I am republishing this post when I normally would have set my school alarm. I am raising my not-cold yet coffee to all of the teachers on winter break. We made it, but more importantly, we must take care of ourselves in order to care for others. Winter Break is the time of year when teachers get to rest and rejuvenate. These two weeks are more than trying out new self-care strategies, focusing on wellness or adjusting our overall mindset. I am trying to move past the buzzwords and embed some of these practices into my life so they become not just the norm or routine, they are my automatic responses to dealing with the stress and chaos of teaching. These two weeks are vital in how we will work with our students for the remainder of the year. We must pour into our own selves just as much as we help others. Our health is their health.

How will you spend your winter break? Here are 115+ different ideas on how you could incorporate some self-care into your winter break broken down by mental tips, physical tips, practical tips, social tips, writing teacher-specific tips, and general teaching self-care tips. I have also added in some mama self-care at the end of the post!

When I make a list of non-negotiables each year, Friday Free Write is on the list. Free-writing doesn’t have to be on a Friday, but the English teacher in me loves the alliteration, and I love ending the week with a little bit of joy. Free-writing is joy. Why? Free-writing allows students to explore the topics, genres, and prompts of their choice. When I survey students at the end of the year, they always say to keep free-writing. I even always offer for the administration to come do walk-throughs and observations during these times because I want them to see the excitement and happiness kids get out of free-writing. While I can infuse love into academic writing, there is nothing like having time to think of your own story and then share with others. This post walks you through what is free-writing, what it looks like in a middle-school classroom, and the logistics of setting up a free-writing time-block in your own literacy classroom. I answer commonly asked questions including what to do when kids won’t write. I would urge non-English teachers to also consider free-writing time as it helps students learn the power of generating their own ideas and showing them their ideas are important enough to put down on the page.

In the midst of summer break, I wanted to take some time to discuss the number of teachers who are leaving the profession as a whole. There is a mass exodus of teachers who are retiring early or leaving positions due to the work load, the toll of the past school year, and the general atmosphere that is education in the current social and political state. It is also now the norm when I run into people I haven’t seen in awhile to ask me: “Are you even returning in the fall?” The assumption is I would run from the experiences of the past 2020-2021 school year. The prediction is that I would leave teaching, and if I said that I wouldn’t be returning in the fall, I would be met with an all-knowing look of “i get it.” I acknowledge that the teaching and education job culture and climate has reached a critical mass of unrealistic expectations that are demeaning and unhealthy. However, this isn’t the first time many of us have contemplated leaving the field of education.

The idea of leaving teaching is one that I have spoken extensively about on the blog for many years. The first post sparked many of the other posts that really got my blog going back in 2017. I spoke about the paper load and the time spent outside of the classroom on teaching-related tasks. The second main one addresses why I stayed teaching for over 10 years (at the time of the post publishing) and continued to come back each year. I said in that post: “I hate the amount of paper and workload we have, the criticism that teachers face, the growing pressure to “fix” the achievement gap, standardized testing, stress and stress eating, the absurdity of sub plans, and the growing anxiety we feel related to work.” This was before the pandemic happened and virtual learning took place.

The first few moments of class are critical for a variety of reasons, but the main reason for really focusing on those first few minutes is your entire lesson could be a success or failure depending on whether or not your students are engaged from the beginning. I love talking to teachers about warm-ups. I love hearing different strategies and ideas. One of the most powerful pieces of teacher advice I have to give is there is power in sharing the why or purpose behind your lesson right away. Our brains are hardwired for the information of “why am I here?” to feel safe and to create a sense of belonging. On another level, your warm-up helps unlock your classroom environment. You make students feel welcome with a warm-up.

So, how do you start class?

I have started my middle school English Language Arts class in a variety of ways. I sometimes rotate my warm-up strategies based on the grading marking period or trimester. I sometimes keep things that work well, and then I toss out other things that don’t. I almost always come back to some form of creative writing or choice reading with conferences.

The first six weeks of back-to-school are filled with getting to know students, testing, and figuring out our classroom routines. When we get into the second marking period, I always notice a shift in how my classroom does its business. There is a movement from the “getting to know you phase” to the “we can finally start learning and growing phase” each year. This phase takes place right around the six-week mark and involves focusing more on content than on routines and expectations. I look forward to this transition each year. I want to take a moment to pause and acknowledge the first skill that I teach students every school year is always the same: annotation in reading. I use non-fiction reading to implement this strategy because it establishes a routine for the rest of the year when we encounter a nonfiction text, and it transitions nicely to when we are dealing with larger works of fiction. In the past, I have done Article of the Week from Kelly Gallagher to teach annotation skills, but I am finding that online learning is causing me to adapt to a new way to teach annotation while online. Annotation is a brand new skill for middle-schoolers. In this post, I will outline how I go about teaching annotation skills, providing purpose for annotation, and how to keep mixing it up to keep kids interested.

As a teacher, it is easy to find yourself in a state of being pretty negative at school. Not necessarily with the students, but with other teachers and staff in the building. The cycle of negative talk-particularly negative teacher self-talk- is one that can consume school buildings in various spots, in entire hallways or sections, and in entire buildings. It manifests into people not wanting to come to work. Think about it like the culture and climate of your brain. The thoughts that we are thinking when we wake up, the ideas that cross our minds throughout the day while we are making millions of decisions, and the contemplations that we feel driving home are all indicators of who we are as people and where we are at in terms of self-care and belief about our work. Simply, we are our thoughts. This post is all about the connection our thoughts have to our actions and bodies. If we can talk about negative teacher self-talk in a way that helps combat fatigue and negativity in the workplace, we have a shot at changing our point of view. First, recognize the signs of negative teacher self-talk in yourself and in others:

1. Significantly reduced patience with classroom management (Quick to snap)

2. Increased levels of stress and anxiety

3. Trouble sleeping or waking up with a 3 am a to-do list

4. Taking work home to your significant other or family in a counter-productive way or bottling up completely about the issues at work to appear like you are fine

5. Lack of creativity or energy in lesson planning or delivery

6. Not wanting to get up to go to work for repeated days in a row

I often go speak to pre-service teachers at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, MI. It is right down the road from my school building, and I love answering questions about teaching. It makes me a bit giddy. However, I have started to realize over the years that I am answering the same questions and some questions-that are really important-never come up. I wanted to make a post to outline the questions that I think new teachers should be asking before they step foot into a classroom, and then offer some words of advice or encouragement about each question. The post shows the 10 questions that I think matter to pre-service teachers and new teachers in the field. The hope is if we start having the conversations now with new teachers, the hard parts of teaching won’t catch anybody off guard. The goal is always for teachers to keep teaching, even when we think it is impossible.

I could talk about sketchnotes all day. I could also really talk about how I think sketchnotes merge seamlessly with thinking maps. Both of these tools create a visual method of note-taking for students that defies the traditional norms of the column notes or teacher-guided notetaking. They also have the power to transform assessment in our classrooms. Students light up when they are able to complete a formative assessment or a summative assessment in a way that isn’t standard. It is outside-of-the-box. It is necessary.

Sketchnotes is visual note-taking.

If you need to be sold on the love of doodling watch this TED Talk, or simply check out any of Lynda Berry's work, like Syllabus. I love Verbal to Visual because they have made an entire center for teachers to become familiar with sketchnotes. This post is a gallery post of examples of sketchnotes and applications from my classroom. This post is meant to be an inspiration to infuse art into your literacy classroom.

Jason Reynolds in his keynote at the ALA Annual Convention this past summer talked about how we are all walking libraries. I loved this metaphor because it provided an image as to how each person is made up of a collection of their identities, experiences, and memories. We are all databases in motion. While many websites, blogs, and social media accounts are contributing to the call for the presence of more diverse texts, the work is still in progress. This comparison only clarified the position to mandate more diverse texts in classrooms and in the publishing industry overall because we have to honor the collective and individual experiences in our schools. Our main libraries, our classroom libraries, read aloud choices, and book talks all need to be purposeful and selective in voice, author, and representation. Because the goal, in the end, is to honor diverse voices as part of our daily and yearly norm.

When speaking about diverse texts, it is important to remember diverse to whom? The School Library Journal summarized the updates to the widely known infographic regarding diversity in children’s books. These infographics remind us that while progress has been made, there is still work to do in the field of education and in publishing. As teachers, we are reminded that diverse texts are a way to access comprehension and unlock engagement in our students because students see themselves in our curriculums. The concepts of windows, mirrors, and sliding glass doors are more than analogies; they are points of access to be humans with our students. Cornelius Minor in We Got This.: Equity, Access, and the Quest to Be Who Our Students Need Us to Be reminds teachers that the very act of using diverse texts is engaging to our students because we are including them in the content and the strategies in our rooms. He also reminds us that “teaching without this kind of engagement is not teaching at all. it is colonization (28). Zaretta Hammond in Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students also reminds us “Instead, I want you to think of culturally responsive teaching as a mindset, a way of thinking about and organizing instruction to allow for great flexibility in teaching” (5). The use of diverse texts in our schools is a mindset and necessity- not a strategy.

An awesome quick strategy to teach narrative summary writing combines the video elements of Pixar Shorts and the application of Somebody Wanted But So Then. Somebody Wanted But So Then is a widely taught strategy for teaching summary while reading fiction. While the materials for SWBST are vast, I often find the easiest way to teach this memorable technique is through the use of quick shorts or Pixar shorts that are available on YouTube. I use the gradual release of responsibility model that focuses no I Do, We Do, You Do. This technique is best applied as a scaffolding technique to reach a higher-level goal. This post will outline the strategy for teaching summary writing with fiction texts, and it will also link some of my favorite Pixar shorts or clips to use in my middle-grade classroom.

Narrative writing is always the first big unit taught in sixth-grade English, but I would also argue that narrative writing is the perfect way to open up a brand new school year because we are finding out about our students’ stories. I am also pretty sure that October may be one of the toughest months to teach in considering that it consists of conferences, the end of the first marking period for my middle school, the flu season that starts circulating, and it is my birthday month. The last part is not a bad thing, I just find it easier to resent less “me time” with all of the to-do lists piling up. This post contains step-by-step directions for teaching a personal narrative writing unit at the secondary level. This includes directions, elements of the assignment, teaching strategies, and mentor texts. I also wanted to include information about writing conferences and grading information.

During this past week of school, I had a realization that the newness of the back-to-school season was starting to wear off. I found myself getting used to routines with remote teaching, and I felt like I finally had some organization to my day-to-day schedule again. With this feeling, almost always comes the anticipated dread of the stacking up of the paper pile. Whether this stack is in-person or virtually in a Google Classroom, this pile can feel draining. I can insert other words all associated with burnout. I wanted to do a round-up of posts about grading in general on the blog that I have used throughout the years. Some of these posts are more general posts about grading categories, reflections on blocking out time, and trying to manage the load. Some of these posts are about specific ways that I work through larger assignments to give feedbacks (Hello, conferences and using rubric codes). You will also see a vulnerable post that started the blog in 2017 where I admitted that working through the giant stacks of paper is one of the reasons I would ever consider leaving teaching. As teachers, managing the to-do list and paper load is one of the most important points we make in our own self-care. My hope is that you find a strategy that lightens the stack you have growing on your teacher's desk or in your inbox. Check out these 15+ posts to inspire your grading routine.

I waited tables at a restaurant during college as many did during their formative years. I hated whenever I had to order something OTF or On The Fly. Why? Because immediacy demanded attention out of me, the cook line, and everyone else around me. I would dare say that the entire field of education operates under OTF standards. Everything is an emergency in education, yet there is no fear like the fear that sets in when sub plans have to be made. In my 105 Ways to Make the Most of Winter Break post, I remind everyone to schedule in those sick days...even if you aren't sick. However, the ultimate fear of scheduling sick/sub-days-planned or not planned-is making sub plans. These lessons take hours, are a giant hassle, and sometimes will get printed or set up correctly, and then sometimes not. Now, with the move to online learning, it is important to adapt to this type of environment as well so that creating sub plans is easier even in virtual teaching. I think this transition will change how sub plans are done forever as we move to everything being available online. This post strives to give 25 different sub plan ideas and more for the writing teacher. These could be used for any teacher, but they are particularly helpful if you are an English teacher that focuses on writing.

The fall inevitably brings about the desire and need to change and update your course syllabus. A syllabus is something that is often debated in the English classroom because the crux of the syllabus is really the organization of how the class will run overall. You get information about the materials, the grading practices, and a course schedule. While middle schoolers are brand new to the idea of a course syllabus, high schoolers and college students come to expect this piece of paper on the first day of class. This post shows you some ways to create an engaging document using the computer program Canva. I have included pictures of my old syllabus and what my syllabus looked like in the 2019-2020 school year. If you choose to use Canva, you can make an amazing syllabus using the free version of the program. I personally pay for the upgraded program to get access to pictures, watermark features, downloading features, and more.

Reading and writing are all too often cyclical. Everyone knows good reading fuels good writing and vice versa. As a middle school teacher, I really wish that I was able to teach reading and writing separately or even give them their own block of time, but I do also love the impossible harmony that is being a reading AND writing teacher. This post will explain how I start my week with students, and how I often will start each class. I always start each hour the first day of the week with a book talk about a middle grade or young adult novel or nonfiction book. It kicks off my mentor text work with kids, and it gets them excited about a book they may or may not have heard about before. This post goes into detail to explain why the simple act of talking about books in a way that makes kids want to read them is one of the most important things we can do as teachers each day.

For many years, I lived in the school of thought that my middle-school students wouldn’t want to read picture books. As with many things in teaching, we don’t know until we know. I love reading aloud to my students, and naturally, they love it because reading aloud goes back to a time when they loved reading as young children. As I could spend a lengthy bit of time here on this post about the apparent lack of love of reading that my sixth-graders come into my classroom with every fall, I will l quote Pernille Ripp from #NerdCampMI: “My goal is to make them dislike reading less.” Reading aloud to my students starts to work on this mission. The power of the read-aloud is equivalent to the power of the book talk. When kids hear stories and your recommendations for stories enough, they start to listen. Colby Sharp, a 5th-grade teacher in Parma, Mi, said this past week, “This year the picture book read aloud is as close to normal as anything we are doing in my classroom. The energy in the room is electric and I feed off it” (@colbysharp). This post contains 15 books that will spark electricity with words and stories.

If I were in my classroom’s physical space, I would plan to read one picture book aloud to my students each week. Now that I am virtual teaching, I plan at least 3-4 picture book read-alouds a week. One of my reflections from the 2018-2019 school year was that I loved how I felt solid with my growth in my independent reading program and my mentor text work, but I felt like I needed to be a driving force behind building empathy and compassion through both of these works. Empathy and reading were my two goals for 2019-2020, and they remain my two priorities in online learning. Reading aloud helps build not only a reading community but empathy and compassion in the form of community listening.

I am always on a mission to find more comfort and joy in life. Naturally, I became more curious about how I could infuse my classroom and the act of teaching with more comfort and cozy as well. I stumbled upon the word “hygge” on Pinterest after posting a few photos of rainy days, coffee cups, and twinkle lights as backgrounds. I love all things cozy, but the idea of taking this idea of coziness and comfort into the classroom didn’t hit until I started to read more and post more about hygge. I really don’t envision my classroom at school being filled with candles and everyone sipping peppermint tea like we are at a cafe, but I do see how some of the mantras from the practice of hygge can transfer over into the classroom and create an atmosphere of happiness. I think it is also important to consider the importance of comfort and cozy in the role of online learning. While I know many of us can’t makeover entire corners of our homes and online learning classrooms, some of the ideas in this post can apply to make ourselves feel a little more at ease while teaching from home. Hygge is about comfort. I am hoping that some of the ideas with hygge in this post lead to more happiness in my classroom and home, and therefore, lead to better wellness for me and my students.

According to The Little Book of Hygge: Danish Secrets to Happy Living (The Happiness Institute Series) by Meik Wiking, “The word hygge originates from a Norwegian word meaning “well-being.” For almost five hundred years, Denmark and Norway were one kingdom, until Denmark lost Norway in 1814. Hygge appeared in written Danish for the first time in the early 1800s, and the link between hygge and well-being or happiness may be no coincidence” (ix). Let’s start with how you pronounce hygge. To sound it out, you would say “hue-guh.” Like the hues of the sun and guh rhyming with duh. Hygge is “about an atmosphere and experience, rather than about things” (vi). In short, hygge creates an atmosphere of calm and comfort in everyday things and experiences we all identify with naturally, and then these feelings create a sense of happiness.

As we all return to school this fall, the buzzwords of “social-emotional learning,” “SEL,” and “mindfulness” are swirling around faster than Starbucks is serving up Pumpkin Spice Lattes. The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning otherwise known as CASEL is one of the main research institutes regarding SEL work for PreK-12 education. If you are unfamiliar with social-emotional learning, their website provides a great resource and graphic with the topic introduction including information on the competencies: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making. CASEL also offers an interactive online Guide to Schoolwide SEL that has more information. My district rolled out their plan for options to return to learning, and both options include a day dedicated to SEL lessons and learning. The district helped form a pacing guide, but I wanted to reach into my own teacher toolbox for some of the strategies and tools that I use to address social-emotional learning in my classroom. The main resource for SEL is the power of the read-aloud. I have written before on the blog about the power of the book talk, and the read-aloud stands right next to the book talk as a powerful tool to use in any classroom from elementary through high school. This post contains 12 book recommendations for read-alouds, some classroom routines to consider including my own goals with my own SEL work, and some links to further reading. My game plan is to use the power of the read-aloud to begin each social-emotional learning session.

I love looking at what other people have planned for the first two weeks of school. While some people feel inventive and creative, I sometimes feel really pressured to make sure that the first two weeks feel…perfect. And I can guarantee that nothing feels particularly perfect this year as we head back-to-school with online learning. However, I told my classes today: “No matter where we are, we are going to learn and have a great time.” I meant it. I wanted to include my favorite resources, books, and the learning platforms that I am using for heading back-to-school. I know that my teaching will be forever changed due to the adaptations and modifications I am making for my instruction in the current moment. This post starts with my first day plans, and then it provides a simple-structured outline for the rest of the two weeks. I did not include any language regarding essential questions and standards. I wanted to focus on the main activities and the tools I used to plan those activities along the way.

The end of August and the beginning of September marks the official kick-off of back-to-school. Many of you have probably been planning for a while. Some of you may be still working out the first few weeks of plans for your classroom. Wherever you are in the planning process, this post is designed to give you some sparks of joy and added creativity in your planning and in your adjustment in the closing out of summer. If you have reached a dead-end, (like I had earlier this week) browse the posts below to find one that may help insert some much-needed inspiration into your plans or your own personal routine. You will find some posts about teaching including ideas for classroom activities, literacy instruction, and how to structure your class setup. You will also find mindset posts about anxiety, stopping negative teacher talk, and remaining uncomfortable as you approach this school year with a focus on anti-bias and anti-racist teaching. I know this school season of 2020-2021 is unlike any other we have faced in the world of teaching; however, I know we can do this through the collaboration of ideas and helpful reminders to see the good in all situations.

We can do this. I promise.