This is a typical student jackdaw collection.

To quote a former principal of mine, "School is not summer camp." This phrase kept playing over and over in my mind as I began thinking about the beginning of the school year and one of my favorite learning experiences I use to build community. With formative assessments, state standards, required testing, and NCLB mandates, I began asking myself why the jackdaw project is important to the development of my classroom community.

You may be asking yourself, what's a jackdaw? I first read about the use of a jackdaw as a way for children to respond to literature in the resource, Children's Literature in the Elementary School by Huck, Hepler and Hickman. A relative to the crow, a jackdaw is a bird that likes to collect bright and shiny things. A jackdaw is a collection of things about a topic. When using it as a response to literature, the students gather items that represented things from the setting, events, and/or characters to demonstrate comprehension and foster discussions. Part of the fun is finding and building the collection to share with others.

I provide each student with a gallon size zip lock bag and ask them to make a jackdaw about themselves. The only parameter is it must all fit inside the bag. Here are the written guidelines I provide the students with. These guidelines have been revamped through the years but especially after attending a workshop promoting service learning sponsored by www.partnershipsmakeadifference.org.

Bring in items that fit in a bag (provided) of things that represent:

• some of your "gifts"-- things you are good at (maybe a book or a paint brush or a game piece)
  
• some of your interests - things you are fascinated with and like to spend your time reading about or doing (maybe a catcher's mitt or word puzzle)
  
• relationships you have with other people (maybe a photo of friends or a souvenir from a family trip)
  
• ways you already help others (maybe a leash if you walk the dog or spoon if you set the table)
  

The jackdaws are then brought to school and each child gets to share their work with the rest of the class. One at a time the children take turns sitting in the rocking chair found at our meeting area. The sharing session runs like the show-and-tell activities still popular in many primary classrooms. The jackdaw provides support for oral language and public presentation skills. I have found the jackdaw to increase social success for everyone, but especially students who may be quieter and those with disabilities. The items collected are all the support needed to make these children comfortable.

To help keep the audience engaged I create a graphic organizer called Jackdaw Sharing. Using a clipboard, pencil and this recording sheet, the audience is able to record one thing they want to remember or thought was interesting about their new friend's jackdaw. The graphic organizer is basically a square grid and each box is labeled with a student's name. Each fall I have an open house after a month of school for the children to come in and share our classroom and our beginning work with their families. Each year at least one parent is excited by the way their child came home and shared the Jackdaw Sharing paper with them, and how much they knew about each new classmate.

I do a lot of interviewing and surveying to get to know my students, but I also like to have them write about themselves. The jackdaw is a great tool to use for writing. The ideas for the piece are right in their zip lock bag, and for children who don't know where to begin, the support they need is provided. When I taught first and second graders the common phrases with this project would be, "I like . . . or "This is . . .". Along with my guideline revamping over the years, I've learned to provide more support with the written piece by providing a three column tool to support their writing. The 'Jackdaw Thinking' tool asks these three questions -

What? What's in the bag?

So What? Why did I include it?

Now What? What good deed could I do for someone as a result of my gifts and interests?

After the children have used the 'Jackdaw Thinking' page to organize their thoughts, they then write a piece that we hang in the hallway with a photograph to share with our school community and parents. This piece of writing is probably the easiest because of the jackdaw support. The writing piece is only written as one edited draft, without much revision - I feel it's too early to go through the full writing and editing process. I'm also able to learn a lot about the students as writers.

• How do they organize their writing?
  
• Do they make it a cohesive piece?
  
• Do they divide the writing by object?
  
• Can they think about others?
  
• What does their handwriting and spacing look like?
  
• What does their spelling look like?
  
• Do they expand on the jackdaw items with thought or is their writing very focused?
  
• Is their a sense of the child within the writing?
  

I have found the jackdaw project to be one of the best things I do each year. It helps students connect. They are able to share and learn about each other in a safe environment, and they are also developing oral and written language skills. This year my students and I needed to address a disability that is part of our community. After reading a picture book and talking for some time about how we could understand Aspergers syndrome, a student said . . . "I want to bring in a chess game. He said he was good at chess and beat his Dad eight times. I would like to try and play him." This is a great example of how jackdaws also help build understanding and support of peers in concrete, meaningful ways.