Fifty and Fabulous ~ SOLS 29

The wise words of our 16th president are timeless.

    

    Today I am thankful for my dear friends at school,

    for the surprise birthday greeting, 

    for Friday breakfast treats on a Thursday

    to celebrate me! 

    For the love of friends, I so am very thankful.

    Today I am thankful for family,

    for memories I hold deep in my heart,

    for the memories that we continue to make together,

    for the memories that will come later,

    for every second we spend together

    for the life, the love, and the laughter

    Today I am blessed and thankful. 

   

    Today I am thankful for the love and blessings

    of the people in my life! 

This was a birthday of pampering. I feel very spoiled. They really shouldn’t have fussed like that, but they made my day nonetheless!  

There is always a certain peace in being what one is, in being that completely.
Ugo Betti 

Looking for Inspiration ~ SOLS 28

Poems and all writing are hiding in the most ordinary and familiar places – if we can only change our way of looking at them.

~ Georgia Heard from Writing Toward Home

10 Places to Find a Poem

Good morning greeting

A jumbled junk drawer

Chirping chickadees perched in the pines

Words from wise wee ones

Playfulness on the playground

Tick tock in the quiet of night

Stitched in a quilt

Jingles of a beloved charm bracelet

Voices chanting in unison

Tucked in with a teddy bear

I am perched on the couch watching a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band concert, pondering my list places where poems might be hiding. This particular show was performed at Madison Square Garden when Clarence was still alive. It’s three and a half hours of music madness. Bruce leaping on the piano for the start of Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out!

I have started to build a collection of concerts recorded from the Palladia channel. This is one I will never get sick of watching. I have had the opportunity twice to see live Springsteen concerts and hope there are more in my future. Nothing really compares to the energy and passion that Bruce and the band pour into their performances. The crowd is an eclectic mix of equally energetic and passionate swaying-singing-along fans of all ages. "Whoa, whoa, whoa..." Pure poetry!

Why I Write ~ SOLS 27

    Tonight I am thinking about all the reasons that I write. I really started and continue to wrestle with words as a result of my love of books. I love to infect young readers and writers with this passion. I write to dive deeper into the depths of words and the wonderful ways that authors weave them together to tell a story. As a teacher, I write quite simply to be a better writing teacher.

I write

To remember

For I will forget

Big moments,

I write to savor

Small moments

Moments that matter now

Moments that will matter later

I write

To understand

To find my way

To heal

I write

To weave

My teaching together

To celebrate

I write to grow

To improve

To be a better person

To walk in their shoes

      

       

Mentors and Poetry ~ SOLS 26

       In less than a week we will bid farewell to March and the write-everyday challenge. It will be time to spring into National Poetry Month. April is a busy school month shortened by our Spring Break week and intensified by testing that begins a couple days after our return to school. It’s the perfect time for some extra perusal of poetry. Even though poetry is not an April houseguest, I like to pamper and fuss over it a bit more during April.

       Since I am pondering some plans for poetry, there are some ideas I would like to try on my own first. I have been thinking about mentor texts that are especially meaningful to me. While I appreciate all that I have learned from my professional reading about excellent mentor texts, I would like to find my own ways to use some of my favorite books and authors. I have heaps of children’s literature that I am connected to already, so I am thinking this may be a project to dabble in now with the bulk of my research coming later. When I can haul piles of picture books  home for the summer, when I have time to linger, to read and reread for potential writing mentors. 

       For now I have a couple in mind. A while back our reading teacher gave us a classroom set of the Imagine books written by Sarah L Thomson with paintings by Rob Gonsalves. These beautiful, thought-provoking picture books are a wonderful gift to be read, reread, and savored.

Tonight I am spending some time with Imagine a Day, imagining the possibilities. Each page starts with imagine a day…followed by a thought written in a poetic, dreamy, yet wise voice. One of my favorites from the book is:

Imagine a day…

when your sand castle

can withstand

even the highest waves.

       One of my attempts:

Imagine a day…

…when the mountains are

a challenge to embrace

with confidence

knowing that life does not

have to be a race.

       Not terribly creative. Perhaps this will be my mantra to greet the angst of stressful days. Surely we can come up with other variations and inspiration from these lovely books. Right now I should do more than imagine what a good night’s sleep would be like. Sweet dreams.

SOLS 25 ~ Pondering Possibilities

       I am so immersed in getting ready for the week ahead, I almost forgot about my SOLS. While perusing through some materials to assist with writing mini-lessons I was reminded. It dawned on me that it was getting late, so I quick needed to decide on a focus for tonight’s post.

The following quote and accompanying text from Day by Day written by Ruth Ayres & Stacey Shubitz are speaking to me tonight:

Writers don’t need to be given formulas; they need to be shown possibilities.

I am thankful for the March writing challenge and the balance that it maintains for my students and I. Like so many classrooms across the country, we are weaving in some ELA and Math test preparation. While we are determined not to teach to the test, we are doing some work in the testing genre.

One of our anchor charts is the “Answer Sandwich” recipe, the formula for a well-written paragraph responding to a prompt. Like so many recipes, there are variations and different names, but the staples are present in each adaptation: topic sentence, supporting details, & conclusion. Be sure to include evidence from the text in your supporting details! You can’t go wrong with these traditional steps. How about the creative cook that likes to kick it up a notch and incorporate his or her own flavor? Sure the writers who have a distinctive voice or stellar word choice will spice up their offerings, but really this is a tried and true formula. Perhaps it’s the tollhouse cookie of writing: pretty standard, can’t go wrong with this recipe. Most cooks have the ingredients on hand for these “go-to” recipes.

As I mentioned, I am thankful that we are participating in the March challenge with the Two Writing Teachers. Our slice of life stories allow us to slow down, to live like writers, to tweak the recipes, or maybe even set aside the cookbook.