Writing With Abandon
Reflections and ramblings about life as an educator, writer, reader, knitter, and over-thinker. Trying to do the writing only I can do.
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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: “How’s it going?” One thing I’m proud of myself…
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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…
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I’ve been trying to write this post about the importance of thought partners for the past week and a half, but I keep coming up against a wall. “Blog!” kept staring at me on my to-do list, and I kept pushing it to the next day, and the next. It was the first week back…
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Anyone who knows me knows that I am very organized. (Yes, I do tend to get cluttered. I’m working on it.) I especially value organization when planning Project Based Learning units, which, without some structure, can just seem like a bunch of floating ideas. My three favorite tools for planning PBL units are curriculum calendars,…
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This October, I decided to get back into rollerblading. Perhaps “get back into” is a generous statement, seeing as aside from the occasional outing as a child and one semester of rollerblading P.E. my junior year in high school, I was never really “into” rollerblading to begin with. But when I moved to Miami this…
Writing With Abandon 