The big news today in my classroom was "We got mail!"  If you've read my blogpost on The Three Ninja Pigs  then you'll know that the author, Corey Schwartz, commented on my post. This led to an email exchange, bookmarks for my students, and her offer to respond to any letters they wrote to her.  What teacher can pass up a real-life writing assignment like that?  So my students went through the writing process, produced their final copy letters, and I took photos of their papers using our document camera in the classroom.  I then emailed Ms. Schwartz the jpegs--easy peasy!

And today, Ms. Schwartz was kind enough to send her replies!  Not just one letter to the class, but a reply to each individual student and our one group letter.  I printed out duplicates so we could keep one of each in class and the students could take their own copy home.  I've distributed half of the letters; the other half will go out later this week, when the students are done with content focus groups.  Ms. Schwartz has asked them some questions of her own; I think we'll be writing more letters soon!

I love this avenue for exhibiting our IB learner profile of "communicator"!

No library experience to report this week (sigh).  I have, however, begun a month-long writing challenge put forth by the women behind the blog Two Writing Teachers called the "Slice of Life Challenge".  By joining the challenge, I have committed to writing on my blog every day during the month of March.  Since the writing can be of a personal nature versus professional, I've chosen to post on my reading blog, More Books Than Time.   Not all of my posts are or will be reading-related this month, but I'm hoping that my followers (all six of them!) will understand and put up with my musings, rants, and raves during this challenge month.

I chose to do the challenge to flex my writing muscles.  As a teacher of reading and writing, I feel it's important to model those actions as well; I want students to "do as I do", not just "as I say".  I won't be sharing every single post with them, but I will share my struggles to write thirty-one cohesive, interesting pieces.  And when I'm not successful, I'll share that, too; students need to know that failing does not have to lead to shutting down, and failed attempts at writing do not mean failure as a writer, or worse yet, failure as a person.  We celebrate the attempt, and strive to improve!