It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 03/29/20

 

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA! 

It's Monday! What are you Reading? is a weekly blog hop I co-host with Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers. The original IMWAYR, with an adult literature focus, was started by Sheila at Book Journeys and is now hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date.

It's a great way to share what you're reading and get recommendations. We encourage you to write your own post sharing what you’re reading, link up below, leave a comment, and support other IMWAYR bloggers by visiting and commenting on at least three of the other linked blogs.

Last Week's Adventures:

I am proud to say that I actually got some reading done this week! It's all thanks to audiobooks. If you are an educator or librarian, did you know you can get access to free audiobooks through Libro.fm. If you aren't signed up, you can go here and do that now. You'll get an email every month with new audiobooks to download to the app and you can listen at any time. 

Last week I listened to Becoming Muhammad Ali by James Patterson and Kwame Alexander, Class Act by Jerry Craft, Land of the Cranes by Aida Salazar, Chlorine Sky by Mahogany L. Browne and I started listening to Ancestor Approved: Intertribal Stories for Kids edited by Cynthia Leitich Smith. I also read most of The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien as a mentor text for the essays I'm working on.

This Week's Adventures:

This week I plan to finish listening to Ancestor Approved and The Things They Carried and then to listen to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls; 100 Immigrant Women Who Changed the World and The Barren Grounds. I also plan to finish reading The Things They Carried and then also finish up some other teacher books I've been reading. 

Next Monday, April 5th, I'm hosting another FREE workshop for educators. You can get more information and sign up HERE. Please feel free to share with friends who might need a little boost right about now. I know I've been feeling the impacts of the last year especially as the anniversary of schools closing hit. This workshop is about taking time for yourself, recentering, and reclaiming you. I hope you join me!

Goodness Coming Your Way This Week!

What are you reading this week? 

Link up below and check out other blogs to see what they're reading!
To help build our community and support other bloggers,
we ask that you comment on at least three other blogs before you.
Also, if you tweet about your Monday post, don't forget to use #IMWAYR!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 3/22/2021

 

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA! 

It's Monday! What are you Reading? is a weekly blog hop I co-host with Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers. The original IMWAYR, with an adult literature focus, was started by Sheila at Book Journeys and is now hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date.

It's a great way to share what you're reading and get recommendations. We encourage you to write your own post sharing what you’re reading, link up below, leave a comment, and support other IMWAYR bloggers by visiting and commenting on at least three of the other linked blogs.

Last Week's Adventures:

Well, I did read more of The Flight of the Puffin and When Things Fall Apart but then I started reading The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I'm in an essay writing class with Megan Stielstra this year and she recommended it for me to look at structure and form. 

I have to be honest, Tim O'Brien's work is hard for me to read. It always has been. I've tried before because my dad is a Vietnam vet and he only tells me bits and pieces of stories so I've always wanted to know more. Of course, I know Tim O'Brien and of course, I've tried to read his work before. But it's always been heart breaking in multiple ways. The universe brought me back to his work though so I started reading The Things The Carried this week.  

This Week's Adventures:

It's spring break here! I'm looking forward to taking time to read and work on some writing to but MOST importantly, to hang out with my guys. Taking a break from blogging this week but will be back next week. xoxo

What are you reading this week? 

Link up below and check out other blogs to see what they're reading!
To help build our community and support other bloggers,
we ask that you comment on at least three other blogs before you.
Also, if you tweet about your Monday post, don't forget to use #IMWAYR!

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 3/15/2021

 

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA! 

It's Monday! What are you Reading? is a weekly blog hop I co-host with Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers. The original IMWAYR, with an adult literature focus, was started by Sheila at Book Journeys and is now hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date.

It's a great way to share what you're reading and get recommendations. We encourage you to write your own post sharing what you’re reading, link up below, leave a comment, and support other IMWAYR bloggers by visiting and commenting on at least three of the other linked blogs.

Last Week's Adventures:

Gah. I'm still reading The Flight of the Puffin by Ann Braden. I also have been reading a little of When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron.

Writing with Learning Mascots

This Week's Adventures:

I'll still be reading The Flight of the Puffin and more of When Things Fall Apart. This week we're writing food reviews to share and I'm excited to share some student writing from 826CHI and the Eat Your Words collection with my current students.

Goodness Coming Your Way This Week!

What are you reading this week? 

Link up below and check out other blogs to see what they're reading!
To help build our community and support other bloggers,
we ask that you comment on at least three other blogs before you.
Also, if you tweet about your Monday post, don't forget to use #IMWAYR!

Writing with...Learning Mascots

A BIG thing I work on with writers of all ages is self doubt. It comes up no matter who you are and it can look different at different times in your writing life. 

With so many stressors on our mental health, we could all use some ways to tackle self doubt in our writing life and beyond. As I asked my students to reflect on trimester 2 and plan goals for trimester 3, I thought about my friend Carrie Baughcum and the learning mascots she creates with her students. 

And then I thought, we need learning mascots!

Our goal is to be able to draw our mascots in less than one minute so we started in 1-minute intervals. We first took one minute to make a list of animals we like, and then we took one minute to pick one of those animals to draw. If a student was finished early, they could try drawing another animal. We repeated this with food, objects/things, and characters like Pac-Man or Garfield.

Next we looked at all of our drawings and thought about what would work for our personal learning mascot. I explained that a learning mascot is a doodle character we create that goes everywhere with us and cheers us on as we work on our goals. 

We're still iterating and getting to know our learning mascots but I wanted to share mine. Her name is Globo (which means balloon in Spanish) and she's an uplifting, bubbly, inspirational kind of gal who wants to help you soar to the highest heights!

I drew her on my notes the other day so you can see how I can add her to all sorts of places to cheer me up and cheer me on. I already have ideas for learning mascots as well and will see if some of my students will share theirs.

You can learn more about leaning mascots from Carrie on her YouTube channel. Here are the videos I watched to get myself ready to share learning mascots with my students. 

Learning Mascots: Part 1 - What is a Learning Mascot

Learning Mascots: Part 2 - Bringing It Into the Classroom

Learning Mascots: Part 3 - Using Learning Mascots in the Classroom

I'll be sharing slides in our Patreon community to talk through how you can bring learning mascots to your students.

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 3/8/2021

 

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA! 

It's Monday! What are you Reading? is a weekly blog hop I co-host with Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers. The original IMWAYR, with an adult literature focus, was started by Sheila at Book Journeys and is now hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date.

It's a great way to share what you're reading and get recommendations. We encourage you to write your own post sharing what you’re reading, link up below, leave a comment, and support other IMWAYR bloggers by visiting and commenting on at least three of the other linked blogs.

Last Week's Adventures:

I'm really enjoying The Flight of the Puffin and read some poetry from rupi kaur's book home body too. 

Writing with Zen Pencils and APJ Abdul Kalam

This Week's Adventures:

I'll be reading more of The Flight of the Puffin this week and I have a student who is reading and recommended Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas so I'd like to read that too. 

Goodness Coming Your Way This Week!

What are you reading this week? 

Link up below and check out other blogs to see what they're reading!
To help build our community and support other bloggers,
we ask that you comment on at least three other blogs before you.
Also, if you tweet about your Monday post, don't forget to use #IMWAYR!

Writing With...Zen Pencils and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

Zen Pencils is a must-need resource! I love it for so many reasons and here are a few:

1. Quotes turned into cartoons - These are short, visual pieces with so much to discuss. 

2. Critical thinking - There are so many things to discuss in these texts. There's the person who said the quote and learning about them, there's looking at how the quote is brought to life in the cartoon. There's using visual literacy to analyze. So great.

3. Translations - Many of the comics are translated into different languages. I teach dual language so I love that there are options in Spanish but there are also translations in Chinese, Farsi, Hindi, Kannada, Telugu, Polish, Russian, French, Portuguese, and Turkish.

Students and I have been talking about activism and studying activists. This week we're also talking about failure. As we are finishing this trimester, I asked students to reflect on this school year, how they feel about themselves as learners, what goals they have for themselves for the rest of the school year, and what steps they need to take to achieve those goals. I gave students an option to share in Flipgrid or in a Google Form. Now we're creating learning mascots (I'll share more about this next week!) and we're discussing what it means to fail versus what it means to be a failure. We'll then go back to our goals and use our learning mascots and our deeper thinking about failure to move us into trimester three. 

To get myself prepared for this discussion, I did a one minute word association about perfection and then I did a two minute word association looking at the difference between what it means to fail versus to be a failure. 

I'll be sharing this with my students today and inviting them to think about these as well. We do restorative justice circles and the topic today will be, "When is a time in your life when you failed? What happened afterwards and what did you learn?" Then we'll look at this Zen Pencils cartoon of Life's Pursuit A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and do a free write and then discuss in small groups. And after that, we'll go back to our goals (hopefully with renewed energy!) and connect this all with our learning mascots. 

A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was noted as saying: 

“If you fail, never give up

because F.A.I.L. means 'First Attempt In Learning'.

End is not the end, in fact E.N.D. means 'Effort Never Dies.'

If you get No as an answer,

remember N.O. means 'Next Opportunity', 

So let’s be positive.”

I'll be sharing this quote too. Woo hoo! I'm so energized for this. I'll share my slides and more details on this lesson in Patreon this weekend. And I'll share more about my learning mascot journey next week.

If you have a favorite Zen Pencils cartoon or go look through them and find one that stands out to you, I'd love to hear about which one it is and why! Please share in the comments. 

It's Monday! What Are You Reading? 3/1/2021

 

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? From Picture Books to YA! 

It's Monday! What are you Reading? is a weekly blog hop I co-host with Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers. The original IMWAYR, with an adult literature focus, was started by Sheila at Book Journeys and is now hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date.

It's a great way to share what you're reading and get recommendations. We encourage you to write your own post sharing what you’re reading, link up below, leave a comment, and support other IMWAYR bloggers by visiting and commenting on at least three of the other linked blogs.

Last Week's Adventures:

I ended up reading and LOVING Cultivating Genius by Gholdy Muhammad and then rereading En Comunidad by Carla Espana y Luz Yadira Herrera. I'm officially starting The Flight of the Puffin by Ann Braden today. 

Writing With...Woke

This Week's Adventures:

I'm so excited to read The Flight of the Puffin! Looking forward to some fiction reading this week.

Goodness Coming Your Way This Week!

Some fun with Zen Pencils!

What are you reading this week? 

Link up below and check out other blogs to see what they're reading!
To help build our community and support other bloggers,
we ask that you comment on at least three other blogs before you.
Also, if you tweet about your Monday post, don't forget to use #IMWAYR!