Category: Uncategorized
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My head at 45 degrees to the right I fell back against the cushion and watched the classroom spin around me It’s day 6 of this newly-acquired vertigo and I now believe it’s worse than any other sickness I’ve encountered Room shifting tilting my hand reaching out against a wall to…
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Today one of my students brought his writer’s notebook with him to our social studies lesson, sneaking poetic lines in between notes taken on his classmates’ presentations. Yesterday, he asked if he could bring it down to music, because he thought he might get distracted, and knew having the notebook there to write in would…
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It’s 7:29 am and I’m waiting for Ana to pick me up to take us to school. I also just finished Marshfield Dreams by Ralph Fletcher and I feel like I’m floating. What a fantastic book. I read it quickly, within a couple of nights curled up in bed and this morning while eating my…
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At the launch of every new writing unit, I feel a wave of anticipation that teeters dangerously between excitement and overwhelm. Excitement because it’s a new genre, and there are so many great tools and resources, and I have some new systems I want to put in place, and this time I swear I’ll be…
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As I finish grading the last of the end-of-unit narrative on-demands, I’m smiling. Aside from the evident creativity, it’s so clear to me that these writers grew a ton, especially the ones who took the mini-lesson strategies to heart and/or who I was able to meet with often throughout the unit. Of course, on-demand data…
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My weekly reflection got postponed a bit from our days off for Hurricane Ian. It didn’t end up hitting Miami too badly (thankfully), so it mostly gave us teachers and the students a mini vacation to rest and recuperate. Which was much needed, especially as I was nursing a cold at the time. So sessions…
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It’s Saturday and I’ve just finished planning the lessons for the second week of our realistic fiction unit and creating some tools to help my writers. Mini-Lesson Breakdown This is the week where I’m going to attempt to really tackle each of my goals in mini-lessons: Session 5 – Plotting with a Story Arc (I’ll…
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It’s September and we’re about to head into the 5th week of school. Routines are falling into place, the students are beginning to feel more comfortable with one another and with us teachers, and the amount of work we have to do goes back and forth between feeling manageable and never-ending, all at the same…
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This morning we held our essay writing celebration. I gifted students their typed final drafts in plastic report covers, their letters to the reader pasted on patterned cardstock. They set up their writing displays, encircling their essays with all the work that went into them: the ideas in their notebooks, their plans, their revised (and…
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In October 2020, Natalie and I presented at Bank Street’s Language Series. The theme that year was Anti-Racist Language Teaching. Our workshop, “Taking an Anti-Racist Stance as a Teacher-Researcher” focused on the question: What stories need to be told in the community where I teach and how will I center them? Natalie and I are…
