The Launch of Literacy Ladies!

We've talked about it for long enough.  The "talk" started when we taught fifth grade together from 2010 until 2012.  During those years, we would lesson plan together, come up with riveting reading lessons, prepare for those lessons, therapuetically create anchor charts to go along with those lessons, execute those lessons...then look across our rooms at each other in the middle of teaching those lessons and say, "Eh. That could've gone better." But then...there were other times when we would get to school, look over those well thought out lessons plans for the day, say to each other, "This will never work.  We can do better," and at 8:25 a.m. (five minutes before our students would start flooding the hallways to our classrooms) would come up with an alternative lesson.  Those were the lessons where we would look across our rooms at each other and say, "We.Are.Awesome."  Usually a high five would follow. 

The Literacy Ladies have been friends for a loooooong time.

So that's when the "talk" began: when we realized that we had our finest moments in the classroom when we were able to look at our objectives, scrap what we had spent our precious time planning, and come up with something far better.  We figured we had a knack for this whole "teaching kids how to read and write" gig.  Why not share what we come up with with other teachers?  After all, 80% of teaching is stealing ideas from other teachers!  Why shouldn't we contribute to the bank of ideas-to-be-stolen?  We should really blog about this stuff. (It's free, after all.  I mean, I know we're teachers, and we're made of money, but I'll take free whenever I can get it.)

But, as often happens with "talk", this blogging idea remained just that.  An idea.  For a couple of years.  Until one summer (which happens to be this summer), while presenting some staff development courses for our district, we again looked at each other and said, "We.Are.Awesome."  (We're also humble.)  We figured that if we were receiving compliments from excited audiences who were sitting through staff development courses, maybe we could extend our audience through the world wide web via a blog.  (Hey, haven't we talked about that before?)  Two days later (which happens to be today), we were in the audience listening to Jennifer Serravallo, when Katie scribbled a note to me: "Seriously. We could be published, too." 

So enough talk.  We're doing this thing.  We're the Literacy Ladies, and we're blogging about literacy.  Why "Literacy Ladies"?  Because it's alliterative.  Teachers take courses in how to come up with cutesy alliterative titles and labels: "book boxes", "literacy library", "sitting like a super star", "rockin' reading", "wicked writing".  Even the title of this post!  So here it is!  The Launch of Literacy Ladies!