Gearing Up

I am looking forward to tomorrow night's #whatisschool Twitter conversation on "Engaging Families and Community in Student Learning". Laura Hill, Moderator, John MacLeod, Family Literacy Expert at Wonderopolis and NCFL, and I will discuss this topic with the global community across Twitter. 

Please join us on September 21, 2017, 7 pm EST at #whatisschool.

To gear up for the event, the team created publicity documents. 
Jon Reigelman, Creative Director of Wonderopolis, 
designed the following promotional flyer.

You can link to my Wonderopolis Wonder Ground post here that followed Laura Hill's blog post. Below is the question document created by Wonderopolis and provided by John MacLeod.

Stress and harmonic imbalance at home can decrease student's ability to enjoy school and perform to the best of their abilities. So what can we, as educators do? - Laura Hill

It is an important question to pose to parents and community members, as well. As stakeholders in children's educational lives, home-community-school connections are vital. Students are the future and we need to invest commitment and diligence to fostering positive learning grounds for them. 

Learning grows each day through a stance of noticing and wondering in positive environments. 

Digital Dream Tool

When I was young I used to dream upon a dandelion, calling it my wish flower. Today, I still stop to pick a dandelion in the spring and watch my wish float into the universe. During a #whatisschool Twitter conversation about dream tools, I wondered about digital resources of the future. I recalled an image of me as a child blowing my wish out into the world. Now in my adult years I am still wishing upon a dandelion but realize that:

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.    -C.S. Lewis

If I had a dandelion weed now, I would wish for a digital dream tool in the shape of an interactive app. It would be an all-inclusive word-weaving resource with capabilities to immediately pull content on a topic and spin it into a digital inspiration. Being more specific, the app would be able to capture all of my photos and tag them into different topics for easy access. It would also have a button to link to free photo sites (the photo above came from Photos for Class). When designing an inspirational message, the app would intuitively match nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs together. It would also be sound activated so I could direct the app to blend certain words together to form a motivational quote, eduinspiration, or haiku. For Twitter aficionados, the message could be spun into a 140 character twihaiku or micropoem to be sent out into the Twittersphere with or without a photo. 

If I had my druthers, this digital dream tool/app would sit at my creation table and assist me in sending random acts of poetry out into the universe. It would be so much easier than the process I use now: finding a photo, digitalizing it with effects using PicMonkey or other photo-editing tools, weaving words into a haiku (paper and pencil-old school style), transferring the poem to the image so it matches the flow of the photo, and then signing off.

But until then I will continue to wish upon a dandelion 

for my digital dream tool as I weave words. 

Do you have a digital dream tool in mind?

Please visit Two Writing Teachers where you will find the Tuesday Slice of Life. An anchor chart, Strategies for Generating Ideas for Personal Narrative Writing, is found there. 

Notice, Reflect, Write: Celebrate Life this Week

Today is a day to celebrate life by noticing, reflecting, and writing.

Each Saturday, Ruth Ayres asks us to CELEBRATE This Week. 

This week, Ruth Ayres is celebrating purpose. Please go here to read her thoughts. Then check out the offerings from the Celebrate this week writers. Each writer looks at life in a different way making the reading of their pieces an enjoyable weekend experience. 

I engaged in several writing experiences this week that I would like to celebrate. They were:

• Twitter chats, such as #BFC530, #ChristianEducators, #satchat, #whatisschool
• Co-moderating #NYEDChat on National Day on Writing 
• Blog posts for Spiritual Journey Thursday and Poetry Friday 

Besides those meaningful happenings, I traveled to New York City for an annual visit to my oncologist. This visit was the start of my week of celebration because I have now completed eleven years of being in remission from lymphoma. The power of faith, medicine, and the support of family and friends have allowed me to rejoice in life and its experiences so that I can fully share my joy. 

Because of all of these face-to-face and virtual events, conversations have flowed seamlessly and positively affected my daily life. I captured the essence of all those events in the following poem:

Reaping a Harvest of Connective, Collective Talk

May all of my connected colleagues, whether it be from face-to-face or virtual encounters, celebrate life and learning this week.