Mountain Lion Shapes Rivers

local ecology as an entrance into writing (and vice versa)

One of the cool things about teaching writing, is that you can bring in pretty much anything else you want to, because writing is a way of looking/thinking/expressing tht happens in conversation with the rest of life. Sure, you can write about writing, but mostly writers don’t. Which means there are really no walls in a creative writing classroom.

This winter, my classes are doing a big unit on local plants and animals. I made lists of local species, trying to get a balance of types of species, and had each kid pull one from a hat. They all, of course, hoped they would pull wolves. (They don’t call' ‘em charismatic megafauna for nothing.) When instead, they pulled foxgloves or questionable rock frog lichen, I turned on the charm. Cool! That flower is super poisonous!! Whoa, what a name, questionable rock frog. And did you know lichens are both fungi and algae AT THE SAME TIME???

I mean, big mammals are super cool.

First, research, then relationship

Then we broke out the field guide. Each student researched their species and wrote a field guide entry about them. This is a great project to practice research, summarizing, and organizing ideas. I asked them to include the usual kinds of things, like what they looked like, where they lived, facts about their life cycles, cool facts etc., but I also asked them to focus on two bigger questions:

• What does my species need?

• What does my species give?

The idea was to begin to think about the relationships between species.

We came back to our class circle and everyone shared what their species needed and gave, as well as some cool facts they’d learned. We discovered that the pileated woodpecker big sister made holes that her flying squirrel brother nested in. We learned that giant Pacific salamander and Coho salmon both ate each other’s babies. We learned that Pacific tree frogs like to wrestle, apparently for fun. We learned that Sitka spruce’s shallow roots make it blow over easily, making openings for her friend thimbleberry to get the sunlight she needed. We learned that by keeping the elk and deer too nervous to over browse the streamside willows, mountain lion shapes even the rivers.

Already, it feels better to say “who” than “what” as we talk about all these species.

But I’m pretty cool too! I mean, I am a member of two kingdoms of life at the same time, and I can basically eat rocks. Love, Questionable Rock Frog

Going deeper

Then I had them draw a slow, careful illustration of their species. I also asked them to fill out the following sentence:

I know it is [my species] because of [distinguishing details].

Then we thought about which species we might see at the park. And we saw a couple!

We’ve spent a couple of work blocks on all this, and need a little more time on it. Coming up, we’ll write poetry about our species, and from the voice of our species. We’ll lean into understanding our species as beings. We’ll also make masks and have a council where the species get to advise humans on our affairs (more on this another post). We also plan on writing a play with the species as characters. I’ll keep you posted as it develops.

But I’m excited already by the beauty of illustrations I’m seeing, and the moments when the kids are already in character as their species. And the excitement and pride they all are finding in them. (Well, most of them. Questionable rock frog is still feeling, well, a bit questionable.)