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Early afternoon I visited three third-grade classes while David took six-graders on a romp, as he called it, along the creek, for a photography lesson. When I asked him what happened, he said it was pretty normal stuff, like you say Nobody go in the stream and then you turn around and half the class is knee-deep. And there are only three cameras to go around so the students have a hard time figuring out the mechanics of sharing more than they do the mechanics of composition. In one of David's classes they came to the top of a high hill and a couple kids turned around and asked a question. He heard them ask if they could run down the hill. "Sure, go ahead!" he said. Suddenly they flopped down and started rolling down the hill, through what he describes as "snake-high grass." He bursts out laughing telling the story. He said the sight of them rolling made him want to roll too. But he contained himself. |
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For me, each class wrote a short collaborative poem inside the classroom, then we went out and wrote it with colored chalk in a long meandering line, like the creek itself, down the sidewalk where the buses park. The children came behind me and decorated the poem with colorful chalk drawings of butterflies, snakes, suns, clouds, trees, fish, squirrels and birds. Three or four children worked together on a 12-foot snake drawn in black by Jonathan, colored with red and blue. It was gorgeous. As the last class was finishing I heard a sudden clap of thunder immediately west. School ended and the children started loading on the buses, and what great pleasure it was to see them following the lines of words, mouthing them, and walking with glee over the pictures and poems without harming a thing. The drawings brought festivity to a day of state-testing, and there was much hollering and giggling and jumping and exclaiming. We were having a party for the creek. One little boy stopped at the big snake and asked Bea Bruce, the teacher in charge of having us, who had drawn it. "Your brother," she said. It happened to be Jonathan's little brother asking the question. The little boy looked concerned. "Did he get in trouble?" he asked. Within 15 minutes the overhanging cloud burst and dumped its water-load on the school, washing the sidewalks clean and blowing even under the covered sidewalk, erasing everything we had done. |
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Here are the three poems: The wind blew water into the trees.
Wind blew the birds away.
The water turned into a creek.
I like to see butterflies fly.
They fly across the lake to a tree by the creek. When the wind hits the creek I see butterflies.
Once there was a fox running on the creek.
His big teeth made a screek.
The fox's enormous paws caught a catfish.
He ate it on a snakeskin dish. Creek oh creek you gurgle
with all the life splashing in you.
Creek oh creek you are so bright
shimmering in the morning light.
What a sight. |
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