1000th Post: The Past and Future of A Year of Reading

1000 posts ago, this blog was created for a conversation between two people. It was about our reading journeys as we attempted to have read the Newbery. We didn't have a blogroll back then because we barely knew how to link.

After about six months, we joined the larger Kidlitosphere conversation and our blogroll started to grow.

When stories about how we use books in our classrooms started to seep into our blogging, we began to read and be read by teacher and librarian blogs. Our blogroll grew and the conversation about books and reading included a wider audience.

We found that we could listen in on lots of Mock Newbery and Caldecott Conversations including those run by past Newbery Committee members.

As we look to the future of our blog and our teaching, we are beginning to explore ways to expand our understanding of literacy. We are thinking about what it means to be literate in the 21st century and how to expand our thinking to include things beyond books in our own and our students' reading lives. We are (kind of) learning to Twitter. Our blogroll will continue to grow and we will do our best to take part in conversations where we sometimes only understand 50% of the words! We love the fact that people come together in ways they couldn't before blogging. We've learned so much from people who we weren't able to learn from before (librarians, authors, journal editors, etc.)

We've made so many new friends over the two years. We have started to get together with old and new blogger friends in Columbus to chat about books and to shop for new books!

We really had no idea what we were doing when we started this blog (Franki, even less than Mary Lee). But after 1000 posts, we are still loving it and can't wait to see what we learn next!