Category Archives: Uncategorized

#SOL20 Day 8 “Long”

March 8, 2020Uncategorizedpaulabourque

SOL20 This March I will be participating in the month-long Slice of Life Challenge. Each day I will be posting a ‘slice’ from my life. This year I am using Natalie Goldberg’s book Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir to provide my sparks for memoir writing. Each post will be a quick write using one of Natalie’s exercises.

I was asked by a slicer why I chose to write out my slices and share the notebook pages. Here are my thoughts on that.

I want to write out my memories by hand. I find my thought process is very different when I do that. I think the slowness of it (compared to my typing speed) invites me to linger/envision a bit more and a bit longer and I am more immersed in the memories. I can often type at the speed of memory, but the handwriting puts it all in slow motion, which if you think about it in videos and movies, brings importance, nostalgia, and, focus to the moment. I would encourage everyone to reflect on how your tools shape your writing and your remembering.

What have you waited a long time for? Go. Ten minutes

#SOL20 Day 7 “Religion”

March 7, 2020Uncategorizedpaulabourque

EASILY OFFENDED? Skip my slice today and come back tomorrow. My religion memories are from a child’s perspective and probably bordering on blasphemy. 😉

#SOL20 Day 6 “Bicycle”

March 6, 2020Uncategorized#SOL20paulabourque

Today it was 10 minutes about a bicycle:

#SOL20 Day 5 “Three”

March 5, 2020Uncategorizedpaulabourque

Name 3 times when it came to you clearly that you wanted to write memoir. 10 Minutes. I noticed a pattern of emotional events when I took the time to think about it.

#SOL20: Day 4 “Coffee!”

March 4, 2020Uncategorizedpaulabourque

Screen Shot 2019-03-02 at 5.28.56 PM This March I will be participating in the month-long Slice of Life Challenge. Each day I will be posting a ‘slice’ from my life. This year I am using Natalie Goldberg’s book Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir to provide my sparks for memoir writing. Each post will be a quick write using one of Natalie’s exercises.

Today’s spark from Natalie: “Tell me about how you drink coffee. When? Where?…A whole world exists in coffee. Glean those details…Go. Ten minutes.” Here is my ten minute slice.

Do you drink coffee? Tea? Hot cocoa? What’s your ritual. What details do you think of?

#SOL20: Day 3 “Die”

March 3, 2020Uncategorizedpaulabourque

In this writing SPARK, Golberg asks us us to tell her, “What will you miss when you die?” I gave myself 5 minutes, because I wanted to see what would bubble up first-my life has been so wonderful I could write a tome on what I’d miss if I gave myself enough time.

What will you miss when you die?

#SOL20: Day 2 “Test 1”

March 2, 2020Uncategorizedpaulabourque

In this memoir SPARK, I have 2 to 3 minutes to respond to each memory prompt. fullsizeoutput_1813b fullsizeoutput_1813a

See what Natalie is teaching us about? Using our senses when we write. Sound, taste, touch, sight, and smell. What do you remember when you lean on your senses for memories?

#SOL20 Day 1 “I Remember”

March 1, 2020Uncategorizedpaulabourque

SOL20 Welcome to the 2020 Slice of Life!! This March I will be participating in the month-long challenge. Each day I will be posting a ‘slice’ from my life. This year I am using Natalie Goldberg’s book Old Friend from Far Away: The Practice of Writing Memoir to provide my sparks for memoir writing. Each post will be a quick write using one of Natalie’s exercises, slicing from my childhood or young adulthood.

I REMEMBER

This spark asks me to begin with “I remember” and write for ten minutes to see where it takes me. As you can see memories don’t come to me chronologically, and it’s fascinating to see which memory the mind lands on first.

What do you remember if had 10 minutes to quick write?

Slice of Life 2020 is Coming!

February 23, 2020Uncategorized#SOL20, memoir, Natalie Goldberg, Slice of Life, The Slice of Life Challengepaulabourque

Starting on the 1st of March I will be blogging each day for the Slice of Life Challenge from the TwoWritingTeachers. (So if you are looking for educational ideas and reflections you might just want to visit my Facebook page this month) This will be my 5th year participating in this challenge and for the past several I have tried a theme to pull my slices together. One year I wrote a small moment from the previous day, another year I wrote micro-poetry, and last year I wrote quick writes from my book Spark! This year I will be practicing memoir writing using exercises from Natalie Goldberg’s book Old Friend from Far Away.

As she says, “To write memoir, we must first know how to remember.” The book is filled with timed and meditative exercises to guide you through remembering. It is an invitation to “open forgotten doors of memory”. So my #SOL20 for March 2020 will be meditations on memories and slices of my life that I want to remember and reflect on from my childhood or maybe even early adulthood. Though I want to try all of her exercises in the book, I will be mindful that my memories may not be shared memories for all who lived them and I will not be posting any that may be hard truths that others may dispute. I won’t shy away from writing them, I just won’t share them with the blogosphere.

If you would like to participate in this year’s Slice of Life Challenge I think you will find it to be a potentially life changing experience. I have met so many amazing people through these month long journeys that I have kept in touch with, met up with at conferences, and have formed wonderful friendships with. I have learned to appreciate the writing of others, the stories of others, and the joys and sufferings of others with so much more empathy and understanding. It will help you see small moments with the keen eyes and ears of a writer. Ask any ‘slicer’ what the experience was like and I would bet most say it was a game-changer for them.

If you are interested (or think you might be) click HERE for information from the TwoWritingTeachers. It has all the information you need, and if you would like to chat with me about it, leave a comment or tweet me @LitCoachLady. I would be happy to help anyone with this challenge. Get your notebooks and pens ready!

One More Off My TBR Stack

MAYBE HE JUST LIKES YOU by Barbara Dee
What a powerful book! I think this will start a lot of conversations and hopefully stop a lot of heartache and hurt. Mila is a 7th grader who finds some boys giving her unwanted hugs, and then comments. When she tells her friends how uncomfortable it is making her feel they think she’s overreacting and tell her, “Maybe he just likes you.” But Mila knows in her gut that this isn’t ok. Their passive aggressive behavior is making life miserable but she can’t talk to her mom, who has just lost her job and she overhears arguing with their estranged dad over money. Who can she turn to? Who will listen and understand? This is a book I think all middle schoolers should read to build empathy and understanding so that all kids feel safe and respected. Sexual harassment and bullying are becoming more problematic, I’m glad readers have books like this to help.

Rethinking Kindergarten

February 16, 2020UncategorizedACEs, Dysregulation, kindergarten, Multiple Intelligence, SELpaulabourque

I’ve been teaching for 33 years and have seen a lot of trends and witnessed the shifts in society that have impacted our educational world. But the crisis we are seeing with our youngest students lately has been overwhelming our teachers and our schools in a way I have never seen. Children are coming into our schools with such an increase in dysregulated behavior that is impacting the educational environment for all students. Whether it is the result of ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences of trauma from violence, poverty, addiction, neglect, abuse, separation, mental health, etc) or some other reasons, we are having to rethink how we educate these young children so that they can have a more hopeful future.

In our district in Maine, we are taking some time this year as a kindergarten team to look at alternative ways to structure our teaching day that can help students develop a sense of belonging and find ways to cope with the stresses of life so that they CAN self-regulate in order to learn.

We have discussed incorporating more play, adjusting academic expectations, delaying classroom placement at the start of the year, examining supportive routines and rituals, and integrating experiences that tap into multiple intelligences. At our last workshop day we focused on the latter-inviting in a professor from University of Maine at Farmington to help us take a look at how multiple intelligence (MI) theory could help us frame some experiential learning for kindergarten that may address the interests and needs of all learners, especially those most at risk.

Now I realize there is often conflation of learning styles and MI, but we are thinking about this theory as a rejection of the ‘one size fits all’ model of learning and recognizing that we all have intelligences beyond the 3 Rs and that we don’t just want to raise “college and career ready” students, but that we want to raise human beings who can have successful and fulfilling lives.

At this point, we still have more questions than answers. What is this going to look like? How will we integrate this into our current framework? What resources or materials will we need? How will this impact first grade? Subsequent grades? How will we support our teachers? We are clearly in the messy research and reflection phase with no clear direction, but we know we can’t continue with our current model. The meltdowns, disruptions, and defiance are corrupting the learning environment and not meeting the needs of those distressed children. We have adopted Collaborative Literacy: a curriculum with a heavy focus on Social Emotional Learning (SEL) as well as reading and writing. We’ve hired more social workers, counselors, and deans of students but the crisis is growing for those coming into the educational setting.

I’ll keep you posted on our journey, but in the meantime I would love to hear from others who may be having similar experiences with the growing needs of young students and how you are seeking to support them.

Sketchnote of our Early Release Workshop on Rethinking Kindergarten

One More Off My TBR Stack

SOMETHING ROTTEN: A FRESH LOOK AT ROADKILL by Heather L. Montgomery
Every once in awhile you read a book that changes the way you think about something-often something so common that you rarely give it much thought to begin with. This book is one of them. Author Heather Montgomery’s fascination with roadkill translates into a an en”gross”ing look at scientific research that depends on DOR (dead on road) and URP (unidentified road pizza) to research parasitic diseases, track species, cure cancer, and even cut down on auto accidents. She also found that roadkill is used for art and sustainable food sources. I had no idea about so many of these aspects. I can say for certain that I will never be able to look at roadkill the same way again-and that is the power of a well written book! If you think nonfiction is boring, you just aren’t reading the right books! Not for the squeamish, but perfect for the curious minds out there! (oh, and don’t skip the footnotes: informative and hilarious)