by Mary E. Cronin | Aug 19, 2024 | Cape Cod, Community connections, Poetry
Summer is winding down! One of the sweetest treats this month was my visit to Barnstable West Barnstable Elementary School here on Cape Cod. As a Visiting Poet, I presented to a class or rising second graders in the Literacy and Arts summer program. We drummed along...
by Mary E. Cronin | Jul 17, 2024 | Cape Cod, Teaching
It was three years ago this week that I signed my contract to become a Literacy Coach in a school district here on Cape Cod. I love working in a K-3 school, where the magic of emerging readers and writers is crackling! I wrote a poem about working with a struggling...
by Mary E. Cronin | Nov 14, 2023 | Cape Cod, Community connections
As a Literacy Coach in a K-3 school with a large Brazilian population, I was thrilled to win a grant from SCBWI that allowed me to invite Brazilian and American picture book author Ana Crespo to be a visiting author to Cape Cod elementary school M.E. Small in the fall...
by Mary E. Cronin | Oct 6, 2023 | Cape Cod, Poetry
Poetry came to life when the very talented music teacher in our Cape Cod elementary school used my poem “Drum” in her exploration of percussion recently. What a delight to read my poem to our K-3 students, to hear children drumming, to listen to them beat out the...
by Mary E. Cronin | Mar 31, 2023 | Cape Cod, Community connections, SCBWI, We Need Diverse Books
At the school where I work, the vast majority of children qualify for free and reduced lunch. A quarter of our K-3 students are English Language Learners, many from Brazil. Most of the children had never met an author, or had a book signed… until author Ana Crespo...
by Mary E. Cronin | Mar 3, 2023 | Cape Cod, Conferences-workshops, Poetry, Teaching
This week I led a professional development session for teachers, “Vitamin P: Boosting the Use of Poetry in the Literacy Block.” For three hours, we played with poetry! We talked about how to infuse poetry across the curriculum, find rich and meaningful poems, and...