Category Archives: my classroom

(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

Four hours of in-person teaching immediately followed by three straight hours of parent-teacher conferences on Zoom immediately followed by two hours of facilitating professional development on Zoom leads to what only could be described as a very blurry brain.

Peace (wide awake and ready),
Kevin

(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

I happily wore the mask she made by hand for me, another sewn gift to celebrate a moment in time.

Peace (decorated and worn),
Kevin

(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

This is a sample of some of the faces created and shared by students last week as we talked about “reading emotions” in the Pandemic, when our masks cover our faces.

Their task, as part of our social-emotional lesson, was to answer the question: How are you feeling about coming back in full to school?

(Which happens this coming week) They had to capture their feeling in a picture with both a mask and mask-less face, as we then talked about the importance of our eyes and addressed any anxiety over the coming changes ahead for our school.

Peace (noticed),
Kevin

(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

It was exactly one year ago, today, when we walked out of the classroom on a Friday afternoon (the 13th) and never returned to the building for rest of the school year.

Peace (thinking on a year),
Kevin

(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

I do love it so very much when I get a chance to see the choices my students make for the books they want to be, and are, reading.

Peace (in pages),
Kevin

(The Slice of Life Challenge in March is hosted by Two Writing Teachers as way to encourage teachers-as-writers. You can join in, if you want. There is also a monthly call for Slices on Tuesdays. You can write then, too)

Give them a chance, and young writers will invent words that will spark your pondering and set you guffawing, and make you wonder where our language might yet be heading.*

Peace (invented and spoken),
Kevin

*This is the 17th year that my sixth graders have been building an online collaborative dictionary of invented words. It’s part of a unit on word origins. Each year, every student adds a new word, and their voice (through audio file), to the dictionary. It’s just one of those annual rituals that keeps moving forward …

Listen to this year’s voice collection.