Links I Loved Last Week: A Round-Up of Online Reading 9/6/15

My favorite line of the week comes from Carrie Gelson’s wonderful post on 20 things to consider in organizing your classroom library: “I am often asked to share a photo of my classroom library. The thing is . . . my classroom is a library. Where is the library within the classroom? Where is the classroom within the library? Who knows?”

I’m not yet sure what I’m going to do with these 40 Creative Prompts in my Creative Mind class, but I’m going to do something.

Michelle Haseltine explores the value of her writer’s notebook in I Am Safe and Free.

Tara Smith explains how she builds a culture of bravery in her sixth-grade writer’s workshop. I’m super flattered that my post, A Writing Life Requires Bravery, inspired her to write this!

This Literature of 9/11 course sounds really interesting.

I loved this story about how the Book Internet jumped in and provided copies of a challenged young adult novel for this community. (Though I couldn’t help wondering if the best use of all 830 donated copies was to go to one community.)

This week in Graphic Novels class, we’re reading and discussing CeCe Bell’s El Deafo. This is a wonderful photo-essay Bell did for The Guardian about her artistic process.

Jessica Lifshitz’s elementary students articulate all the reasons why I think memoir is so important (and why I could easily spend an entire semester of composition just on memoir).

Patience is a real challenge for me when it comes to “literary nest building” with my college students, so I found this post by Carrie Gelson so helpful.

Pernille Ripp explains how she uses picture books to teach her middle-schoolers important lessons about life, community, and literacy.

I loved Christine Moers’s blog post about the importance of waiting, listening, and agreeing with everything our children say.

Beth Shaum has started curating the Internet on Sundays and sharing her favorite links! It’s very possible that the last thing I really need is more online reading, but I’m obsessed with her new series and delighted that even though we have so many overlapping online communities, our links posts are still so very different!

If you need a little cute in your day, check out this video of two raccoon brothers at the swimming pool–the adventurous one goes for a swim, while the overprotective one tries to “save” his brother.