Category Archives: Slice of Life

(This is for Slice of Life with Two Writing Teachers.)

We were just coming out a freewriting session – a quiet space where students can write whatever they want, as long as they are writing. As usual, I opened the floor up to sharing. Usually, with freewrite sharing, the collection becomes odds and ends of unfinished ideas — scraps of poems, a comic strip, a journal entry, a string of sentences that don’t necessarily make sense. My students love freewrite time because it gives them freedom but I can’t say that focus is the key ingredient for many of them.

Still, I let them go. Writers write.

So I wasn’t expecting much for sharing. Even so, I always enjoy this mini-celebration of writing in all of its messy glory because you never know when something interesting might surface. And so it did. I won’t go into deep details on the piece because of the personal nature of it, but one of my students — a solid writer, for sure, but often a surface writer, skimming along the top of the story — raised his hand to share.

What came out was a beautiful personal narrative that begins with him looking out the window at home and moved into becoming a wonderful meditation on dreams and aspirations, and hurdles, and connections to family for support. The class listened in silence as he read his piece, loud and articulate, and when he was done, he looked up and smiled. He knew he had written something powerful, and that he had shared powerful words. We knew it, too.

It was an expected text that changed my teaching demeanor for the day – one of those moments when you realize that you really are in a room of writers, even if they are just 11 years old and trying to find a voice. Here, this student found his voice, and shared it with us. It was a glorious slice of life.

Peace (in the days),
Kevin

Yesterday, I received this in the mail (and recorded it in Vine):

It is from my friends Franki and Mary Lee over at A Year of Reading. It’s actually been eight years of reading/sharing for them, and as a celebration, they are planning to spend each month donating to charity in the name of a blogging friend. It turns out that I was the first on their list (humbled and honored), and they donated to a group known as Birthday Wishes, which helps ease the lives of homeless children.

Thank you, Franki and Mary Lee. It’s a pleasure to be in your community and network and more. And such projects remind me of the human interaction behind the digital conversations, too. While I have met both Franki and Mary Lee (at various conferences, including their own Dublin Literacy Conference), most of our time “talking” is online at our blogs and at Twitter. But friendship blooms in all sorts of places.

It’s a frigid day outside (hello, Polar Vortex) but there is some warmth in here.

Peace (with sincerity),
Kevin

(This is for Slice of Life with Two Writing Teachers)

The other day, I shared out this digital story about our family’s tradition of writing notes to our future selves and stuffing them into glass ornaments. Yesterday, two ornaments broke, and a bunch of our messages spilled out. We huddled around, passing the little scrolls around, reading what we wrote to ourselves years ago.

Here are few things that were on the notes:

• Our dog’s first Christmas, in which he was everywhere, full energy, wagging tail knocking things over
• A scribbled one sentence from my son who was five at the time, saying hello
• A gift wish note from another son, asking (please) for a plastic skunk for Christmas (don’t ask)
• Two notes from my wife and I from the same year, in which my mom and my grandmother passed away
• My own note of love to our future selves

We’ll work on this year’s notes soon enough, once the festivities settle down  bit. It’s a powerful tradition, though, writing as the heart of remembering and connecting the past to the present to the future.

Peace (to you),
Kevin

This week, I decided to capture my day as in comic strip form. The small space made me focus!

Peace (in the slice),
Kevin

We get a lot of professional publications at our house — my wife is an administrator and I am a teacher and both of us are active readers and learners — so it was just another day at home when I was flipping through the November 2013 edition of The Reading Journal yesterday. I found myself (not surprisingly) at an article about integrating technology called “Love that Book: Multimodal Responses to Literature” by Dana L. Grisham. I was, however, surprised to see my own name referenced in her article, though. It was one of those “hey, I recognize that name!” moments. You know, “that’s me!”

Grisham referenced a Glogster poster project that I had done with my students around Three Cups of Tea, where they used media to present learning from the book and thoughts on their own lives. It was nice of her to include my students’ work as an exemplary, although the irony is that I have completely and utterly revamped the way we read that book. We now use Three Cups of Tea as our source for critical analysis – given that author Greg Mortenson’s veracity has been called into question and main events in the book are in dispute. It occurs to me that I thought I had put a note on that site — http://norris3cups.yolasite.com/ — to explain how we were now reading the book. I guess not.

Still, I appreciate shout-outs in a publication like The Reading Journal.

Peace (on the page),
Kevin

(This is for Slice of Life).

This coming Friday, a colleague/friend/collaborator (Gail Poulin, whom some of you may know through blogging and Twitter) and I will be facilitating a session around digital storytelling via iMovie with the colleagues at our school. I won’t say I am nervous, but I will say that I know the range of technology comfort is wide among our staff, and there are probably more than a few that would rather do anything than work with technology during a PD day. We were asked to do this session by our principal and I do want to find ways to engage my colleagues with digital writing.

Still,  Gail and I both are aware of the trepidation among our teaching friends, and let’s be honest: iMovie is more complicated than Photostory3, but we are now a Mac school so … into iMovie we go. At yesterday’s staff meeting, as I talked about what to expect for the session (we’re going make digital stories in a hands-on session) and what to bring (Macs and images, etc.), I also tried to broaden the expectations around discovery, fun and reflective stance. I had created this presentation in Haiku Deck to help ease some minds.

Did it work? I’m not sure, and the fact that we will have a pretty large crowd on Friday for a technology session around digital storytelling means that Gail and I will be running around a bit, I am sure. But I also made clear that they will be called on to help each other, that this PD is going to be collaborative. We need one another. We’re a community of learners, too.

And my final point? They are going to make a digital story during our time together, and the story can be about whatever they want (school, family, vacation, etc.) but find and work on a story that interests them and which will result in a digital video that will be something they can be proud of. Find a passion. Just like our students. Right?

Peace (in the slice),
Kevin