Writing, planning, reading websites I love...

Just a few websites about writing, planning, reading and I have thrown in a few shopping sites as well.

Meet Me at Mike's
This site has it all - beautiful imagery, support with blogging, great recommendations, recipes, and what feels like advice from a friend.

Planning Mindfully
Tips and tricks when trialling a new organisational system. It is nice to think about being as organised as the author.

The Tot
Lots of articles about parenting babies and toddlers. I found this site after a friend sent me the 10 best books for 1-year-olds article when I asked her about early literacy.

Teachers as Writers
Many short and practical articles about writing and the craft of writing.

Primary English Teaching Association Australia (PETAA)
PETAA has a range of resources available for members under the title 'PETAA Papers' - they are very useful and written by reputable authors. I have found a lot of the Professional Learning on offer to be beneficial to the high school classroom, as well.

NSW Teachers' Association Centre for Professional Learning
The Journal of Professional Learning (JPL) has a heap of articles on every topic related to teaching imaginable. Definitely worth a look.

Multimodal Me
I took lead from the author of this page to create a writing teacher group. The resources from her sessions are filed here.

The National Writing Project 
The NWP website has a plethora of resources to support writing instruction. I have linked to the 'Teaching Writing' resources.

Writers Digest
WD has a heap of resources, books, articles. Some of these would be terrific in the classroom.

Print Friendly
I tweet this website regularly. It is a brilliant way to capture a website which in teaching, sometimes you need to do. I also use it when saving craft or cooking instructions! To print or save a website simply paste the URL into the search bar, the website will load, you can delete extra spaces and large images if not required and proceed to print or PDF a document that is much shorter. Save paper and space on your hard drive or cloud!

Booko
Getting a price range on books can be time consuming so pop the title into Booko and it will do a price comparison (with postage!) so you can see how many books you can buy with your monthly book budget. I like that there is free shipping through Booko with Booktopia, too. I have found a few times that there is a cheaper edition available so it does pay to do a quick double check if you have been directed to Booktopia, or Book Depository.

Doops Designs
The fabric designs are striking and the garment design is simple and pared back to allow the prints to shine. I have one dress so far. I will be purchasing more.

Mentor texts

It is sometimes difficult to find great texts to use in the classroom. English teachers use texts all the time - as mentor texts to support students with their writing, as an example of a particular rhetorical device, to determine reading comprehension skills, as a prompt for creative writing, or when putting exams together. I love to have a tapestry of different voices in my classroom and my aim is to ensure this happens more often this year.

This is a list of quality sources:

The Paris Review
A variety of articles and interviews with writers (going all the way back to the 1950s!).

Teen Vogue
Many great articles of varying lengths about current affairs, sustainability, and, of course, some fashion.

The Sydney Morning Herald Summer Reading
Short stories which could be useful in demonstrating a particular way of opening or closing a piece of writing or another technique.

Literary Hub
Pithy articles of varying lengths, as well as poetry.

AF Harrold 
Many poets are kind enough to share some of their work on their websites which gives teachers a chance to read through to see what will appeal to their students. I did a workshop with AF Harrold a few years ago and it was so much fun. He also has a website that focuses on his writing for kids.

Marie Claire
A range of articles of varying lengths. These work well as they are very current and local to Australia. I am on the look out for the current magazine to get a copy of the article, 'Meet the Indigenous Women Fighting for Change.'

Other resources:

Tropfest
Short films can provide as much insight into film techniques and construction as feature length films. Tropfest is a gem. I must admit, I loved when I could get my hands on the DVD with the Sun Herald but times have changed and YouTube is more accessible anyway - especially since laptops no longer come with DVD players.

Writer's Digest
This page contains many useful resources around writing, rather than articles, but I thought I would include it considering the focus on writing in the new HSC English syllabuses.

CPL Journal
Lots of greats in the NSW, Australia teaching world have written for the NSW Teachers' Association Centre for Professional Learning journal. There are so many quality articles to support teachers.

Preparations continue...

There are quite a few things cropping up that I did not anticipate or have forgotten in the long list I have been compiling for the past few months. I want to be ready for everything that will fly at me once the year starts. I would like to be present in my baby's life so I don't miss anything while still being an effective leader. How this is going to happen is still playing out in my mind and I guess I won't really know until I am back at work (in 14-days, but whose counting!). 

So, after 13-years in the education system, I forgot that we do mandatory training. How?! So I have added it to my long list and I started whittling away at these last night. I know there's a few I can do now that will ensure I have a little bit of wriggle room in the day which will allow me to support others doing the training (especially if this is happening on the School Development Day in a few weeks) and it will also allow me to get to the most exciting part - the filing of everyone's certificates of completion. I have created a folder for all of the permanent staff so far and will make the rest once I know who will be in the English Faculty in 2020. I feel a little rude excluding people who are likely to be employed but I don't want to cause any issues if they are located elsewhere in the school - this decision is not mine to make and I can't confirm anything for anyone!

After an extraordinarily hot day - it was 49 degrees celsius in my car when I went to the supermarket to get supplies (I ran out of soda water! I went a day without it but couldn't hack any longer - it is my joy!) I think I have ended the day being quite productive. I am a little sad to realise though, that I didn't publish the post I was working on last night  but it is up now! I will definitely press the publish button on this one.

Preparing for 2020

I have just lost 3-hours. I swear it was 9.23pm like, 20-minutes ago?!

I have had a productive evening really - backing up my phone, making dinner, getting baby to sleep, and then the rest of the night has been spent moving files from Google Drive to a Teams Drive in Office365. A wonderful colleague very recently began a Google Drive to consolidate faculty resources and while this brave new world is in its early stages I am going to make the faculty leap over to Office365 instead. This may seem a little bizarre but I have very good reasons and I am sure that some time will be saved once it is up and running. A little context for this decision - I went into corporate 3-years ago as an avid Google Drive user but just before I arrived to the team they had begun the process of moving to Office365. Within days I was wowed by the functionality and haven't looked back. I love being able to access Word online and then work from the desktop in the full version of Word when editing and creating documents. With the advent of Teams as well, I just cannot think of a better way to store resources and open up a channel for communication online. Sorry Google Drive, I do think you are a fabulous tool but just not quite right for this purpose.

I am currently waiting for a few files to download and in my world of contradictions I am taking notes in my hardcopy bullet journal and downloading files to upload them on a different platform. I once did a left brain/right brain test and landed smack in the middle of the two - the online platform possibly appeals to my sense of order and the paper and pen appeals to my need for a creative outlet (this is probably all made up but it sounded interesting at the time and I have always remembered the results because I felt a little odd not having a dominant preference like the rest of the staff!).

It is good to slowly get back into the swing of things.