Something I talk about with students when I go into schools is noticing. And we all stop for a minute and we notice the classroom or the library that we’re in. We notice how it smells, which always makes people laugh. We listen to the sounds and we also notice our own feelings like I’ll say, “My shoes are too high. I wish I hadn’t worn these high heels,” or “I’m kind of hungry. Is it lunchtime yet?”
You know, I say look at your feelings in your body and then look at your emotions. As well as noticing what’s outside of you, notice what’s inside of you. And then I talk about Water in the Park, which is a book that came to be because I live next-door to a park and one summer it was 98 degrees almost every day. So, I would go out to the park with my baby daughter at six in the morning because that was the only time that it was cool at all to be out there.
And it was still hot, but, you know, you could still go down the slide at six in the morning. And we would wait for two things. One was for the dogs to arrive because dogs would come for their early‑morning walks and they would go swimming in this little pond by the park. And the other was for the sprinklers to be turned on, which happened around 7:00 but really whenever the park keeper felt like it.
And that got me started in thinking about all the ways that water was used in the park. So I tell the students that I went out to the park, you know, all through that summer and I just kind of kept my noticing goggles on so that I was looking around for water and what people were doing with it, but I also invite the students to be noticers in looking at the art in the book.
This is my favorite spread to show for that. It’s early in the morning when the dogs come to go swimming, and I start by asking them to look at Mr. Fluffynut and his person and I say, “What do you notice?” And they notice a lot. They can tell how she feels. They can tell how he feels. They can tell what words she is saying most likely.
Then we look over here and right away they can see that little Nonny is missing a leg and then they can think about what emotions his people are having — her people. She’s a girl, little Nonny. And I ask them what else they notice, and they’ll notice the cat running away from the dogs and they’ll notice the squirrel also running away from the dogs. This is like dog happy time and maybe not happy time for all the animals.
The turtles are slipping off their rocks. So they notice all of this and then we turn the page — it’s actually in a projection — and we can see Mr. Fluffynut and his person going home and we talk about all the things we notice in this picture. And by the time we’re done noticing everything, they are noticers and then I make the connection between them being noticers and them being writers because that is the starting point. You notice and you write down what you notice and maybe you have a poem or maybe you have the start of a story or maybe you have a science question.