Archive for the ‘photography’ Category

I spent an hour this morning taking photographs on St. Therese’s school grounds with third graders. We had 13 students with 5 cameras to share and two adults with a camera each. The kids ran for the grassy area with wildflowers. One of the students said: “I found a 4.” It took me a minute to realize that she meant a flower with four petals. Another said: “I found a five!” I had read Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature the previous day.

We were very excited to find this spiderwort, which is featured in Growing Patterns. It was this time last year that I was taking the final photographs for the book.

I visited third graders at St. Therese Elementary School in Jackson today to begin a project I cooked up with librarian Julie Owen. (See her post here.) She and I are field testing a project we will be featuring during our workshop at the International Reading Association Conference in Chicago next month. The workshop is called “Seeing is Believing: Photography in Nonfiction.” Each student will take a digital photograph in the schoolyard. Then, each will write a Fib poem inspired by the photograph. The final step is making an accordion book (with folds based on the Fibonacci sequence).

Today, I began by reading Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature. I loved hearing the smattering of “wow”s and “that’s cool”s. I got asked, as I often do, how long it took me to make the book. After I answered two years (which was from idea to publication), I backtracked and explained that it wasn’t two years of solid work on nothing but that. I also got asked: “What does this book mean to you?” Wow. Answer: While writing and photo-illustrating and getting one book published felt like climbing a very big mountain and made me very proud, I was worried about whether I could do it again. Would I find the right idea? With this book, I feel like I’ve answered that question with a big fat affirmative. And, it’s math. Cool.

Here we are trying out our newly-made paper frames. The third graders will practice with their frames when they go outside for recess and at home after school. Tomorrow, we got out with digital cameras. The third graders have already written haiku and cinquains. I can’t wait to see their photographs, poems, and Fib books.

My middle and youngest sons spent the day Friday at the Mississippi Science Olympiad at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. They competed in events such as trajectory, elevated bridge, Wright stuff, pentathlon, and dynamic planet. I went along to chaperone and take pictures. The photography challenges were that most of the events we could watch were held in the gymnasium and the student union. I had to use a very long lens to get close enough, but my flash wasn’t effective at that distance. I propped the lens a lot to try to steady it. You can judge the results.

I went back to Davis Magnet School today to facilitate the writing of captions. If you remember, I went out with second graders earlier this month as they photographed their neighborhood for a unit called Davis on the Map. Today, I sat with groups of four or five at a time at a kidney shaped table and we talked about proper nouns, active verbs, capitalization, spelling, and pronouns. We learned words: official, baptismal, peel, kiln, convince, unresolved and Jamaica. We had to consult dictionaries, the internet (which was slow and ineffective – ha!), and the teacher’s notes.

As the teacher and I worked with each group writing captions, the other students spent time going from one center to another. One of the centers was dedicated to books that were related to our unit. I added a work-in-progress of mine to the pile and invited the students to read it and make comments. Once our caption writing work was done, I talked with three students about the manuscript. One girl expressed her observations in the form of “text to self connections and text to text connections.” This particular manuscript is missing an ending so I asked them to give me their ideas and, of course, they had some good ones. I love interacting with my audience!

Wolfsnail update: A new review of Wolfsnail: A Backyard Predator went up on Maggie Reads, the blog of a librarian in the northeast part of the state. I really appreciate the kind words about the book and the recommendations for its use with kids. She also mentioned Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature.

Richard went in search of interesting objects to photograph with the macro lens. These are the things he found — most of them on the kitchen counter.

Today is the reading and signing party at Lemuria. We’re looking forward to seeing young readers and their grownups at 10 a.m. for some Fibonacci fun!

After being on a blog tour all week (thanks to all of the hosts), we have the featured attraction right here. I interviewed Richard about his unique contribution to Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature.

This is the fun portrait I took of him when we were doing our publicity photo shoot. The powers that be at the publishing house wanted a straight (faced) shot for the catalog so I decided we’d use it here.

Today, the blog tour continues at My Log Cabin Life by Julie Owen. Because Julie and I share a passion for photography, today’s post centers on the images.

If you missed previous posts, check them out at:

Monday: Joseph D’Agnese’s blog.

Tuesday: Live. Love Explore. by Irene Latham.

Wednesday: Elizabeth O. Dulemba’s blog.

Tommorrow’s post will be at Dori Reads by Doraine Bennett.

Read about how I got the idea to write a picture book featuring Fibonacci Numbers in nature at today’s stop on the virtual book tour: Elizabeth O. Dulemba’s blog. An author and illustrator, Elizabeth has a lot of cool stuff on her website so poke around a little after you check out the post.

Monday’s stop: Joseph D’Agnese. Tuesday’s stop: Irene Latham.

I began my artist-in-residence work today at Davis Magnet School. I am team teaching a unit titled, “Davis on the Map,” with second grade teachers Beth West and Kim Hansen. I introduced myself (many of these students were familiar with Wolfsnail because I read it to them last year on Read Across America Day), read my new book (Growing Patterns: Fibonacci Numbers in Nature), and introduced them to the work of Roland Freeman. We broke the students into four groups so we could have more interactive discussions. This meant I went through my talk four times back-to-back. I was tired by the time it was all over, but I enjoyed the students’ observations and questions.

How do you get a good picture when people are moving? (I actually misunderstood this question). I told the student that taking a good (clear, focused) picture of moving people depended a lot of having enough light. But that with enough light, the camera would be able to capture an image and freeze the action. He pushed me further, pointing out that in one of Roland’s photographs a drummer’s hand is blurry, making it a good picture of movement. In that case, Roland wanted the blur and made sure the aperture was open long enough for the camera to capture the hand in different spots along its movement.

Why did you use a drawing and a photograph in your book to show the spiral on the nautilus? I used the drawing because I wanted to make clear the connection between the Fibonacci numbers I had introduced at the beginning of the book and the way the spiral on the nautilus grows as its shell grows. I think the diagram of different colored squares makes it easier to see the how the Fibonacci sequence relates to the spiral in the photograph on the following page.

I do like the teaching/learning/inquiry practice the teachers at Davis employ. They have t-charts all around that have two columns labeled with two columns: I notice …. and I wonder …. As we talked, the teachers wrote down the students’ observations and questions on sticky notes and placed them in the appropriate columns on the chart. We will reflect on these as we go along in the unit. The students who weren’t with me spent their time working on two activities with some other teachers (gifted teachers and teachers’ assistants). They made frames and simple how-to manuals for the digital cameras they will use to photograph their neighborhood.

The next time we get together we will be taking a walk in the Davis neighborhood, gathering ideas about the people and places we will photograph.

We awoke to a beautiful blanket of snow. And it’s still coming down. Though we’ve already had snow this year, it is still rare enough to prompt whoops of joy from my sons. Of course, the joy has something to do with the fact that school was called off. They don’t really have the proper gear for this kind of thing so they never stay out for long. I went along with my camera because I wanted to get some pictures of the snow and of them enjoying it. I thought about calling the grandparents, but I thought I’d better let them sleep in. Stomping around in the snow in my boots (the ones I bought a few years ago to attend Writing From Nature in Honesdale, PA, in April), reminded my of childhood trips to Cincinnati to visit my grandparents. We borrowed gear from cousins had lots of fun.