Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out
Robert Frost, from ” Mending Wall”
Let me know what you think of this reading of the poem: Robert Frost reads the poem to a video of the Berlin Wall
Month: August 2015
Inspired by a poem.. THE WALL
The jacket of Talking Walls Discover Your World shows the inspiration for the book, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. In the fall of 1990, I listened to poet Doug Rawlings, co-founder Veterans for Peace read his poem, The Wall . As he read I thought about other walls and their stories and turned to my friend Elizabeth and told her that I might have a good idea for a book.
The Wall
Descending into this declivity
dug into our nation’ s capitol
by the cloven hoof
of yet another one of our country’ s
tropical wars
Slipping past the names of those
whose wounds
refuse to heal
Slipping past the panel where
my name would have been
could have been
perhaps should have been
Down to The Wall’ s greatest depth
where the beginning meets the end
I kneel
Staring through my own reflection
beyond the names of those
who died so young
Knowing now that The Wall
has finally found me \endash
58,000 thousand-yard stares
have fixed on me
as if I were their Pole Star
as if I could guide their mute testimony
back into the world
as if I could connect all those dots
in the nighttime sky
As if I
could tell them
the reason why
http://voiceseducation.org/content/doug-rawlings-veterans-peace
Margy is presenting at Maine Social Studies Conference on October 30th
Margy Burns Knight-Unpacking Complex Social Studies Text via Talking Walls Discover Your World
Audience: grades k-8
Wander into an ancient walled city, visit Nelson Mandela’s prison cell, and view the Great Wall of China. Author and teacher Margy Burns Knight will introduce the content of Talking Walls Discover Your World through the lens of five texts: visual, informational, compendium, paired and digital. Teachers will then learn how to unpack the complex text in Talking Walls. They will not only add this strategy to their tool kit, but also understand how this instructional strategy supports and expands the key elements of close reading : key ideas and details, craft and structure, integration of knowledge and ideas and range of reading in their social studies units. With practice this strategy will become habit and help students when they describe, evaluate, compare and analyze social studies text.
http://www.mainecouncilsocialstudies.org/2015-conference-session-abstracts/
Dolores Huerta..book and statue
In my book Who Belongs Here? I wrote, Dolores Huerta and many others are working with the United Farm Workers of America, so that all farm workers can be healthy, safe and treated fairly.
A statue of Huerta and Chavez was dedicated in May.http://napavalleyregister.com/news/local/statues-of-cesar-chavez-dolores-huerta-unveiled-in-napa/article_effceee6-3dea-53f6-a8bf-ee7aad1ab5d7.html
I just bought this book by Sarah Warren. Let me know if you have read it with your students.
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A town wants a monument…..will it be a wall?
Lisa Gilman, a middle school art and reading teacher, loves to read and re- read The Monument by Gary Paulsen. A farmer from a small town returns from DC where he visited the black wall with the names. Does his town need a monument too? Will it be a wall? Read the book, meet Rocky and Mick and you will find out ! if you want to know more about Lisa’s lessons contact her a lgilman@winthropschools.og
