Saturday, September 6, 2014

Celebrate #Hashtags



Here I sit on Saturday morning, doing exactly what I dreamed about all week...

  • drinking more that one cup of coffee
  • watching The Today Show
  • snuggled in a blanket on a chilly Iowa morning
  • writing about celebrating my week


And this was one amazing wonderful week.

I don't really know why the start of this school year has gone so smoothly, why I'm enjoying the start of this year more than years past, but I am. Seems like I am celebrating daily!

My favorite celebrations came in hashtags this week...

#CWFierce
I try to come up with hashtags for each class. As I tweet out what we are doing in class, I have a hashtag we can use. It's mostly for our class, but parents catch on and so do other teachers.  #CWFierce is the hashtag we came up with for Creative Writing.



It's been quite active this week as we wrote 6 Word Memoirs and Twitter Memoirs this week in preparation for Expressive/Reflective writing.  Once kids got writing, there were many great words shared. Some kids don't have Twitter or they preferred to remain anonymous, so they wrote their memoirs down for me and I tweeted them.  They loved seeing their stories out in the world.

And then, my blogging community teachers asked if they could also use the hashtag for sharing out student work. Of course, I said yes.

So, please, follow our hashtag. The kids are (and will) sharing some amazing things.

#OMW1415
This is going to be a fun project for my 8th graders to participate in this year (I may get my writing kids doing this too). Out My Window is a creative project to help kids become more aware of the world around them. Each month there is a different theme for kids to write about, all while using the five themes of geography.  We've taken our pictures and started our poems. Look for the final products next week!



#BoysDontRead
Ever since I read Grasshopper Jungle and then Winger I have been a HUGE  fan of Andrew Smith. I followed him on Twitter (he followed me back!)  I followed him on Facebook (he followed me back again!). This week on Facebook, he told a story about meeting several adult non-fiction writers. They seemed to believe that boys don't read, especially boys don't read YA. All week, teachers have been writing and sending pictures to him of boys that read. So yesterday, during our ten minute reading time, I snapped a couple of pictures of football players reading in College Prep Lit.  I tweeted them out with our school hashtag (#2020HowardWinn, just in case you want to follow that one) and then, thought What the heck and I added Andrew's name to the tweet.


This picture has taken on a life of it's own. It's been retweeted MANY times and Andrew put it on his Facebook page. How cool is that?  Well, the conversation on his page was pretty fun too. Especially after he said he should consider coming to Iowa and author Geoff Herbach jumped in. He visited my room last year and recognized it!


As I'm writing this, Andrew tweeted a promise to visit Iowa. I'm going to hold him to that :)

Well, that was my amazing wonderful week. How was yours?

9 comments:

  1. The boys reading pic's life is cool indeed. It is fascinating how it may be a start for a future author visit. Your # celebration has a joyful spirit.

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  2. Love the fun you're having with students and twitter. It seems to be the perfect place to engage today's students! We'll expect a blog post when Andrew comes to Iowa.

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  3. This was my favorite celebration post that I read today. I spent some time checking out the #CWFierce hashtag too--loved some of those pieces! And maybe Andrew would like to come to the western panhandle of Nebraska too. We have lots of interesting tumbleweeds! I really enjoyed this glimpse into your classroom, Deb.

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  4. Love this-you're making such terrific connections on twitter, Deb! At PO line now-will check hashtags...

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  5. That is one amazing and wonderful week! How cool to connect with the author! Here's to every week being just as amazing.

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  6. I LOVE that picture of those big boys reading. Awesome. I haven't done tweeting with my class yet - you make me want to!

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  7. BTW, I shared this post on Facebook I loved it so much. :-)

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  8. I love those boys reading. Such a great photo - the best part about it? It just captures what is an everyday reality in your room. I recently read Winger and am a complete Smith fan too.

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  9. AWESOME! How did I not know Geoff Herbach visited your classroom?! Now I have something in common with him. How cool is that? The best thing about this post (and that is saying a lot since this post is packed with awesome) is that pic of the boys. They are REALLY reading. It is all over their faces. I love it. Your teaching matters--in your room and far beyond.

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