You don’t know how tempted I was to put a pun about “20/20 vision” in the title of this post. I am so ready for the new year! I don’t mean in the sense that all of my lesson plans, copies, and grading are done, but more so in the way that I feel rejuvenated after winter break. I really tried not to work the entire time over the two weeks, and I feel the benefits in my creativity and in my writing motivation. I started to wake up yesterday with new ideas and the desire to fill notebooks up with thoughts, reflections, and more. This came in handy because I was procrastinating about migrating over into my new bullet journal for the new year. My local independent bookstore, This is a Bookstore and Bookbug, started carrying my favorite journals so now I have a constant supply to look at and plan for when I go get a chai latte and grade or pick up new books. The goal of this post is to show you how I use my bullet journal to plan for the new year with year-long goals and plans, and also how I set up my monthly plan for January. This post is similar to the other bullet journal “plan-with-me” posts on the blog, but it provides more information as I am moving into a new journal and it is the start of a new year.

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.

Compound sentences are all about bringing ideas together or showing how those ideas relate to one another. There is a real opportunity when we start talking about combining sentences together to help build the classroom community and share how our writing looks in different situations. The very nature of conjunctions suggests jointness. It is during these mentor text lessons where I will increase the level of movement and partner work to show how we can generate ideas together. When completing the mentor text routine, I look at how I can book talk mentor text books so students want to read them, and I use the whole class novels that we study during this marking period to show example sentences. Last year, I covered the conjunctions “and” and “but.” This year, I am also adding the conjunction “so” to tie in some cause and effect lessons. This post will outline the mentor text slides and activities used for each sequence of lessons for compound sentences with the conjunctions “and,” “but,” and “so.”

Highlights of each conjunction:

• But-This conjunction is fun to say to middle schoolers over and over, and it shows opposites.

• And-This conjunction connects ideas and shows addition.

• So-This conjunction shows cause and effect, and the ideas here can transfer over to other cause and effect work in class.

I love swapping weekly routines with teachers. It shows what we value and what we prioritize for each day of teaching. I talked about my planning process in my back-to-school bullet journal post in August, but this plan can be a candidate for change based on the group of students each year. I always like to review my weekly routine each year when I do my reading each summer. Reflecting on these practices is one of the ways that I like to feed my own creativity and keep my teaching practices fresh for students. I know teachers always like to have established routines “that work,” but I would argue that the new things we try to keep our student-minds working like new. I got into teaching because learning was something that appealed to me; the nature of the weekly routine is something that begs to be refined over and over.

Let’s #swaproutines. I would love to know how your classroom runs and is organized with different activities and lessons.

I think all new English teachers love the idea of the novel study. I did. I still do. However, I have picked up some skills and strategies along the way that have made my novel units much more enjoyable for both me and my students. In my first year of teaching in 2010, I was instructed by my district pacing guide to teaching Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor to my sixth-grade students. I was at the district alternative middle school that involved a heavily transient population that struggled with reading. I think we studied that book for almost 3 months because we couldn’t move as a group through the novel. I had an idea in my head, I wanted to finish the idea to the end, and I was determined to manifest that moment of talking about a book happen in my first-year classroom. It didn’t happen. Now, it is a story I tell my pre-service teachers when they come into my room to observe my classroom during novel units. A novel study should never be a tool for torture.

I still teach Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry; however, my novel units are designed completely different from when I started teaching. I also know when it is okay to give up on something if it is not working. No teacher I know wants to be pegged as a “book quitter,” but there are times when we, as teachers, need to quit books, practice, and strategies that we have been doing to discover a deeper level of learning on the other side. Perhaps one of the best parts about being a teacher of English is the infamous novel study unit. From choosing books to share with students to figuring out how to shape the ins and outs of each day of class, the novel unit remains a joy to teach and a complicated mess. This post will walk you through all the things I think about when it comes to teaching a novel to a group of students. I also throw in some examples at the end of the post for you to check out in both general and accelerated classes.

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.

I should warn you now that the underlying theme of this post is that teaching is tough, and while we all know this we have to keep encouraging each other to thwart off burnout and exhaustion. My goal is to always find ways and different approaches to making this fight easier year after year. It is interesting to me that I will research teacher books, listen to podcasts, study teacher websites, go to conferences, and then realize that sometimes the answer is where I’ve known it has been all along. It’s been with me. Self-care has always sounded corny to me. But, if you break self-care down into you must literally take care of your own self to flourish. Then, self-care does not seem unreasonable or indulgent. Self-care sounds like a buzzword, but it is a necessity in all aspects in order to keep teaching in classrooms year after year.

Teachers must build themselves physically, intellectually, emotionally, and mentally to continue to go back into their classrooms each day. Many of the reasons in this post have become my “whys” for when I step onto my yoga mat or push myself in a workout for 10 more minutes. I originally posted this almost two years ago in January 2018 when the opportune time to realize that we needed to make “resolutions” or changes was upon each of us again. I started rethinking exercise in October of this school year. While I started a draft of this post, and I have intentionally not wanted to revise and redraft because of the utter fear of holding myself accountable. Also, a certain aspect of imposter syndrome sets in. I feel like I have little expertise in trying to get “in shape” or follow any really fitness regimen. However, I have tons of experience in burnout and feeling like I can’t do another lesson plan. I have always been a teacher and a student of learning, but we all have things that we aren’t naturally good at-and being a student at those things is what matters.

The phrase that I have heard so many times in meetings and throughout professional developments is: “We have to stop going a mile wide and an inch deep.” I will often keep track of how many times I hear this in meetings on a sticky note. Not kidding. The alternative to this is of course that we need to be focusing on an inch-wide worth material while going a mile deep in the quest to find mastery. As this idiom relates to teaching, secondary English Language Arts teachers have the particular problem of being tasked with teaching both reading and writing in small blocks of class time. Here are some particular questions I often get on the blog, in my classroom, and the questions I ask myself on days when I am pulling my own hair out:

How do I fit it all in?

What gets left out if I can’t do it all?

How am I building readers AND writers?

Is reading more important than writing?

Does my curriculum guide provide that balance of reading and writing for me?

These are just a few questions that cause any ELA teacher to pause and reflect and perhaps think, “how is this job even possible.” My brain often looks like a tangled Pinterest feed with ideas about strategies and resources.  I don’t have any hard answers here. I just want to provide how I attempt to “fit it all” into my blocks of class time each day, week, and year. I have many things I love and will continue to do, and I have things that I try out all the time. This goes back to my non-negotiables because I have things that I will always continue to do because I can visually see learning taking place in front of me, and I have things I try to improve on all the time. My goal with this post is NOT to try to say what the correct strategies are for “fitting it all in,” but simply offer a way one teacher is doing it in the spirit of collaboration and sanity. 

The title of this post isn’t serious. I know you are tired. If you are teaching, you perhaps have hit a wall called the “November Blues.” These are the feelings you get waiting on Thanksgiving Break. Everything is starting to settle down. For me, the first round of testing is done, routines are established, the first round of parent-teacher conferences are over, and the second set of grades will be due soon. The expectation of who we are in my classroom is going strong. There is still work to do in terms of lifting literacy, inspiring new thoughts, and building capacity for compassion, but we will get there. While November is when everything starts feeling stable, it is also the first time in the year when I often suffer from “paralysis of the mind” or teacher burnout. 

These two weeks focus on adding adjectives and snapshots in narrative writing using the mentor texts Out of My Mind by Sharon Draper and A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Both of these lessons build on each other as I first teach using adjectives in writing, and then we get some experience making snapshots in regards to characters and setting. A snapshot is a moment in writing that provides detail in terms of character or setting. The text The Reviser’s Toolbox by Barry Lane was the first text that introduced the idea of snapshots to me, and this text remains the go-to standard for items to teach in terms of narrative, personal narrative, and memoir writing. Students often receive practice in regards to describing themselves or character, but sometimes struggle with describing a setting or character interaction. Teaching them how to add detail in narrative writing sets the stage for teaching elaboration when it comes to argumentative and informational writing in our upcoming units.

November calls for gratitude. It includes the first big holiday since maybe Labor Day or the Fourth of July when people get together. I am often struck by these holidays that sometimes the people closest to us are family, but not connected by blood. While I am not an advocate for celebrating the known reasons behind Thanksgiving, I am a person who loves holidays. This post outlines my November bullet journal inspiration, my November pages, and some key points of reflection. If you choose to celebrate Thanksgiving, you might feel the same as I do. The push and pull of recognizing the “Hallmark” holiday absurdity of it all or really loving the atmosphere of the day. To me, there is something comforting about the food (my husband makes the best turkey), the people, and the purpose that everyone has for taking time out of a busy schedule. It makes me want to plan more holidays throughout the year for no reason. at all. I always focus on the opportunity to be grateful for this moment in my life and then also trying to be more mindful of this feeling throughout the rest of the year.

The mentor texts for these two weeks, Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes and The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley, are similar in the sense that they are amazing examples of kids working through problems. Both books are easy to sell during the book talk because kids love books where students are handling conflict. I love teaching irregular verbs over the course of two weeks because the first week we learn what irregular verbs are and then do some practicing with examples. In the second week, we combine standard past tense verbs with an -ed ending, AND we also use irregular verbs in our sentences. We are still building on our work with action verbs/verbs of being and helping verbs from previous weeks.

Below is my acceptance speech from receiving the Michigan Council of Teachers of English Middle School Teacher of the Year Award at the fall annual conference in Lansing, MI. I so appreciate the support during the speech, and also the kind words that I received throughout the day at the conference. I would also like to thank Dr. Karen Vocke from Western Michigan University for my wonderful award introduction.

The Crossover by Kwame Alexander might be one of my all-time favorite mentor texts. It could be because kids love the novel-in-verse format of this book, or the basketball theme, or the fact that they want to know what happens each quarter. This is an easy book to book talk because it just grabs kids. I love using this book to show helping and linking verbs in the present tense. This continues from the work the previous week where students identified action verbs and verbs of being. This lesson speaks to the easy conversational tone that we all have with each other on a daily basis. Kwame Alexander sounds like me. He sounds like you. This directly links to the ability to make grammar accessible because it is something we already know, we just have to know what to call the writer move when we make it.

I love October. I fall for all things pumpkin and leaves and warm coffee. The inspirational books from this month were very deliberate, and yet they all sort of fell into place naturally. I am going to be reading Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes with my classes this month in preparation for her author's visit to Kalamazoo in November. We will be writing ghost personal narratives while studying this mentor text, and also learning skills in scene writing, dialogue, snapshots, and imagery. Some other things I am excited about this month:

• My husband and my birthday are on the same day this month.

• Michigan Council for Teachers of English is this month! I am presenting on mentor texts and receiving an award!

• I am presenting in my district about mentor texts this month.

• Jason Reynolds Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks comes out on the 8th!

• The FIRST marking period of the year comes to a close this month.

• The FIRST round of parent/teacher conferences is this month.

• I speak at Western Michigan University to a group of pre-service teachers this month.

• Happy Halloween!

Fish in a Tree by Lynda Mullaly Hunt is our all-sixth grade read. Our district gave all fifth graders this book to read over the summertime, so they have a chance to have a common, shared conversation about a single text when they enter middle school. While not all students take part in the rising class read, all students are given books. The best way to promote this text is through a book talk. Often, I hear students say “I didn’t read this book over the summer,” and then they choose to pick it up after they hear it book talked. We can never forget the power of a book recommendation to our students. The goal for this small mentor text mini-lesson will be to show students the difference between verbs of action and verbs of being.

One of my big mentor text reflections from last year was that I felt like I didn’t spend enough time on the basic parts of the sentence. Things like subject, predicate, verbs, and adjectives. These are the things that middle school teachers are always teaching and re-teaching, but I really wanted to frontload these skills at the beginning of the year. There are so many variations in the English language, so I really want to encourage my sixth-graders to have a strong grasp of the simple sentence before moving forward. Even in my advanced sections where students have reading levels well into the highschool range, they were identified as struggling on identifying the subjects of sentences.

Sometimes the hardest part is knowing where to start. I want to start writing individual posts each week, so that people can follow along with my mentor text routine. It can be daunting looking at all my materials for the first time and thinking:

“How do I find time to read all of these books?”

“How do I teach kids to read like writers?”

“Where do I put this into my curriculum or pacing guide?”

“Can I really teach grammar with books on my shelves?”

The answers to these questions aren’t always easy, but they are possible. We have to make time to show our kids that books have the power to unlock the world of writing in front of them. We have to dedicate space in our own lives for reading because it is one of the greatest forms of self-care. We have to reconfigure our pacing guides to use these resources because we have to prioritize what matters. Figuring out what matters to me as a teacher has always been the struggle. I know without hesitation that the use of mentor texts has changed the way I do business in my classroom. Last year was a road trip of trials and errors, but those experiences and that time spent researching mentor texts was so worth it. Now, I also wanted to share what I am doing to help lighten the load on others.

I wanted to open this blog post with ramblings of how motivation can change throughout the school year, but I decided against it because we all know the deal with motivation: It does what it wants to do. It can come, and it can go. We just have to decide how to fight back against the utter lack of motivation that presents itself in our own bodies and minds and in our students looking back at us in our classrooms. It is important to note the relationships between motivation, expectations, and behavior management as we establish norms for the fall and the beginning of the year. If we understand motivation, we can troubleshoot any foreseeable classroom management issues as well. If we make our lessons engaging and root our energy and enthusiasm in our delivery, we can help students access our expectations in a variety of ways. Because according to Gretchen Rubin, we all have different tendencies towards outer and inner expectations.

September is one of those months that everyone has an opinion about. Either people love the start of a new academic year, or they miss the days of summer where things were a little bit slower and more carefree. I fall into both camps; it is a time to reminisce and a time to jump back into routine. September is about re-finding your rhythm. I love the inspiration from this month’s books, and also the idea of of holding onto the ideas of empathy, perspective, and adventure as I get ready to start year 10 teaching middle school.