follow friday #ff

Hi Friends! Today is Follow Friday! Did you know this is really a thing? On Twitter, if you ever see the #FF hashtag, it's because we're sharing great users for you to follow! So here are some of my best recommendations!

Bloggers

• Two Writing Teachers - One of my favorite blogs done by a handful of classroom teachers, coaches, reading and writing specialists, etc. They host the Slice of Life Story Challenge all of March and every Tuesday is SOL writing, too! In addition, they constantly share great information about the Writing Workshop. Check them out!
• A Rocky Top Teacher - Sarah Cooper feels like my old friend (who I've never met). She's so upbeat and positive that it's hard to not love what she shares! You can find her on a Rocky Top Teacher facebook page where she does a Monday Moment - kind of like a way to positively center ourselves for the week ahead. She's also on Instagram!
• Adventures in Literacy Land - This is another collaborative blog by a group I collaborate with on Facebook - The Reading Crew! They share all kinds of literacy related ideas, book studies, and classroom information that is reading and writing oriented.
• Blogging Through the Fourth Dimension - Pernille Rip has outstanding ideas about all things teaching. It's practical and comes from her work with middle school students. Love. Love. Love! She's on Twitter, too!
• Curmudgucation - Grumpy Old Teacher, aka Peter Greene,  talks about education politics going on around the country. Super snarky, super funny, love all the stories he makes me aware of.

Twitter Friends

• Dr. Mary Howard - She presented to our whole staff and was awesome. We're now connected through Twitter and I've done the Good 2 Great chat a few times (Thursday nights, #g2great). She reaches out and is always willing to help - including offering to teach me all about Canva last night (which I used to make the image at the top of this post!)
• Diane Ravitch - Educational Historian de jure, she is active on twitter and also blogs here. Like me, she believes in public education and shares lots of information about the reformy movements to try and privatize it all. Be aware of politics, teacher friends!

Facebook

• Love, Teach - Funniest teacher blogger out there. If you're a teacher, you live her blogs, so read along and laugh your @ss off! One of my faves, #DEVOLSON :-)
• Badass Teachers Association - A growing group of teachers (we're around 54K now I think) who is all about keeping public education just that - public. Their mission: Badass Teachers Association was created to give voice to every teacher who refuses to be blamed for the failure of our society to erase poverty and inequality through education. BAT members refuse to accept assessments, tests, and evaluations created and imposed by corporate driven entities that have contempt for authentic teaching and learning.
• The Gottman Institute - John Gottman, PhD, studies educational research in counseling and mental health. Author of The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, he has research that can predict, with around 94% accuracy, the couples who will stay together or divorce. His research group shares tons of articles applicable to all relationship statuses, including working with children. Fabulous!

Okay, I'm tired, so that's enough for today. Who do you follow and read religiously? Write up a list and drop it off below!

Get the details for this challenge here!

An InLinkz Link-up

valentine's day with kids

Good morning! Yeah, it's the weekend again, so I'm late getting the BigTime Blogging Challenge started, but I've arrived!

Last night I went to a Sox game with one of my best friends, Holly, her husband, Mike, and the boyfriend. We had a great time and the Sox won...and...there was a great fireworks show last night, too!

Anyways, today's prompt is about our favorite holidays to spend with kids and mine is most definitely Valentine's Day! Especially in middle school, it was always pretty awesome because the kids went crazy, bringing in tons of gifts for their boyfriends/girlfriends, gifts like these:

But another reason why I love Valentine's Day is because I always do Warm Fuzzies. I already wrote about them in a post before, so check that out - it's a tutorial for making them. They're just these little yarn necklaces that you use to give appreciations to everyone. And then, when it's all said and done, there's hundreds of little yarn pieces all over the floor. (I always make the kids pick them up before they go though!)

I'm pretty sure I've done them every year over the last 11, and here's a few years worth of kiddos having fun on Valentine's Day:

Two girls from my third year - now in college!

Fourth Year Kiddos

Sixth Year

Last year - My first with kinders!

Anyways, the Warm Fuzzies are popular with all kids no matter what age. What I didn't anticipate this year with the kinders was the fine motor skills it takes to tie these super tiny strings on their necklace, but they love it just as much as the older kids! (and I think their teacher would do them again, too!)

Well, there's a little happiness for this Saturday morning. What's your favorite holiday to celebrate with your students?

An InLinkz Link-up

do you like you?

Have you seen Colbie Calliet's new video, Try? I heard about it on the news yesterday and decided then and there it was worthy of a post asap. Take a few minutes and watch....

One part of the song goes like this...

Wait a second.
Why, should you care, what they think of you
When you're all alone, by yourself, do you like you?
Do you like you?

I can't imagine being a middle or high school girl in 2014. Our media - the music, movies, TV, Internet - it's all crawling with photoshopped perfection that our kids think they have to emulate. I'm in my 30's and I still have these conversations in my head about my body image and thinking about the weight I should lose or how I should change something about the way I look.

But at the end of the day, I like myself. I'm proud of the woman I've become and my accomplishments and I can give myself lots of positive self-talk to snap that negativity right out of my head.

But can our girls do the same? Our daughters and nieces and students - do the conversations in their heads go the same way? When they look up to us, are we saying things to ourselves like, "I wish my hair were straighter." or "If only I had enough money to buy that dress/makeup/manicure" Do they hear us speaking positively of ourselves and others?

We need to be sure we are being the right model for our young ladies, and that starts with the way we talk to one another and talk to ourselves in the presence of our young ones.

Let's help our girls see that they don't have to try so hard to fit in and belong, because they are beautiful at any age, at any weight, on any day of their lives. Let's have conversations about treating others the way we want to be treated and setting good examples for our peers. Let's help our kiddos know that they are all loved.

So this year, as you head back to your elementary, middle, or high school kids, find some time to let them know just how special and unique they are. Spend time talking about what is going on in their lives and how they're feeling. Pay attention for conflicts and use it as teachable moments about acceptance of others, even in our differences.

and to all of my girls...
Take your make-up off
Let your hair down
Take a breath
Look into the mirror, at yourself
Don't you like you?
Cause I like love you :-)

Mom in back, sister on left, and my Monkey :-)

Niece and Goddaugther

Some loves from my last middle school team :-)

My last volleyball team....

and cheerleaders :-)

An InLinkz Link-up

love letters...better than money!

Today I ran to the office to make a quick copy, and when I got there, Maria, our secretary, said, "Ms. Brezek, I have something for you!"

I replied, "Oh, is it money?" thinking that there was some outstanding reimbursement that the board still hadn't approved. (I actually think they do still owe me some money, but I clearly need to keep better records.)

"No, no," she said as she took some papers from a manilla envelope and handed me two essays by former students, and I thought, "Oh yes, it is that time of the year!"

See, after my eighth graders move on to the high school, they always have to write an essay at the end of their freshmen year about a teacher that impacted their education. Two years ago, I got a few, and this year, I got two more. I love this day - because these essays are much like the letters I used to write with students!

today's letters: a great blog to follow!

Before we blogged about our books, we wrote dialog letters. Students would be responsible for writing one letter a week to me - but all about reading and their books. Then, I would write a letter back to them about their books. Round and round we'd go over the course of the school year, having our own 1:1 conversations about books.

When I came to Heritage, these changed to blogs, but I still kept aspects of the letter writing. When seventh grade began, the first homework assignment was to write me a letter in response to a letter I wrote to students introducing myself. They would write back (on stationary that I provided them) and tell me about themselves. These would be filed into their writing portfolios as an On-Demand writing sample to look at at the end of the year for growth.

At the end of seventh grade, I wrote them another letter (one same letter that was copied for all students) and their last homework assignment was to write me back. I love these "love letters," as Nancy, a fabulous teacher who I got to work with called them. I would bind them into a book and save them:

Here's a letter I wrote to them at the end of seventh grade:

In eighth grade, we continued talking about books, writing blogs about books, and developing our thinking about experiences with them. At the end of eighth grade, I again, wrote each child a letter. This time though, every student got a hand-written, personal letter. They *loved* this, and even though it took ages, I loved doing it too, because then I got back the best love letters of all!

Here's one of my faves from the end of eighth grade last year:

So back to my main point about the freshman essays. This year, Lillian and Kirstin were the two girls who wrote about me. Here's Lilli:

Did you love how she said that I have a degree in Lit Studies? :-)

And Kirstin said...

Anyways, just wanted to share the highlight of my day with you all, and let these two special girls know just how important they are to me. Lillian, you remind me how important it is to *really* get to know someone before I pass judgment and that great relationships take time. And Kirstin, you are always so happy and so positive - I am not sure there is much that gets you down and I love that about you! Also, you remind me that it is great to try new things that might be outside my comfort zone! Thank you both for trusting me for the two short years we spent together, and I hope we are always just a phone call or a text away!

So...any of you do the letter writing, too? It's that time of the year, my first without my own class and I'm feeling kinda sad!

Please leave a comment with your version of the love letters, especially if you are someone who is out of the classroom now, like me!

Happy Wednesday!

Currently May

I seriously can't get things done on time! It's May 3rd and I'm just now getting to linking up with Farley for this month's Currently! Aside from that, I can't believe that it's already May and we have one month until school is out! Excited for a break and also looking forward to finishing up my first year as a Literacy Coach. Anyways, without further delay...here's what's up with me this month!

Listening to....What Does the Fox Say?

Okay, do you know this song? If you teach school, you have to! It all started out during our Chiberia winter. We had to get creative with indoor recess. (When I say we, I mean our classroom teachers, namely Jennie B!) Anyways, she and her coteacher had their kids doing Just Dance during indoor recess. So, I saw them doing this dance one day:

And then, well it became a thing, and then we had a talent show and so it ended up being the Grand Finale and I love, Love, LOVED it!!

As you can see, the fox now holds a special place in my heart, and so do all those third graders and their awesome teachers!

Loving....Twitter!
Twitter is so amazing. As a blogger, I find Twitter to be a blog on the go and...as Literacy Coach who is in and out of various classrooms all week, I always have my phone and snap pictures of the work I see kids doing. Then, they go into instagram and then off to the Twitterverse. My district is 1:1 and so lots of our teachers are on Twitter. It's so cool to see what's going on in all the classrooms across the district and also show off the great things that are happening at Emerson.

Regular school events in our district are even more amazing now, thanks to Twitter and our awesome tech team. As I mentinoed above, our talent show was on Thursday, and we had a Tweet Deck set up, with live tweets put up on a screen throughout the show. As parents and teachers watched, they tweeted about what  they thought, which was then posted up on a screen for all to share. All you need  is a hashtag! I love the Tweet Deck! If you're on Twitter, go check out our hash tag #RAWRS2014 to see what everyone was saying! Here's a sample....

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though. I follow lots of professional educators who always post great articles, like this one that says teachers dominate Twitter. (I had no idea!) So so awesome.

Follow me @BigTimeLiteracy!

Thinking....about the Kentucky Derby and the hat I'm going to wear today?

I'm meeting some friends out this afternoon to watch the Kentucky Derby and the place we're going is having a "Best Hat" contest. I love accessories! I would like to say I'm going to pull off something like this:

but yeah, probably not. So I'll be sure to post a pic next week with what I end up with!

Wanting....my new blog design to be finished!

I know, it's a process and I'm taking my time with Kassie at Designs by Kassie, but I'm so excited for the big reveal! Here's a little hint: I built the whole theme around the Chicago flag:

Soon, my friends....soon! I'm so so excited!

Needing....to get down to business in the exercise department!

I need you all to tell me things so I will feel the motivation to get to exercising - maybe run around the block a few times? I have a 5K coming up in about a month and a mud run in two months and I seriously haven't really done much of anything, including go to a yoga class that I've been paying for for the last 5 weeks and not attending.

Mostly, I've been blaming it on the weather (it's still so cold and rainy here in Chicago) but it's also hard to go after working a long day. All I want to do is come home, write, watch some TV, relax and unwind. But, I can do it! Anyone else fall into similar habits?

Surprise....Literacy Without Worksheets!

This blog caught my attention because I love the name of it - Literacy can and should be done without workbook pages or random, meaningless worksheets!

But, this blog is more than just a name - her blog design is so clean and cute and she posts great stuff - like inspirational quotes, and I loved her Somebody Wanted But So Then freebie she posted a few weeks ago. So, make sure you run over to Literacy Without Worksheets and check out Bridget's blog!

That's all for me here at BigTime Literacy! Next week is Teacher Appreciation Week and I'm going to join in a blog hop with some other fabulous bloggers! We'll have some giveaways so don't forget to stop back by!

Have a great weekend!

Rituals

The first day of school can often be very hectic with collecting supplies and going over forms and just getting to know the kids' names. In the time you do get with your class, what do you plan to do with them? Do you have any special rituals that you always make sure to save time for? For the past four years, the following are just a few of the things that were at the top of my to do list on day one....

First Day Read Aloud
My first day of teaching, ever, I remember reading a picture book to my sixth graders. Ten years later I see the importance of it - showing your students exactly how important reading is to them - but at the time, that was not my intention.

The past four years I would gather my seventh or eighth graders on the carpet in the center of my classroom and I would read to them. Yes, I make them come sit on the floor with me even though they were a little uneasy about it. Perhaps you're thinking it's not very age appropriate, but that was the ritual I wanted to begin, starting on day one. I knew that as we moved forward with reading workshop they would be relaxing on the floor or in the chairs reading great books, so I wanted them to get in the habit right away.

Shortly after the first day....shared text altogether in our meeting space.

Eventually they tell me, "It was so weird in the beginning....but we love our classroom!"

My favorite first day read aloud is First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg. It's about someone who is so nervous about going to school the first day, and then when you get to the end, you see it's the teacher, on her first day of school. The kids never really expect the ending, and that's what I love about it!

I highly recommend finding a great book or short story to share with your kiddos on day one!


Learning their names & first photos
On the first day, I try my best to take a picture of all the kids in my homeroom. I had a great teacher in graduate school who said she would learn all of our names the first day, and she accomplished this with pictures. I think this sends an important message to kids that you care about them: finding out their name, if they have a nickname they preferred to be called, and even learning how to say it just right.

Later on, these pictures go up on my "Proud Wall" where each student has a space to showcase work of their choice. The kids love to see how much they've changed with these pictures - especially when you loop with them. The growing up that happens in seventh and eight grade is awesome!

First Homework Assignment
Another ritual I get students acquainted with right away is letter writing. On the first day, I have a letter prepared for students that I wrote to them - everyone get the same letter for this one - but it just tells them about myself and then at the end it asks them to write a letter back to me. I get a bunch of stationary from the dollar store and let them pick one for this assignment. Not only does it give them an opportunity to introduce themselves to me personally, it's also a great way to see what kind of writers you have on your hands.

Letter writing continues throughout the school year when we write letters about the books we read and then at the end of the year, I always write students an individual letter and they have to then write one last one back to me for their final assignment. I LOVE getting these "love letters" back from them - I bind them each year into a book that I keep on my shelf. When I'm having a bad day, it's a great place to look for a little sunshine!

Circle Time
At the end of each week, my homeroom meets for the last 10 minutes of school on Friday in a circle on the carpet. We do appreciations and high-low. Obviously appreciations are just who and what they appreciate. High - low is from my good friend, Katie, and kids just share the high of their week and their low. Again, you might be thinking that it's crazy for seventh and eight graders do this, sitting on the floor in a circle and all, but after they get used to the idea, they ask for it. 

If you're going to do this, I recommend having a stuffed animal or ball of some sort that they can pass around so they know whose turn it is to talk. After two years, we really had become a family and they always talked over one another - in a playful way, but they need to know how to listen as well as share.

Some kids will always just listen, and that's okay. Some kids will want to share 5 times. If there are a lot of kids who want to share, I will tell the kids who want to talk the most they only get to share two or three times so everyone has a chance.

I believe that this circle time was what really brought my homeroom together. Towards the end of our two years, I had kids resolve problems and apologize to one another during this time. And celebrating what is working for them throughout the week is the best way to wrap up another week together!

Our little family <3

What rituals will you put in place in the upcoming school year? Please share your ideas with me!


Until next time.....