Welcome to Poetry Friday - Welcome September

 

          Yes, green grass with yellow leaves, more are coming! Welcome to Poetry Friday everyone, September's beginning. It's twenty days until autumn! Click on the link below to add your posts.

      For all those starting anew: "The vision must be followed by the venture. It is not enough to stare up the steps–we must step up the stairs." ~Vance Havner

    Our lives hold numerous thresholds; from youngest to oldest, starting can be exciting, daunting, happy, and sad. This time, I'm thinking of schoolchildren who wonder so much before that first day.  Do you imagine the first day's morning?

     I am not a great artist but I do like trying to sketch once in a while, thus my attempt from my imagination about that first day with all ages beginning again! Enjoy your Friday and the weekend!

Tick-Tock

 

See the afterglow

on students’ faces,

sunshine souvenir

from the neighborhood pool.

So long silly races with 

splashy-ends,

relentless fun,

their vacation run.

 

Hear the sighs

as they keep the swing-along,

goodbyes up the stairs

to summery songs.

Open doors await

to enter and then

they hop the threshold

to begin again.

 

Linda Baie ©

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Time for Clean Slates

          Time for our Tuesday Slice of Life Sharing at theTwo Writing Teachers blog. It's a wonderful place to share. Last night, even more sharing happened on Twitter, at the #TWTBlog chat. Thanks for a great conversation!

          It was quite a day yesterday, one that was cut into tiny, tiny slices;  I'm actually happy it is over. As I said above, I enjoyed the twitter chat from everyone here, but the day itself was filled to the brim. I hoped to write a long post about the first days of school, but it will be brief today, sharing only one thing that became so important to me in the first days of school. 

          While even from the first day, I wanted my class to know that this would be a reading and writing year, even more I wanted them to realize that they were the ones that would be driving the year. I taught a mix of 6th, 7th and 8th graders and many of you know that personal choice is a top priority for all of our students, K through 8. One of the things I did on the first day was to share a poem or a poetic quote to help us leap into the year. I gave each student a copy, they taped it into their writers' notebooks, and then responded to it. In that response, I asked them to make one secret and very personal goal for the year.  Although I never knew what those particular goals were, I would re-visit students once in a while to ask how they were doing with it, and if there was something I could provide that would help reach the goal? Obviously, it involved a lot of trust. There were other times that students created goals that I did know about, but I always felt that trusting that they could work to reach a goal secretly was inspiring and empowering.