Tag Archives: writing

I Remember!

I remember it like it was yesterday, in my first year of teaching–1st graders.  It was extra eerie on this anniversary as that morning was very much like it was today: bright, cool, and with promise of exciting things to come.  Who knew what tragic events would unfold as I was driving to work that morning?   And while you and I have memories of that fateful day, our friends do not.

This is the first class I have where most of my kiddos (well, all but 2!) were not even born on September 11, 2001.  Everything they know about September 11, 2001 is from stories, TV, books, etc.  And I wonder if even the stories they’ve heard are true, or if they’re more based on bias and opinion–intentional or not.

So how do you deal with a major topic in their history in a way that both makes sense and doesn’t scare them?  How do you share truth in an appropriate way for a 10- or 11-year-old?

I decided to tackle the anniversary first in Writer’s Workshop.  First we read Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of the John J. Harvey, and then talked about what we were thinking.  We used this as an opportunity to both teach a strategy for writing (responding to literature and what’s going on in the world around us) as well to work through their thoughts and feelings of the day.  Everyone wrote entries about what they knew about 9/11 or what they were wondering.

Later we took some time to watch a news segment made just for kids. It was from Nick News and was called What Happened?: The Story of September 11th.   It did a super job of explaining what actually happened as well as addressing questions that many kids have about that day.  They went back to the entries they wrote earlier in the day and listened for answers, or to add information they wanted to remember. Hopefully your student came home talking about it, and you were able to have a discussion with them about it, too.

Let’s help them learn, so that they, too, can remember. 🙂

They Grow Up So Fast…

Ok, so in order to understand this post, you probably should have already read this one.  Anyhow…today was one of the most exciting days in our classroom up to now.  Really–I was excited for what I knew would come from that mysterious pile of brown-paper-wrapped rectangles–and my kids didn’t disappoint with their reaction to the whole thing.

 

So that answer to that question yesterday was this:

Each kiddo was given their very own, specially wrapped Writer’s Notebook!  I gave them a new pen, too, since we have a “pen only” rule when we write in our notebooks.  And it was the clicky kind of pen, which was extra cool.

 

Now….before they could be gifted their very own, specially wrapped new Writer’s Notebook—which we fondly refer to as our “bears”–they had to agree to a few specific things and sign our class writing pledge (I’ll show you that tomorrow!).  Then the brown-paper-package was theirs (and yes, I was tempted to tie them up with string!).  Just look at their faces:

 

The whole class waited with anticipation as each kiddo individually came up to the easel to promise, then sign the pledge, and were given their goodies.  Then once we all had our presents, they got busy unwrapping:

 

Ok, and so while I know that video is blurry in places (sorry!) and out-of-focus (sorry again!), I KNOW you can see the joy on their faces and hear the excitement in their voices.  And believe me, it’s all real.  They have been waiting for this day for a while (like Devan said today, “It only took 4 weeks!”), knowing that one special day, after they’d learned the right way to use that Writer’s Notebook, they’d have their own.  From the second I walked over to my chair with the pile in my arms, I heard whispers of “today’s the day” and “those are our notebooks!” and lots of suddenly-jumpy 5th graders who were eager–honestly eager–to start the next phase of our writing journey.  AND I LOVE THAT!

 

So now their “cubs” have grown into “bears” (which I heard Anna exclaim after she’d unwrapped her present) and they’re ready to continue their learning journey as capable, FEARLESS fifth grade writers.

Do you have a Writer’s Notebook?  Does it have a special name?  What does it look like? Our homework tonight was to decorate our notebooks.  🙂

I Love Jerry Spinelli!

…but don’t worry, my husband’s totally ok with it. 🙂

Remember when I told you about me as a reader?  And as a writer?  Well, as #10 on both lists (which is a strange coincidence!), I mentioned that Jerry Spinelli is one of my favorite mentor authors.

I was introduced to Jerry Spinelli’s work via my good friend Michelle Simmons, and her love of his book Crash.  We taught together many years ago, and she introduced me to it as one of the first read-alouds of the year.  But not only did we read it to enjoy it as readers, we incorporated it into our writing unit on Reading Like a Writer.  We’d reread parts of the text that we’d already heard, this time digging for nuggets and craft moves we could use in our own writing, teaching our students to do the same things.  You can find amazing things in that book if you pay attention.  And because Crash is such an amazing book on so many levels, it is a must-read every year in my class now.

The reason I write about this today, though, comes from inspiration of another colleague of mine.  I have a new teammate, Bridget, who shares my love for Spinelli and his many great stories.  We were talking about some of our favorites, and I had to sheepishly admit that while I was aware of, and even own most of his books, I have only ever actually read Crash.  I know–that’s just silly.  So they became the majority of my to-be-read pile this last month.  Only makes sense, right?  On so many levels.

First I read Eggs–one I’d actually started at the time I first bought it, but never finished.  Just today I finished Maniac Magee.  I know–how could I have never read that one?  It’s a classic.  And it won the Newberry Medal.  Sorry!  I’m lame.  But I’ve made up for that now, right?

I have Loser and Wringer here in my pile, still waiting for their turn.  I hope to get to them soon, as well.  And while now my list of Spinellis-I’ve-read is only 3, my initial opinion on his writing holds true.

I know–you wonder, “What is it that love so much about his writing?”  It’s many things, really.  I love the way his writing sounds.  I know that’s hard to explain, but I’ve heard it many more times out loud than in my head, since I read it to my students, and every word just has such a great ring to it.  Like he chooses each and every one specifically to be there together.  I like that he seems to break every established rule of grammar and mechanics and still ends up with an amazing story that makes sense.  He writes sentences that have only one word, chapters and paragraphs with only one sentence.  But because he does it on purpose, it works.   I like how the characters in his stories have real conversations.  They actually sound the way that kind of person would sound in real-life–not some sweet, idealized, sugar-coated way because they’re in a book for kids. Raw and real.  Sometimes saying things that shock you, because that makes sense for the character.  I like that he writes about things that matter, things that both kids and adults can relate to.  Bullies. Friends. Racism. Families. Things that aren’t so pretty.

So like I said when I started, I love Jerry Spinelli!  I learn from him every time I pick up a book he’s written, and he’s a mentor even though I’ve never met him.  That’s pretty cool, I think.

How ’bout you?  Who are your favorite authors?  Who do you have as mentors for your writing?  What books are your favorite to read? Share with me. 🙂

100 Things About Me as a Writer

I am a writer.  I wouldn’t say that I am an author, because I haven’t been published, but I definitely write.  And I write a lot.

So here are 100 things about me as a writer:

1. I started my writing journey way back in kindergarten and have loved it ever since.

2.  When I was in elementary school, I wanted to be an author when I grew up.

3. Writing has always been one of my favorite subjects in school.

4. I still have writing pieces from when I was a kid.  I think they’re saved in my mom’s dresser.

5. In junior high, I wrote mostly short stories about girls who were babysitters or who had crushes on boys in their classes.

6. As an adult, I usually write expository text or to tell my opinion/thoughts on a topic.

7. I officially started my Writer’s Notebook in June of 2005.

8. I am now filling up my 10th notebook.  Each one is different and tells something about my life at the time I was writing in it.

9. My favorite authors as a reader are my favorite as a writer.  I like the way their words sound.

10.  Sharon Creech, Ralph Fletcher and Jerry Spinelli as mentors of mine even though I don’t know them.

11.  I write mostly for myself.

12. Sometimes I write so I can share it with my students.  My Writer’s Notebooks and my students’ needs are the main resources I use in my teaching.

13. I’d love to publish a book someday.

14. I write better when I have choices about what it is (i.e. format, length, etc.)

15.  If I have an assignment, I will always write longer than is asked.   It’s probably really annoying to my teachers!

16. I learn a lot from my students when I read their writing.

17. I like feedback, but only if it’s positive.  Hey, we’re being honest here, right? 🙂

18. I read almost everything like a writer, looking for things I can use in my own writing.

19. I love words.  I collect quotes and often write down the things other people say.

20. The outside of my Writer’s Notebooks are covered with things that inspire me.

21. I am a “pen” person.  I could shop for hours for just the right one.  What it looks like when I write is really important.  Well at least to me. I’m kind of obsessed. 🙂

Wow–that was harder than I thought it would be.  Didn’t get as far as I thought I would.  Hopefully I’ll come back to add some more soon.  Check back again, will ya?

What would you say about yourself as a writer?  Could you add anything else to my list?

 

 

Confessions

Hopefully you’ve already read about me as a reader.  If not, I’d say it’s worth a few minutes of your time.  Please?  🙂

And so as I sat down to write about myself as a writer, I decided I needed to start with a confession instead.  Remember when I first posted about that really cool summer online writing camp I was doing?  Well, at that point I was really excited about the prospects of learning and writing with amazing teachers/writers/librarians (and I still am) and was anxious to see where the process would take me.  I really had no expectations.

I dug in, and was finally comfortable enough to post the first two things I wrote.  And that’s when it all went downhill.  Somehow the wind came out of my sails, and I have not done a single. assignment. since.

In many ways that bothers me.  I don’t like to not succeed.  I am naturally a perfectionist, and I usually take that to the nth degree when it comes to school/writing/reading/anything professional.  I am an all-or-nothing kind of girl, and so if I can’t do it all and do it right, I don’t want to do it.  But with this, I only did two assignments and then I hit a brick wall.

But after I got over the initial disappointment in myself (annoyance, really), I sat down to reflect on what had happened.  I think part of my problem was that I write mostly for myself.  I write when I need to write–which is usually to process feelings or to collect moments I don’t want to forget.  So when presented with a “job” to do, I had a hard time figuring out how to do that.   Since I write for myself, I had a hard time when the assignments/exercises were related to developing characters or settings, or outlining plans for a story.  I did not go into the camp with the plan of writing or finishing a novel.

Ok, so what matters here?  Does it really matter that I set out to do something and didn’t finish it? Or does it really matter more that I walk away with something that I learned?  I say the latter is more important.

I learned to be okay with not being perfect.  I learned that sharing your writing with strangers is hard.  Especially when you don’t really have a choice or you’re not quite sure what it’s “supposed” to look like.  These are both really important seeing as how I ask that of my student writers every day.  I know I’ll think of those times really differently in the future.  Yes, I’ll still ask them to share, but I’ll obviously have more understanding of how difficult it is.  I learned that sometimes you just need to put yourself out there and not care so much about what people say about your writing.  What’s the worst that could happen? 🙂

Oh, and just for the record, I do have plans of jumping back into Teachers Write! at some point.  The great part is that it’s all archived on the blog and I can do it at my own pace.  So yes, I’d like to say that somehow I will finish what I started, even if it looks a little different than I first thought.

Did you do Teachers Write! this summer?  How is it going for you? 

 

The Bed Boat

Teachers Write: Day 2: Tuesday Quick Write

Directions for today (ok, well yesterday 🙂 ):

Write for two minutes to describe a very specific place.  If you’re just free-writing, it can be a place that you love, or have visited, or a place that frightens you.

Then…When your two minutes are up, stop writing.

Now…if your place is real and you can go there, go there now.  I’ll wait….

If it’s far away, find a picture of it. If it’s not a real place, put yourself there in your mind. Now write for one minute about each of the following:

  • Everything you SEE – Pay attention to big things and tiny things. Search for concrete details.
  • Everything you HEAR – Be specific. Don’t just say “a scraping sound.” Say a “high-pitched, raspity-raspity-screeeeeaking noise.”  You can make up words if you want.If you aren’t in the place, try to find a video. Or guess what you might hear.
  • Everything you SMELL – Especially pay attention to the smells that surprise you. If you’re not in the place, pictures can help you smell. Look carefully…what would that dumpster smell like?
  • Everything you FEEL – Weather, wind, things that land on you or brush against you. Again – pictures help you imagine if you’re not there, and if it’s not a real place, try imagining images and then assigning sensations from a similar place that might be real (desert, tundra, etc.)

Now, go back and rewrite that descriptive paragraph. Include your best tiny, surprising details, and work on senses other than sight. Better?  More vivid?  This is a fun activity to do with kids, too. Have them write about the playground or gym or cafeteria; then go there and hunt for sensory details!

Wow.  If I thought yesterday was hard, then today was worse.  I tried the exercise.  And then I tried it again because the first go-round was so lousy.  I think the problem was that I picked a place that was too big, too broad, so I had a hard time specifically describing those details.  I do have to admit, though, that there was some really important teacher-learning that happened in that first try: I totally get it now how my kids feel when I tell them to share their words with their partner or with the class.  I thought I understood it, but I don’t really think I got it until it happened to me.  Priceless experience really.

So I tried again, and this time tried to focus in on a smaller–and closer–place that was important to me.  It is an actual place, and it is in my house, so that made it easier.  Well a little bit.

So here it is:

We own a boat.  But it’s not made of wood and nails or fiberglass, either.  It’s big, squishy and white–just the perfect combination of soft and strong, and there is always a breeze blowing overhead.  It’s a bed boat, and while it goes nowhere, it takes my family on magical journeys together.

Sometimes I sail there alone,  just me with my thoughts or a good book to keep me company.  Solitude is welcome.  But more often than not, the boat is filled with other passengers on the journey with me: one who is the captain and two who are smaller (and much louder) versions of myself.  As we sail on together, we might share a laugh, a story, a snuggle or even a snack.  We sense the safety of the boat brings; just being on it is enough.

The big, squishy bed-boat is where we begin and end most days, our safe harbor through the storms of life.  Problems are solved, plans are made and great days are joyously relived.  Tears are shed, questions are answered and the sailors are made stronger just by being there.  Together.  Nothing seems too big to tackle.  The bed-boat is safe, it’s strong and it’s special.

What is your favorite place?  Where do you go that’s special to you?  🙂

Other People’s Kitchens

Teachers Write Day 1:  Monday Morning Warm-Up:

Ok, Day 1.  Like I said, I can do this.  So the directions today were to describe the kitchen of our childhood using as many sense as you can.

So I sat down willing–and hopefully able–to do this.  But the more I thought about it, I realized that some of my most vivid memories from childhood are actually not from my own house.  Not that the ones I have form home are bad ones, they’re just not really there.  So I thought of other people’s kitchens that I spent time in as a child, and my assignment came together:

Bowls.  Small bowls made of wood-looking plastic filled with salad.  And that salad is covered in French dressing.  Yep, one of my clearest memories is related to Catalina-drenched lettuce eaten in Christy B.’s kitchen.  Dark kitchen.  Why?  Because we’d eat that soggy plastic-wooden-bowl-salad as a midnight snack after everyone else was asleep.  No Oreos or ice cream for us.  Health food all the way.  Well, covered in salad dressing.  Take the bowl memory several years forward and about 100 miles up I270 and you’ll be in Sheila’s kitchen.  This time it wasn’t salad, but tomato soup.  Why does tomato soup bring such a warm, vivid memory for me? Because it’s tied to a brand new experience (don’t think I knew tomato soup existed before I ate it in Sheila’s kitchen in her big, yellow house on Mignon Dr.) and a close, loving family.  I ate so many meals in that bright, sunny kitchen over the 5 or 6 years we were friends, every one of them lovely.  I can still picture every square inch of that room today–some 20 years after.  Memories of the smiles, laughs and late-night snacks shared in that space warm my heart. So what about my own kitchen as a child? It was hard to pinpoint just which kitchen to tell about, because we moved around alot.  And even when we were at home, my parents didn’t really cook.  Everything came out of a box.  So maybe that means my childhood kitchen smelled like cardboard? 🙂

What are your childhood “kitchen” memories? Tell me about them. 🙂

Teachers Write!

Yes, yes we do.  And for those of you who were wondering, no, we don’t really have the whole summer “off’, either.  No, we do not have to get up and get dressed and go to school, but we spend many, many hours learning new things that we’ll use in the next school year, planning with our grade level teams, reading and writing, and well, just becoming better teachers so we can help out students even more effectively in the fall.  Ok, but I digress….

So that being said, one of the exciting learning adventures I’m taking part in this summer (along with Mrs. Meihaus and Mrs. Berger–a few Robinson teachers you may know!) is an online writing camp called Teachers Write!

Every day for the next couple of months, there are assignments posted on the Teachers Write blog, and we do them and then post what we write for others to read.  Seems easy, right?

That’s totally what I thought going into this.  I mean, I’ve been a writer for many years.  Not a published author, but a writer nonetheless.  I thought that this writing camp thing would be a piece of cake.  But cake it is not.

Ok, let me explain.  It’s not necessarily the writing part that is hard for me, it’s the sharing part.  Up to this point, I’ve primarily written for myself and my students.  If I share my writing, it’s on my terms, when I want to and how I want to.  Usually its pieces that I’ve chosen to write, and I share them during the revision stages, so that my kiddos can help me fix it up and make it better.  That’s scary in itself, because kids can be really honest, but again, it’s on my terms.

This is a whole different ball game.  This time it’s writing prompts, and the “campers” I’m sharing with are other teachers and–get this–published authors!  Talk about pressure.

But I signed up for it, right?  And what an amazing opportunity for growth as both a writer and a teacher of writing.  So I guess I’m game.  Nothing but good things can come of it, and no one will die in the process.  I just need to put my pride aside and let people teach me something.  Goodness knows I have tons to learn!

Alright.  Here I go.  Taking the plunge.  Jumping in with both feet.  Wearing my floaties and nose plug and hoping not to drown. 🙂

Stay tuned for examples of my “homework.”  I’d love your comments.  Really, I would. 🙂

The Other 22 Hours of the Day

Hello!  Remember me?  I’m the one who blogs here.  I know–you probably forgot I had a blog.  But no, I’ve just been so busy that it has been very hard to get here to tell you about it!

There is a quote (and I CANNOT seem to find it anywhere to share the exact words with you), but it goes something like “I write 2 hours a day, but it’s what I do the other 22 hours of the day that give me what I write about.”  I am certain that the exact words are more poetic and well-said than the way I paraphrased it, but you get the idea. 🙂

And I think this is absolutely true!  I have taught my students for a very long time all about how to use their Writer’s Notebooks and how to figure out what to write in them.  One of the tips I give is to pay attention to the things you are already doing.  We talk often about how the events/thoughts/ideas that you capture in your notebook don’t have to be monumental or “big” or necessarily special, they just have to be yours.  If you carry your notebook and pay attention you will find countless things to write about.

But then there’s my problem….I have been so busy with the “other 22 hours” that I have been neglecting the 2.  I mean that I haven’t been writing any of it down and that KILLS me! If you have a minute, be sure to check out the kid blogs, because they have written about it!

And while I know you’re hoping I’ll write a 1000 post right now all about those things, friends, I simply CANNOT do it right now.  We have one last busy, crazy day with kiddos tomorrow, and then it’s SUMMER!  I am hoping to come back in those next few days and update you then.  Can you hold on until then?  Please?  🙂

What do you do in your “other 22 hours” that you would write about?  What is a quote that you think is worth sharing?  What things have been keeping you busy lately?  We’d love to hear about it!  Leave us a comment! 🙂