I’ve been meaning to post this link for some time. It’s to a video I recorded to help promote the recently released book, co-written with LYNNE KULICH and TIM RASINSKI, titled The Fluency Development Lesson, Closing the Reading Gap. Here’s the link, https://youtu.be/Mgn1lBu-Oi0 and here’s the book,
The book was released in June 2024 by Benchmark Education. The genesis of the project was The Fluency Lesson, a one-page document that Tim published and began using many years ago. Teachers everywhere use his formula in their classrooms and love it. Meanwhile, Lynne developed the original lesson into a five-day program that she used when she was teaching elementary students. Now we have expanded the whole concept in this 456-page book. It was my privilege to write poems for grades 1-5, ten per grade level. Lynne and Tim used my work to develop lessons, word ladders, and knowledgeable, practical text. Believe it or not, the original manuscript ran over 600 pages so what was published doesn’t include all the material we prepared. Of my fifty poems, twenty-eight of them appear in the final version. What we will eventually do with all the material that was left out is unclear, but not forgotten.
I started posting on my blog in October, 2009, nearly 15 1/2 years ago. I had no idea at the time what a blog was or how to run one. KATHY TEMEAN, designer of my website, urged me to add a blog and Kathy can be persuasive. As I was puzzling over content and approach, here’s a list I sent her of some activities I might want to try and questions I thought should be responded to in one way or another.
LIST OF BLOG ACTIVITIES Questions asked by kids 1 What inspires you to write a poem? 2 What advice do you have for kids to write poems? 3 How long does it take to write a poem? 4 How long does it take to write a book? 5 How long does it take to get a book published? 6 Who draws the pictures? 7 Do you choose the artist? 8 How many books have you had published? 9 Is it hard to be a writer? 10 What do you like about being a writer? 11 What is your favorite book of yours? 12 What is your favorite author? 13 What is your best selling book? 14 How old were you when you wrote your first book? 15 Where do you get your ideas? 16 Why did you become a writer? 17 Was it hard to get to be an author? 18 Do you still get rejected? 19 Does anyone else in your family write? 20 Why do you write about animals? 21 Are all of your books fiction? 22 What is your favorite genre to write? 23 Have you ever done a chapter book? 24 Have you won any awards? Establish a word of the month to inspire poems Talk about finding ideas Talk about starting stories Talk about picture books Establish guests on my blog: poets, authors, editors, agents, etc.
For those of you who have followed the blog for a while, I leave it to you to decide if my original thinking has remained evident in my posts. I know I’ve written often about where I live and the ideas that come from observation of place. I spot a number of items on the q/a list that have received attention. I got the Word of the Month Challenge up and running soon after I made the list. But I’ve also talked about myself more than I had imagined, my books, occasional recognitions, places where I speak, etc. I worry a lot about the me-me-me aspect. It’s my blog and it’s supposed to be about the life of a writer, but too much of that sort of thing becomes tedious and self serving.
I’m glad I found this old list. This is a good time to evaluate what I present on the blog. Since 2009 I’ve posted almost 4,800 times and have averaged about one hour per post. That’s a lot of my time, and yours to read what I choose to say, and I don’t want to waste time for any of us. I’m going to give this some serious thought and I welcome your comments and suggestions while I do. Thank you very much.
Children's Author David L. Harrison's Blog 