WHEW! It has been a couple of busy weeks for this blogger. I went back to my teaching job at Apogee Gulf Coast School on January 20th after the Martin Luther King Holiday and our unexpected snow day (I am only required to be there on Mondays and Wednesdays, but it’s so interesting and fun that I sometimes “drop by” on other days.

Lunar New Year came and went without my posting about it, which in the past I have done. I did order a special New Year’s tea for a former student at the university who now lives in Boston. She was at a conference in Austin, Texas, and drove down the weekend of the 31st. She rented a car and drove down to spend Friday night. What a catch-up visit we had! We didn’t stop talking and hugging from the time she arrived until she left Saturday afternoon.

February slipped up on me, and my teaching week this week went especially well. I am learning about Project Based Learning, something we had very little of back in the 70s and 80s when I taught in public school, and I am slowly but surely implementing it into my teaching plans and thinking. I am really inspired by a book I’m reading, Project Based Learning: An Integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Approach, edited by Caprano and Slough. I didn’t expect to find much helpful for a Language Arts classroom, but with a bit of imagination, I found several things (“assists” from the STEM disciplines) that I could hardly wait to incorporate into my lesson plans. Plus, some ideas from the book made learning in general more fun for both my students and me.

I made a couple of new friends at the bookstore on Thursday of customers who were referred by mutual friends, and reconnected with an old neighbor from where I lived before moving into the bookstore. Her kids were about 10 and 6 when they used to visit my Little Free Library at my old house. I moved that LFL to the bookstore yard when I moved a year and a half ago, and this morning as she was taking her kids to high school, she was visiting that same LFL just in a different location after dropping them off. Needless to say, I saw her and invited her in for coffee.

It reminds me of an old Girl Scout song:

“Make new friends, but keep the old; / One is silver and the other gold.”

If you have a chance and can open a Facebook account, Look up RAE’S READS, and see what’s happening at the bookstore!

RAE 2/7/25