Slice of Life: Time for a Stretch Check

Today I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice" 

to the Tuesday Slice of Life (SOL) community.

Thanks to Stacey, Tara, Betsy, Dana, Beth, Anna, Kathleen, and Deb

                    for hosting this meeting place each Tuesday and nurturing our writing lives.
Fifth Tuesdays are my personal check-in time for my OLW, stretch.  Today I contemplate the changes that bring us the golden days of fall while reminding myself that change requires earnest effort in order to bring much wanted results in this "stretch" acrostic.

    September leaves

   turn from green to gold. Fall 
   reaches forward to 
   earnest endeavors, recognizing change as 
   the catalyst,

   creating cathedrals of 
   holiness.

Celebrate This Week!

                             Join us each weekend for Celebrate This Week with Ruth Ayres.  

 When we pause to celebrate, we find the joy.

  A week filled with moments to celebrate and remember!

1.  Thirteen pounds of paper gone!

Sara joined me on her day off, and we spent part of it decluttering files.  It can be a stressful time.  I courageously gave her entire files to purge and didn't even look through the recycling after she left.  I found the joy this time and chanted, "Goodbye," to each page as I gleefully tossed it into the recycling basket!

2.  Next book?  

I celebrate KCLS, our local library system!  I love that I can request books from my home computer, stop by the holds shelf at the library, and come home with treasures weekly.  No, I won't read all these books, but I do share books with my after-school book club every week.  And we had eighteen students at last week's meeting!

3.  Fall is officially here!

If you haven't checked out the picture book, Ask Me by Bernard Waber and illustrated by Suzy Lee, request it now.  I captured this week's celebration of blue and yellow (with a touch of lingering green) in the Costco parking lot.

 "Every leaf speaks bliss to me, fluttering from the autumn tree."
-- Emily Bronte

Slice of Life: I Did It!

Today I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice" 

to the Tuesday Slice of Life (SOL) community.

Thanks to Stacey, Tara, Betsy, Dana, Beth, Anna, Kathleen, and Deb

                    for hosting this meeting place each Tuesday and nurturing our writing lives.

There are times when I despair of ever learning all I want to know, or even a small bit of what I want to know.  There are huge gaps in my  knowledge of technology which I like to attribute to "being a blogger of a certain age."  I fight with  blogger weekly. The format I see on my compose screen is never how it shows up when I hit the publish button!  

Several years ago I started a summer reading blog for my students, Sweet Summer Reads.  After retirement, I used it occasionally to report on our after school book club activities.  I wanted a new blog, or I needed to rename the old blog.  Neither seemed satisfactory, what I really wanted was to post all my Sweet Summer Reads stuff onto a new blog. So I wandered around, I punched keys to see what was in different sections of the settings, and by serendipity I discovered that it was possible to import everything and still leave the other blog intact.  And then because it showed up a bit differently in the new blog, I played around with some of the possibilities and discovered a new format to use.   I'll share the blog this afternoon with students at our after school book club meeting. Take a peek at Sweet Reads and let me know what you think.  

Most of the time when I have computer questions, I go to my husband, to my kids, to Ryan, or to a workshop at the Apple store, but this time I figured it out all by myself.  Someday I want to schedule a google chat with other blogspot users so I/we can troubleshoot some of my/our common issues.  (For instance, why is the spacing in the last few lines goofed up?)  But for today, I'm happy with the new blog and ready to add some new posts about this year's group (as soon as I get parent permission forms returned).   

Celebrating 100 Weeks!

                             Join us each weekend for  Celebrate This Week with Ruth Ayres.  

 When we pause to celebrate, we find the joy.

  A week filled with moments to celebrate and remember!

I'm thrilled to be here with my friends for this centennial celebration - 100 times we've gathered to Celebrate This Week together.  Thanks, Ruth, for your gentle ways which remind us to celebrate:  to look for hope, to make connections, and to seek the light.  Every.Single.Week.

1.  Writer's Notebooks!
I bumped into this guy at the public library after the first day of school.  
I've known him for a long time, but he's in fourth grade now.
He was focused on finding the perfect pics to decorate his writer's notebook.
His dad was helping him cut them out, and his mom sent me this pic last week.  

2.  Books!
I joined fellow Friends of the Library on three days this past week to volunteer for our fall book sale, the big one.  Imagine my delight when I arrived on Monday,
and they assigned me to unpack children's books. 

Of course, if you put me to work in children's books, chances are I'll buy a few. 
For those of you who know about my decluttering efforts, 
most of these books are gifts.  And books aren't clutter.

3.  Books, Brownies, and Beyond
Our first book club meeting for this school year was on Tuesday with twelve
students in attendance - five returning 7th graders and seven new 6th graders.  We threw name tags into the hat for a drawing at the end.
Winner:  first person to read Sunny Side Up!
                                                                     

4.  Fall Color!

 I stepped out of the library on Wednesday to place a phone call and discovered gorgeous yellow leaves announcing fall's imminent arrival
against a magnificent blue sky. 

Wednesday, a blue and yellow day!

My daily page-a-day calendar featured this John Ruskin quote: 

"Nature is painting for us, day after day, pictures of infinite beauty."

Slice of Life: If You Give a Book Lover a Topic . . .

Today I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice" 

to the Tuesday Slice of Life (SOL) community.

Thanks to Stacey, Tara, Betsy, Dana, Beth, Anna, Kathleen, and Deb

                    for hosting this meeting place each Tuesday and nurturing our writing lives.

If you give a book lover a topic to teach, chances are she'll find a way to make a book connection. This past week I was asked by a friend to teach a class at church that she normally teaches (she's recovering from a broken ankle).  Topic of the lesson:  The Elderly in the Church.  I don't know about you, but I was not excited about this lesson topic.  Even though it was filled with great advice for "the elderly" and guidance for the church community on meeting the needs of the elderly, I was less than enthusiastic.  

There's something about the word "elderly" that conjures less than positive connotations.  I asked my husband to help me brainstorm other words or phrases to describe this stage of life.  His responses reveal his dry wit and humor:  seasoned, filled with wisdom, mature, on the last legs, broken in, circling the drain, old silverbacks, pensioners, and walking on the edge of the ice floe.   

Finally, on Sunday morning, I woke up knowing how to approach my topic.  When my husband came downstairs, I was sitting on the floor surrounded by children's books.  I had pulled every book that featured "the seasoned" (isn't that a better phrase than the elderly?) as part of a table display for my lesson.  

Just walking into the classroom and seeing all these stories of life with seasoned family members put a smile on everyone's face.  I concluded the lesson by sharing Mem Fox's Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge. 

Celebrate This Week

                             Join us each weekend for Celebrate This Week with Ruth Ayres.  

 When we pause to celebrate, we find the joy.

  A week filled with moments to celebrate and remember!

1.  Sunsets!

2.  Roses (captured on the sunset walk)!

3.  Smiles on Friday afternoon from administrators 

who in the midst of the first week of school

and a challenging school remodel,

still manage to put students first!

4.  Trunk full of generous donations from
neighbors for Annual Food Drive
to benefit Youth and Family Services!

Thanks, Ruth, for this blessed way to end the week!

Poetry Friday: This Place I Know: Poems of Comfort

                                                                      Head over to Life on the Deckle Edge

for this week's roundup of poetry love.  
Thanks for hosting, Robyn!

I can't think about 9-11 without remembering Georgia Heard's anthology This Place I Know:  Poems of Comfort.  I discovered this book several years ago while pulling books for our month of poetry in my classroom.  In a School Library Journal review, Sally Dow sums up the impact of this book with these words, "In memory of the September 11th tragedy, this book was compiled initially to offer hope and comfort to children who witnessed the event firsthand, but has far broader application, speaking to all people, young and old, who suffer trauma."

You can get a flavor of the book through this preview at Google books, see the poems that are included, view some of the poetry and artwork, and read the note from Georgia Heard that accompanies the book.  Deborah Chandra's poem, "Stars" is included in the preview and concludes with these lines:

". . . But shining through the dark they calmly stayed,

And gently held me in their quiet way.

I felt them watching over me, each one -

And let me cry and cry till I was done."

Well-known children's book illustrators responded to an appeal from Candlewick Press and volunteered their talents to illustrate the poems.  If you've never explored this book of poetry, treat yourself to this gem of a book filled with poems of comfort and beautiful illustrations.