August=Sunday Night #SOL

(First draft of a cartoon I am working on. Can you tell what it is about?)

August 1st always makes me sad. As soon as the calendar page turns, it’s time to start thinking about school again — for real. When I mentioned this in a workshop last week, someone said, “August is the Sunday night of summer for teachers.” So true. With just a week or so left before I need to start making my way to school on a regular basis for set up, meetings, and finally the return of students, I’m reflecting on my accomplishments of the last few weeks, and what remains undone.

I’m currently…

• Enjoying my first batch of homemade healthy-ish granola. I’ve always wanted to try making it, and it really is as easy and delicious as they say! (I used this recipe.)
• Planning the annual blueberry picking adventure that I go on with my mom and sister every August.
• Experimenting with my new camera and zoom lens. I’ve been taking lots of pictures of the birds that visit our bird feeders — especially the hummingbirds!
• Reading (just finished!) Harvey “Smokey” Daniels’ The Curious Classroom: 10 Structures for Teaching with Student-Directed Inquiry. I want to up the inquiry game in my Kindergarten class this year, and I am looking forward to #TheEdCollab’s Twitter chat about it tonight.
• Practicing sketchnoting, cartooning (see picture above), emoji story writing, and blackout poetry writing, all of which I learned about during my NH Literacy Institute course I took with @ShawnaCoppola last week at UNH. (Her new book RENEW! Become a Better—and More Authentic—Writing Teacher is pretty fabulous!)
• Messing around with Padlet and Pic Collage, putting together my final project that is due Friday for the aforementioned UNH class!
• Reconfiguring my classroom so it is more accessible for my new student who is in a wheelchair. (I’ll be slicing about him this year, I’m sure, as he is adorable and a true inspiration.)
• Brainstorming ways to use the fossils I collected on England’s Jurassic Coast this summer in my Kindergarten classroom.
• Celebrating becoming a Wonderopolis Lead Ambassador for the 2017-2018 school year and planning my first posts on the Wonder Ground. 

Writing all of this out makes me feel better. I think I’ve actually accomplished more than I realized!

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Many thanks to the crew at Two Writing Teachers, and the extended SOL community, for giving us the time, space, and encouragement to live the writerly life each Tuesday. Won’t you join us?