This blog has been on hiatus for a few months but I’m feeling inspiration strike again. My new goal is to create 1 – 2 posts each month, in order to keep my life reasonable, my new plan is to keep posts short and sweet. I think the reason for the break was the fact […]
Last Saturday I joined two car loads of librarians and English teachers for a drive down to Santa Monica for Yallwest 2019. Yallwest, an epic festival celebrating young adult and middle grade books, is a joyful event. It’s more than a book festival because it is all about young teen and tween fans in attendance. […]
What I Was Thinking Pretty much anyone who has been teaching a long time has figured out that traditional grading systems don’t work. Last spring, during my nineteenth year teaching 7th and 8th grade English, I decided to do something about it. Without getting too deep into my disillusionment with traditional letter grades, I’ll just […]
Have I mentioned I’m new to this library business? Among the many new skills I’m learning is the art of the booktalk. That’s the one-word-on-purpose booktalk I heard about in library school. There is one major goal for booktalks: Get students to check out books and read them! Easy, right? Well, sometimes it works and […]
First of all, I learned way more than five things at the 2019 California School Library Association Conference, but I don’t have a ton of time to write, so…five it is. Who does not love a good conference? There’s something about the feeling of collegiality and enthusiasm you get from being around people who are […]
What I’m Thinking About: Students need to do research. They need a way to report the facts they’ve learned. Posters are a time honored way for students to show what they’ve learned with a little bit of artistic panache. That said, how many poster projects does the typical junior high student complete in a year? […]
Well, I start by collaborating with my inspiring colleagues. There is nothing like starting a new job to remind you how much we need to support each other as educators. Thank you, @msawoods! Before school started, my colleague Amy Woods and I made a seventh grade orientation lesson involving QR codes. Instead of talking at […]
