Can you believe it? I just looked at the calendar and here we are, nearly smack dab in the middle of the month of March. ALREADY! The coming of Daylight Savings Time last weekend has already lifted the spirits of so many of us who grew weary of the season of winter as early as, oh I don't know, say January 1st? All around these parts of south western Colorado are beautiful signs of Spring's imminent presence amongst us. I felt especially happy to walk down the aisles in Walmart earlier this week and find the shelves filled with all the things necessary to begin enjoying the warmer weather that will surely come before we know it. I thought of my own three children, now very grown up, who used to beg to go down the aisle that had the sandbox toys in it. We'd always seem to go through our fair share of brightly colored plastic buckets and shovels each year but now that I look back at it, so what? The days of seeing them playing and having fun out in the backyard sandbox provided memories that I still hold in my heart, now these many years later. My heart smiles.
Yesterday we finished up the writing section of our Colorado state assessments. I was proud of the effort that the students put in. As their teacher, I know how very far they have come this year. For some, the words flow quite easily and for others it is more of a challenge. Each of them are very different in their style of writing and that is perfectly fine. It has been fun to teach them the writing process and my only regret is that we never seem to have enough time each day to devote to it. Their greatest "reward" during the course of the day is any extra ten minute block of time that they can devote to "free writing". Tucked neatly inside of a few of their desks are their first attempts at writing a novel. I smile when I see the cover pages that they have designed on their own and when they come to my desk and say, "Mrs. Renfro may I please use your stapler?", I know they have finished yet another page to their manuscript. Every good author starts out as 10-year old and thus I probably should be saving back a few of these first attempts by them :) In the years to come, I would imagine that we will be reading pieces of their published work. Hey, it can happen!
My dear little Marissa, one of the fourth grade girls who is an avid reader of this blog, is still at it. Before school is out each day, she often comes to me quietly and asks me if she can take some of my sticky notes home. I know exactly what she wants them for and I no longer ask what she is planning to do with them. At night, before she closes her eyes in slumber, she opens up my blog to read before bed. When she comes across words or thoughts that make no sense to her or better yet, when she can find a mistake that I missed in the editing process, she reports back to me the next school day. I had to laugh yesterday when she came to me and said, "Mrs. Renfro, I do not understand what the word "rued" means." I had to stop and think a moment of where I might have used it. In fact, I had to ask her to spell it because it wasn't ringing a bell with me.
"You used it in your blog a couple of days back. You were talking about your mom and the nursing home stuff", she explained. Then I realized what she was referring to. I had mentioned in a recent blog post that my mom "rued the fact that she could no longer take care of herself and had to rely upon others to help her." Marissa had wondered if I really had meant the word "rude" and had simply misspelled it. What a great chance to teach a quick lesson on words that sound alike but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Now she understands and so do the others because when Marissa asks a question about this blog, everyone in class ends up learning about it as well.
Today's post in this online diary is number 676 which is about 650 more than I ever intended to write when it began back in the late spring of 2011. I never had the intention, not once, to write this many posts. Yet here I am today, the 13th day of March in 2014, sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee beside me. It's the early morning hours and shortly the quiet that I now have about me will be broken by the sounds of Mike and Sally the dog as they get up and ready themselves for the day.
A friend at school yesterday asked me how on earth I ever found the time or energy or even the ideas of what to write about each day. My answer was kind of simple when I told her, "I just write about life." As I tell the kids each and every day, as we write on our own in class, the idea and inspiration of what to write about has got to come from within us and surely as can be, it has got to originate from deep in the heart. I do not know what scores we shall receive on the writing part of the state assessment when all the results come back in late summer. Yet despite what might be recorded in the official record books, this teacher knows that they gave it their best and you know what? I don't think a person could have asked them to do any more than that.
Have a great day everyone out there~
Thursday, March 13th, 2014 shall prove to be a great day to have been alive in. And if you think today is going to be great, just wait until tomorrow comes. It shall prove to be even better.
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