious like art itself. But I think it is the choice that William Styron made to use the young, naïve Southern male as the narrative channel for this story of ultimate horror that gave it a kind of distance that, in the end, made it so powerful.

I, too, must have subconsciously sought a distance. There are many stories and many voices for telling them, but the voice of Lilo in THE EXTRA and that of Gaby in ASHES were the ones that whispered in my ear with an insistence I could not deny. It was a great risk. I let loose of my own identity, and watched my self-possession dissolve.

Bullying is not a new phenomenon, but today, parents and teachers are talking about bullying behavior and its effects on children much more than in previous generations. This heightened awareness around bullying is a good thing. Unfortunately, however, this awareness has come as a result of the now countless number of cases in which bullying victims have lost their lives, either as a direct result of the actions of their bullies, or indirectly through their taking their own lives in attempts to end their pain and suffering.

p: Jason Walton via photopin cc

Few of us will ever forget the 2009 suicide of 11-year old Carl Walker-Hoover, who hung himself with an electric cord while his mother made him a cheeseburger.  In that same year, 11-year old Jaheem Herrera hung himself in his closet as his mother cooked dinner. The common thread with both children was that they were both victims of bullying at school. In both cases, the boys were bullied because other children believed them to be gay. These boys are just two of many children whose lives have been lost because of bullying. So while the heightened awareness of bullying is undeniably a good thing, how tragic a commentary that it has taken losing so many precious lives for us to begin to treat the issue with the seriousness that it deserves.

Part of adults’—teachers and parents—nonchalance and inaction with bullying has stemmed from the fact that so many of us grew to see it as a normal, even if unpleasant, part of the childhood experience. In many of our school and childhood experiences, children who had characteristics or qualities that put them outside of average were likely candidates for teasing and bullying. If a child was perceived to be too smart, not smart enough, overweight, underweight, poor, wealthy, gay, or sexually promiscuous (for females), he or she could end up the victim of a bully. And both today and in previous generations, the categories of bully and bullied are not necessarily mutually exclusive ones. In other words, bullies have often been victims of bullying, and bullying victims can sometime turn into bullies. In bullying another child, the bully is often mimicking bullying behavior that she or he has seen or been on the receiving end of.

Few of us have managed to completely avoid being involved in relationships where we were either the bully or a victim of bullying; and for those of us that did manage to avoid direct involvement with bullying relationships, nearly all of us have at least seen it in or schools, in our neighborhoods, or in our homes.  I am no exception. So yes, I approach the topic of bullying from the perspectives of a former middle and high school special education teacher, a teacher educator, and an education policy researcher; but also, and just as importantly, I approach the topic of bullying from the perspective of an adult who was once a child involved in unhealthy adolescent bullying relationships.

As adults—teachers—who have been involved in or have witnessed bullying relationships, we must acknowledge how our own experiences, biases, and perceptions around bullying impact the way we understand and respond to bullying in our professional roles. Here are just a few things teachers should keep in mind:

1. We all have biases, prejudices, and past experiences that can impact the way we see the world and the way we go about doing our jobs. Teachers are people just like everyone else, with political preferences, religious beliefs, ideologies, etc. But it is important for teachers to do the work of trying to understand their own beliefs, biases, and experiences and how those might impact their understanding of and intervention in bullying situations.
   
   I have seen more than a few instances where teachers’ religious beliefs about sexual orientation, their personal biases and prejudices about racial/ethnic minorities, and their political beliefs about immigration have resulted in their failure to intervene in bullying situations where they clearly should have intervened. Please do not let that happen to you. Not only is such behavior a violation of professional ethics, but it puts the well-being of children in jeopardy.
2. Bullying today is not the same as bullying in previous generations of children. Social media has changed bullying significantly. Social media platforms have allowed bullies to attack their victims at any time of the day and from any place. It is no longer necessary for the bully and the victim to be in the same place. Also, bullies are now able to launch anonymous attacks against their victims.
   
   At one time, children could escape the school bully by going home, or even escape the neighborhood bully by staying inside. Children today are unable to escape bullying attacks via social media, and the attacks can happen with the whole class, whole school, or whole town as an audience. The day has passed when the bully’s only audience was bystanders. Now, depending on the platform used, the bully’s audience can be enormous.
3. Never assume that a child is tough enough to endure bullying. While some children show their pain outwardly, others hide it very well. In the cases of 11-year old Carl and 11-year old Jaheem, neither of their mothers had any idea that their sons suffered so severely from bullying abuse that they planned to take their own lives.
   
   Yes, these mothers knew that their children had been bullied, and they had even spoken with teachers and administrators about the bullying, but they did not fully understand the amount of pain that their children were experiencing. For teachers, it does not matter if the victim of bullying appears to take the abuse in stride or if it appears to not bother her much, bullying is never acceptable. Teachers must make it their business to intervene whenever bullying is taking place.

Wayne D. Lewis, Jr. is the author of THE POLITICS OF PARENT CHOICE IN PUBLIC EDUCATION. He is an assistant professor and Principal Leadership Program Chair in the Department of Educational Leadership Studies at the University of Kentucky.

In the not-so-distant past—December 18, 2006—the headline on the cover of Time magazine enticed readers to learn, “How to Build a Student for the 21st Century.” Inside, authors Claudia Wallis and Sonja Steptoe noted that the national conversation around education at the time focused on ensuring that no students were “left behind” rather than how American children would be able to compete in a global economy which required the abilities to work in teams, think abstractly and reason through problems, analyze the quality of information and communicate in a language other than English. Wallis and Steptoe (2006) identified the 21st century skills students need to be successful and suggested that teachers need to bring their methods and the curriculum “in line with the way the modern world works” (p.56).

Seven years later, readers of the P21Blog: Connecting the 21st Century Dots: From Policy to Practice are asked again to consider the needs of students who must learn both the 3Rs (content knowledge) and the 4Cs (Creativity and Innovation, Critical Thinking and Problem Solving, Communication and Collaboration) to be successful in the 21st century workplace (Partnership for 21st Century Skills, n.d.). The P21 Blog, an outgrowth of over a decade of work by a coalition of educators, business leaders and policy makers to improve 21st century readiness, addresses issues surrounding the implementation of 21st century skills and deeper learning in American schools. Beginning this academic year, the P21 Blog, housed on the website of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, doubled its posts to provide weekly information that focused on answering a driving question about implementing 21st century skills.  

The thoughtful entries offered by a growing group of education experts, business leaders and more recently classroom educators from the P21 Exemplar Schools, are definitely worth reading. Topics include book reviews, policy discussions and most importantly practical articles addressing implementation of 21st century skills in real classrooms. Educators will find entries like “How Can Technology Empower Deeper Learning in a 21st Century School?” and “How Do Teachers Become Deeper Learners?” valuable as they consider how to incorporate critical thinking and problem-based learning activities in their instructional plans. Although commenting on blog entries is encouraged by Jim Bellanca, blog editor and Executive Director, Illinois Consortium for 21st Century Skills and Senior Fellow at the Partnerships for 21st Century Skills, few readers are taking advantage of this opportunity. One thing is evident in reading through the posted comments—divergent opinions are accepted and open for discussion. In addition to commenting, readers are invited to contribute anonymous posts to the blog as “The Secret Educator” taking any position for or against 21st century learning practices and policies. Contributors are asked to be respectful in their discourse and prepared to accept pushback on their point of view. The P21 Blog clearly has potential to become a significant resource and discussion forum for those seeking information about the needs of 21st century learners.

References

Partnership for 21st Century Skills. (n.d.) The champion for today’s students and tomorrow’s workforce. Retrieved from http://www.p21.org/storage/documents/P21_2013_Brochure.pdf

Wallis, C. & Steptoe, S. (2006, December 18). How to bring our schools out of the 20th century. Time, 168(25), 50-56.

Joan A. Rhodes is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Reading Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

This article is part of a series from the International Reading Association Technology in Literacy Education Special Interest Group (TILE-SIG).