Happenings

When Spring time comes in middle school, sometimes I find myself challenged to come up with novel ways to keep 6th graders engaged, especially during those last days of school.  This year, I came across Spine Book poetry online, and I decided to add it to my poetry writing workshop. Check out this google slide presentation of some of the cool and unexpected spines that became poetry! Spine Book Poetry Student Submissions 2016

How wonderful it is to see Sara Holbrook and Michael Salinger every year!  They travel the world using poetry to reach kids and content areas, and it's magical when they make their way to Eastern!  Michael and Sara are both published poets, and they have written many books for teachers. After an amazing kick-off assembly, I love how they enter a classroom, have a brief chat with the teacher about what's been going on in their class, and within minutes, the lesson has started and all of the students are engaged!  By the end of the 43 minute period, all students have a draft of a poem!  While it's not easy to schedule 15 English classes with each of them in only three days, I manage to figure it out so that each and every one of our 285 sixth graders gets to have a workshop with each of them.  My only wish is that we could have each of them for a second class period to work on revisions and presentations! I've learned so much from watching Michael a...

Video Pen-pals Global Collaboration via Level Up Village has made an impact on my students!  It all started in the fall of 2015 on the side lines of my son's soccer game.  When I first heard about Level Up Village, I was intrigued and wanted to try it with my class!  But, at the time, LUV's offerings were related to science and technology, and since I am an English teacher, the courses didn't fit. So, the solution was to create my own course that related to literature I was using in my classroom already!  So, that's what I did! Read " Creating Meaningful Global Connections "--the article I wrote about my first experience with Global Collaboration (and why English teachers should try it)on Edutopia.org. The experience was so positive and contagious that Greenwich Time ran an article about it!  And, much to my surprise, when googling my name, I found that someone blogged about my article and their own experience with global collaboration.  I ...

Yes, it's true! In 2015, my family filmed an episode of The Property Brothers at our home in Connecticut. Check out the before and after photo gallery here ! Wanna catch a re-run of the episode?  Check when it will air here .