Here are notes from Marcela Descalzi, who is teaching at one of the camp sites in the Montrose area. Marcela shares about the “reign of kindness” that she and her teaching partner are experiencing in their classroom:
My writing partner Patty and I create community with “our” children. In 3 lightning weeks, we gather in the morning to celebrate writing. On our first day, we had asked the young writers to share values that helped build a community of kindness. Among words like respect, generosity and active listening, we were surprised to hear awareness. Our fourth graders were on a roll.
In our gathering circle of the morning, we share many of our own passions as we play Connections– a game that invites active listening and voicing moments and feelings from our day. It began to rain hard. When it was my turn, I said with a certain amount of enthusiasm, how much I loved the rain. Shortly after, as we introduced the Haiku, rain and thunder washed over our room. Submerged in the energy of rain anecdotes, I shared with them my attempt to capture feelings in a tiny bucket:
Love raindrops whipping
at the window sill
trying to get in
That same afternoon, over the bustle of goodbyes that mark the end our daily time together, one of our young poets dropped a folded paper into my hand. Ella left softly before I could ask her what she needed. I found this:
Rain, rain, rain
sprinkles down so softly
sounds like fingers
softly touching the stained glass windows
watch, watch, watch
the rain trickle down the window
run, run, run
out of the house to feel the rain slip down
my dark brown hair
but rain, rain, rain
what I love about rain
are the fingers it sets on my stained glass window sill.
From that moment on, as Houston’s summer clouds offered water, many a young voice would herald the rain, just in case the adults in the room forgot to notice gifts of awareness sprinkling through.
A-washed with kindness
within our community
of young WITS writers.
bonzoi
Thats amazing… i loved the lines you have scribbled on rain