Dear WinkWorld,

Readers, you know that my blog tends to be whatever is hanging out on my desktop or in my head. I am very interested in teaching, learning, languages, cultures, literacies, stories, and people: Mostly people–for example, Kelly.

I am fascinated by the lives of modern young women who live  on isolated ranches. In this issue of WinkWorld, I will tell you a little about one young woman, Kelly, whose life is reflective in many ways of how other young rancher women live. They seem to live in 2 different worlds or 2 different centuries.  I see that some of their challenges are not too different from those of my Grandma Grace, who homesteaded this ranch where we live. And, other times, I see these young women on social media on their phones, and I am amazed at their skills.

I remember several years ago, when Kelly’s clothes dryer stopped working. She had small children playing outside in the dirt, a husband whose clothes were often covered with dirt, manure, and wheat shaft, and there was no one around who could help her. So, she jumped on YouTube and figured out what the problem was and learned how to fix it.  Soon, her dryer was whirling again.  I know many people solve problems this way today, but Kelly was the first person I saw do it.   Now, I am convinced that she can, and often does, learn any skill needed by getting on the internet. For example, recently I know she learned how to make butter with cow’s milk and how to give an IV to a sick cow by watching YouTube.   

On the surface, this might appear to be a blog post only for prairie people, but I think this story is really for my friends, who live in cities, and have no idea about country life.  Many in cities have romanticized, nostalgic notions of life on a ranch, which have nothing to do with the reality of some of these young rancher women.

Meet my friend, Kelly.

Meet Kelly’s 5 kids. (and, yes, I am  crazy about each of them)

Kelly loves her family and her wild assortment of pets which include:

1 pony, Apple, 19 years old; 8 goats Richard, Mavis, Sheila, White Momma, Black Momma, and Luna + 2 baby  goats without names; 3 dogs, Gus, Bruce, Bodie; 3 cats, Henry’s Cat, Kinley’s Cat, and Casper; 12 chickens; 5 ducks (one duck only has one eye, because the other peck her, so she lives with the pigs);  2 potbelly pigs, Frank and Daddy; 1 nurse cow, Janice (who presently has 2 bum calves on her), plus she is pregnant; and 80 pregnant cows.  Kelly, Jesse (her husband), and their 5 kids spend many hours each day just feeding and caring for the various animals.  Their kids think that mom has her very own petting zoo.

Meet Henry spending quality time with one of his pets.

Kimber is soothing the mama milk cow, Carol.  Sadly, Carol died later of milk fever.

Here is Kelly with Janice, obviously another nurse cow who accepts the bums. Bum calves are those whose mama did not make it through birthing in a blizzard.

Recently, I noticed that Kelly and her two little boys had stopped at our Little Free Library. Incidentally, their ranch is 40 miles from ours.  This is considered all part of the community on the rural prairies.  She had to hurry home as she had a calf, who had lost its mama, in the back seat of her Blazer.  

Below, you will see Kelly with a calf in her car.  When a mama cow loses her baby, Kelly jumps in her car and drives 100 miles (one way) to pick up a calf, who has lost its mama in birth.  Kelly takes the new little bum calf home and skins the hide from the dead calf, and ties it on the new calf.  By doing this, the mama cow thinks the new calf is really the calf which she birthed and will then accept the new calf. Without that smelly hide, the mama cow would reject a new calf.  

Henry and Holden at our Little Free Library (LFL).

Here is Holden reading later that evening.

Here is Kelly oldest daughter, Kodi, dancing at the spring prom with her dad, Jesse, for the father/daughter dance.

Here are all 5 kids watching a movie.

Kelly loves her family, and when I read the following study about the benefits of hugging babies, I thought immediately of her.  Based on this study, and what I have seen, it is safe to guess that Kelly’s kids are very smart.

Latest research reveals the more you hug your kids – the smarter they get

Of course, the real story of Kelly is not what I am writing, but rather what I am not writing.  Her real story is hidden between my lines.  Maybe one day, she will tell her own story.  If we don’t tell our stories, they die.

Dear WinkWorld Readers, 

TESOL 2018 friends, this one is for you.  Dawn and I will be sharing during PreK-12 Day.

Rm E265 Lakeside Center at the McCormick Place

10 to 11:15, Sat., March 31, 2018

Our purpose is to create authentic biliteracy in dual language, mainstream, or ESL classrooms.

Click the link below to open our 2 page handout.

Joan & Dawn Wink Biliteracy handout TESOL 2018, PreK-12

Here is the powerpoint, which we will use.

Hope to see you there.

Dear WinkWorld Readers,

It is humbling to read this 2nd review by Dawn Wink of my new book, The Power of Story.

Here is her 1st review, which I previously shared. 

And, here is her 2nd review, which demonstrates the power of reading books and more books.

#oneluckymom

Dear WinkWorld Readers,

What in the world is Kisisi? It is an invented language between two little five-year-old boys, one, American and the other, Kenyan.  It is based on the Swahili language, and only the two of them understood it.  They created their own language as they ran and played in Kenyan.

Here is a review of the book, which Dawn Wink contributed.  Perry Gilmore is the author of the book. 

Book Review_Kisisi_Perry Gilmore_Dawn Wink

Perry will be sharing in Alaska on her book, March 6. Lucky Alaska!

Dear WinkWorld Readers,

So yesterday morning, I got up to this surprise on my Facebook (FB) feed. 

#speechless #humbled  

And, I know now that she will begin a series of posts on my book.  How lucky am I? 

FB Friends, forgive the double-post, but I have a lot of WinkWorld readers, who are not on FB.

Happy Reading Dawn’s blog, Dewdrops.

Click here.

Dear WinkWorld Readers,

This week I am in Las Vegas, working with colleagues at a school and also presenting at a conference.  It has been a very productive and inspiring week.  One of the ideas, which we explored is efficacy in teaching and learning.  What makes an effective teacher, learner, and/or principal?  And, then today I was able to watch an effective principal, Connie, in action as she worked her magic.

The Problem

The problem at this school is that the intermediate students (6^th and 7^th graders) are not reading well. This group is the most vulnerable in a school which focuses on the needs of low-income and at-risk students, and speakers of other languages. In others words, this particular class is filled with students whose social, emotional, academic needs are many and complex.   These students are the most-challenging group of reluctant readers.

The Principal’s Plan

Enter Connie, the principal, with a plan to support the students’ reading, while at the same time to model and mentor the teachers in the school. Her plan was to create learning groups and to use high-interest novels. Her goal is to make these stories comprehensible and compelling for the students. In addition, she led this transformative process, and brought in other teachers to take part and others to observe.

We entered the classroom, and the students were seated quietly waiting for her. She greeted them and immediately went to the white board and drew a large quadrant. The students drew a large blank quadrant on their blank paper on their desks, which indicated to me that they knew from past experience that this would be their graphic organizer for the day.

Today (View)

Next, Connie moved into the lesson of the day. She asked the groups who knew what an acronym was. She and the students agreed that it is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word. Connie explained that her acronym of the day is HERO, and she filled in the quadrant with the letters.

The Book

Connie held up her copy of Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, the classic story of a Danish girl and her family’s dangerous struggles to smuggled Jews our of their Nazi-occupied homeland to their safe haven in Sweden.

Looking Back (Review)

Connie began by asking the students what they had read the previous day, and a brief whole-class review of the book followed.

Today (View)

Next, Connie moved into the lesson of the day and the three chapters which each group would be reading.  She gave hints of what was to become of the characters and the plot in today’s reading–she made me want to grab the book and start reading. 

Please notice the teacher in the background, who is carefully watching what Connie is doing as she reads with the students.  In addition, note how the students are listening intently.

Teachers, here is what I saw Connie, the principal and instructional leader, doing.

•Model: She went to the classroom and demonstrated one way of teaching reading.

•Mentor: She invited other teachers to take part and learn with her and from her.

•Scaffold the students’ learning: When you forget what scaffolding is, always think of how kids learn to ride a bike: Gradually a family member slowly releases the support, and the child is suddenly riding alone. I have posted here some other ways of scaffolding. If you want more materials on scaffolding, just go to my home page, scroll to the bottom right, and find the SEARCH bar; type in scaffold.

•Review/View/ Preview: Teachers often (a) review the previous lesson; (b) talk about what will take place today; finally, (c) teachers share what students will learn tomorrow. 

•Readers and Writers Workshop

Readers/Writers Workshop is a very effective method, which teachers often use.  Connie was using her variation of reading & writing workshop. 

CARE Conference

We presented at the CARE Conference (Conference on Academic Research in Education), which is paired with EQRC and AABBS. The three conferences run concurrently, and all three focus on ethnographic and qualitative research.

Le Putney, who was once my graduate student at CSU Stanislaus and who is now a full professor at UNLV, is lead researcher on our focus on efficacy.

Chyllis Scott was also one of my grad students in CA and is now an assistant professor at UNLV.  Chyl, Le, and I shared our understandings of mentoring.

And, of course, I loved the flamingos in Las Vegas.

And, look, I found an avid reader at the CARE conference! He was waiting patiently for his parents, who were at the conference, as he read All The Light You Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, which is a book for adults about WWII and a young blind French woman and a young German man.

Dear WinkWorld Readers,

Forgive all of my back-to-back burst of blog posts.  You can probably tell that I am getting ready for 3 back-to-back trips, and I will need some of this information to use with my colleagues.  If it is all on WinkWorld, I won’t have to do so much digging around in my computer when I get where I am going. 

Two of my friends (Dr. Le Putney & Dr. Chyllis Scott) from UNLV and I will continue our exploration of mentoring from a Vygotskian perspective.  We have published and presented on it numerous times.  

~Original image from pixabay.com, free. Edited and adapted by excellentwebs.com. Thank you, Susan.

Here is a journal article in which several of us connected teaching with mentoring.

Teaching as Mentoring

We will use the following image of a tree as a metaphor of how mentoring grows larger and deeper with each student (mentee), who will eventually go on to mentor others. 

(Pixabay.com, free image)

Often in my teaching, I have used the metaphor of a tree to help students reflect  on their own learning.  The following two images were created by Areli Dohner Chavez, and used to reflect on her own learning & teaching (pedagogy).  Thank you, Areli.

First, Areli drew this tree.

Next, she reflected on what she knew and where her knowledge originated.  Areli is one of the branches on my academic tree, and I am confident that she now has mentored many students, and has her own academic family tree filled with mentors and mentees.

I suspect that when we are finished with our sharing at UNLV,  Le, Chyl, and I will have a new tree which captures our academic genealogy.

Tip of the hate to Lindsay Vonn, the Olympic skier: Am I the only person to notice that she is also a fabulous mentor to many other skiers (mentees)?

Dear WinkWorld Readers, 

Previously, I wrote about the scientific method which is being used in a rural school near us.  You might want to read this post before reading this update of that project.

Prairie Pedagogy: The Scientific Method

This project was started last September, and now I have a story to tell about a bromeliad and a geranium, which just would not bloom during the winter months, even though they were in the East and South windows with glorious sun light of the prairies.  I so remember Grandma Dora’s plants in Moville Iowa.  Every September she took her geraniums to the local little public library and plopped them in the southern window.  During the winter the plants grew to the ceiling and bloomed and bloomed. For decades I have tried to get a geranium to bloom during the winter: Nothing. In addition my bromeliads would not bloom like those of my friend, Julie, in CA.

This is what a geranium and a bromeliad should look like:

Here is my pitiful bromeliad.

Here is my geranium without blossoms.

If you read WinkWorld, you know that I love spending time  with 16 precious K-8 kids at Atall School, which is 50 miles from our ranch.  They are often the “din in my head & heart.”  This was a one-room school until a couple of years ago.  Now, the modular building has been divided, and they have a full-time teacher for K-3, another full-time teacher for 4-8, and a teacher for Special Needs.  I primarily spend my time with the students in 4-8; Missy is their teacher.

Here are a couple of photos of Atall School, which we took in the fall.  The prairies are now totally white; photos at the end of this story.

Missy has many professional and personal strengths, but one of the things which I notice about her is that she never loses track of the fact when the 8th grade students leave this little isolated school, they will more than likely need to go to one of several little towns near-by, necessitating a drive of anywhere from 30 to 60 miles, depending on the town and the location of each student’s ranch.

She is always looking ahead to make sure that the students are as prepared as possible for this eventuality.  For example, for the last several months, the students have been learning more about the scientific method, which will probably be used in various classes in secondary: Science class will use this approach, and certainly all inquiry based, research projects in the reading/language arts classes will spring from this approach.

Missy and I had a hunch that if I took the plants to the kids, they could get a blossom to pop. 

The best part of this story is that in November the students suddenly realized that they had not been watering their plants. So, without ever discussing it with their teacher, Missy, they took it upon themselves to add this one chore (watering the plants) to their rotating list of daily chores. Watering the plants was added to the Devices and Sharpener chores.

The kids have now taken care of the plants for several months. 

Their bromeliad has grown a “pup,” which is thriving.  I expect a blossom by May.

Here is the first blossom on the geranium plant.

Here is my pitiful bromeliad today.

Feb. 21, 2018 photos of Atall

Dear WinkWorld Readers,

The beauty of a blog is that you can read, whenever you have time or interest. The same is true for me, in that I can post when I have time and interest.  As a reader, you can always go to  WinkWorld News to find something which had been previously posted. 

I noted that in the previous posts, when I shared some of our treasures and memories, so many of you wrote to me individually and shared your personal experiences. Thank you.

Today, we are moving forward with some ideas, which I am exploring.  I will probably post several times in the next few days, and you can read whenever it is good for you. I am fascinated by Storytelling as Research and have started a bibliography. These are all new-to-me citations, since my latest book, “The Power of Story” was published in November 2017.   If you want to add other citations in the Comment sections or to me privately, I’ll compile and re-share at a later date.

Here’s the deal: I make. You take. 

Storytelling as Research Bibliography JWink 2.18

Dear WinkWorld Readers,

We tried something new when the blizzard was about ready to hit us here on the prairies. Hope you enjoy.