Celebrate this Week .

Celebrating Completion of a Challenge

This week, the 10th Slice of Life Story Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers wrapped up. For one incredible month, I blogged day after day with several hundred other writers. On Friday, over 100 of us crossed the finish line, completing a unbroken 31-day writing streak. SOLSC is so worth celebrating on a number of different levels — the writing, the posting, the reading, the commenting and replying, and the learning. But most of all, I celebrate the blogging friendships that I have made during these 31 days, absolutely nothing short of wondrous.

This week, for Slice No. 30, I wrote a tribute to our month of blogging together with nonsense poem using the blog names of 112 slicers. If you haven’t read it, come on over because you don’t want to miss The Gossip of #SOL17. You’ll raise an eyebrow, chuckle, and perhaps outright laugh at some of the gossip.

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Celebrating Beginnings in Work

This week, I launched literacy professional development with Tornillo ISD teachers with a day onsite. I celebrate this opportunity to work for the next year with an awesome team of educators! We’ll be spending hours together online during the next several months: a wonderful way to customize PD, complete with personal feedback. TISD students will be the winners!

This week, I will be recording lesson snippets for blended instruction. A dream of mine for a long time. A frequently expressed wish from teachers. I remember one who said, “Oh, Alice, it will be like having you beside me every.” Another said, “… Like having you in my pocket.” I’m thrilled the way everything has finally come together on the technology layer. Now to roll the production forward and unpack the learning.

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Celebrating Family

This week, three grandsons celebrated their birthdays. We gathered, nineteen of us, around the table to celebrate our boys with birthday traditions — singing good wishes, lighting and blowing out candles, slicing cake and dipping ice cream, opening homemade cards, unwrapping gifts. Filling our hearts with love and laughter. I am thankful for the blessing of another year for each of our boys.

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Celebrating Life with Gratitude

This week, I’m reminded of the words of Melody Beattie:

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

–Quoted by Sarah Ban Breathnach, Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy

You really must come on over
and celebrate at Discover Play Build
with Ruth Ayres and others who have linked in
to share their celebrations this week.

Thank you, Ruth, for hosting a place
for us to celebrate with you!
#Celebratelu