A collection of pieces I’ve read recently that really hit me…
I loved using wordless picture books in first grade and kindergarten but haven’t figured out how to do it as well in third grade. Mary Lee Hahn shared some beautiful ones here and her process with students to use them as read alouds. I’m looking forward to giving this a try.
As Kevin Hodgson writes daily (something that impresses the heck out of me) it is not surprising that I regularly have something of his open in a tab, waiting to be shared. This one is specifically about the challenges of reading online and what we need to do to support students in this.
While difficulties with online reading may have to do with the lay-out of the pages (texts are first displayed as full page and then reduced to a scrollable text box when paired with questions), I am realizing that I have not done enough to explicitly teach how to read for content and information on a screen.
Given the amount of reading I do online and I think my students will do in the future, this is something I need to be thinking carefully about.
As my husband is a college professor we run in similar and yet different circles. It always fascinates me when our worlds collide, as they did in this piece from Bud Hunt. He is writing about a day spent with two of my husband’s colleagues, Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris. That’s not why the piece is worth your time, however. Bud writes about empathy and agency and working through the hard and scary parts.
Sean opened the day with a challenge, a provocation of a sort, to help us remember to be imaginative and awake in how we approach the systems we work in and help to shape.
I love Kate Messner’s books and am grateful to her for all she does to support teachers. Her years in the classroom show up through all of her work. Right now she’s writing a series of blog posts, this is the most recent, about the process of writing her newest book. The book intrigues me for so many reasons and I can’t wait for my copy to arrive soon. I’m hoping it will be one of our read alouds next year, for all it will offer students as readers and as writers. These blog posts will also be wonderful teaching tools to help students better understand the writing process and all its possibilities.
Finally, I love Julia Torres’s writing. Just love it. I have so many mixed emotions about the end of each school year and Julia has helped me clarify some of them in this piece. She writes about how endings, like the end of a school year, are also beginnings.
But what if, rather than avoiding, fearing, or dreading endings, we learned to see them another way? What if we saw endings as beginnings, as the chance to have a fresh start, to begin anew stronger, bolder, better–with all that brought our last conversation, adventure, relationship, situation, to it’s finish. It’s never easy to say goodbye to someone if a part of us fears we will never see them again, but what if we knew that separation is an illusion, that everyone we’ve ever loved is just a thought away at any time?
See what I mean? Beautiful.
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