Last week, I taught all week at Success Beyond the Classroom’s Young Authors Conference in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I love this event every year. It’s an opportunity for me to lead the same writing workshop 12 times in a row with 4th-8th graders, mostly kids who are strong,
Thank you notes from kids are the best! Recently, I got three thank you envelopes in just a couple of days. I had so much fun reading through each note. Jen Britten’s 2nd graders at Warren E. Sooy, Jr. Elementary School in NJ sent a huge package of notes after
I had a great time at the Sheboygan Children’s Book Festival! Will share stories and photos this week or next:>)
What did I do this summer? I spent three weeks with K‑5 summer school students in a local school district. It was the most intense visiting author program I’ve ever done. Three weeks, four sites, 1700 students. Whew! It was hard work and incredibly rewarding. I shared this process in
Last week,?I did?Young Authors Conferences all week with 4th-8th graders. I’ll be doing a poetry workshop I tried out in March, and the kids and I had lots of fun with it. The theme of the conference is making unforgettable characters, so we wrote mask poems as everyday objects. But
Last week, I went to Marshall, MN, for a young writers conference. Kids from all over southwestern Minnesota came to the university there for a day of writing fun. It was an uneventful drive on a sunny, warm, January day (in Minnesota?!) through farm country. Becky Fjelland Davis gave a
I had a great time working with 4th-8th graders at Young Authors Conferences in May, and I wanted to share (with their permission) just a few of their poems. We imagined certain scenes/settings, and then the writers brainstormed all the things Hope and Fear could do in those situations. They
Last week, I shared some of the highlights and the areas I needed to work on in my poetry residency with fourth graders. Today I want to share just a few of their poems. Most of these were first drafts, written in three minutes or less–we put the timer to
Back in April, my first trip was a three-day poetry residency with fourth graders. Four classes, an hour per day with each class. Most of my school visits are large-group presentations, so I hadn’t worked with classroom-sized groups on multi-day projects in ages. I had a great time with the
Last fall, I wondered how to make the poems in Stampede more interactive for readings with young kids. For either pre-readers who can’t read the entire poem up on a screen or for settings where there’s no screen available. I got some great ideas from you guys (thanks!) and did some brainstorming
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