Blessed to Teach and Read

It's not abnormal for me to only post twice a year, but this school year, I purposefully took a hiatus from this blog.  I took a step back from trying to maintain this piece of my library program along with my monthly, library newsletter, because I wasn't going to keep putting work before my family.  I took self-care seriously as we rolled into the 2021-2022 school year, and set some boundaries that I hope to maintain, should we ever get out of this pandemic.   First semester, I do have to share that I had the students make the most beautiful Dot Day display that we have ever made!  I bought and gave each student a small, round, paper plate.  The only instructions I gave were to choose a color family and be creative.  Thanks to the help of a couple of substitutes and several 5th grade helpers (Castle Apprentices), I was able to get the whole thing taped to the walls.  Several teachers begged me to leave the display up for after fall break, so I did!                             

Oh my goodness!  I found a draft of a blog post from back when I got my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.  I was so excited and relieved to receive it!  I was proudly, fully vaccinated as of mid-March.  In the original draft, started a summary run-down of all the lessons I had been doing with students, but only managed to get through kindergarten and first grade.  To the draft, I added on what I did with students for the rest of spring 2021.   I do have to say, I am so proud of all of teachers everywhere for our efforts, our love, our devotion, and our perseverance in the face of truly difficult times this school year.  We made it to the end of a year to be proud of, building relationships, teaching students, and growing as professionals! Without further ado, here are my lessons: Kindergarten:   We made puppets of Kevin Henkes' characters from Egg,  after reading the book together and learning about how he uses his typewriter, his Sharpie, and his water colors to create his illustr

As the school year started back, in-person, at the end of July, this was me a lot of the evenings when I got home: The stress was seemingly unreal and mostly from me expecting too much of myself with too little time to do it.  Since school had closed mid-March, I was not able to finish genre labeling the remaining books in the fiction section (F SNI - F ZZZ), which meant trying to do it all during preplanning.  It also meant moving 4,000 books into their new sections by myself.  I insanely, and very briefly, considered doing a full inventory of our books, since I was supposed to have done it at the end of the previous school year, but thankfully gave myself permission not to do it. 😄 Deep breaths. To accommodate some changes to the way our library would function this year, I made and shared a Bitmoji Virtual Help room with lots of different links for both virtual and face-to-face learners.  I also made a Google sign-up calendar so teachers could bring their entire class for library ch

A couple of nights ago, as I was getting ready for bed, a song from decades past popped into my head.  It has a dissonant, forlorn tune*, which somewhat matched my mood.  I think I sang it as part of high school all-state honor choir.  Its lyrics are from George Eliot's poem, "The Choir Invisible".  I found myself singing the last stanza of her poem: May I reach That purest heaven, be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony, Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty, Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world. The poet talks about what she hopes her legacy is after she dies.  Think about the many who "live again" when we remember the legacy that they leave us.  Someone famous?  A loved one?  Someone taken too soon by a disease or by violence? The start of her poem is: O may I join the choir

This January kicked off with one of the best birthdays - ever!  Lots of students gave me cards and birthday posters.  Several classes sang to me.  Had a blast!  January also brought the start of an Educational Specialist degree in Instructional Technology, completely online, through The University of West Georgia.  And now that it's UWG's spring break, I am finally making time to update my blog.  ('Cause updating my blog is much  better than doing our taxes!)  In Issues in Instructional Technology, one of the assigned texts is Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns  by Clayton M. Christensen, Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson.  It was first written in 2008, but my copy is an expanded edition from 2017.  I LOVE reading current texts, especially since technology has changed so much year to year.  We just got to chapter four, "Disruptively Deploying Computers" about how there are areas of non-consumption, where there