Ms. M's Tales of a Teacher: My Personal Teacher Blog

My blog comes early this week my friends to prepare for the Podcast Study that I encourage you to sign up for here:  https://spod23.my.canva.site/podcast-study This week the focus is around literacy leadership. I was inspired by the work of my friends at Learning Ally, and my role as a facilitator for a podcast study on Sold a Story by Emily Hanford.  In preparation for the podcast study, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on what it means to be a literacy leader. I learned this term through my connections in the Learning Ally Community, and I'm continuing my journey to learn what it means even more with time. To me, the literacy part means you have to believe that learning to read is a fundamental right, and that literacy is the cornerstone to equity. It's the foundation of all other learning and one's future. It's going from learning to read to reading to learn, and that guides everyone to their goals.  Leadership is a heavy term we've explored before, but...

One of my favorite books to read to my students every year is The Word Collector by Peter H. Reynolds. It's about a little boy who collects words of all kinds, and then shares them with others.  In our class, Ferny the Dragon loves words too- he's always learning new words to share with our students and wants them to be Word Wizards by learning them; their spelling, meanings, and how to use them in writing.  Being a Word Collector or a Word Wizard isn't just for students- it's for us too! One of my favorite things to do is listen to others speak- whether it's a podcast, lecture, TED Talk... and hear words that I don't use often or are new to my lexicon. Whenever I hear these words I like to write them down and keep them to remember and use them in my own writing. I make it a goal to use the word more often when I speak in general conversations.  This week, let's take on a small challenge together. Grab a pen and paper and keep your ears open for new words th...

 This week as we "spring ahead" with our time and adjust to the change let's take some time to appreciate all of the great educator groups and communities that are out there, and celebrate them!  I know I speak of communities frequently throughout my blogs and other posts on social media, but I've been working a lot lately with these groups and preparing to do a special podcast series discussion with my friends at Learning Ally's Educator Community .  I do hope you join me in the discussion of the riveting podcast "Sold a Story!"  I always tell my preservice and early educators to network with others in educational organizations and find communities. This may seem like a challenge at first, and many ask "where do I start?" I say the best place to start is with social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. There are many groups already connected through there you can belong to and you do not have to "add" any more logins, accoun...

 I am excited to announce that I flew solo on an episode of the New Teacher Talk. This  was a great learning experience for me, since I never completed an episode on my own. I'm so glad that my first solo-podcast topic was one of my favorites... literacy. The essential question or main idea was what new educators should know about teaching reading.  Pre-service and early educator friends... head over to listen! My goal is to make all teachers feel confident they can and will be successful at teaching reading. My target audience however is novice educators because I know how difficult it can be to not know where to start because that was me! It took me a long time teaching to realize that I did not learn all I needed to know in order to feel confident and be prepared to teach reading to my elementary students.  It's hard to feel confident as a novice teacher when you probably only had one or two classes on "teaching reading" in college because that's clearly not en...

 Greetings teacher friends! Have you ever thought (like me,) that the work you do can be even more powerful than it already is? Ok, so we are teaching our future leaders... you can't get anymore powerful than that really, but, what if your work could reach more people and make a difference?  Recently I attended a great workshop: ISTE Aspire.  I was inspired by this workshop in many ways. Even from the first advertisement about building a personal brand I was hooked. The workshop was fun and engaging- anyone who as attended workshops from ISTE before knows they do this well! The keynote speaker, Jonathan George was inspirational, and showed how to build your personal brand. It's not just about the "thing" or website. I learned that a while ago from Jeff Bradbury 's podcast. Building a brand starts with you ! You want others to experience you and want more of what you have to offer.  What I learned at ISTE Aspire was to be creative, think outside the box, and lear...