Happy Poetry Friday! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) Life (both personal and professional) has been super busy lately, and I confess I wasn’t planning to post for Poetry Friday this week. But then… I saw that Amy Ludwig VanDerwater’s Forest Has a Song, one of my very favorite poetry collections of recent years, […]
Handout for My Nonfiction Picture Book Mentor Text Session
Howdy, teachers. Yesterday, I shared the slides from my Hubbs presentation. Today, I’m sharing my handout. All three of the professional books I recommend on it are awesome! (I attended a poetry session using mentor texts put on by Lynne and Rose last year at ILA, and it was terrific!) Here is my Mentor Texts […]
Using Nonfiction Picture Books as Mentor Texts in the Classroom
It’s Leap Day! If you want your students to take a leap forward (hehe) in their writing skills, try mentor texts! A couple of weeks ago, I presented at the Hubbs Children’s Literature Conference at the University of St. Thomas (always a fabulous event for those of you near the Twin Cities!). In addition to […]
Can Be… Books by 2nd Graders
I’ve been sharing loads of poems by the students of Wealthy Elementary, but today, I want to share some nonfiction. The second grade wanted to write nonfiction books using my Can Be… mentor text project. I would only have two sessions with each class, one 45 minutes long and the other 30 minutes long. So […]
What a School Can Be (Poetry Friday)
Happy Poetry Friday! (Wondering what Poetry Friday is? Click here.) I wanted to give Wealthy Elementary School a small thank you gift for having me spend a week sharing poetry and nonfiction excitement with its students. So, I decided to write a poem. It’s hard to capture how involved and positive, and supportive this school’s […]
Leaf Creations by 3rd-Graders
Last week on Twitter, Madison Bailey shared some 3rd-graders’ leaf creations they made after reading A Leaf Can Be…! How awesome is that? My Can Be… books are all about seeing common things in new ways, and that’s exactly what they did. Some looked at the shapes of the leaves and thought about what they […]
A Tree Can Be…, by Mrs. Vallarino’s 3rd-Grade Class
As a writer, nothing makes me feel better than knowing that my words inspired someone else to do something: to write, to think differently, to take some kind of action (or even just to relax, to laugh, or to learn). Last month, I got the nicest letter from teacher Ashley Vallarino, who wrote: I am […]
Water Can Be… Chinese!
At a library event this past spring, a woman introduced herself to me and explained that she had translated Water Can Be… into Chinese for Lerner, my publisher. Cool! I just received my 5 copies and thought I’d share. The paper is porous, not glossy, so Violeta Dabija’s gorgeous art is more muted than in […]
Writing Openings
A couple of weeks ago, I posted about working on the opening to my next picture book. I still haven’t heard if the opening I submitted will fly or not, but I thought I’d follow up here and share a couple of openings written after the fact. A lot of times, the meat of the […]
Teachers College Reading & Writing Project’s Book of the Month
Teachers College Reading & Writing Project (TCRWP) has a post encouraging schools to institute a Book of the Month program —basically a picture book all-school read. And TCRWP lists a few books for your school to consider, including Firefly July, selected by Paul Janeczko, The Adventures of Beekle, by Dan Santat, Water Can Be…, by […]
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