Award-winning blogs by educators….

Have you been meaning to start reading more blogs about education?  Might as well start with the best.

An easy way to follow blogs is to set up an RSS reader acount, e.g., a Google Reader one.  (NB: although we have Google Apps in school, that educational package doesn’t have a Reader component — so you would need to create an outside (regular) Google account and then sign up for Google Reader).

Poetry resources

Grade 3 has just finished a poetry unit and both K2 and Grade 1 are about to start units on it.

So I’d like to share a Poetry Resources page I put together for all of you:  Poetry Resources.

Poetry…. There are so many links I want to highlight for you.

— among our students, the most popular YouTube video is Michael Rosen performing his “No Breathing in Class” (though this is probably more Junior than Infant….)

— A3/A4 downloads – free – of poems to display — Poems For… a UK initiative –some bi-lingual – poems for … waiting, poems for … one world, poems for … all ages… (registration required before downloading) — but wonderful for display purposes….

— TextFlows — a program that displays a poem with stylistic pauses on your computer screen….  Here’s the list of all the poems available as Textflows – e.g., click here for  Emily Dickinson’s I’m Nobody! Who are you?

Re poetry and teaching…..

A teacher shared this poem online — “Fetch” — about sending a dog off to retrieve a snowball which disappears upon impact  — and he commented on it thus:

I was thinking about this poem at lunch time today.  It reminded me of how we send students off on assignments and how important it is that we are clear about the requirements of the task, its purpose, and our expectations about quality.

It also reminded me of the times the administration here sends us out to fetch information or to complete a task without a clear definition of terms, process, or purpose.

I’ll end with a link to my favorite poem about teaching… by the Canadian poet, Tom Wayland:  Did I miss anything?