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Many years ago, one of my first jobs was as a ski instructor at a local ski resort. During our instructor training, we were taught a technique called "strength identification and enhancement."

In my day-to-day teaching I often get swept up in trying to load students up with next step after next step… after next step. Sometimes, what might benefit some students most, however, is clear… Continue reading →

Take the time to compliment every child in every kind of conference you do.

Check out this article by Anya Strzemien at The Huffington Post, which is collecting comments for a good cause. Simply give yourself a compliment! For every comment up to 5,000, the Huffington Post Media Group will donate $1 to Girls Inc. I pointed readergirlz diva Melissa Walker to the article and she immediately posted about it at I Heart Daily. As Melissa said, "How cool is that?"

I told my friend Amber Benson about it as well, and she tweeted: "Say something positive about yourself and help raise some money for Girls Inc - JUST DO IT!"
 Go to the Huffington Post website and leave your comments by April 10th! Then post, tweet, et cetera, and encourage others to do the same.

Mr. Stowlkey and Mr. Smith were the teachers in one of the kindergarten writing workshops I was in today. They are incredible teachers. They are both six. (Normally I don’t refer to students as Mr. or Miss…but since they were acting as teachers today, they wanted to go with this form of their names. I’ll [...]

Slicing is supposed to be fun. Sure it’s a challenge. Not just the challenge of writing every single day for a month, but also the challenge of the technology. Unique URL? Commenting? Where do I link? If I miss a day can I still share my link? There are questions that abound. Most of these [...]

Slicing is supposed to be fun. Sure it’s a challenge. Not just the challenge of writing every single day for a month, but also the challenge of the technology. Unique URL? Commenting? Where do I link? If I miss a day can I still share my link? There are questions that abound. Most of these [...]

During today’s Writing Circle Luncheon, I had two of my students share a piece of writing they did this week that they were pleased with and on which they wanted feedback.  I wanted to see how they were with providing each other feedback (e.g., peer conferring) by paying each other a compliment and by giving [...]

I’ve hesitated writing this post for a few days.  For one thing, I didn’t want this post to seem like I was tooting my own horn.  Second, I didn’t want my classroom to seem like it’s without flaws either. Recently, I’ve had some visitors in my classroom (one of whom is a TWT Reader and [...]