Slice of Life: NaPoWriMo

Hello Slice of Life community! Happy National Poetry Month!

This is my third year of participating in NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Writing Month.  The goal is to write a poem every day for the entire month. This year, coming right off the Slice of Life Story Challenge in March, I wasn't sure I'd make it all through April this year so I decided not to post every poem as I did last year. It turns out my instincts were correct. So far, I've done fairly well but have missed a couple of days. Since sharing is part of the fun, I joined a private Facebook group with a several of my friends. We're posting our almost-daily poems and commenting on them. Because it's private, the pressure is off. They will still like me if I don't show up every day. 

Writing a poem a day means quite a few mediocre poems, but once in a while there's a keeper that could turn into something significant. And sometimes, there is something that is just plain fun.  For Day 10, the prompt was to write a poem based on the titles of books taken from my bookshelf. Since I have a stack of poetry books sitting next to my writing chair, I decided to use the titles of those books. Here's what came from them:

Ask Me

Dear Girl

How to Read a Poem

it is

Difficult Fruit

this Crazing

of The Human Line

Ordering the Storm

Like a Beggar

The Sharp Edges of Knowing

blurred with

Smoky Inky

Felicity

it is the

Taste

and Shift

Small Things:

Owls and other Fantasies

flying like angel

Ariel sending out her

Cry of the Nightbird

I thought this could be a great prompt to use with students. If you try it in your classroom, I'd love to see the results. Happy writing.

SOL 2016 Day 31: The Last Day!

Two Writing Teachers Slice of Life March Challenge 2016

This March, more than 300 teachers have committed to daily writing. If you’d like to read more “slices” (from other teachers and even students), visit: twowritingteachers.wordpress.com/challenges.

Now that this day has arrived,  I'm sorry to be done.  Along the way, more days than not I grumbled and moaned about committing to this challenge.  I'm so glad I kept going because this has been one of the best online writing challenges I've been involved in. What made this experience so special? The writers, and the amount of interaction between bloggers.  I've been in other online "communities" with almost no interaction at all. During the Slice of Life Story Challenge, for almost every post I got at least a few comments from readers, letting me know they appreciated my words. 

I know this project is so wonderful because it was created by teachers. The women behind Two Writing Teachers live what they espouse for developing writer capacity in students and teachers alike. I am so grateful I discovered their blog while researching  professional development ideas as part of my job. I've recommended their blog to other teachers in my district, and have added them to my reading list.

I'll be back for Slice of Life Tuesdays and look forward to reading

many of the blogs I discovered during this month. So farewell for now.

Can I do this? -- Taking up the Slice of Life Story Challenge

It's been over three months since I last posted to this blog, and even that post was just a "hey, look at me" short notice of publications. No real writing, no real effort. That's been the issue with this blog ever since I took my new job.

When I started blogging, I knew who I was, I knew what this blog would be about.  I was a poet and middle school language arts teacher who loved to travel.

Four years later, I'm still a poet and still love to travel. What has changed? My job. After 23 years teaching 7th and 8th graders, I left the classroom to become an instructional coach for language arts teachers. I'm still an educator and I'm in classrooms all the time. But teacher? I no longer grade papers or create lesson plans. I don't go to parent-teacher conferences or bus duty. I'm no longer responsible for 90 or more 12 and 13-year-olds on a daily basis. It's hard for me to say "teacher" when I realize that all the things that make teaching so complicated are no longer part of my working life. It almost seems like it would be an insult to all the teachers I know who are still in the trenches.

I never expected these feelings to stop my blog dead in its tracks, but they have.




Then in the course of doing some research on how to help teachers implement writing workshop in their classrooms, I stumbled across the Two Writing Teachers website. What a wealth of information!   For weeks I've been reading posts on tips about writing workshop and sharing it with teachers I work with.

Inevitably, all this led me to the Slice of Life Story Challenge. According to their website, "the individual challenge began on Two Writing Teachers in 2008 and has grown each year. Adults, classroom teachers and their students across six continents participate in this weekly challenge as well as in the month-long challenge in March."

Basically, this challenge is designed to get teachers and students to write their own "slice of life" stories and share them with the world, to get them to embrace their own identities as writers. This is exactly what I'd like to inspire in the teachers I coach, hoping they will then bring this passion for writing to their students.

Since finding out about the challenge, I've been toying with the idea of contributing for months, but the idea of a daily challenge for an entire month sounded too daunting. Finally today I decided that I'd just go for it. After all, what better way to inspire others than by modeling it myself. Isn't that what teachers do? Maybe there is some teacher left in me after all.

So here is my first post. I have one more Slice of Life Tuesday to go before the March challenge begins, so I can see how it feels. All I know is, it's the first excitement I've felt about my blog in a long time.