Slept in, check. Went to the beach, check. Read a mindless book, check. The first week of summer to do list is done, now that I have recharged it is time to look back on the last, frantic weeks of school…
Celebration, that is the word that comes to mind when I think about the end of the school year. The celebrating that went on in our school was different this year, it wasn’t about “yeah, we made it”, it was about “Look at what we did!!”. What they did was some amazing writing and those of us who were lucky enough to celebrate along with these writers will forever be touched by their words.
It started with Twenty:5, an unforgettable evening of magical words, but it didn’t end there. The last two weeks of school my appointment calendar was filled with celebration invitations. The celebration format varied from “open house” type classroom galleries to formal readings of personal anecdotes to a coffee house of poets, but each one was the same in that it truly celebrated the satudents and their words. The pride that was pulsing through our school was unmistakable, it could be felt the minute you walked down a hall.
How did this happen? What took us from one gallery to a school full of writing celebrations? Some say it came from reading Writing Gems, a book that can change how a teacher looks at writing. Maybe, but I think it came from amazing teachers. Teachers who let their guard down, who let their students lead the way and teach them about how to teach writing, teachers who were willing to take the risk that they were asking their students to take. No matter how it happened, the results will forever change the students who sit in one of these classrooms and that is all that matters.