Courage Doesn't Always Roar: A Teacher's Quest to Be Better Each Day

He hopped down the sidewalk on one foot, his joy and excitement bubbling over with each step. Just across the street we walked, but like another world- kindergarten. The first orientation for parents and students. How strange it was to be on the other side of it now- for ten years, I taught kindergarten and stood at orientations, smiling reassuringly about this milestone. Sitting in the cafeteria and listening to the principal and school specialists talk about kindergarten, I tried to hear what wasn't being said as much as what was. Tears fell as the psychologist read this poem . Letting go is not as easy as I made it sound when I gave the pep talk to parents.  There was a packet and many, many papers. There was a book (I f You Give a Dog a Donut ) which was lovely, I thought. There was a list of sight words and a conversation about early literacy profiles and being picked up for reading if you  score low. Worry filled my heart, because my sensitive, bright boy is so very ...

Sunday night, I participated in the #Read4Fun chat on Twitter. The topic was poetry, and the chat brought to mind some of my favorite poems. A long-standing favorite of mine is " A Valentine for Ernest Mann" where Naomi Shihab Nye writes, "Poems hide."  Today, I found a poem hidden in the oversized, dusty Nemo that has been sitting atop the mailbox in my classroom. Nemo originally came from the board walk of the Jersey Shore, where I surprisingly won him in a game in the summer of 2004. Nemo lived in my kindergarten classroom for a long time. Now he lives in 3rd grade and he's part of the background, largely ignored. My third graders and I were writing poems today, beginning with an image first. I brought in some objects from home and invited them to look out our classroom window, too, for ideas. At first, the room was chatty and I worried they weren't focusing, but soon they all found spots and there was a quiet hum of kids really working. I sat...

Two Saturday mornings ago, I received an email from a parent in my class. My student had been inspired by a school assembly called "Bash the Trash", where musicians used recyclable materials to make musical instruments. The buzz from many of the teachers, including myself, was that the assembly was a little quirky and not our favorite. Some of us felt ourselves being lulled to sleep as the recyclable instruments were played. But you just never know what is going to resonate with a student and this assembly really did for one boy in my class.  With his dad's help, he created musical instruments out of soda and water bottles and cans taped together. He wanted to make a video of himself playing his instruments and his dad even joined him in the concert. Then, he wanted his dad to send ME the video. It was adorable, but also made me stop and think about the nature of learning in today's world: We need to give kids lots of different experiences, including ones that ...

I tweet. I vox. I even snapchat now. But I haven't really embraced podcasts until the last couple of weeks. After reading a great post by Kimberley Moran about the podcast her students created, I knew I needed to listen more to podcasts. I couldn't really envision a way for my students to create their own podcasts or even why they should do that until I saw the value myself. Now I can say I am a podcast lover! One of the podcasts I started listening to was Penny Kittle's Book Love Foundation Podcast Teacher Learning Series . Today I listened to a podcast about teachers as leaders. During the conversation, a teacher shared how being part of a local site of the National Writing Project gave her confidence with her writing and support as she learned strategies to teach writing. Penny spoke about the model of teachers sharing with each other as being so powerful and how the Writing Project remains the most favored professional development.  This was music to my Writing ...

Back on March 1 , I wrote about the bridge we were stepping on as we crossed from March to April in this month of daily writing. Today, on the downhill, we now easily trot the last steps to the other side, the place we've been journeying to all this month, the bridge itself full of discoveries and adventures.  I found myself saying, "I haven't been reading much because of the blogging challenge this month", thinking about all the novels, chapter books, and picture books still on my TBR list. But, I caught myself after saying this, realizing I've been reading so much: so many moving, funny, surprising, brave slices. The reading and the writing have changed me- perhaps invisible to most, but the stories, poems, and posts I've read and written have changed me for good. (Nod to "Wicked.") So, Slicers, this is my poem, celebrating us. We did it. A badge of honor that always belongs to us! Here's To Us Here's to us. Here's to the...

Dear Friend Having a Baby, It filled my heart with happiness when you slid the sonogram picture across the diner table, your way of sharing the amazing news with me. I know this baby was a dream that wasn't easy to come by, as my first baby was  also "the dream that I'd been chasing" to quote Martina McBride. When you want a baby of your own, it is a wanting like no other. It is a deep yearning and a worried question mark about what the future will bring. For me, getting the news that I would be a mom came from a doctor's office voicemail on my cell phone, which I listened to, disbelieving, in the closet in my kindergarten classroom. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.  Being pregnant is a unique season in your life. For me, I eagerly counted the weeks, noted how the baby changed from a poppyseed to a blueberry to an orange to eventually a melon. I read all the books. I kept the pregnancy journal. I eagerly anticipated doctor's appoint...

"I think you should run for President of the Student Government," he told me, his warm brown eyes holding mine.  Sophomore year in college, E. was my crush. I looked for his car whenever I drove onto campus, and when I saw it parked in the familiar spot, my heart would beat faster knowing he was around and I might bump into him. Molloy was totally a commuter college at the time, but E. worked on campus in the fitness center and often parked near it. He was older than me, although I didn't exactly know how much older. He was a social work major and had that kind, caring heart that goes along with that job. My crush was totally unrequited. But, here he sat across from me, imploring me to run for President of the MSG. I was sophomore class co-president and the current Vice President was slated to run, unopposed, for President, which was usually how elections worked at Molloy. No one ran against anyone else. People floated into positions of power and promptly did.. not ...

On Easter morning, Alex sits across the kitchen table Dark lashes framing  big blue eyes, Expressive as he explains  a meteor killed the dinosaurs, even the babies who just hatched. I say, "No one knows for sure" "Maybe it happened fast" Don't want to think of eggs hatching into a world where they were doomed from the very start. It's Easter and we  don't go to church. The kids won't sit they are too little, but maybe we should, because Easter is more  than chocolate rabbits and toys. Maybe church can help me Explain to Alex The unexplainable. In a world of meteors and doomed baby dinosaurs and bombs exploding  in every corner of the world and guns killing first graders and their teachers, We need to believe that there is so much more than what we see. Easter reminds us The saddest part  Of the story  Is never really The end.

Thank you to Margaret Simon for another week of #DigiLit Sunday. Visit Margaret's site to link up your post this week on TRUST.  When I taught kindergarten, some of my colleagues always told the students what topic to write about. The whole class would be writing about animals today, or the weather. They felt that students would not know how to pick an idea and it was better to have an idea ready for them.  I never assigned topics. We would brainstorm how to think of your own idea for writing, with charts made mostly of pictures for them to reference if they got stuck. Because I trusted my 5 year old writers had ideas and believed they could pick a topic, they always did. We had struggles in writing workshop, for sure, but one of the struggles was never picking a topic. They could always do it.  Trust goes hand-in-hand with risk-taking and security. You have to feel secure that if you fall, you will have a soft place to land. When you know that failing won...

My first memory of shame about my weight was sitting on the white-tissue paper covered table in the pediatrician's office at a well exam. Could I have been 6? The nurse and my mother were having a conversation in the hallway and my older sister took it upon herself to let me know the nurse was telling Mom I weighed too much. I remember the feeling of shame and embarrassment. I think I cried. It wouldn't be the last time tears where shed over my weight.  I was always chubby, from the start, aside from my very average, slightly small birth weight of 6 pounds. Family legend has it that I ate my pastina with two hands. My second birthday reveals me in a a bathing suit, extra flesh squeezing out the sides, wearing a crown and holding a fork. I was a kid who enjoyed, thoroughly, food and loved eating plain slice of American cheese and dishes of my Grandma's pasta. I was also a sedentary kid, who loved sitting with my toys, reading books, coloring and disliked sports and ou...