Category Archives: Day in Sentence

Hello out thereeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

I’d like to invite you to join our reflective Days in a Sentence collaboration. It’s just another quick way to take a deep breath, reflect in writing and then connect with others of us who also need a moment to think bigger, wider, deeper about what is going on in the days of our lives (random soap opera reference).

Here’s how it works:

• Think about a moment in your, a single day or even the entire week
• Boil it down to a single reflective sentence
• Use the comment feature on this blog post to share your writing
• Sometime over the weekend, I will gather the Days and publish them together

It’s easy and it’s open to anyone. Come write with us!

Here is mine:

I gave the most enthusiastic cheer of the week as our technology dude told me that while I was meeting with parents in our Curriculum Night, he had finally finished replacing all of the keyboards on our old PC cart, which means I can finally do our beginning-of-the-year digital story project.

I can’t wait to read your reflective sentence.

Peace (in the moment),
Kevin

 

I put out a call last week for a version of Day in a Sentence called Day in a Haiku. That little twist produced some interesting poems.

Gail P. captured the essence of summer’s ending.

Summer’s days are few
but it’s heat still lingers on.
Come cool autumn breeze.

 

Amanda notes how routines give a rhythm to things, and at the start of the school year, routines are key.

Grateful for routine
and savoring each moment
with new-found focus.

 

I love this one by Joe. It is just so poetic and thoughtful. It has a calm essence to it, doesn’t it?

The quiet stillness
of anxious first impressions
is far too short lived

 

I was pleasantly surprised to find not one, but two gems from Linda. Both are about nature. Close your eyes and see the moments.

Summer memories
linger in the warm air
as I welcome today

Strong cascades of rain
cover the saturated ground
with wonder and fear

 

And Britton‘s poem is like a camera. I can see the empty nests.

September highway.
Swallows gone, nests abandoned.
Half a moon rises

I had shared a haiku when I put out the call for reflections. But time has passed and I have another one to share now that I have been observing my new students.

Eager faces watch
Wait, with pens poised, writing lives
in fresh, new notebooks

Thanks to my writing friends and I hope you can join us when we next do Days in a Sentence. If you have a haiku you’d like to share, just add it into the comment of this post. The more, the merrier. Consider yourself invited.

Peace (in the reflections),
Kevin

 

I had promised that I would be more regular with Day in a Sentence, but I haven’t. I guess vacation and then the start of summer got in the way. But I want to invite you into this week’s version of Day in a Sentence by asking you to consider writing a Day in a Haiku.

How does that work, you ask?

• Reflect on a day in your week or your week as a whole
• Boil down the essence of it into a haiku (formal structure or not … I don’t mind)
• Share it as a comment to this post
• I will gather up as many haikus as have been shared and post them all together over the weekend
• Be reflective and creative

I hope you can join us.

Here is mine:

Thoughts swimming inside:
The first days, I put faces
and names together

Peace (in the reflective sharing),

Kevin

 

This week’s Day in a Sentence uses the new Wiki function at Edublogs.

Please follow this link to the wiki (or you can scroll down the right side navigation to the Wiki header)

Kevin

Maybe it was a busy week, or maybe the metaphor theme threw people off, but we had only three Days in a Sentence contributed this week. Wait. “Only” is the wrong way to phrase that. I am always happy to get contributors. So, to rephrase, I found three wonderful Days in a Sentence in the bin this week. Thanks to Bonnie, Rita and Tracy.

Here they are, using metaphor for their sentences:

• I’m enjoying this morning, sitting on my front porch feeling the breeze that is a wave of cool water, refreshing after the oven the summer has been so far. — Tracy
• Returning from the Farmer’s Market with Jersey Tomatoes, Sweet Corn, and Green Vegetables to create a colorful countertop collage of summer’s healthy invitational. – Rita
• Give me a 7-year-old, a bag of Half-Naked popcorn and we are walking with Harry in his Deathly Hollows. Cheering right to the end! – Bonnie

See you later this week for another call for reflective words!

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

 

Got any metaphors lying around? Put them to good use with this week’s Day in a Sentence, as I ask you to boil down your week or a day in your week into a single sentence that is built around a metaphor. Then, use the comment link on this post to share your sentence. I will be compiling them all into a single post, or some format, and sharing out early next week. It’s a great way to be reflective and to be part of a writing community.

Come join Day in a Metaphor.

Here is mine:

After months of having no name at all, my rock and roll band suddenly became a mysterious figure under the guise of our new moniker, Duke Rushmore.

I hope you can join us, too.

Peace (is a huge rainbow),
Kevin

 

Come join us this week at Day in a Sentence with a Wallwisher. Just go to the Wall and click to add your own sentence. Feel free to share the Wall link with friends. The more reflective sentences, the better.

Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

I’m going to try this for a second time …. I am not mad at Edublogs, but their upgrade scarfed down my last collection of Days in a Sentence, and no draft post was saved anywhere. Ack. So, anyway, I noticed that when I put out the call for last week’s reflective Days in a Sentence, I forgot to add my own. Here goes ..

Days of humid, hot days transformed into a cold, wet one today, and we are just fine and dandy about that.

And now for you and you and you …

Amy writes of a milestone. Or will it be manymilestones? She writes, “A proud moment as my daughter declared, “I passed!”: now we have a new driver on the road!” Good luck!

 

Lynn is happy to be back where she belongs. She writes, “After a long week of travel through hot desert countryside, home looks really great to me.”

 

We are hoping Cindy and her son are feeling better. She writes, “My son’s ears aching and my head throbbing have lead us to the same wish – for a quiet space with the comfort of being alone together.“

 

Jen had two sentences that are questions and I don’t have an answer for either. Sorry, Jen. First, she writes, “An unexpected text from Stephen, the mysteriously kind and handsome man with green bedroom eyes that entrance me, leads to invitations to come and see him at 10:42 at night, but I have been up since 4 in the morning, and just can’t get myself to go – will this be the last invitation?” and then she adds: “My sister, with whom I only really get along via text, email, or the occasional phone call, lets me know she is in Virginia Beach and if I want to spend 2 1/2 hours in rush hour traffic, she’ll consent to see me for dinner – and am I paying in the literal sense, too?“

 

Bonnie is writing and loving it. I love that! She writes, “How is this July different from the last 11? I am not racing to New Paltz every morning. What a wonderful way to spend the morning. I just wrote morning pages with http://750words.com YES!“

 

Gail is already getting herself ready for September. I’m not. ‘Enuff said. She writes, “Looking back on all the work I’ve accomplished readying the new classroom and forward to my first real week of vacation.”

 

I’d say Denise is pretty darn busy. She writes, “My plans for this week (and the past six) included cleaning off the catch-all corner cabinet in the basement, gardening, blogging, reading, relaxing, exercising, and photographing; I’ve done the important things, and the cluttered cabinet waits.“

 

I’m pretty intrigued by Ari‘s sentence. Just a hint of mystery … He writes, “Creating a fantasy to experience more of reality.“

 

And my friend, Brian, is the first to post a Day in a Sentence on Google Plus. He writes, “In the deepest heat of the summer I find myself thinking backward, trying not to panic, wondering how in the humidified air to move forward.“

And that’s it for now. Be on the lookout for a call for new sentences in the coming days, and feel free to add yours to the comment section here, too. We love having you part of our collaborative sharing.

Peace (in short bursts),
Kevin

 

What’s been going on with you? Share out your week or a day in your week with Days in a Sentence. Here’s how it works:

• Think about a moment, or a day, or the entire week.
• Boil it down into a single sentence.
• Share it out as a comment to this blog post.
• Over the weekend, I will collate the submissions into a single post.
• Be part of a reflective writing community.

I hope you can join us.

Peace (in the collection),
Kevin

I relaunched Day in a Sentence last week and honestly, I wasn’t sure if anyone would come along for the ride. Thankfully, a few folks did, and I have something to share this week. I’ll be posting a new call for this coming week tomorrow (I think), so if you didn’t get a chance to add your reflective sentence this past week, no worries. We’ll gladly and happily make room for you in this coming week.

And now, this week’s Days in a Sentence.

Tracy and her boy are doing some exploring where it is cool, a respite from the heat. She writes, “Jack and I are celebrating his first attempts at crawling by camping out at his grandparents…thoroughly enjoying the air conditioning that we don’t have so he doesn’t work up too much of a sweat with his movements.”

Nancy seems swamped with kids, but lets the caffeine kick in to help control the ruckus. She writes, “I have four kids this week and I wasn’t sure I was up to the challenge but I’ve found a Mother’s Helper in my 7 year old niece, so that, along with coffee, is keeping me alive!”

Bonnie has been working hard with teachers learning about learning in the digital age. She writes, “On this hot morning for a second day of our digital teacher lab I’m blasting up north on the NYS Thurway!”

If our lesson were imagery this week, Lynn would get a shout-out of praise. Heck. I’m going to do it anyway. Her sentence is so vivid. She writes, “Here in Northern Mexico I am sweltering beside the Sea of Cortez, yet can’t get enough of the watery horizon alongside the desert landscape, the huge brown pelicans diving for fish and the bathwater-warm sea.”

And Cynthia’s sentence reads like family poetry. You can even hear the music of her accent. She writes, ““MyMy, it’s ‘morn din’; time to go to the playroom for coffee” is music to my ears each morning during our stay in Dallas as we get ready for Tommy LaRue’s fourth birthday party on Saturday, music even when it’s morning before the crack of dawn.”

And finally, Debbie writes of her son, home from college. That’s still a few years down the road from me as a dad, but it feels like another world on the horizon. She writes, “Spending time conversing and “being” with my son, as he visits from college for the weekend, planning and envisioning his future.”

Meanwhile, over at our iAnthology Writing Space (for National Writing Project teachers), I posed the same query and received these wonderful reflections:

• “Should I do some work, hell no, it’s Saturday.” — Martha
• “A day of reading, wiki making, and yard work. What might be the connections?” — Rita
• “Today my mom is 93 and my 90  year old dad will be honored for his commitment to the Democratic Party; they still live together in our first and only house. Yes, they are both fragile and need more help(that they continue to refuse) but not a morning goes by without a call to them to begin my day.” — Bonnie
• “The day began with sun and ended with darkness.” — Jim
• “I woke to a dream where my dog Siegfried was cueing me with terms from teaching ELL’s, and we were putting them on post-it’s for a workshop, my colleagues Callie and Christineand I, and as the dream faded I held tight the truth that ideas can come from anywhere (while gardening) and everywhere (dreams of talking dogs) and there are also waking dreams we shape, often with words.” — Susan
• “I should model better what I want from others.” — Dixie
• “Strangers become friends, workshops inspire, and community grows enveloped in the magic that is the U of MdWP Summer Institute 2011.” — Cory
• “Last night our room was too quiet without him; we’ve hardly spent a night apart in 31 years, and I’m so glad he’s home.” — Rita C.
• “Hard work, dedication, and perseverance all learned from my father who served 40 years on the fire department!” — Jeremy
• “As I swing my leg off my bike, unclipping from my pedals, pulling myself out of the ride that almost did me in, one thought surfaces in my foggy brain, “That was a close one.”” — Alicia
• “Too many hidden, changed, altered agendas take my breath.” — Peg
• “t has been a blessing sharing your thoughts and ideas with the Writing Project folks.” — Hector
• “I can create success tomorrow by knowing that opportunity is always just a breath away and is often uncovered by what seems to be failure, but I must make my heart believe it first.” — Peg
• “Siblings diving into mom’s old chest freezer and examining the fruits and layers of her life.” — Joanne

Thanks to all of you writers and friends. I appreciated your Days in a Sentence.