A Week of Celebrations in Photographs

Time is at a premium as the school year draws to a close.

Celebrations are easily missed, so I tried to collect 

celebrations this week in pictures...

Recess. Extra recess this week. What's better than recess? Bubbles at recess!

We played and chased and giggled with the bubbles!

Sick day this week. No voice. Sore throat. Exhaustion. What's the cure? Popsicles of course, the purple ones are the best!

 National Notebook Day was this week! 

We celebrated with some 

extra writing time in our notebooks. 

 Time to write in the middle of the chaos of testing and wrapping up the school year. The moments of notebook time bring us peace and give us time to breathe!

  Storytime in communications. We completed our debates and as a transition into our next unit, I asked students to grab pictures books. The room transformed. Students begging to read aloud their favorite from my collection (some brought in their own).

Books really are magic!

Stormy skies! I love how I can see the clouds coming in this picture. It's been a stormy week in Virginia.

Bella on our early morning Saturday walk. She's so sweet and such fun! What a joy to have her in my life!

What are you celebrating this week? 

Thank you to Ruth Ayres for providing this space for sharing our celebrations. Please join us and share your own!

Celebrating a Week of Ups & Downs

What's the saying? Life is like a roller coaster. This week has seen ups and downs...and I'm tired. I celebrate them all here today. DOWNs... More rain. State testing. End of year exhaustion.  Allergies.  UPs... National Notebook Day! Time spent with friends.  Students falling in love with their notebooks again.  

New possibilities. A former student who sees me in the hall and lights up.  Two students starting to write their own book. (One of these students insisted that she hated writing at the beginning of the school year!) That same student publishing her hundredth blog post for the year. (Now, she's on her 103rd post.) Voxes from friends. Moderated a great Twitter chat about Genius Hour.  Another makerspace lesson in class this week. (I'm writing more about that soon.)

When I sit down and look at my week, I see so many positive things. I'm surrounded by good friends. Work is crazy, but good. The week ended at my new favorite place, the Michael Helene Salon. Lauren cut my hair again and I like it better the second time.

I've never felt comfortable at salons and it's rare that I return to the same one. I'm excited to have found a place where I feel comfortable and heard. She is funny and passionate about hair and so talented.  I begin this rainy Saturday celebrating new haircuts, new possibilities, and good friends. I'm off to meet with some of these friends to make plans for the summer invitational institute for the Northern Virginia Writing Project. 

Thank you to Ruth Ayres for providing this space to share our celebrations. Please join us and share your own!

Falling in Love with Notebooks!

Today is National Notebook Day! This holiday is made for me. Unfortunately, we can't celebrate in class tomorrow as we are testing, so I began the celebration today. The past couple of weeks I've noticed students complaining about notebooks and forgetting notebooks. I thought about it and realized that we aren't using them enough. Wednesday, I posted this on the board...

In each class we spent some time reacquainting ourselves to our notebooks. It took some time. We perused our pages. We picked out special entries. We started to write and play in our notebooks again. Two students said, "Ms. Haseltine, I get it! I wrote better today than I have in a long time." These same two students stumbled on an idea for a book and started drafting and planning. Oh, the magic of notebooks! During the next blocks, we continued our journey back to notebooks. We wrote about ordinary objects that are around our classroom every single day. Some students wrote descriptions, some wrote poems, some began stories...they all wrote. They felt powerful and energized. As we ended, I heard the noise every teacher loves to hear, "Awwww! Can we have moooooorrrrreee time!!! Plleeeeaaassseeee?!?!" Here are some pictures of my students working and their writing...

Notebook Trouble

I have sad news. Many of my students have fallen out of love with their notebooks. I noticed this last week when I said, "Please take out your notebooks." and that was greeted with moans and groans. Uh-Oh! Today we began our journey back to our notebooks. Check out my blog post tomorrow for National Notebook Day. We are falling in love with our notebooks again. Here is a sneak peek...