April 25, 2018
Why you should never write a rough draft. Well, first off, we believe that draft should be a verb in the writing classroom not a goal. Plus, there only seems to be two draft statuses – rough and final. We prefer to use the term Version – and title everything we begin working on Version […]
April 21, 2018
It’s truly amazing that things work out as well as they do sometimes. The bluebonnets were blooming on the side of the road on our way from DFW to the Abydos Literacy Learning conference hotel. Alise and Emily were navigating us, darting back and forth with the assuredness of veterans of Dallas traffic wrangling. There […]
April 2, 2018
True story, we were surrounded by vampires. Okay, the American International School of Bucharest just may have the best school mascot ever. Who wouldn’t want to be a Fighting Vampire?! But, a boss mascot is not all the school has going for it. Librarians par excellence Stacey and John shepherded us through four fun and […]
March 26, 2018
The Cold War is ostensibly over but that didn’t keep us from being picked up from our Anglo-American School of Moscow provided apartment by a spy. Or so I suspected from the info sheet given to us by Kris one of the librarians at the school. K. will pick you up at 11am to take […]
May 4, 2017
So what are we accomplishing here?
We are close reading a text as a group.
We discover themes of our literature.
We are collaborating to discern the importance of what we are reading.
We are taking collaborative research and writing as individuals.
We are getting hands on experience using poetic elements.
We are accepting the extra challenge.
We are working and succeeding through a bit of cognitive dissonance.
We are coming back together to edit and write a finished piece with a partner.
We are sharing our work with an audience.
March 30, 2017
That one day the poets showed up. Shanghai American School is split between two campuses on either side of the river. One side Pudong the other Puxi. The cool thing is the teacher bus for both campuses stopped at exactly the same place outside of our apartment ten minutes apart – so we had that […]
February 19, 2017
“What are you afraid of?”
January 14, 2017
So armed with bags of pretzels we brought our two groups together for a little collaboration. The break down ended up with an officer at a table with six students. We had the officers and students talk about their experience writing poetry about personal conflict.
January 4, 2017
So, Sara and my latest project involves students and law enforcement officers. It’s something we have been talking about for a long time but never had the chance to implement. We’ve had a couple false starts over the years but we’ve finally got our foot in a door. We’re just starting out and we will […]
December 5, 2016
We’ve worked with the Language Arts crew in the middle school the last couple times but the official poet wrangler of SAS for this installment, Scott Riley, decided to mix it up a bit this time and we collaborated with the Social Studies and a Science class.
