Recap: Guest Blog Posts

Tomorrow will be the first Friday in over three months that there will not be a guest blogger posting.  Ruth and I are going back to posting on alternating Fridays.  However, I wanted to take a moment to recap all of the guest blog posts in case you missed one.  They’re ALL worth reading, as are each of the blogs that each of our guests keep.  Thank you to all 15 guest bloggers who graciously wrote a guest post this summer.

JUNE

• Sarah Mulhern, of The Reading Zone, started our guest blogger series off with The Doors of Poetry, which included some resources you can print out and use.
• Mary Alice Gruppi blogs at There’s a Pal in Principal.  She wrote Make a Simple Summer Journal, which can easily be done with students at any point during the school year.
• Elizabeth Eastmond, who blogs at Occasional Piece, wrote about the Good Teacher.  She also included a list of works she’s presently reading, watching, or listening to, which you might be interested in too.
• Amy Ludwig VanDerwater blogs at The Poem Farm.  Naturally, she wrote a poetry-related piece entitled Poetry & Structure: Falling in Love… and Holding It Together, which included three poems plus a wealth of information about structure.

JULY

• Alan Wright, of Living Life Twice, reminded us that First We Need to Rehearse.
• Jen Munnerlyn, who blogs at Literacy Bytes, recapped the five greatest things she took away from her time at the Teachers College Reading and Writing Project’s Summer Writing Institute in The Fun of Hard Work.
• Annie Campbell, who blogs at Write Now in Room 204, shared routines that help her and her students celebrate stories in Listen Like a Writer.
• Amanda Villagómez, of Snapshots of Mrs. V., got us thinking about blogging with students in A Blogging Adventure.
• Kevin Hodgson blogs at Kevin’s Meandering Mind.  He took readers on Threaded Adventures through the web in his guest blog post.

AUGUST

• Caroline Gonzalez, who blogs at Writing from the Heart, started off the month with a post entitled Boy Writers.
• Kristine Michael blogs at Best Book I Have Not Read.  Her guest post, Confessions of a Lurking Writer, will inspire you to write if you’re looking for some motivation.
• Ryan Scala, of the East End Reading and Writing Project Blog, had us Imagining Possibilities by sharing some of his reflections from the Writing Institute he attended at Teachers College this past summer.
• Mary Brothers, who writes Teaching in the Tech Frontier, got us thinking about Launching Writing Workshop in the Primary Grades.

SEPTEMBER

• Lynelle Snowbarger, author of the Bohemian Teacher Blog, wrote about the ways you can sustain workshop teaching in the face of standardized testing in a post entitled Best Practices and Tests CAN Go Together.
• Lindsay Reyes of Chasing Beauty… in the Classroom closed out our guest blogger series with Happy New Year! Using Celebration to Restore and Build Our Identities as Writers, which included photographs of three excellent charts you, too, can create with your students.

Our guest bloggers shared their expertise with us from as far as Australia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from all parts of the United States.  Only in the Blogosphere could a group like this come together to share their voices about the joy and teaching of writing!