"WOWed" by My Students

I love learning. That's why I love teaching. Teaching regularly offers me new opportunities to learn. My favorite "learning" moments come when my students teach me, when they "WOW" me with their abilities. That is just what happened about 10:00 Friday morning, October 3rd.

Background: There is a genre study at the end of each unit in our new Houghton Mifflin (HM) reading series. "Poetry" is the genre study at the end of Unit 1 for 2nd grade. On Tuesday, I used variations of the old nursery rhyme "Over In The Meadow" to introduce the new vocabulary: rhythm, rhyme, stanza. On Wednesday, we read another version of that rhyme, Over in the Ocean by Marianne Berkes, an author who visited NBE two years ago when these students were in kindergarten. Then we went to our HM anthology to read the first four poems. I read each poem several times. We tapped to the rhythm if there was rhythm, found the rhymes and looked at the shape of the poem to decide if there were stanzas, divisions within a poem. On Thursday, we reviewed our vocabulary, read another variation, Over in the Jungle, also by M. Berkes, brought in by Jered. I read the next four poems from our anthology. Then I asked the students to pick one of the first 8 poems and practice reading it at least four times with their reading partners. On Friday, Reading Workshop was shortened by our "Healthy Living/Spike" assembly. I read the last poems in the HM anthology. We talked about each poem in terms of rhyme, rhythm, shape, why the author may have written the poem and closed the books. Finally, I asked the class if anyone could remember a poem, any poem and would like to share that poem with the class.

That's when they "WOWed" me. To my astonishment, many hands went up. One by one, students stood up and recited poems from the HM anthology. Chase shared "Gecko," Bailey shared "People," Majiya shared "Pickety Fence"... My heart sang!

My students reminded me not to underestimate their abilities. I knew they loved learning as much as I did.