Tag: middle school
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Book Review: I Only Read Murder by Ian Ferguson and Will Ferguson
With a busy week where I was spending a lot of time at my former school directing an adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew (written by my daughter, allow me a moment to brag), I had very little time to read, and when I did settle down after wrangling middle schoolers, I was out…
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Book Review: Janie Writes a Play by Heidi E. Y. Stemple and illustrated by Madelyn Goodnight
For those of you who have been following my book reviews, this will be a bit different for you. Today I read a book to be published on February 11, 2025, a children’s picture book with only 40 pages, short paragraphs on each page, and bright, colorful illustrations on every page. This is a bit…
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Book Review(s?): The Rom-Commers and Hello, Stranger by Katherine Center
A colleague of mine recommended a book to me at the start of this school year, Hello, Stranger by Katherine Center. She said it was one of her favorites and that I should read it. So, in December, I did. And I liked it. It was about something I didn’t know anything about, face blindness,…
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Shielding our Differences
The summer before my first year of full-time teaching in middle school literature and English, I looked over the textbooks I would be using. As a second-career teacher with no formal education courses behind me, I had no idea how to plan a unit, but I knew how to read and analyze a piece of…
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Cross on Over to Nerdy Book Club!
After teaching The Crossover by Kwame Alexander, I wrote about the experience–and and the man behind it–for Nerdy Book Club. Please read it here and let me know your thoughts!
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Who’s Your Favorite?
These “top 10 of this” and “favorite 5 of that” lists are very popular these days. Someone is always posting a list of these types of things on Facebook: list your favorite book (Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier), favorite song (“Your Song” by Elton John), favorite color (pink), favorite day of the week (Sunday), favorite…
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#LeaningintoLent
It’s Lent, and I’m a Catholic school teacher. That means I bring my faith and religion to work with me every day, and I bring my work to my faith and religion every day. At my school, we talk about our Catholic faith a lot, in all classes-not just in religion class. My middle school…
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A New Year, A New Me
A new school year has begun, and week two is in the books, or grade books as it were. However, my school year began a day late, due to a back injury that sidelined me for the first day of school. Calling in sick has never been easy for me; I was even more…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 