Happy Sunday, friends. Despite my best plans and efforts, February has just not been the month of blogging I thought it would be. It started out promising, but then just fizzled. I even took an unplanned week off from pretty much everything related to the internet that wasn't dealing with school. I wasn't even really that busy, but most of the posts I had planned on doing fell to the wayside because I just didn't feel like writing them.

Maybe I've been in a bit of a creative funk? The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. This past month my classes have been working on an essay, and we've been doing it in a very broken-down sort of way. As in, sentence-by-sentence for each paragraph. It's been intense and honestly pretty draining creatively speaking on my end.

I've been writing and working with other writers for such a long time, but never on this level. Taking a task that truly takes no thought from me and breaking it down to its fundamental core has forced me to think about writing in a very analytical way. It takes a lot of focus. Honestly, it's like trying to explain to someone how to breathe.

Anyway, I've written two separate essays to model for my students. I've broken those essays down sentence by sentence to explain how this type of essay works, and I've helped approximately seventy kids read citations for Medal of Honor recipients and break them down into a summary. It's been exhausting, and I'm glad this essay is officially finished.

We're about to start a unit on poetry, and I'm really excited for it. I had originally planned on using a longer narrative poem but then decided that I would rather expose my students to a bunch of different poets and all of the types. So we'll be doing a little bit from all my favorites: Robert Frost, William Blake, Walt Whitman, William Shakespeare, Alfred Lord Tennyson, etc.

I don't have much else to chat about this morning. Life has just been going along at its normal pace with nothing extra happening. Alexis was named Student of the Month for her class and she's preparing for her spring gymnastics showcase. Chris is making progress on his building in the backyard, and I have no special projects going at the moment other than brainstorming some blog ideas for March.

That's going to wrap it up for me this week. I hope you enjoy the rest of your Sunday and a have a wonderful week ahead!