Hello. I want to invite you all to join us for this week’s Day in a Sentence, with an alliterative twist. Please boil down your week or a day in your week to a single sentence, but use some fun alliteration with your words. Be creative and be reflective!

To participate, just add your alliterative day in a sentence to the comment section of this blog post. I will collect the sentences during the next few days and then release them to the wild on Sunday.

I look forward to reading your sentences. Every0ne is invited to participate. Come join the fun.

My sentence (and as podcast in Vocaroo):

We’re wandering around the world of words this week as we probe the origins of our laughingly liquid English language.

Peace (in the perspectives of all you people),
Kevin

Hello

I am back to hosting Day in a Sentence and it is cool to be doing it for the first time in 2010. I am going to direct folks to a Wallwisher site that I set up because it is just so darn easy to use and I want to show people what this site is and allow them to think about possibilities.

Are you new to Day in a Sentence?

Here is what it is all about:

• You reflect on a day in your week or your entire week;
• You boil down your reflection into a single sentence;
• You share it out (in this case, on the Wallwisher, but often, we use a blog post)
• By Sunday or so, we share out what everyone has written.

You are invited to join us! Come to the Wallwisher and leave a sentence. You can even add audio links, video links, or even your blog address with your sentence.

I wrote about my entry into Glogging with my students this week. We had a great time just saying that word, you know?

Peace (on the wall),
Kevin

PS — Oh, yeah, I can embed the wallwisher, too.

Tracy, over at Leading from the Heart, is the guest host for this week’s Day in a Sentence. She asks us to consider something important — and the balance we need to strive for in our life — and reflect upon that with our sentence this week.

You are invited to join us.

What you do is mull over your week or a day in your week, and then boil down your thoughts into a single reflective sentence. Over at Tracy’s blog, you submit your sentence with the comment box and she will collect them all and then publish them over the weekend.

Come get connected with us!

Peace (in the days),
Kevin

I must be in a poetic frame of mind. So, how about Day in a Haiku, which we have not done in quite some time. You can go traditional 5-7-5 or veer off into your own creative Haku-ish world of syllables and topics. It’s up to you. Please reflect on a day or your week, compose a haiku and add it to the comment link for this post. I will gather up all of our haikus and post them over the weekend.

Here is mine:

Rain days drift upon
us as the summer’s sun seems
nowhere near us now

Peace (in the three lines),

Kevin

Before we begin, I found a site called Sharetabs from Larry through his Twittering and thought it might be a nice way to send you off to the various blogs of contributors this week. Sharetabs allows you to collect websites and then open them all as tabs or link them from small windows.

So, click on this screenshot (or this link) to head to the Sharetab for Day in a Sentence contributors from this week.

Here are this week’s contributions for Day in a Sentence:

• Lucky to be in Kuala Lumpur for the Innovative Teachers Conference, I was placed in a group with a teacher from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Korea, where English was not strong, yet we completed together a student lesson plan on indigenous shelters, with fun, endeavour, confusion but determination. – Anne M.
• I had forgotten how tiring it is to keep up with a very active almost two-year-old little boy. – Cynthia
• Taking a day off from the mad rush of school to attend a conference at Stanford University on Microfinance, I filled my head with so much information it will take all summer to digest. — Delaine
• The last week with my students has been lovely, but I wish the adults would behave! — Karen H.
• I let my students turn their research papers in on the very last possible day, Thursday, which meant that I had only a day in which to grade the on-the-verge-of-failing students’ papers to find out whether they’re exempt from the exam or not (since our exemption policy this year is passing and not missing more than seven days per semester…); I’m now about halfway through the 87 papers received. – Jo
• I’m finally home as the classroom slumbers, rests, and rejuvenates for next autumn’s kindergartners- but there’s no rest for me with a summer agenda full of volleyball camp (Dear Daughter), a college move (Eldest Son), play dates (the Pre-Schooler) and deployment preparations (Dear Husband)! — Michaele
• Summer is coming, but there is still much to do, so I seek a new sense of balance in my daily life. – Lynn J.
• Lost in a game of musical chairs at a school Pep Rally, and couldn’t figure out if the resounding cheers were because students were happy I lost or because they appreciated my effort — Larry
• Autumn wrung out its day and let go what’s left of its colour as the mist vanished from the last gasp of a dying season. – Ken
• I returned to Dover Middle School today for a presentation on Assessment to find that our DS team is officially invited to present our project to the school board, for 10 minutes. We have to select 3 pieces from our library of 76. – Bonnie
• I’ve completed my eight hour hard labour sentence for the crime of impulse shopping on credit. — Val
• Getting (and keeping) a teaching job has become political, competitive, and just plain icky in the wake of California budget cuts. — Matt

And mine:

• How in the world will I pull off a claymation project about tolerance in the few crazy weeks that remain in the school year?

Peace (and thanks to all of you),
Kevin

I was thinking it might be cool to try to add a numerical element to our Days in a Sentence. See if you can work some sort of number into your reflection this week. It could be a countdown to something. It could be a tally. It could be some creative operation that shows something else. It could be just about anything.

As always:

• Reflect on your week or a day of your week;
• Write it down as single reflective sentence;
• Share it through the comment link on this post;
• I will gather up and publish them over the weekend.

Here is mine (as a podcast):

After many floating deadlines have come and gone, 74 students who spent 17 classroom periods (about 15 hours of project planning, writing and construction) working on 39 digital science books are almost completely done.

I look forward to yours.

Peace (in the numbers),

Kevin

There was another wonderful collection of Days in a Sentence from folks this week. I am always surprised and interested when another submission finds its way into my blog bin. Here goes:

In Massachusetts, we are entering our testing season — the MCAS. Mary, my colleague at the Western Massachusetts Writing Project, is already thinking of how the testing can be turned to her advantage. She is so smart like that.

I wish that helping students become better test takers actually helped them become better learners. Alas, I feel the real test comes after all our tests are over.

You have all read about the tragic fires in Australia and Anne M. is right there, teaching her students about safety and we call cross our fingers that the drills don’t turn into reality for her.

A more settled week at school, where we practiced fire drills in anticipation of a high risk bushfire danger day again today (Friday) but fortunately all is well for us.

Ghosts in the computer? Hacker spirits? Byte-sized sprites? Lynne C. experienced some oddities in the lab this week.

My timer blasts for no reason, and one of the computers repowers up out of nowhere; noise kharma?

Ken gets his Haiku mojo up and running this week.

With no computer
there’s time to reflect on life
without a PC.

Janice suffers from the pressure to put a grade on knowledge acquisition when her gut tells her that it might not be the most adequate way to gauge learning and progress in her students. I think her conundrum is also most of ours, right?

This week I hate that the timelines of report cards seems to contradict almost everything we know about good teaching practice; the kids aren’t ready, I know they’re not ready, but I test them anyway just so I’ll have marks to put on report cards. Aaargggghhh!

Did someone say Groundhog Day? Matt enters the cycle.

I’m wrapping up loose ends to begin the process again.

Shaun experiences both sides of the coin.

I have been the assessed and the assessor, to grow as a learner and to grow my learners.

Happy birthday, Elona!

This week my granddaughter and I combined our birthday celebrations-she’s 4 and I’m 4+.

sara is feeling .. uh … antsy.

oh my god – not having a vacation at this time of year is akin to being swarmed by angry hornets and seeing the smoke pot twenty yards away.

Mary Lee has been away and now wants to return. I have some snow and ice and cold that I can let her have, for cheap!

Weeks full of long days and hard work got me to this Phoenix IRA pause, and it’s been SO good to slow down in the sun, but I am ready to go back to clouds and cold and work and family and home and friends and students and routine.

Aram is faced with a dilemma I bet a lot of high school teachers, in particular, face in this age of easy cut-and-paste-with-no-attribution research papers. I don’t have an answer for him but I wonder if there is a better approach out there for him. Maybe creating multi-modal documents that force students to be creative and make their own materials?

After discovering the fifth research paper that “borrows” freely from Wikipedia, I seriously am considering completely pitching the way I teach research papers, as opposed to calling them all lazy.

Two years of work … off in the mail and Nina can breathe a sigh of relief.

As I mailed 11.5 pounds of an institute self-study we have been working on for almost 2 years, I felt an even bigger weight lift off my shoulders.

Stacey – whose collaborative site, Two Writing Teachers, begins the Slice of Life Challenge this week that is worth checking out and participating in — had one of those heart-thumping moments that I hope you never experience (but I have).

I consider myself lucky since my defensive driving skills saved me from an accident on 95 South this evening… scary!

I was not sure if this was Bonnie‘s sentence, but I like it because it shows how immersed she is in working with teachers and kids, and how ambitious she is.

I am getting ready to work with 100 6th graders as they create digital stories.

Ben is riding high on a pave of optimism and pride in his students, and I think we should all ride along with him. When one of us succeeds, we all succeed.

My students (11th grade) have truly impressed me with their ability to rise to my expectations for literary quote IDs. Judging by their performance on my test, I would say that those who made 80%+ on my test could walk in to a college English class at a university and perform and get the same grade as the university students. I have never been so proud of students.

Cynthia, a dear friend from the National Writing Project, had some good news, too, as an initiative to create a Technology Institute seems to be gaining ground when she gathered up a crucial audience.

A small modicum of success–today the Alcorn Writing Project’s leadership team agreed to be the participants in our first technology institute!

Amy had a breather, thanks for a holiday.

On this three day weekend celebrating Casimir Pulaski, I am appreciating an extra day for catching up.

Parades … dancing … Lynn J. also has a nice break. I bet we see some evidence on PhotoFridays in the coming week, right?

Grateful that today is Saturday and I can forget about the kids for a couple of days, I’m headed out to watch them march and dance in a parade this morning.

Thank you to everyone and one final note: The Slice of Life Challenge for the month of March is now up and running over at Two Writing Teachers and I encourage you to consider joining in the fun of writing about those central moments of life. I “ran” into Stacey and Ruth last year with the Slice of Life and found it a great way to connect with others. See Two Writing Teachers for more information.

Peace (in sharing),
Kevin

Thanks to Bonnie and Anne for guest hosting Days in a Sentence for a couple of weeks while I was off to Japan with my family. I appreciate the fact that there are plenty of folks who are willing to host the feature from time to time, and if you are interested in hosting Day in a Sentence at your blog, let me know. It’s a fun and relatively easy way to bring the network to your doorstep.

This week’s Day in a Sentence is the traditional format: reflect, and boil down your week or a day in your week, and use the comment link down below to share out. I will collect and then publish them all over the weekend. Easy, right? Come on in and join us.

Here is my sentence:

Although I am required to teach it, I can’t quite figure out how a student learning about parts of speech and breaking down the role of an individual word in a sentence becomes a better writer.

Peace (in sharing),
Kevin

PS — Remember the theme song? Here is again, just to keep you dancin’

Please join Day in a Sentence over at Bonnie’s Blog this week while I am away and then look for the call for words over at Anne M’s blog site for the following week. I hope you enjoy your travels as much I intend to enjoy mine (to Japan).

Peace (in flight paths),
Kevin

Hi

This week’s Day in a Sentence explores a new online application called Stixy, which is sort of like a wiki but looks and feels like a bulletin board. I am hoping it is easy to use. You just need to drag a text widget up into the white space, write your Day in a Sentence, add your name, and save.

Would you care to join us this week? You are invited.

Head on over to my Day in a Sentence site on Stixy and use another collaborative tool. I’m not sure of the applications for the classroom yet for Stixy but I would love to hear from you if you have ideas. You can do that by leaving me a comment here.

The way Day in a Sentence works is:

• Reflect on your day or your week
• Boil it down to a single sentence
• Share it out

Meanwhile, I look forward to your words.

Peace (in collaboration),
Kevin