Part of Slice of Life by Two Writing Teachers March Slice a Day Challenge!
I’m slicing every day this month. Thanks for stopping by. 🙂

I don’t usually hear owls in the morning.

Do I?

This is what I am thinking as I arrive at school, balancing my coffee and bags and a water bottle, and my phone so I can speech-to-text a note to myself to remember later. Only, my phone thinks I’ve said, “I don’t usually hear about it in the morning.”

So I have to rebalance my bags so I can correct that in the note– because it feels like a slice. If I go home hours later and see a note that says “I don’t usually hear about it in the morning,” I’ll never know what I was talking about.

I breathe in the cool morning air, that feels both like it’s spring now, and also like it could snow any day.

Maybe this will be the kind of day where there are slices all around me, I think. Maybe I’ll fill my note on my phone with amazing inspiration for a poem that starts with

I don’t usually hear owls in the morning. 

I can add something about the cool morning air.

I don’t usually hear owls in the morning
Cool morning
Spring air
Snow soon

What a poet I am! I write a little in my mind while I walk to my room.

It will be a day full of slice inspiration. Slice-piration! 

Only I’m pretty busy, and the only other note I write is scrawled on a post-it on a page of the 5th-grade literary essay book. It’s a comment a student makes during the connection of our mini-lesson, and I have to write it down because I need it for my #finthejoy video.

I had reminded the class I was there for writing yesterday, and that today we were going to continue growing ideas about our stories to help us with interpretations for our literary essays.

“Wait. You were here yesterday?” A boy asked. “Morning or afternoon?”

“Afternoon.”

“You’re like a ninja!” he said.

So, that’s my poem for the day, I guess. It must mean something, right?

I don’t usually hear owls in the morning

Cool morning
Spring air
Snow soon

Like a ninja