Yesterday, I learned from a fellow blogger and Wisconsin educator, Tammy at Tammy’s Reading Life blog that today is Pocket Poem Day! According to Tammy’s blog, the Pocket Poem was started in New York and meant to spread cheer. A poem, written or copied (with acknowledgment, of course), is shared and passed to those one…
What have I done to celebrate the earth, I ask myself? Mostly, it’s involved informing others of the precious resources the earth provides. In the past, for celebrations of Earth Day I’ve presented to whole schools on topics such as the forest and monarch conservation. I’ve presented on the prairie as an ecosystem, and helped…
This spring has been one that I’ve really stopped to observe the changes in our environment. Part of this has been due to being asked to make a video for a local school’s environmental day and part is my own interest in phenology – or signs of the change of seasons. As I’ve aged, these…
I’ve been meaning to clean out my files. However, it’s one of those jobs that keep getting put off. I have 16 years of curriculum, lessons, and grad school materials sitting in my filing cabinets. I have four cabinets in my home office and two more in the basement. Two of the four in my…
This is an odd title. What do I mean – forgetting what you did not know ? I’ve been working on a video presentation for first graders on phenology – or more specifically, the seasonal changes associated with spring. I very much enjoyed working on this project. However, at some point I felt I was…
Last night, I did something spontaneous. It’s a big deal because I rarely work that way. Typically, I’m an over-thinker. But, I have been missing student contact. It’s been almost two years since I had a student group. Before that, you have to go back to 2004 to get to a year when I did…
One of the most satisfying, yet challenging, writing lessons I did with my former writer’s circle group was pourquoi tales. These are stories that tell how or why something came to exist. As you might imagine they are difficult to write but fun to read. Even though my students were above benchmark third graders, writing…
Two years ago, when I worked for a local land trust, I had to organize education and outreach events. One such event, was Spring Foraging. Okay, it sounded fun but I had never foraged! Luckily, our local university had a mycology club and the student president was more than agreeable to lead the foraging hike…
When you write nearly every day for four years, naturally you develop a style. Over my 1,334 posts since February of 2017, I’ve shared many opinions, moments, and memories. My topics vary from education to dieting, from travel and book reviews, to lamenting the broken systems of our society today, such as healthcare, education, and…
This is not the post I had planned today. In my head, where most of my posts start, I had thought about writing about two other topics. Those can wait, however, because to do the subjects justice, I’ll need to spend a little time on writing them. I am short on time this Monday morning,…