Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Time collage by Linda Mitchell
This month I am participating in Laura Shovan’s February poetry project on Facebook. The theme this year is Time. This beautiful collage made by Linda Mitchell was our prompt on Monday. So much to write about, but I focused on the couple dancing. This weekend my husband and I were dancing to one of our favorite bands, Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys at an event at the Acadiana Center for the Arts. Opportunities to dance have been few during the pandemic. We were a little rusty, but so happy to be out there again. A nearby friend captured a photo of us on the dance floor.
Time in a Picture Frame
The photographer shutters the moment mid-glide of a waltz. You were smiling at him in the way a person whose known someone for a long time- familiarity mixed with joy.
In your mind’s eye, the planets spin an orbit of protection. No matter what, the photo will always show joy.
You do not know when loss will reveal something else hidden there- a child looking on or the tail of an astronaut’s lifeline.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
I filled the last page of my notebook, the one I use every day as I write alongside my students. We use marbleized composition books. With decorative paper, magazines, and other things, we collage covers for our notebooks. The last few days I have been stealing a few minutes here or there to work on my new notebook. Here are my completed covers. I tend to be pretty critical of my own collage work, but I like these.
My new writing notebook for 2022
One of the elements on the front cover came from an ArtSpark postcard exchange with Jone MacCulloch and Amy Souza. I cut the quotes on the back from a 2021 calendar.
May the space between where I am and where I want to be inspire me.
Tracee Ellis Ross
This week I am sharing videos from Margaret Alvarez about gratitude art journaling that I discovered in an email from The Network for Grateful Living. We’ve enjoying playing with these easy, yet creative ideas in my classroom. Day one was “Life is a gift” using watercolor shapes and sharpie designs. Day two we did string art. My students have been highly motivated by art journaling. These ideas are simple enough for my second graders while creative enough for my 6th graders. And it’s fun!
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
I try not to complain. I try to see the good in each day. Really, there is good in each day. But yesterday I got this haiku from a friend in Facebook Messenger.
It made me laugh, and I couldn’t resist playing along.
Haiku of my life at 5:00 on Monday.
My ribs are bruised Coffee has lost its sweetness Raindrops in my hair.
Margaret Simon
Sliding with “Tuffy”, age 60 and age 28 months.
This photo gives a clue to my injury. See that rather thick siding on the slide, just thick enough to bruise a rib on the way down. Can’t a Mamère have any fun!?
But I will not leave this post without hope. I am currently nurturing about 20 monarch caterpillars in my kitchen. Last week before a hard freeze, I got a text from Jennie who tends the garden at a local school: “There’s a bunch of monarchs at Sugarland. Do you have any desire to bring them in from cold? Thank you, Caterpillar hero!” On my way home I stopped by the school, found an open gate, and cut lots of milkweed with caterpillars feasting. I’m posting updates periodically on Instragram.
My January Kitchen
A net enclosure holds milkweed to feed future beauty-wings
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
When we returned from winter break, I started a new daily writing activity in my classroom: 100 Days of Notebooking. In truth we don’t have 100 days of school left, but no matter. The point is to write and draw and be creative every day in some way or another. My students have embraced this idea.
We start each entry with the date and a quote. I have a copy of 360 Days of Wonder which is full of quotes. I also allow students to look up quotes by famous people they admire. One student is choosing a sports quote each day.
Notebook page, January 6, 2022
The papers I used for the collage above were images in a National Geographic magazine of a polluted lake in Romania. I told Chloe about it and she wrote a poem about it. I asked her if I could have a copy for my notebook page.
For Christmas, one of my students gave me a gift card to Target, so I used it to get more notebooking supplies, washi tape, felt-tip pens, and decorative paper.
new notebook supplies
Michelle Haseltine started a Facebook group and an Instagram hashtag. It’s fun to be a part of a larger group. Everyone has their own unique style of notebooking. I enjoy drawing inspiration from others.
Notebook page, January 10, 2022
Avalyn picked out the quote above, and we discussed the figurative meaning of it. On her notebook page, she wrote a loving poem. You can see how she worked on the line breaks. She posted it on our Fanschool page. You can leave a comment for her here.
Avalyn, 2nd grade
Do you have a notebook? What creativity can you bring to the blank page?
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Fire pit in the Blue Ridge Mountains
Let the magic find you.
I picked up that line from fellow slicer Fran Haley’s post this morning. I want to adopt it as my 2022 mantra.
Instead of piles of presents, our family took a trip to the mountains of North Carolina. We rented a home near Burnsville outside of Asheville. The house was just right with three floors, five bedrooms, and a fire pit. The only treacherous part was the drive up. As luck would have it, we arrived before dark to drive the mile long switchback trail up, up, and up. Thank heavens for confident sons-in-law drivers and 4-wheel drive. The trail became part of the adventure to the mountain house. We did make sure we were home each day before dark. And one morning the guys walked down with a wheelbarrow and patched some squishy places with branches and rocks.
Magic found us in the mountain house.
Three toddlers making fun. Men making meals. Scary barns. Fields of cows. Nightly fires under a blanket of stars. Magical Christmas!
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
He sat on the bench near the door eyeing the white hard hats on the other side of the bench. The next thing I knew, he announced, proudly wearing the hat with the strap over his forehead that he was a “fighter fighter”.
“Who are you?”
“A fighter fighter!”
“A firefighter?”
“I a fighter, fighter.”
“I a fighter fighter” Leo (3)
This weekend I accompanied my daughter and her husband as we drove with Leo (3) to the Louisiana Children’s Museum in New Orleans for his special birthday weekend. We met up with my younger two daughters, son-in-law, and cousin Thomas (2). The Children’s Museum is full of pretend play areas, water, music, grocery shopping, etc. I climbed into a huge bubble-making contraption with both boys. Leo was interested in the pulleys that hoist the bubble up while Thomas whispered, “Bubble.” Then we all squealed when it popped.
“Cold” Thomas (2)
Pretend play with toddler boys is fun. I could watch and listen all day. As they bounce from one thing to another, a cup becomes a gas can, a handle becomes a sword, and a puzzle becomes building blocks. At the end of the day, Mamère becomes a storyteller and lullaby singer, and that’s the best job in the whole world.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
The shopping season is here, and to be honest, shopping’s not my favorite thing to do. Or at least that’s what I usually say, but Sunday was different. I started out by picking up our Christmas cards at Walgreens. They were so easy to do. I used my phone and the Walgreens app; there was a 60% off sale, so they were also not that expensive. I left Walgreens with a spring in my step that helped motivate me for the next stop.
After buying a gift card for the name I chose on the angel tree, I found a new-to-me-boutique, right in my home town. All about You. I hit the jackpot on gifts for my Secret Santa gift exchange at school as well as a Christmas t-shirt for me and do-dads for the grands. Having saved some money at Walgreens, I splurged at this shop.
With all this shopping success (not to mention a good phone chat with my sister in the parking lot), I decided to treat myself to a pumpkin cream cold brew at Starbucks. New Iberia is barely large enough to sustain a Starbucks, but this day there was a long drive-through line. No matter. I took the time to check email and Instagram and such. When I got to the overly cheerful man at the window, he announced, “The car ahead of you paid for your drink!”
“Oh no!” I exclaimed. “Pay it forward. Now I have to do it for someone else.”
“The order for the car behind you is only $…”
I flashed my phone and in the blink of an eye, I had passed on the holiday giving cheer.
Sometimes shopping is a burden, but this day turned a chore into a gift.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Fredericksburg, Texas
For my 60th birthday back in August, my daughters bought me a vacation with them to Fredericksburg, Texas. A sisters trip. We invited my sister-in-law who lives in Dallas to come along. This was to our advantage because she drove and picked us up at the Austin airport to drive to Fredericksburg. Not to mention she was fun to have along.
Fredericksburg is a town in the hill country, settled by Germans, and home to 59 wineries. Just imagine all girls at a winery table on the banks of Baron’s Creek toasting and sharing stories. Nothing better, right? We laughed, we cried, we laughed.
One evening we found ourselves closing down a winery. We had stayed beyond our welcome, and it was dark. Two of my daughters worked on getting us an Uber (We were being responsible), but on a Sunday evening in a small town, they were few and far between. We were also being a bit picky and didn’t want the old cowboy with the car full of trash (and a foul smell). We walked to the entrance and someone told us the gates were closed. We’d have to walk to the back gate which was apparently quite a distance down a dark dirt road.
To the rescue appeared Enrique. He told us to wait right there while he got his truck. His truck was like brand new and big enough to hold 4 of us in the back seat comfortably. When he got us to the back gate, Katherine said, “The Uber is 15 minutes away.”
Our angel Enrique said, “Ya’ll going back to town? I’ll take you.” And he flashed his million-dollar-twenty-something-Mexican smile our way.
We made it safely back to town while I embarrassed my girls by calling our angel “Enriquo.” But I was sober enough to find $40 to leave on the seat. He saved us and wanted no payment for it.
My Inkling friend Linda Mitchell is the host at Ethical ELA today with a prompt for writing a Tricube poem. Here is mine in deep gratitude for my daughters.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
Through blogging communities like this one (Slice of Life) and Poetry Friday, I’ve met many mentors for writing. Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is one of those special teacher-poets who generously gives of herself. During the pandemic shut down, she recorded videos in Betsy, her writing camper, every day. These can be found on her YouTube channel. Last year she went back to teaching, so she didn’t blog as much. Boy, did we miss her voice in cyberspace!
But she’s back and each week on Friday, she posts a mentor poem on The Poem Farm with student-friendly (and adult-friendly) instructions for writing your own poem. This past Friday, her poem came up on my Instagram and was just right for our writing time.
Crocheted wool hat by Margaret Simon
One of our kindergarten teachers is having a baby, so I crocheted a little hat for her new child. This was on my mind when I wrote alongside my students. I gifted the poem to Miss Heidi along with the hat.
When sheep’s wool becomes yarn becomes crochet becomes hat, a newborn baby’s head holds a sheep, yarn, hands, needle, warmth, and I wonder how prayers offered for a stranger growing inside a friend becomes a child wearing a hat passed on from sheep to hand to heart to warmth to love.
Margaret Simon
Jaden, 6th grade, has started a new trend when he writes his gratitude poem. If he makes a mistake, he turns it into a picture. I noticed his little designs and complimented him. He said, “Oh, I made those dots and stars because I messed up.” That sounds like a poem to me. And so he turned his mistakes into stars into a poem.
Recycle Poem
Old mistakes become rainbows and new designs old mistakes become new inspirations when I look at the designs will I remember the old mistakes? will I think of new ideas? shapes like stars and squares? or something new? what will the new mistakes become?
Jaden, 6th grade
One of the fourth grade teachers is raising monarchs. Katie was inspired by this and wrote her circle poem about the life cycle of a butterfly.
Life Cycle Poem
Out of a small egg comes a small, slimy, bean. A bean that squirms and grows and grows. Grows into a small chrysalis where it stays for a while until it’s ready to fly. Fly into the real world with beautiful, colored, wings and to reproduce another small egg.
Thank you to Two Writing Teachers for creating an amazing community of writers and a safe, welcoming space to write and share.
On Saturday as part of the Festival of Words, I had the privilege to attend a small workshop with Aimee Nezhukumatathil. She led us through a number of writing exercises and ended with a discussion of the haibun.
From Poets.org: “Haibun combines a prose poem with a haiku. The haiku usually ends the poem as a sort of whispery and insightful postscript to the prose of the beginning of the poem. Another way of looking at the form is thinking of haibun as highly focused testimony or recollection of a journey composed of a prose poem and ending with a meaningful murmur of sorts: a haiku.”
Aimee added to this definition with two concepts: Aware, a Japanese concept similar to natsukashisa, a type of nostalgia with a fondness for what is gone but also slight optimism for what’s ahead and a sense of calm because this is the natural course of things. She also Nezhukumatathiled the form with the addition of scent. She spoke about scent as a way to activate the reader’s mind to a memory.
On Monday, I went to a former school to screen a student for gifted. They put me in my old room to do the testing and while the child took her test, I wrote this poem.
I enter the spacious classroom, and you are not here. So many hard days in masks and social distance defined our relationship then. Your desk is gone. The smell of pencil shavings is sharp mixed with musty-mold of an old school. Today I am testing a girl like you, bright and edgy with a little swagger to her walk. But she isn’t you. No one can be you but you. This chair, the small blue square that lost its cushion years ago, holds me again. I trip over its wobbly wheels wishing you were here to laugh at me. Where are you now? In another classroom, another school, same masked face, same suspicious eyes. I want to know if you are OK. I only ever wanted you to be OK.
Students come in Twist my heart into a knot And leave it longing
Margaret Simon lives on the Bayou Teche in New Iberia, Louisiana. She is a retired elementary gifted teacher who writes poetry and children's books. Welcome to a space of peace, poetry, and personal reflection. Walk in kindness.
Reflections on the Teche 