Field trip

I’ve been waking up at night with such feelings of guilt for not blogging more… or at all.  It’s been a week. I feel like a failure…until I think about everything else that’s been going on. I’m a work in progress. Since I last posted, we took our first field trip to a college, we wrote brain dumps, read our books, we continued with the read aloud, we drafted our first piece of writing, we attended the book fair…what else? Professionally, I spent some time planning to present at a national conference with my colleagues. (This is very exciting for me! I can’t wait!!) My hope is that  you’ll forgive me for the lack of posts.

Brain dumps. I’ll explain. If you write, you may be familiar with the concept of morning pages. I first read about them from the book The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron when I was in graduate school in the 90s. It’s stream of consciousness writing. There are multiple reasons for brain dumps. They clear our brains. They build our fluency and help us write more and write longer. The more we let go, the crazier our brain dumps can be. They can be used as ideas for future pieces of writing, too. Students are enjoying the brain dumps. In addition to using them in class, I use them when I’m upset or confused about something. Writing a brain dump for a certain amount of time (or until I’m done writing) often helps me untangle my mind and I’m able to figure out the root of my problem. I encourage students to use them at home as well as at school.

Here are a few photos of our week…

Brain dump page 2

Brain dump page 1