In December, I challenged myself to better my mornings and, perhaps, my whole day. Instead of opening my laptop and starting the mindless scroll of social media over coffee every morning, I wondered if starting the day with quiet writing and reading time would feel restorative and centering. The short answer: yes. YES. This month,…
Inspired by the final A Month of Favorites prompt, I’m sharing my 5 most popular blog posts from 2014 (surprisingly, one of them was published in 2013!) as well as my own personal favorite posts of the year. 1. Raising a Less Reluctant Reader: 13 Suggestions for Parents was–by far–my most popular post this year. In…
Ruth Ayres hosts a weekly celebration at her blog. I appreciate this invitation to reflect on the positives of my week. It’s fitting that my 400th blog post comes on a Celebration Saturday. 400 isn’t really a traditional number to celebrate, like 100 or 500, but it’s a nice big round number, and there is…
Top Ten Tuesday is a feature hosted by The Broke and Bookish. This week’s topic? Blogging confessions. 1. I don’t track stats. I have no idea how many followers I have, how many page views, how many anything. I do know which of my posts has the most views of all time, but that’s…
Ruth Ayres hosts a weekly celebration on her blog. I appreciate this invitation to reflect on the positives of my week. 1. Even though the soccer season means some incredibly long drives to get to games, I am sorry it’s over. I love watching my son play, and we have seen a real transformation in…
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and Bookish. This week, they ask for our top ten reasons to love reading and/or book blogging. My list focuses on book blogging. 1. Being part of a community of readers. This is my favorite part of blogging–the other readers, teachers, librarians I have…
Students in my Adolescent Literature class are blogging on their own WordPress sites as a course requirement. Most of these students are new to blogging. I love to have students teach students whenever I can, so on Wednesday, my blogging rock star, Kelsey, gave us a tour of her blog, taught us how to do…
If you’re a Buffy fan–and I hope you are!–you can read this post while playing “Where Do We Go From Here?” Because I’m thoughtful like that. “Where do we go from here?” is the theme song for the end of all of my courses for pre-service teachers. By the end of the semester, we may achieve…
Monday evening, I happened upon a post by Shawn White detailing his intention to start a new blogging challenge: 365 days of blogging. Several other educators in his PLN were planning to join him. I have a novel to finish in the month of September, plus NaNoWriMo coming up in November, plus, you know, regular…
A few weeks ago, I read The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging. They make a wonderful point about exigency that’s very relevant to this post: a bunch of OK posts is probably better than a perfect post that took so long to compose the event was old news by the time you hit ‘submit’…
the dirigible plum 