A Patchwork Life: writing, teaching, learning more each day

Inspired by Trent at the Simple Dollar and my friend Professing Mama, I’m going to do a series of posts about concrete goals I have for myself in 2010, each in a different area of my life. When I first started this blog, I set distinct writing goals for myself, and while I didn’t always accomplish each item, it helped keep me focused and productive.

One of the accomplishments I’m proud of this year is that I have really made this blog a functioning personal website for myself. I thought a lot about how to use this site, and what functionality I would like, and how to organize it all. I’ve added tons of links in different categories having to do with teaching, and have found myself coming here again and again to check on a link, retrieve an idea, or pull out a lesson plan I wanted to use. I’ve also added a Life List and Love List for myself, and want to use those to guide my priorities in the coming year.

In the upcoming year, I want to continue to add on–I’ve joined a handful of Nings recently and would love to post a page here about that, for example– but I would also like to do more of what I always intended, as far as posting entries whenever I found myself using a resource I dug up and archived here. For example, in my Gatsby unit, I finally implemented the color journal and connotations ideas in this lesson plan, and also designed a lesson incorporating this lesson’s resources on the cover art of the book. I always hoped to write more posts like this one about my Secret Life of Bees unit, because posts like that have been so helpful to me when I find them on other people’s websites and blogs. Right now I’m building a very exciting unit around Catcher in the Rye.

So one goal of mine is to do more teaching-focused blogging in the upcoming year, both as a reflective tool for myself and as a way to contribute to the incredible conversations I’ve benefited from so much this past year.

I’ve also decided to do NaBloPoMo for the month of January, to help start me off in 2010 towards my second blogging goal– to continue to blog regularly!