Author: Erin

We Can Do Hard Things

Posted on by Erin

So, Pinterest is my new favorite thing. Also, I love etsy.  I spend entirely too much time on both sites. Awhile ago while poking around on Pinterest I found this:

Pinned Image

You can find it on etsy here: we can do hard things.

I thought it kind of summed up a truth I’ve realized over the last couple of years and something I try to get my students to believe every day. I thought, “Oh, my gosh, that’d be an awesome thing to having hanging in my classroom!” Then I thought, “Oh, my gosh, that thing is $70.” And, while it is very awesome and I’m sure the person who made it is lovely and talented, I don’t have $70 to throw at classroom wall-decor.

What do I have? A printer, some scissors, and a bunch of kids who like crayons.

We made this:

It’s not as well photographed, for sure, but I think it’s cute. Plus, there’s something I like about that being the first thing you see when you walk into the room.  When you’re in third grade and you’re still having a hard time keeping your short-vowel sounds straight, I feel like that’s a message you probably need to see every day.

Of course, if that’s you, probably you can’t read the sign anyway…but we’ll get to that. 🙂

Pull the trigger…

Posted on by Erin

I’m just jumpin’ in here. It’s been awhile. It’s been since, like, April or May or something. The problem with letting something go for so long is that once you feel like starting again it seems impossible. Or at least really difficult. Once something is already rolling, it tends to stay that way. Isn’t that what physics tells us? But what if you felt like you had to stop the ball for just a little bit while you walked away to do something and then the ball grew moss and kind of sank into the ground? And maybe a little bush grew next to it? Or somehow lots of bits of debris, rocks or twigs or what-have-you, builds up around it? What if you want to get back to writing, but you’re worried that the best you can come up with is a lame metaphor involving a ball you’ve left in the yard? What do you do then?

Well, you pull the trigger and you just go for it. You post something, knowing it’s going to get e-mailed out to folks that haven’t heard anything from you in for-ev-er, and you move on with your life to the next, better post.

That was my band-aid. Consider it ripped-off. The end.