Picture books aren’t just for children—they hold profound lessons and beautiful insights that resonate with readers of all ages. For caregivers and teachers, these books are especially powerful tools, offering a creative and accessible way to foster emotional exploration and self-reflection. Picture books can serve as a bridge to reflective journaling, unlocking deep thoughts about life, emotions, and personal growth. They provide a unique opportunity to engage both young readers and adults in meaningful discussions, offering simple yet evocative narratives that inspire reflection. In this blog post, we’ll explore several picture books that not only tell compelling stories but also provide rich opportunities for journaling. Each book comes with a summary, a link to a read-aloud YouTube video, and thoughtfully crafted journal prompts to guide readers in exploring their inner world and nurturing personal growth.

Many of us are done in all ways with 2020. Starting this post out saying it has been quite a year would be redundant, to say the least. We know this year has had many challenges; however, moving on to a new time period is always an excellent way to reset and restart our intentions and goals for not only the coming year but in life in general. I love making vision boards. They help me get my priorities in line as I start to plan for the year and each individual quarter. I always feel like after I complete a vision board exercise I feel lighter and a bit clearer. The key to creating a great vision board is to allow yourself to dream, but also let yourself wander into the territory of who you want to be and what it actually feels like to be him or her. I always like to start this work with some journaling prompts, and then I move into the cutting and pasting part of the project. This post outlines some helpful prompts, shows you a quick vision board video tutorial, and also walks you through the 4 main steps to create a vision board in any journal you have around the house.

What a year this has been! 2019 is coming to a close tomorrow with New Year’s Eve, and I wanted to take a moment to say thank you for sharing this blog space with me throughout the past year. In January 2017, I started Writing Mindset as a way to reflect on teaching. Now, I focus on the ability to not only reflect on teaching, but to also constantly share ideas and learn from others. This blog has been and continues to become a passion project that is an outlet for my learning through teaching. It is also a space that is teaching me so many things. I am always in the role of a student when I am working on Writing Mindset. What I love most about education is trying new ideas and learning new strategies as ways to give and receive information. I am a Questioner, but more so, I am a person who loves to reflect on what went well and the things that did not go so well in my classroom and in life. 2019 was a rollercoaster of reflection. I was awarded the Michigan Council of Teachers of English Middle School Teacher of the Year, I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone by presenting at conferences, and with 48 total blog posts in 2019, I wrote more than any other year so far on the blog. I lend that to being wildly passionate about mentor texts, but I also feel like I am getting closer to why this blog exists in the first place. Writing Mindset is a way to use writing to access mindfulness, mindset, and overall wellness. I can see 2020 becoming a year when I focus more on the whole teacher. This includes the mental, physical, emotional, and intellectual health of anybody in education. Our wellness is an access point to more complex issues in education. As I said in the winter break post recently, our health is their health. Too many of us are unhappy, and too many of us are unhealthy. I can’t wait to explore some of the ways teachers can continue to be happier and healthier in 2020.

I have been writing a lot about burnout here on the blog and in my journal. If I look back at my morning pages, it is something that has slowly been building up since we went back-to-school in September. Because I have always felt that December is a month for reflection, I wanted to highlight that purpose in my December pages this month. If I compare my October reflection page to my November reflection page, I have already made some changes in terms of physical wellness and professional wellness. I have engaged in the idea of trying to balance the six different areas of self-care: physical, emotional, spiritual, intellectual, social, and sensory. While I always feel like self-care is a concept that isn’t obtained, kind of like “work-life balance,” it is a word that is a strong reminder to put yourself first before the work.

Rachel Hollis in Girl, Stop Apologizing said, “When everything is important, nothing is important” (97). These words are so powerful, especially in December. I am getting better at understanding that everything can’t be important. We only have three weeks until winter break (not four this year!), and I want to make sure that in the rush I am celebrating small wins on a daily basis and setting the intention to practice regular self-care not for the sake of sounding good, but the ability to keep teaching month after month. December is about small wins…and all things merry and bright.

Pernille Ripp asked her readers in her post “What Did You Want to Be This Year?”: “Did you accomplish the goals you set out to reach or did you realize that your life needed something else?”  Pernille Ripp’s blog is one of my favorites because she makes me think and reflect on who I am as a teacher. I love any situation that puts me in student-mode because I am ever learning. Ever since I saw her speak in March at the Michigan Reading Association Conference, I often remind myself of her words: “It is time to be reading warriors” and “for too long we have been too nice.” As I doodled these phrases in my journal during the conference, I nodded my head, I scrunched my nose, I squinted my eyes, and I did some reflecting on my own work. Now, as I close out the 2018-2019 year, I want to focus on what I wanted for myself in my classroom, in my writing lab, and in my teaching life this past year.

And to answer her main question, I accomplished some goals and I realized my teaching life needed something else.

The conversation about teachers leaving the field of education is a real one. We hear the statistics early on: Teachers leave within the first five years of their career, new teachers struggle with anxiety and depression, the field of education is shrinking as a whole, and so on. The problem is all teachers feel all of these things at every point of their career. Teaching is hard. All the time. If it were easy, everyone would do it and attempt to do it well. But, we exist among those that are self-labeled as crazy for doing what we love to do. We are all going to have mornings where we don’t feel like going, where we drag ourselves to the doorstep of our buildings just to hold on to our coffee cups tighter. But the bottom line is, there are so many good things about this job that make a teacher want to keep teaching. And the truth is that the silent urge to constantly quit all the time is a friendly reminder we are doing the hard work. I often will scroll Indeed just to see what is out there or to feel like I have professional options. However, I have been faced twice with the option to leave, and I cannot do it.

As we close out 2018, I am so thankful for this tiny blog space that I share with you all. In January 2017, I started Writing Mindset as a way to reflect on teaching; however, it has transformed how I do business. I am constantly on the lookout for writing inspiration for the blog, and how I can put new ideas into my classroom to share. I sent out a newsletter to subscribers today talking to them about 2018 accomplishments. So much has happened this school year already that it seems a bit poetic to talk about endings…when we are in the middle. However, the end of 2018 marks many accomplishments in terms of blogging, writing, and reading.

Last year at New Years, my friends and I dubbed 2017 the #yearofselfish. What this meant was engage in more awareness when it came to self-care, workout, invest in personal opportunity, meditate, seek out a work to life balance, and try new things. I definitely tried new things. Writing Mindset was a leap out of nowhere that constantly challenged me on one end because I thought of it as a personal business move, but I also saw it as a way to reflect on teaching. Writing Mindset simply was a way to connect to my teaching and share my teaching with others. I set up my LLC, invested in a website hosting platform that I thought was aesthetically pleasing, and then tried to write a lot. Then, I realized that writing and working full-time were more difficult than I ever imagined. 

Granted this upcoming weekend is a "winter break weekend," but it still counts as a weekend. Now is the time to practice amazing and nurturing habits for the back-to-the-grind that is about a week away. I have rested this past week between the Christmas holiday and New Years with the full intention of getting to my pile of papers next week after the last holiday (casually looks at all the teacher memes that say we aren't touching it even with the best intentions). I need to get into that stack. I have three preps worth of essays that I think I can get through using my rubric coding system with the six traits. I feel good about being updated with grades and lesson plans by the time we get back, yet, I know that it will be all too easy to get wrapped up in the Monday-Sunday, when we open our eyes to when we close our eyes, day-to-day that is teaching. The re-takeover of our time starts with the weekend. It was always meant to be ours anyway. 

It doesn't seem right that the school year is already heading into week three. I wanted to take a moment to pause as we approach the end of week two, and to take the time to reflect on how the first two weeks of school have gone. The goals for the first two weeks involves setting foundations, establishing systems, building community, and getting know to know each other in Writing Lab 615. There have been highs, mids, and lows in these two weeks. I am teaching on the split team this year. This means that I have two sections of General English 6, two sections of Advanced English 6, and one section of Advanced English 7. 

What is it that students want?

This was the question I asked my sixth graders in an alternative assignment to giving them an end of the year survey. I know some of the usual answers that sometimes we as teachers don't take as seriously (and maybe should) and I also was hopeful of the answers that may seem surprising and shocking. I have included both in this post to start a conversation.