Teacher Participation in Elementary School Assembly I admit my job is fun! This video came courtesy of the good teachers of Northview Elementary School in Manhattan, KS. Taken two weeks ago. Special thanks to a special librarian, Andrea Wollenberg, for coordinating the assemblies!
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Last week at this time, I was getting acquainted with Emporia State University, home of Kansas’s annual statewide Reading Recovery conference. Title of my luncheon keynote speech: “Teach Reading Like a Jazz Musician!” Jazz musicians specialize in what I call the three I’s: Improvisation, Interpretation, and Ingenuity,
Read more →Last weekend at the annual CRA conference (California Reading Association), I had the pleasure of hearing, then actually meeting, “The 2 Sisters,” Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, authors of “The Daily 5.” They are teachers making a big impact on elementary school classrooms nationwide. Here are the
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To all the educators and parent volunteers on my list, Looking for an exciting way to engage students in curriculum this fall? Consider a dynamic author assembly for grades K-8th. The calendar says summer, but school in these parts starts again this week. I am already looking
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Mark Twain QuoteRead more →
My “Creative Jazz Writing Workshops” this summer left me with fodder aplenty to start a new book. As I made the rounds to fourteen (count ‘em!) Migrant Summer School sites in towns like McFarland, Wasco, Taft, Arvin, Lamont, Rosamond, Tehachipi, Shafter, and some lesser known rural districts
Read more →Recently returned from a 2-week tour through Migrant Education Summer Programs located at schools around Kern County, CA. And I mean AROUND this huge county. Stops included far-flung school districts in small agricultural towns as well as the outskirts of Bakersfield itself. Wasco, Taft, Tehachapi, Rosamond, Buttonwillow,
Read more →OK, so here’s my take on the 7-1 shellacking of Brazil in today’s World Cup semi-final. In our house, we’ve been watching the matches in Spanish, so when I turned on the game and heard the commentators marveling about the 5-0 score at the time, I thought
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First, let me go on record to say that a public, well-funded neighborhood library elevates the civic and cultural well-being of society. But as Texas librarian Brian Kemp demonstrates, there is also a place for free, public book deposits where members of a community simply circulate good
Read more →Two weeks ago, I got a bell-hop to leave his post at his hotel in downtown San Antonio and help me move my gear into the city’s vast convention center. “What kind of convention did you say this was?” he asked. “A librarian convention. It’s called TLA,
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