The Sunrise Story

Last night there was a thunderstorm. It was loud. It was bright. The rain was pouring from the sky. Everything stopped. I sat in bed with all of the blinds opened and watched the flashing lightning paint the sky over and over and over again. The thunder boomed and my poor Bella ran under the bed. The rain poured and poured and poured.  I thought about how cleansing a storm can be. While it's happening, it can be scary...just ask my dog...but after it's over, I wake up and feel renewed. Maybe we need to storm sometimes too. Let it all out and see what's left and how it feels. I storm...on the pages my notebook. When I'm frustrated or worried or ecstatic, I open the pages and let it all out. The emotions paint the pages of my notebook...it's all left there. And after, I feel renewed. I breathe more deeply, think more clearly, and feel better. Without thunderstorms, what would spring be? Without writing, who would I be?  I have always been deeply connected to th...

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 . Be. Present. Now. There's too much. Life is too fast. It's hard to catch my breath. I'm in the middle of two planning days between first and second quarter. I love the end and the beginning. It's time to reflect. Readjust. Renew...usually...but the words, "too much" keep floating around in my head as I worry about fitting it all in. My attention is distracted with new initiatives and techniques. I'm overwhelmed and failing at mindfulness. This thought shifted my thinking to mindfulness. Am I in the moment? No. I worry and plan and check emails...what can I do? The first thing I did was to stop checking emails multiple times a day. In the past, I would check my work email ten or more times a day! My no...

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 . Today we took our writing notebooks out to write a sentence. Just a sentence.  What is your sentence? I stumbled upon this amazing video from Daniel Pink's book, Drive.  I asked my sixth graders this question. We decided that we'd like to see some examples, so I shared a couple of other videos with mentors of this sentence.  We analyzed their sentences. We noticed that the sentences were written in the third person. We noticed that the sentences were written as if these things had already happened. We got lost in their words.  It's time to write our own. We spent five minutes writing and rewriting our sentence. We added details. We rearranged words. We tried out new ideas. We shared. After a few students share...

Thank you to Ruth Ayres for the opportunity to focus on celebrations every week! September 19 will mark our 100th celebration! Please join us! I love September. September means new beginnings and fresh starts. It reminds me of the new year in January. As teachers, we get this additional opportunity for a new year and I love it!  I celebrate enthusiastic and sweet sixth graders and their parents. This week school started. We are getting to know each other. We are reading and writing a lot! Thursday was Back to School Night and I met lots of kind and supportive parents. I am blessed to work in such a wonderful school! I celebrate my OLW of the year, FLY!  This word has taken me places I didn't expect. I began writing a book this summer. It's about notebooks and how I keep them and how I use them with my students. Hoping this has an audience when I'm done. I'm hoping to get a publisher and get it published, but the act of writing it is amazing and powe...

Thank you to Ruth Ayres for the opportunity to focus on celebrations every week! September 19 will mark our 100th celebration! Please join us! I'm writing this blog post on my phone because I'm in Massachusetts this weekend celebrating my cousin's wedding. I'm attending an "I Do BBQ" with family and friends.  Spending the weekend before school begins four hundred miles away was stressing me out, but now that I'm here...it's perfect! Yesterday I took my sister and niece and nephew for ice cream. We played games and built Legos!  We played in my notebook when we were out at dinner. Last night, I got to be the one to read bedtime stories!  Today, a morning with just me and the kids to some fun places. I love getting to spend time together and spoil them! The BBQ is this afternoon. Lots of family to visit and relax and have fun! I celebrate my wonderful, loving, beautiful, crazy family today! 

Thank you to Ruth Ayres for the opportunity to focus on celebrations every week! September 19 will mark our 100th celebration! Please join us! Today I am celebrating small moments that make up my life! This upcoming week is a week of transition...from summer back to work...so I want to focus on the small moments that bring joy. Notebook writing! I have made a commitment to post a notebook page online everyday.  I want to make my writing open and model my life as a writer for my students. Join me!! I'm using the hashtag #sharingournotebooks right now. I may use another one...haven't decided yet. On the days when my writing is private and I don't want the world to see, I'll Waterlogue it.  I celebrate my notebook writing! I celebrate my Saturday morning writing group. Leigh Anne Eck and Jennifer Laffin and I meet Saturday mornings (via Google Hangout.) I love that we picked mornings because we aren't night people! We share struggles and ...

Thank you to  Ruth Ayres  for the opportunity to focus on celebrations every week! Today I want to celebrate reflection. I write. Today I write for many reasons. I've been thinking about why I started writing. My five year old niece, Jillian, just visited me for a few days and I shared my notebook with her. I asked her to write in it and draw a picture in it. She loved that and wanted a notebook of her own. We decorated it and wrote in it. I don't know if she will ever write in it again, but it reminded me of when I was little. I wondered when I decided to write. In my first notebooks, it's a diary...an account of my days, with very little commentary on that. It's like I wanted to remember. As I continued to write through my teen years, the writing got more creative...I included poems I wrote...and very dramatic, after all, I was a teenager. I feel like it was around this time when I started to realize that writing helped me figure out what I was feeling....

Thank you  Ruth  for inspiring me to always look for the celebrations in life!  Join us and share your celebrations! It's been a long week. How does time work? Weeks with three-day weekends seem to always feel longer. Can anyone explain that to me? In this long week, I've been enjoying working with students. We've begun our process of reflecting on ourselves and our writing! That's always fun. In this process, I collected my notebooks from this year, so I could reflect along with them and discovered that I couldn't find a notebook (or maybe 2 notebooks...turns out it was only 1 notebook and I need to update my count). What startled me is that I couldn't even visualize what this notebook looked like! I celebrate my students! They were able to give me details that they remembered, "It was a big notebook." "I think it was white." "The one from the beginning of the year had spirals." "It said YOU MATTER on the title page....

Today is my 25th slice for the  March Slice of Life Challenge on Two Writing Teachers . I have long believed that writing is therapy. It works for me. I've seen it work for students. Today I got tagged in a Facebook post by my friend, Heather... Our local shelter for women and children is collecting journals for kids and teens. They use the journals as part of their therapy. I am so excited to collect unused journals of mine to donate. I put out a call on social media hoping to collect more. Students and teachers are responding! I can't wait to collect these precious journals and donate them to this worthy cause. Writing as therapy...YES. Holly asked how others can donate. The organization is called  Loudoun Abused Women's Shelter . The address is 105 East Main Street, Leesburg, VA 20176.  Thank you!

This is one of my favorite posts of the week! It gives me the chance to look back on the week and celebrate all of the good! Thank you to Ruth for this opportunity. Please join us at her blog ! Monday: I celebrate a day off. It was relaxing and quiet. I enjoyed a yummy cup of coffee while I watched one of my all time favorite movies, Annie!  Tuesday: I celebrate student bloggers. Students started blogging today! This is one of my favorite days of the year! I love watching them figure out the blog's dashboard and how to maneuver around. I love reading their posts and comments. It's such a fun and exciting time in our class! (They will soon be ready for the world to read!)  Wednesday: I celebrate my church family. Wednesday nights I attend a class at church. Life is so busy, I almost didn't sign up, but this hour is one of the best of the week. The leader of the class was celebrating his 81st birthday...so I brought cookies & brownies. We all indulged...