When I walked into a classroom today to meet with a teacher, her kids were finishing cleaning up, heading to lunch and the lyrics to “It’s not easy being Green” were projected. Years ago I shared a bunch of different Slice of Life prompts and lessons with teachers. The prompts float around now, and I always get a kick out of seeing kids writing from them.

This one transported me back to my sixth-grade classroom. Somehow that song had come up in conversation, not so unusual in sixth-grade, actually. I decided we needed to use it as a mentor text to slice. We closely read the lyrics, and then decided what we would need to keep if we wanted to have our slices sound like Kermit.

My sixth graders wrote and wrote. They wrote beautifully. There are a lot of things that aren’t easy about being in middle school.

One of the third graders was still in the room and I asked her, “Are you doing It’s not that easy being slice of life?”

She nodded her head and said “Yea. It’s…It’s…” and I wasn’t sure if she was upset about the writing or not.

She tried to say, “Nevermind,” but I said,

“Do you like it?”

“Yea,” she told me, “It really helps to get a lot of stuff out.

I guess third graders have a lot of things that aren’t easy too.

The teacher said I had to read some of her kids’ slices of life, and showed me a few.

I had to tell her that I remember making that prompt, and she smiled.

“One of the kids said to me today when we did this, ‘I know where you got this idea from! You must have gotten this from Ms. Gabriel!’”

A third grader was walking into school this morning, and she noticed a poster had fallen on the floor.

She picked it up, tried to hang it back up and then I heard her say, like a miniature thirty-year-old, “And…that’s done.” She walked the poster to her classroom, presumably to find it’s next resting place.

I heard her call out to a classmate, “You were in this group, weren’t you?” But when he didn’t respond she just said “No? That’s right, you weren’t.”

I asked fourth graders to think about what was exciting and unique about the natural wonders they were reading about this morning. When I walked over to one of the desk-sets, a boy shrugged his shoulders.

“I don’t find any of this unique and exciting.”

I told him I understood, and was about to ask him what he thinks the author found exciting and unique. But, he interrupted me.

“But, I guess since they are called natural ‘wonders,’ they are unique because there’s only so many of them.” He decided.

After I was done modeling that lesson, I had to run across town to a meeting. I happened to go to the parking lot right as the fourth-graders were headed to recess.

One of them walked over to me and said “Hug?” As he leaned in for one of those side hugs fourth graders give.

He asked me, “Are we going to do that same lesson in Writing Society after school?”

I told him we were actually going to be doing something other than informational reading in our after school writing club and he looked kinda sad about it honestly.

“Why?” I asked. “Did you like that lesson?”

“Oh yes!” He said and he went off to play with his friends.

In Writing Society, I sat down next to a young third grader.

“Want to write a poem with me?” He asked and of course I agreed.

“Actually, I already wrote one.” He said as I opened up the google presentation he had sent me.

He asked me how I spell my name, and then how to spell Ms. I explained “M-S-period,” but noticed that he wrote “Ms Gabriel.” next to his name.

He said his poem, I typed it and we added a line or two.

Outside the sky is grey
But in (school) we see it as blue
Everybody is kind and nice and follows PAWS (expectations)
Well, everybody should…
At least try to.