Celebrating 700 posts! Whew!

         This is the Tuesday Slice of Life community, hosted by the Two Writing Teachers each Tuesday. This is where I started, and it fits, doesn't it, to have #700 arrive on a Tuesday? My first post was the beginning of the Slice of Life Challenge in 2011. My first commenters were Tam, Elizabeth E., Tara, Ruth and Mary Helen, all still here, although Elizabeth seems only to do the March challenge. I appreciate everyone's support, warmth, inspiration, laughter, intelligence and spirit. And I applaud those I read online, and meet at conferences for showing creativity, humor, sorrow, beauty, kindness and love. There really isn't anything more to say but THANK YOU! 

Tweet at #SOL14 

        My favorite quote, from Rainer Maria Rilke — 'And now we welcome the new year, full of things that have never been.'

the wordle from my tags-click to enlarge

It's April--Poetry Month and Reading Goals

   

  It's Tuesday, & time for the weekly Slice of Life at the Two Writing Teachers blog. Today I'm starting some poetry sharing, but this year I hope to share different things, poems, books of poetry, lessons I believe are good with students. My One Little Word this year is "wander", so I'll be "wandering" in the poetry world, & continuing to link with others, too.
       Today, I'm also linking with Carrie Gelson in a group formed because we thought we had too many books at home that were from last year and still haven't been read. You can find the group at Carrie's blog, There's A Book for That. It's titled #MustReadIn2014, & this is our round-up for the first three months. You can access my goal list up at the top of this page.

31/31 It's Monday, It's the final SOLC, It's Chalkabration - We move on!

(special note: some font sizes seem stuck-cannot reduce it unless it's too small-sorry for the crazy size!)   The Last Day, #31 of the Slice of Life Challenge at Two Writing Teachers! Tweet at #SOL14  for It's Monday, What Are You Reading: Jen at TeachMentorTexts, Ricki and Kellee at Unleashing Readers. Tweet at #IMWAYR
Here are reviews for Non-fiction Picture Book Wed. at Alyson Beecher's Kid Lit Frenzy.

     

                   

Betsy Hubbard of Teaching Young Writers and Two Writing Teachers has been hosting a Chalk-a-bration where we share poems chalked on the last day of the month. Here's mine, for all the slicers who wrote through the month. Congratulations! 

And, congratulations to my three colleagues who also sliced every day: Suparna at Me and My Soliloquy, Max at Teaching From Behind, and Susan at UnderConstruction. Max's class posted all month, too!

30/31 Time And Choices - Weaving More Than Yarn

Thank you to
       Stacey, Tara, Betsy, Anna, Dana and Beth for 

keeping us going, keeping writing about teaching along with your lives, slicers' lives, and all the myriad behind-the-scene details that enter into this month. Almost done, nearly there, what a journey!

Thank you to so many slicers who read my posts, who commented, and to those who wrote such words of inspiration that I had to re-read them, or copy and print them, or bookmark them for my teaching archives for future use. Your words will live on. Isn't that a wonderful thought?

I'm linking up to Two Writing Teachers for the 30th slice of 31!

Wow, next to the last day, and for one of the first times, I haven't yet linked my post. There aren't enough hours... I wove more than yarn yesterday into my life. My first day of spring break filled me up like a deep breath!

29/31 Celebration and Slicing - completing the week

It's the end of the week, the 29th post for the Slice of Life challenge, and time to Celebrate with Ruth Ayres & the celebrating community she has formed at Ruth Ayres Writes: Discover, Play, Build. It's the 24th week, the first thing to celebrate!
                 Tweet at #Sol14 and #CelebrateLu

        I'm re-reading Ruth's and Christi Overman's book, Celebrating Writers, hoping to gain more insight in helping those with whom I work. A sentence on page five says: Celebrations ought to wrap around many moments in writing workshop--not just the final product. Celebration is essential to the livelihood of young writers.
         When I read this, I wondered if we can connect this to ourselves, adult writers, too, celebrating things like:

•         Beginning a new notebook
•         Working at a new structure in poetry
•          Attempting new kinds of posts on the blog
•         Noticing words and habits that might be better banned, at least for me

       And I also wonder if we can connect the same idea to life's process, those many moments that we love, are proud of, and think of as rather small things, but they add up to the "publication" of life.

28/31 Wandering Through The Alphabet

 
       It's Poetry Friday at A Year of Reading, with witty poet Mary Lee Hahn. Thanks for hosting, Mary Lee! And it's the 28th of 31 Slice of Life Challenge at Two Writing Teachers.  Thanks to Tara, Stacey, Anna, Beth, Betsy and Dana for carrying the community through this amazing month! 

                   And it's the Friday of my spring break-high time!
      In the past, I've written a few Abecendarian poems, poems that use each alphabet letter as a guide for each line or stanza. There is more about these here. Numerous ABC books do more than just follow the alphabet. There is wordplay within the letters themselves, and that fascinates me.  I'm been playing around with the letters, too, and have a poem to share.

27/31 Something Fun - A Movie & A Tech Contest

        This is a different sharing than I usually do for the Slice of Life Challenge at Two Writing Teachers. It's also number 27 of 31!

       My job as literacy coach takes different paths, and in technology, I'm often exploring new apps that students might use for creating and communicating non-fiction, fiction, poetry, art, and so on. My slice of life Tuesday took another different path!

        All the students in my school choose individual unit topics and the curriculum is built around that topic, with both student and teacher input. Two students interested in animation and several teachers had an entertaining session with our technology teacher, learning a little about the stop-motion animation technique, and watching several movie trailers about a movie coming in the fall, an animation movie!  According to Wikipedia, “stop-motion animation is a technique to use a physically manipulated object appear to 
move on its own.”

26/31 Books With Connections?

        Five more days! What will you share in those five?  
         Great to be writing for the Slice of Life Challenge at the blog, Two Writing Teachers.   And today I'm also posting at Alyson Beecher's blog, Kid-Lit Frenzy for Non-Fiction Picture Book Wednesday. 

          Tweet at #SOL14

          I’ve loved reading about Teddy Roosevelt all my life. He is a fascinating man in our history, and it a pleasure to read about his life. Today, I share two different books that include his acts, both with positive endings, but the first one shares a side of his breaking the law to get what he wanted. I’ve read of his egotism, his pushing the limits sometimes even placing his well-being in jeopardy in order to “conquer” something. So I am not surprised. These two books are worth reading as starters for information in unique ways.

The Panama Canal – A Wonders of the World Book – written by Elizabeth Mann, illustrations by Fernando Rangel

       According to Goodreads, This series is well-known for Elizabeth Mann's ability to synthesize technical and factual information about a topic in easily understood and accessible language for younger readers. The illustrations include detailed drawings of the canal locks, beautiful paintings accompanying the varied stories of the canal’s building, and photographs where important. I took this from our library because I wanted to read some background of the canal and the story of its building before I began reading Margarita Engle’s verse novel, Silver People, out today!

       The book gives a broad overview of the history and challenges of the canal.  Each part 

25/31 Weaving for Memories

   It's Day Twenty-Five of the Slice of Life Challenge at Two Writing Teachers!

           Tweet at #SOL14  




         I haven't mentioned all the reasons why I am so interested in the weaving I've started. Part of it is that I had my mother's loom sitting without love in a closet. But the other part is something I did with a class one year. More than one post has talked of the importance of community, and I believe it makes the year with a class smooth as smooth can be. At my school, there is a slightly different challenge in our core classes, that we keep some students and other join us each year. (I taught Advance School classes, 6th, 7th and 8th graders.) That begins the year with "experts" and "novices".  Weaving (that word again) this disparate group into a learning, fun-loving, cohesive whole takes activities, shared experiences, learning about each other, learning to love each other. It isn't now the beginning of our school year, so those activities are for another post, but this post is about weaving us together into a memory that will last. Each year, one of the things we did was travel on an extended trip together. That taught us about each other more than most things could. 

23/31 Progress and Learning - Weaving Update

        It's been a pleasure to write for this challenge. I'm reading as many posts as I can, and enjoy the creativity and uniqueness of each. Thank you everyone for sticking to it, for your dedication! You can find all the slicers at Day Twenty-Three for the Two Writing Teachers, Slice of Life Challenge.

     Things I've learned this week about weaving, and that I already know about life:

•         Yarn gets tangled; so does life, even during one day. (Oh, what a tangled web we weave...)
•          Yarn that is all wrapped up in the skein becomes a different color and texture when it is unwrapped. (Don't judge a book by its cover.)
•          Plans imagined aren't always the ones that end up being completed.  (Go with the flow...)
•          Looking ahead doesn't work as well as focusing on the moment. (Life is available only in the present moment.-Thich Nhat Hanh) 
•           It's a good idea to have everything needed before one starts. (Look before you leap.)