New Year and a New Reason to Blog

 Welcome to 2023 Everyone!

It has been a total rollercoaster of life since I last published something here. As a writer and a teacher, I realize that I can improve my craft in both fields by writing something every day. I thought about doing this just on my laptop or even handwriting it, but why should I hide it when I can share it with the world. That gave me a good reason to fire this blog back up!

I really can't say what you will find here or if anyone will even visit. It really doesn't matter. If my random writings only improve the skills I already have, develop some new ones, and provide me a creative outlet, so be it. The one goal that I have is to write 300 words per day. 

I recently read in a blog post at AWAI about looking back on all your accomplishments, skills learned, and challenges successfully completed. This was as an application across your entire life. I feel that is a very good starting point for this year for me. The post used it as a technique to get over the feeling and voices that say you are not very good at something. This activity ties in really well with the effort I am making with my students to develop a growth mindset. 

A resource I have used for teaching this in class is the Big Ideas section of the ClassDojo website. The little animated videos are great for engaging the students and having a structured discussion about the concept. I think a good challenge would be tying the two together on a level my students can accomplish as a New Year’s exercise.

Feel free to share any ideas you may have that would help me structure this for a bunch of 9 year olds. My students are great creative writers. I just need to flip that strength into writing something autobiographical.