Well, it looks like I'm not making my initial goal of blogging every school day. I was out Friday as we went up to Massachusetts for our new granddaughter's naming ceremony.
Spending time with our 3 1/2 year old granddaughter Rachel (big sister of the new baby) always gets me thinking about how children develop their language and thinking skills. We went to a restaurant Friday night. Rachel looked at three large round lights on the wall behind our table and said they were "three full moons." Then turning and looking at three smaller, also round, recessed lights on the ceiling, she proclaimed, "Those are lower case moons." Then she laughed and I had to join her, adding a high five. In his book, Five Minds for the Future, Howard Gardner talks about the "synthesizing mind" which integrates ideas from different disciplines. It seems to me that this kind of playing around with categories and making connections between round objects, moons, and the idea of lower case letters is the kind of thing that lays the foundations for a synthesizing mind.
I hope that as we rightly work on the "nuts and bolts" of Writing Workshop, we also continue to celebrate the language children use, the creativity they express, and the connections they make every day as they construct their understanding of the world.
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