Teachers Write! Weekly Check In #1

Welcome to Teachers Write 2023 and the Weekly Check-In! I'm Jen Vincent and writing is my jam! Teachers who write make the very best teachers of writing and Teachers Write has been a huge part of my journey as a writer.

If you’re here, you get it! Whether you already write consistently or you are here to dust off your notebook or you have an inkling that this will be a game changer, you understand that being able to walk the walk matters when it comes to writing instruction.

A quick intro to me! I’ve hosted the Weekly Check In for Teachers Write with Kate Messner since we started Teachers Write in 2012. I've written young adult novels and picture books and essays. Most recently, I’m working on writing about what it looks like to live the life of a writer and how we can share this with students.

I'm a 6-8 Language Arts teacher for Bannockburn School in Bannockburn, Illinois and I’ve been in a variety of roles in my 21 years of teaching. Beyond school, I love being outdoors, hiking, kayaking, paddle boarding, practicing yoga, and hanging out with my husband (also a teacher!) and our two teenage sons (yikes!).

This year, our focus is Poetry and Play and this week, I played around with how I might use Laura Ruby’s suggestion to use a hermit crab poem to write slant and share why being a teacher who writes matters.

Yesterday, I met my friend Carrie Thomas, a high school English teacher friend who writes, at a local coffee shop and I snapped a picture of the menu.

I’m passionate about supporting teachers as writers because it matters. It matters because when we write, we are better able to connect with students and confer with them from an authentic place. Living the life of a writer means navigating the ups and downs and being able to say to a student writer, “That’s happened to me before. You know what I tried?” I wondered, how could I use the menu as a mentor text to share some ways that being a teacher who writes matters?

I started with a blank page in my notepad, recreating the menu with a Teachers Write spin, playing with the words and trying out ideas.

Then I switched over to Canva and had fun designing my own Teachers Write Specialties menu. If you’d like a PDF version to print, you can find it here.

I’m absolutely thrilled that you are here and looking forward to hearing how your first week of Teachers Write: Poetry and Play went! 

Here’s how the Weekly Check In goes. I share a bit of my writing life and I invite you to reflect on your writing life this week and share the ups and downs in the comments. It’s been pretty much the same since 2012 when we first started and if you’d like to see the resources I’ve shared over the years, this link will take you to all my previous Teachers Write posts, starting with the most recent first.

Teachers Write Weekly Check-In Agreements:

1. We respect each other and the type of writing we each do.

2. We are positive and encourage each other.

3. We recognize and maintain this as a safe, inclusive environment for all.

4. We have fun!

Ideas for today in the comments section:

What are your goals for Teachers Write?

How did you do this week? Did you meet your weekly goal(s)?

What was the pit of your week? (The hardest part, the non-fun part?)

What was the peak of your week? (The best part, the most-fun part?)

My Weekly Check-In: My goals for Teachers Write this year are to follow along with the prompts from Kate and our fabulous guest authors and to let myself play and explore. I do have a WIP (work in progress) that is currently at 21,244 words and I’d love to add to my word count and possibly finish my first draft before school starts in August…but I’m giving myself a lot of grace and going with the flow. 

This week I had fun blending Kate’s idea for found poems and Laura Ruby’s hermit crab poems suggestion. BUT I did not work on my WIP until I needed to write this blog post and realized I should at least open it during week 1. Let’s see if I can get some words added by next week’s check-in!

Give yourself a huge pat on the back for being part of Teachers Write this summer! Yay you! I‘m excited to connect with you and hear how Teachers Write is going so far. If you have any questions or if I can help with anything, please let me know.

Lizzo's Musical Mentor Text

Last week we watched Sister Act and Sister Act 2 and I blogged about some advice Whoopi Goldberg gives in the movie from Rainer Maria Rilke. I did some researching I happened to find a Lizzo MTV TV and Movie Awards performance of her song "Juice" and her performance was inspired by the end of Sister Act 2.

I love finding things like this! In some ways, Lizzo used the finale from Sister Act 2 as a mentor text.

Here's the clip from the end of Sister Act 2:

And here's Lizzo's performance from 2019, clearly inspired by Sister Act 2:

You can call it inspiration. You can call it walking in someone else shoes. I call it a mentor text. Sometimes what we create from a mentor text is completely our own but lately I've found it hard to completely create something on my own so I've been using mentor texts almost as a frame for my own creating. I did some mission and vision work for Story Exploratory and I looked at an article an educator wrote about dual language education and I fit my ideas into the framework the writer had created with his article. I had an idea for a book and I looked at what an author had done to set up their book on craft. 

Especially when it comes to play and experimenting or drafting, I believe it's completely okay to use mentor texts and model your writing or any kind of creativity off of others. I love looking at the parallels from Sister Act 2 and Lizzo's performance and being reminded that anything is a mentor text and that mentor texts come in different formats.

And just because Lizzo is cool and I appreciate more Lizzo in my life, here is her performance at NPR's Tiny Desk and her Instagram if you want to check them out. 

How to Code a Sandcastle

Title: How to Code a Sandcastle 
Author: Josh Funk 
Illustrator: Sara Palacios 
Publisher: Viking/Penguin 
Publication Date: May 15th, 2018 
Genre/Format: Fiction/Picture Book 
GoodReads Summary: From the computer science nonprofit Girls Who Code comes this lively and funny story introducing kids to computer coding concepts.

Pearl and her trusty rust-proof robot, Pascal, need to build a sandcastle before summer vacation is over, and they’re going to do it using code. Pearl breaks the big we-need-a-sandcastle problem into smaller steps, then uses conditionals, loops, and other basic coding concepts to tell Pascal exactly what to do. But building a sandcastle isn’t as easy as it sounds when surfboards, mischievous dogs, and coding mishaps get in the way! Just when it looks like the sandcastle might never work, Pearl uses her coding skills to save the day and create something even better: a gorgeous sandcastle kingdom!
What I Think: I'm so excited to use this when we celebrate Hour of Code next year! Our district has been doing Hour of Code districtwide for about five years and next year we have plans to expand this and integrate coding experiences throughout the year. I love how How to Build a Robot helps us think about coding outside of computers. While I sometimes work with the code on my blog, I don't have as much experience with coding that lets me see how coding can be part of other parts of my day. But this book helps me see how I can start looking for times when I can code my day and it also gives me the opportunity to think about this with students. 
     At the end of the book, you can read Pearl and Pascal's Guide to Coding where they explain code, a sequence, a loop, and an if-then-else. I've been thinking a lot about teaching students advocacy. From as simple as, if you aren't sure about something, raise your hand to ask a question, we could talk about if-then-else. I love this! Students could come up with different scenarios and think through what they could do in those situations. You could brainstorm as a group and then ask students to write their own if-then-else scenarios. Sometimes this explicit discussion of what to do in different situations helps students know what options they have in different situations. This is kind of silly but here's an example. When my 7-year-old runs to the car ahead of me and tries to open the door before I've unlocked it, he used to pull and pull and pull on the door handle to get the door open. Finally, I told him, IF he gets to the car and tries to open the door and it's still locked, THEN he should look into the passenger side window and wave at me so to remind me to unlock the door. It worked like a charm. All I had to do was explain to him what I wanted him to do instead of what he was doing. Again, this could definitely work in a school context. Students could brainstorm what to do if: they have to go to the bathroom, need a drink of water, don't understand a math problem, need help spelling a word, etc. Again, this is perfect for discussing any kind of strategies we want students to be aware of IF they encounter a certain situation. 
     As a mentor text, How to Code a Sandcastle also offers a perfect opportunity to look at problems in a story. As students stretch their stories out more, they can start to think about how stories have some kind of problem or conflict that the main character has to work through. Pearl and Pascal encounter four small problems that they have to solve in the story. It's great to pay attention to this as a reader because it helps us understand and retell a story but it's also important to pay attention to as a writer because many stories have a problem or conflict. Once readers notice that this story has a problem, they can start to look for the problem in other stories and make connections in this way while also or before thinking about the problem in their own stories.
Snatch of Text:
"But today, I've got the perfect plan. I've brought my trusty rust-proof robot, Pascal.

He'll do whatever I tell him - as long as I tell him CODE. It's not a secret code - it's special instructions that computers understand."  
Writing Prompt: Write a code for something in your own life. You can write out the steps, identify a loop, or even write an if-then-else code.