Meme: Passion Quilt

Monica, from Educating Alice, tagged us for the Passion Quilt Meme.

Here are the rules:

• Think about what you are passionate about teaching your students.
• Post a picture from a source like FlickrCC or Flickr Creative Commons or make/take your own that captures what YOU are most passionate about for kids to learn about…and give your picture a short title.
• Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt” and link back to this blog entry.
• Include links to 5 folks in your professional learning network or whom you follow on Twitter/Pownce

For us, just like for Monica and Doug, at Borderland, it's a struggle to untangle our passion from the passions of our students, and on top of that, to find a photo that represents it all.

The best we can come up with is this one. In a Choice Literacy article, Franki wrote about creating Revision Toolbags for her students -- big ziplocks filled with all the fun tools for revision that she uses when she writes: highlighters, sticky notes of all sizes, scissors and tape, gel pens with colored ink, staplers and staple removers. Knowing that our children have only been writers for a couple of years, really, and that they are still children, after all, her idea was to let children play with revision, let them experiment with revision and all the tools writers might use. I read the article and it made such good sense that I stopped at Staples after school that very day and spend a wad on revision tools. And sure enough, when I introduced the revision toolbags, revision's popularity soared. Suddenly, revision was fun.

So here's a picture that shows Franki's idea and the way one of my students put her idea into action. It's a picture that exemplifies the ways we share professionally and "borrow" each other's ideas either flat out or with a new spin. It shows how our students try on our passions (reading and writing) and make them their own.


We'll tag Karen and Bill at Literate Lives, Katie at Creative Literacy, Megan at Read, Read, Read, and Meredith at Learning Together. We know that one of you is in Chile (last we heard) and two of you are up to your ears with report cards. Do this when you get around to it. Can't wait to see what you come up with! (I did a blog search of Meme: Passion Quilt and there are hundreds of entries. It would make interesting reading, but alas, report cards are calling my name, too. Actually, I need to finish grading...sigh...NOT my passion!)