Kim Culbertson's Blog

My five year old daughter loves the book ISH by Peter Reynolds. It's a lovely little story about being creative without needing to be "perfect," that the joy of creating far outweighs the need for an exact product. When she draws something now, she tends to say "This doesn't look like a lighthouse, Mommy, but it looks lighthouse-ish." In the book, the main character learns that he can also write ISH-fully and ultimately relax ISH-fully. Life, he finds, is in the ISH.

This year, I read ISH to m...

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Okay, so I know that not all books are created equal. Even within the same genre, there are good books and not as good books. I certainly don't begin to imagine for a second that every book out there is going to get four or five stars on Amazon, or goodreads, or Shelfari or wherever from every reader out there.

But I've decided that on my goodreads page, I'm only going to review books to which I give four or five stars. Now, now, before you go equating this to grade inflation, let me explain.

I'm

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Today my creative writing class and I took a walk. Just for ten minutes. Out around our small town and then back into our classroom. We walked quietly, without talking, and I asked them to just "see and listen and feel." Then we wrote about it it when we got back in our journals.

When I asked for feedback, a couple of the students said some pretty terrific things that I thought I'd share. First, one student talked about how much a walk gives him the time to sort through his thoughts in a way that

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