Slice of Life - A Writer's Life

              I love participating in Slice of Life, started by Two Writing Teachers and writing a                                                                        story, reflection, or musing.

This summer I vowed to live a writer's life.  

This coming year I will be the 5th grade writing content coordinator.  I wanted to spend the summer immersed in many writing goals.  So far, I've accomplished some of these goals:  a writing group I pulled together met for the first time at my house last Monday, I attended All Write last Thursday and Friday (I plan to write more about that in an upcoming blog post), I purchased bunches of books on writing, and worked on my fiction story.  Well, "worked on" is a strong phrase.  It went something like this... 
1.  Write in my notebook for 30 minutes.
2.  Form a monster headache.
3.  Decide writing fiction is ridiculously hard.
3.  Lay down and take a nap for an hour.

Hmmm.  Not exactly stellar.  I know I can do better!  One goal I've had a hard time meeting is to faithfully keep a writer's notebook and to write in it as close to daily as possible.  I still need to work on this.  

I spent this morning at a neighboring district's gifted ELA teacher's house, talking about our upcoming plans for the fall.  It was an energizing morning of conversation and collaboration which ended over a delicious plate of egg salad.  We shared lots of ideas back and forth, and I look forward to implementing some new things.  Each year I struggle with how to fit everything - reading, writing, speaking, vocabulary and word work, mechanics and grammar, and listening - into an hour, and I've yet to completely figure it out, but I know this for sure:  kids need to see their teachers doing everything we ask them to do.  They need to see us in the trenches.  Writing is hard, and our students need to see our struggles as well as our successes, and the only way they can see that is to see us doing it.  One of my favorite (and yet terrifying/frustrating) things my students say is, "You should write a book, Mrs. Mueller!"  Well, yes.  I should.  In fact, I need to stop blogging and go write in my notebook.  I'll have my Ibuprofen on hand.

Books about writing on my TBR pile: