The Sunrise Story

Thank you to Stacey, Betsy, Dana, Tara, Beth, Anna, Kathleen & Deb for this amazing platform to write and share writing! What a wonderful community you've created! I'm honored to be part of it. Join us at Two Writing Teachers . One reason I love social media is the inspiration that's shared. A couple of days ago I was scrolling through Instagram when I saw something interesting posted by @Kevinmenglish. I was immediately intrigued. My mind started working and wondering how my students could make their own RIGHTS. Today we discussed the rights we have as Americans...freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the right to vote. Then I asked them, "What rights do you have as readers?" Lists began in notebooks. Conversations started. We shared our best rights... Our next step is to revise our list and make a final list of ten rights we have as readers. The conversations that happened about reading and what readers need were powerful and mea...

Today is my 24th slice for the  March Slice of Life Challenge on Two Writing Teachers . I love reading aloud to my sixth graders! My friend Julieanne blogged last week about picture book read alouds in her classroom...and those posts inspired this one... I read aloud novels. I read picture books...short stories...poems...articles...even excerpts of novels to my classes. Read alouds have always been an integral & necessary part of reading workshop. I wanted to read aloud more for my writers during writing workshop. Now, I often read books and stories and poems in writing workshop as mentor texts, but I was looking for a different kind of read aloud...one that spoke to my students as authors. Author to author.  We began independent writing projects in class. The students are creating all different pieces of writing...some are writing fantasy novels or realistic fiction novels, some are writing poetry, some are creating a picture book. As we began these projects,...