The Birth of a Substack Newsletter
I have been contemplating doing this for some time: beginning my own newsletter. After all, every writing conference I attend says I have to have one. But what to write about? As both a writer for kids and a teacher of kids, where should my emphasis be? On writing? On teaching? On writing about teaching? On teaching about writing? And who should my target audience be? Teachers? Writers? Kids?
Then, as so often happens, the universe gave me the answer through 3 seemingly random events. (Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist's Way would call this synchronicity.)
First, I came across a note I received several years ago from a fifth grade writing student of mine--and she and her parents gave me permission to share it here, in my newsletter. In the letter, she said (among other things) "In all of the writing classes I have had, none of them have been like yours. Every day in elementary school, I had dreaded the end of the day because that was when I had writing. But now, I am always way excited for Core 2 . . .”
I will be sharing her entire note in my next post, because that note was just the encouragement I needed to believe that through a newsletter, I could make a difference in the writing lives of not just the students and teachers I worked with in my own building, but with kids and teachers across the nation who dread "writing time" each day.
Secondly, I watched a video series by Jon Bard of The Children's Book Insider who advised me to consider my own personal strengths and determine who my audience is, based on those strengths. Well, that was easy. My strengths are teaching about writing, so my audience (or tribe--as he called it) would be teachers who teach writing, and who may (or may not) share my passion for it, but who are looking for ways to make it come alive for their students.
And finally, while researching how and where to begin a newsletter, I stumbled across several YouTube videos about the writing platform, Substack. The more videos I watched, the more convinced I became that Substack could and should be the platform I would use to help grow my newsletter and share my ideas regarding writing and the teaching of writing to kids.
And so this newsletter is born. In my posts, I will be sharing some of the techniques and strategies I have used in my classroom over the years, where I had the joy to teach students who ranged in age from kindergarten through sixth grade. I hope you will join me on this journey as I explore what it means to be a teacher who writes and a writer who teaches, and where my number one job is to help teachers help students look forward to their writing time each and every day!