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Thanks for visiting!

After last year's Slice of Life Challenge (SOLC), I moved over to Wordpress. I'm now posting occasionally about my own learning, both personal and professional, at The Loyal Heretic.  It's active right now because I've committed to the SOLC again.

I've also reserved space on WordPress to write about middle-grade books: In Our Classroom Library, though I haven't yet found the time to get more than one post written, I anticipate that will be more active in eleven weeks when summer rolls around.

For now, I hope you'll catch up with me at The Loyal Heretic.

Slice of Life Tuesday: April 8th Is My Favorite Holiday

April 8th is my favorite holidays and as far as I know, we’re the only ones who celebrate it. April 8th is the day our tree swallows return to their nest box in the spring. I look forward to this holiday more than any other because it requires nothing of me except to witness an annual miracle.

We--my husband and I--look forward to it all year, as eager anticipation mingles with doubt. How can it be that these tiny acrobatic birds arrive on our porch exactly, precisely, on April 8th every year ready to nest?! Seven-tenths of an ounce, they fly thousands of miles through whatever mother nature throws at them to arrive here precisely at this moment. This exact point in the earth’s rotation around the sun, with the planet angled just so. How? And before we put up this nest box four years ago, where did they nest then? 

We had tree swallows on our previous porch, three miles away. We left that nest box, as we had to move before the chicks fledged. We had multiple offers on our house, not despite the fact that buyers had to dodge miniature tuxedoed missiles swooping at them as they attempted to get to the front door, but because of it. Buyers were charmed. Enchanted. Enthralled. Bewitched. They stood on the sidewalk, at a respectful distance, and watched as the  parents glided in graceful arcs, like they were attached with a tether anchored to the nest box itself. 

Although I’ve never seen them actually catch a bug, they return to the nest box dozens of times every hour with something to feed their chicks, and scientists say they only eat “bugs on the wing.” Once the chicks hatch, it is only at sunrise and sunset that one or the other sometimes vanishes for a long stretch. We imagine that they can’t resist the dusk insect bonanza at a nearby creek. 

On rainy days we worry ceaselessly. With the parents grounded, surely the chicks will starve. We have been known to leave dead bugs on the railing near the box, but the parents have never relented. The dead bugs don’t tempt them. Perhaps Colorado is the ideal place to be a tree swallow because rain seldom lasts a day before the sun is shining again. 

Each spring the bluebirds arrive several weeks before the tree swallows, and since they like the same nest boxes, we get lookie-loos. Visually-stunning, Mountain Bluebird couples check out our boxes and settle somewhere else. We don’t mind; we’re partial to tree swallows. 

Tree swallows are fierce. Battles for the nest box, likely between parent and offspring, or siblings, are loud and dizzying, as they swoop at and around each other, bob and weave, and sometimes even pounce, holding a rival down and pecking at it with a minuscule beak. They are relentlessly protective. If anything—crow, magpie, squirrel—dares to approach the nest, the parents team up to torment the aggressor. They chase it down, and aggressor transforms into the flinching victim of a fearless kamikaze. No creature comes back twice. 

My favorite author, Brian Doyle, writes of tree swallows in one of my favorite passages, in one of my favorite books, Mink River: “These things matter to me, Daniel, says the man with six days to live. They are sitting on the porch in the last light. These things matter to me, son. The way the hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass…” I hope you’ll look it up and read the rest of the passage. It’s on page 195. I am confident, Brian Doyle would have celebrated April 8th. 

Slice of Life Tuesday

I woke up crabby Monday morning. I almost chalked it up to Monday blues, but something else was off. Then it came to me: I didn’t write Sunday, and after a month of writing every day for the Slice of Life challenge, I missed it. I’ve discovered I need writing to be part of my every day.

I kept wanting to write Sunday, but I didn’t take the time. Without the SOL Challenge, writing got bumped way down the priority list. This is one of those truisms that I need many opportunities to understand: make a date with yourself...create a routine...carve out time for what matters to you. I don’t want to leave writing to chance any more.

But that wasn’t all. I also realized that I missed the Slice of Life community--the kindness and generosity, reading the amazing writing every day. And it wasn’t just what SOL added to my life that made things better, but what taking time for the Slice of Life subtracted that improved my quality of life. During SOL I ignored Facebook completely and barely missed it. I wasn’t listening to the world news multiple times a day and definitely didn’t miss that. Sadly, SOL also bit a chunk out of my reading time, but that is something I can learn to manage.

So thanks. Thanks for being a part of this wonderful community, and thanks for taking time to read this post. Tuesday is already an improvement over Monday!

#SOL18 3-31-18 How Do You Inspire Quality and Quantity in Student Blogging?

Kelly Gallagher says, “The volume of writing is the key ingredient. If I provide good modeling, but my kids do not write much, they will not grow. If I confer with them, but they do not write much, my students will not grow. If I provide a lot of choice, but they do not write much, my students will not grow. Modeling, conferring, and choice are critical to growth, but if my students are not writing a lot, these factors become irrelevant.” “Moving Beyond the 4 x 4 Classroom,” blog post, July 15, 2015

Each time I hear Kelly Gallagher say these words, it imprints a little more on my consciousness. Each time I think, Okay, how can I make this happen? And I shift a little more in that direction.

This year one of the ways I was determined to increase the volume of my students’ writing was through better utilizing the KidBlog subscription I’ve maintained for several years. Every previous year I have consulted the blogs of teachers who I know implement blogging well. I’ve shared a variety of mini lessons on finding blogging topics, commenting, etc. Then we’ve blogged occasionally throughout the year. This year I was determined to make blogging a more regular part of our writing workshop and to increase the volume of our writing in the process.

To accomplish this goal I set up a routine. Routine helps hold me accountable, and of course, a predictable routine also helps students develop a writing habit. While a few students write more blog posts than required, I asked everyone to post at least one blog per week. Students also know to expect that one week I assign a structure, genre, or topic, and the next week is student choice. We keep a shared list of ideas for the free-choice weeks.

In addition to increasing quantity, I’ve also been looking for ways to increase the quality of student blogs. Mini-lessons, creating charts and rubrics, modeling, sharing student blogs as exemplars—none of these were cutting it. Even expanding our audience through classroom connections didn’t seem to inspire some. As long as there was no teacher filter, some students were still using the blog to search for and post cool pictures—meme-ing without the actual clever caption. This didn’t meet either the quality or the quantity goal. So I put a couple of things in place, and while I’m not entirely comfortable with either, they have increased both the quantity and quality of our blogging.

First, I’ve set up each week’s assigned blog as a Google Classroom assignment, so that a new document is created for each student, automatically shared between myself and the student, and copied into my Drive in a folder called “Classroom.” My students write the blog post on the Google doc. After they click “turn in,“ I give feedback. My feedback consists of response to content, observations about craft moves, revision suggestions, and minor editing, all written as electronic comments on the Google doc. After students consider the feedback and make any changes they agree with, they copy and paste it into a blog post.

Blog posts that students post in addition to the assigned post do not go through the Google Classroom filter.

I took one other step that I’m still questioning myself about. I grade the blogs. Not A, B, or C, but a KidBlog specific grade. KidBlog allows three levels of sharing: Classroom, Connections, and Public. The teacher controls which blogs get which designation. I told my students that blogs that blew my socks off would be posted “Public,” and I would even tweet some out through our classroom Twitter account. This inspires some because if I tag KidBlog in my tweet, they usually retweet it to a much larger audience. If it’s an amazing book review blog, I tag the author in the tweet, and lots of times the author responds to the student personally via our classroom Twitter!

The “Connections” sharing level is for blog posts that are as high-quality as the posts from the blogging classrooms that I’ve shared as models. Left unsaid, posts that don’t blow my socks off and aren’t the quality of the model classroom blogs remain at the default “Classroom” setting.

Both of my teammates have agreed to join me on the blogging journey next year, so all of our fifth-graders will be blogging. I look forward to hearing their perspectives on how we can use blogging to grow our student writers and how we can make it more engaging for our students. I also feel a lot of responsibility for helping my teammates feel successful in managing the blogging in their classrooms. My sense of responsibility comes from my belief that blogging is a good way to increase the writing volume of our students, as Kelly Gallagher suggests we must. With that in mind, I’d love to hear your feedback about how I have structured blogging this year in my classroom, and any suggestions you might have for sustaining quality student blog posts.

#SOL18 3-30-18 Maybe by Tomorrow I’ll Have Something More To Say, But For Now

You can’t get blood from a stone
My words are spent
I’m fresh out
Over it
The well has run dry
Empty
Exhausted
Finished
Kaput
Done

#SOL18 3-28-18 Book Ambassadors

The moment yesterday when I projected the list is a moment I want to remember. Silence reigned for a moment or two while students began scribbling on “Books I Want to Read” lists in reader’s notebooks, then a switch flipped and it was raucous. 

“Can I have Goldfish Boy?”

“HOLD ON! Not that fast.”

“I call Me and Marvin Gardens!”

A chorus replied, “No, way! I want it!” 

“I get Posted.”

“Ms. Bixby’s Last day, please.”

These are my Book Ambassadors “calling” titles. They want the opportunity to give book talks on new library titles to other classrooms. Some titles are new to the library, but have been in our classroom library for a while. Others are new to us. The competition was for books we already know we love, between readers who passionately want to be the one to book talk them. In the end, we had to have Rock/Paper/Scissors face-offs for a couple and pull sticks for others. 

Do you have Book Ambassadors in your school? What processes do you have in place?

#SOL18 3-28-18 POP! Update

A book by Claire Nivola called Life in the Ocean: The Story of Oceanographer Sylvia Earle caught our imagination early in the school year, making Sylvia Earle our class hero, and “You can’t care if you don’t know” our manta as we work to raise awareness among our peers and families in landlocked Colorado about ocean plastics. Students self-selected into advocacy groups, working to make a change regarding one of the four most common types of ocean plastic. We also have a “Great (School) Clean-up” crew and two student project coordinators. We spend some time at the end of every day working on POP!, our Plastic Oceans Project. 

It was a breakthrough day for POP!

Today the #foamfree group realized that the smoothies sold at lunch in the cafeteria as an add-on treat are sold in styrofoam. They decided the change they can make is to convince decision makers to change the container…and someone from #skipthestraws chimed in, “And they can stop serving them with straws while they’re at it!” 

The #skipthestraw group invited the #foamfree group to come with them when they present their data to the head of nutrition services for our school district—the decision-maker. The straws group has been collecting unused straws for three weeks in order to make a dramatic visual statement when they meet. Their goal: convince him to switch back to traditional mini milk cartons, the ones without straws.

The single-use plastic water bottle group decided to meet with the principal to ask if they can put out recycling containers in the cafeteria for the little bottles of water kids often toss in the garbage. To inspire other kids to change their habits, they’re going to post a weekly graph illustrating how many bottles are used and how many are recycled.

All of our groups started out with huge aspirations. Over time they have each independently (with little nudges from the coordinators) narrowed their focus to a single, manageable, and impactful goal. They have begun to embrace influencing the attitudes and behaviors of their peers as a worthwhile endeavor. It has been a powerful evolution to witness.

“Just as we have the power to harm the ocean, we have the power to put in place policies and modify our own behavior in ways that would be an insurance policy for the future of the sea, for the creatures there, and for us, protecting special critical areas in the ocean.” Sylvia Earle

Quote thanks to Brainy Quote.