Passing the bottle

Hi everyone,

Yesterday I finished my parts for the book with LAURA ROBB and TIM RASINSKI for Teacher Created Materials. There could still be tweaks and fixes in my future, but at this point I feel like celebrating. Tonight SANDY says she’s buying champagne.

This book began with exploratory talks among the three of us in January and February, 2021. By March we were ready and submitted our proposal to TCM. I committed to write 25 poems and 25 500-word essays, starting July 1 and finishing by October 1. It would be a killer pace but timing was critical to meet an early 2022 publication date.

I couldn’t start before July because Tim, MARY JO FRESCH, and I were finishing two books for Scholastic Teacher Resources that began with discussions in late 2000 and took nearly all my time through the first half of 2001. One of those books came out last month. The second is due out ten days from now.

When Fairfax County Virginia Public Schools approached Tim to re-write its Scope and Sequence program for grades K-2 and Tim invited me to join him, we asked for and received permission from TCM and Laura to delay pub date for our book long enough to insert the new project. For a matter of months, all I did was work on that project. The day I finished the last of 70+ poems, I turned back to the TCM project and jumped back into that.

It took from November 15 to yesterday, March 3, without a break, to finish the poems and essays for the TCM book. I hope my wife gets a BIG bottle of the bubbly.

Today? I’m sorting out where to start tackling a 16-month backlog of ideas and commitments in the trade world. I’m ready!

Moving on to other priorities

Hi everyone,

This is the first morning in many months that I don’t have a poem to write for the Fairfax County Virginia project with Tim Rasinski. I finished #75 last week before going to the Mansfield children’s literature festival. Sometime this week Tim and I will record a video of me explaining how teachers can write and tweak poems like I did for their scope and sequence program for kindergarten through second grade. The rest of the week I’ll play catch up as much as I can and then get back in the groove for the book I’m doing with Tim and Laura Robb for Teacher Created Materials. My editors there were kind to delay the publication date long enough for me to work in the Fairfax project.

Peggy, and others, the skull in the middle is an extinct form of black bear a boyfriend and I found in a local cave when we were twelve years old. On the left: a replica of a short-face bear, the biggest bear that ever lived. It could top 1,500 pounds, on its hind legs reach more than 14′ into the air, and run 45 miles per hour. On the right, a replica of a saber-tooth cat. Signs of both beasts were discovered in Riverbluff Cave in Springfield, Missouri in 2011.

Time for some goo foffing

Hi everyone,

This will be my first break since March so I’m looking forward to a week out of the wheel. Not saying I won’t think about work, but I promised my M.O.W. I won’t actually DO any work for seven whole days. If anything interesting comes up, I might post about it. Otherwise, you probably won’t hear much from me. I’m at the 40% mark on the project I’ve been on for the past several weeks. The school district is Fairfax County Virginia Public Schools. Student enrollment is 180,000, making it the 11th largest district in America. In the grades I’m focusing on, there are 40,000 students.

My last blog post for a while

Hi everyone,

This past week I wrote four poems and four 500-word essays for the Teacher Created Materials book with Laura Robb and Tim Rasinski. I’ll share the results with them in the morning so they can start working on their own contributions to the book. After that it’s all about the scope and sequence project with Tim from now until the last of the seventy-five poems is written.

I’ll come up for air when I can, most likely on Fridays or weekends. I know I’m going to miss writing a daily blog after twelve years. I’ll probably do a little better on Facebook so watch for me there.