A Year of Reading

  image via Unsplash How to Be a Poet by Wendell Berry (to remind myself) i     Make a place to sit down.    Sit down. Be quiet.    You must...

Over the past several weeks, I have found myself doing a lot of reflection trying to get this online teaching right.  I keep meaning t...

**Mary Lee, Franki and Julie have been talking and thinking about choice during this time of Online/Pandemic Learning.  We decided to share...

I found this great article that reminded me about the power of short writing . SHORT writing seemed like just the thing for this past SHORT...

Nothing Gold after Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost Nature's first green is gold or, in the case of that bush with its s...

You've heard about it, you've marked it "To Read" in GoodReads, maybe you've even ordered it and have it on your st...

There's that one thing that you did that one year and it was magical, so you decided you would do that same thing every year in exa...

Also an Octopus by Maggie Tokuda-Hall illustrated by Benji Davies Candlewick Press, 2016 "Every story starts the same...

My fifth graders did lots and lots of work on their narratives of "imagined experiences or events" in their writer's notebo...

I Am a Story by Dan Yaccarino HarperCollins, 2016 review copy provided by the publisher We've been looking closely at picture b...

Gratitude List Praise be this morning for waking early, tree crickets buzzing, the humid air, the puffy clouds lined with pink firs...

Creative Nonfiction is working on a project to recognize the work that teachers do. They are hosting an essay contest -- "We'r...

Better late than never, right? #cyberPD nearly passed me by this summer, but in the spirit of Tuesday's Big Gulp-O-Reading , I rea...

I just came back from a Choice Literacy Writing Retreat. I am always amazed at the whole idea of a retreat. I never come back feeling like ...

For all those classrooms where students are working hard on their informational writing: may your students' work blow you out of the wa...

Making Nonfiction From Scratch by Ralph Fletcher Stenhouse, available late November 2015 When I got the  Stenhouse Publishers  Newsl...

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Nic McPhee PARCHED It's not that the well of creativity has run dry it's that those lov...

Flickr Creative Commons Photo by see like click The Writer's Wish Come, words. Pour down like rain in the night, with or with...

We are finishing up a unit of study on nonfiction writing.  In the midst of our study, it became clear that my students needed help ...

As many of you know, I received a copy of Ralph Fletchers book,  GUY-WRITE:  WHAT EVERY GUY WRITER NEEDS TO KNOW a little bit early. If ...