Celebrations: The Year in Review

Ruth Ayres has a link-up on Saturdays where people link to posts that are celebrations about their week. I was wanting to reflect on positive things in my life and this looks like a great way to do it. This week I am reflecting on the whole year rather than just this past week.

It is amazing what you can pack into a year and how much you can forget in such a short amount of time. Looking back over my posts from 2013, I find a few that really stand out like those in January concerning the Newbery Challenge which I finished on the day that The One and Only Ivan earned that lovely sticker and we smiled so hard with Colby Sharp.

In February, a fun event was the picture book non-fiction 10 for 10. I couldn't stop with 10, so had a second post that was middle grade and young adult non-ficiton.

March was a very busy time that started off with a wonderful EdCampMadison. We also had a fun visit with author Michael Scotto. He shared his writing life with us and read to us too. World Read Aloud Day and Read Across America were fantastic again this year. Finally, in March I began working with Audrey to set up the Rich in Color blog. I am proud of our work there and think we have built a great resource for diverse young adult literature. Here is one of the posts that I did there that explains why diverse literature is important to me.

In April we celebrated Poem in Your Pocket month and I also baked for the blog. I made a lime pound cake from A Tangle of Knots.

May was a slower month on my blog with the school year wrapping up, but I did participate in Armchair BEA and that was a learning experience. It was great to interact with other bloggers.

June was a relaxing month once school was finished and here is a post about an ordinary June day.

A highlight of July was NerdCampBC. I loved learning and sharing with so many Nerdybookclub members and finally meeting them in person. The second learning opportunity I had was the American Indian Studies Institute which was amazing.

August was a great time with Teacher's Write and BookBootCamp. There was so much to learn this summer and a ton of fun. September was when I really kicked in with writing book reviews.

In an effort to become more centered and have some quiet time, I started visiting the local labyrinth in October. I loved the experience. I will have to try it again now and see how different it is with the snow.

The month of November was devoted to National Novel Writing Month. The first year I wrote a contemporary novel about a middle school girl, last year it was a young adult novel with two voices (one of which was written in verse) and this year, I wrote a middle grade book. Once again my daughter participated and it was a lot of work, but we laughed through much of it.

  

In December I have been working on my Nerdlution and I got to attend TIES, a technology conference in MN.  This very nerdybookclub year is drawing to a close. It has been amazing!