Category Archives: Thoughts and Reflections

Background Last year I wrote and airing of grievances post in the tradition of Festivus and the hilarious holiday of Seinfeld. It was a fun spin on addressing the issues that cause me some degree of anxiety, angst and flat out anger. This year I plan to step it up a level and add inContinue reading “Feats of Strength/Airing of Grievances”

The Winter Break is upon us. I am sitting here watching the Mandalorian and pondering life. Earlier this week a friend and I were talking about some of the messages we see so often on twitter and how the more common sense posts, that shouldn’t need saying, are the most popular posts. Things like “RememberContinue reading “Motivation”

So I have had a bit of a writers block when it comes to my own blog. I think there is a lot of angst in the literacy world at the moment and I in no means am trying to trivialize any of the discussions and many are important but today I was reminded ofContinue reading “Here we are again”

This week it seems the opportunity to discuss language be it written, read or spoken, and the power that comes with it has popped up many times in class. My students came in at the end of Wednesday for their last period class after a long weekend and were very excited to talk about theContinue reading “Language is Powerful”

This week I read an amazing post by Doug Robertson also known as @TheWeirdTeacher on Twitter and it can be found here. It is a great post that provides some commentary on the depth of messages that those in influential “EduTwitter” leadership roles are promoting while ignoring more or less some really important issues. TheContinue reading “The Weaponization of Kindness”

Basketball season is kicking off pretty quickly. The final days of football and volleyball season are fast approaching. Tryouts for basketball are soon to begin. I love attending student sporting events. I love to support the kids and cheer them on. Last year I was honoured to work with a team as their motivational supportContinue reading “What is the message?”

Today I started the day by playing with a room of delightful 18-month to 3 year olds at church, had a delightful meal with family and read a good chunk of my current read The Toll. I had a goal to finish it this weekend but I won’t quite make it. As Julie and IContinue reading “With Gratitude 2019”

Sitting at PD with Donalyn Miller taking a little time to reflect on Monday and some moments. I spent the weekend reading through some of my Grade 9 student work and was just so excited with how they are developing as writers. I wanted to take a moment to share with my kids that notContinue reading “Lifting Literacy- Training requires increase.”

Last Friday night it started to snow. It started to snow a lot. By Saturday afternoon we had a couple inches of snow on the ground. By Sunday morning we had a few feet. We spent the day shovelling and shovelling and shovelling just to make sure the dogs had some snow free areas toContinue reading “Digging Out”

It is funny, a while back I saw a post that discussed how kids don’t care about Gold Star stickers. In the moment I had read it and really stopped in my tracks. I could understand what they were saying. The argument that we needed to stop with this extrinsic motivation tool of getting somethingContinue reading “Just let them have a sticker”