The Perfect Paragraph

I just finished reading Coal Black Horse by Robert Olmstead. It is a brutal story of a teenaged boy searching for his soldier father during the Civil War. Robey's main companion during his journey is the smart, sturdy animal for which the book is named.

Olmstead's writing is powerful and poetic. Because his words are so fresh in my mind, it may be that I am overstating his talent when I say he has written the perfect paragraph. In any case, the possibility in itself is a testament to how masterful a storyteller Olmstead is.

Here it is (from page 156):

He gentled the coal black horse and then he lay down on the warm ground with his head on his father's shoulder. He felt his father's arm lift and his fingers fumbling until he hooked them to his belt. He lay quietly with his arm across his father's chest and his father's arm holding him. He felt the rise and fall of his father's breathing and he wished that sleep would overtake him and painlessly carry him from that place. He knew now that when he left, his father would remain.

This tender description of a boy who has found his father after both have experienced the horrors of war is the best of the few gentle moments to be found inside a heartbreaking story. I will read it again and again.

A Foggy Lesson

It seems fitting that I chose to use Fog by Carl Sandburg as the Daily Warm Up poem this week...

We've been reviewing the different types of figurative language -metaphor, simile, personification- and looking for examples in different things we read. To make the information stick, each student is in the process of making their own "Guide to Figurative Language" complete with definitions and illustrated examples. We have discussed and worked with these concepts daily for over a week. I thought they were getting it.

Yesterday, at the beginning of my first language arts class, I put Fog up on the overhead and read it out loud. My students were looking for the figurative language as I read. I told them I'd be asking each one to tell me which type was being used before they began to write about it. I wanted to be sure they were on the right track. It is a good thing I checked, or they all would have been explaining why Carl Sandburg used personification to describe the fog in his poem.

In case you are not familiar:

Fog

The fog comes

on little cat feet.


It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on. http://www.bartleby.com

Daily Warm Ups and a Plexer

This year I came up with a new idea for how to begin my language arts classes. Each day we do a different activity according to the following schedule:

Monday: Poem Response
Tuesday: Plexer /Analogies
Wednesday: Vocabulary Review Activity
Thursday: Paragraph Edit
Friday: Quote Response

I have enjoyed the results so far and have noticed that my students appreciate (or at least follow without being reminded) the routine. They love Tuesdays and Wednesdays especially. Mondays and Fridays are met with slightly less enthusiasm. I can't really tell what they think about Thursdays yet.

For those of you who are not familiar with Plexers, they are visual puzzles, often made with some arrangement of letters, meant to represent a common saying, person, place name, etc. We are beginning to study South America in my geography classes, so today's Plexer looked something like this:

guay
guay

What do you think it is? Leave a comment with your guess.

Welcome to my blog. I am not sure what this will become, but I am sure my interest in books, poetry, and geography will influence what gets written here. I hope you enjoy reading it and will contribute if you like.