A Fun Way to Reflect!

A letter to yourself to inspire and reflect!

It's summer and there are two days left until I head back to work.  I'm trying to take care of the things that once the whirlwind of the school year begins I'll forget about, like cleaning the kitchen cabinets, I know super awesome, when my husband came home with the mail.  There it is, staring at me from the top of the pile, the letter I wrote to myself back in January!
This past January my district asked to attend a conference in Chicago put on by SDE.   Of course, it was awesome!  The closing keynote was lead by Rick Wormlei.  He chose to use this time not speak to us, but provide us with time to reflect on what we had learned.  He gave each of us paper and an envelope.  The challenge was to write a letter to ourselves that we would receive in the summer, remind ourselves of all that we had learned in the past 3 days and keep ourselves accountable.  I LOVED this idea.  I ended up writing 3 pages.  Through the rest of the school year it did help to remind me to do things that I wanted to do.  I wanted to blog, kept my promise, and start ups a BYOSS session, which I did and will blog about later.  The letter reminded me to go back and look at my notes on rigor and relevance, making differentiation happen, and PBL.  The letter said to either look through them right now, or set an alarm for later in the week, I chose the later.   It also said to blog about this letter right now so I am!
I would definitely recommend us all to write a letter to our future selves that we should open when we're tired or at the end of the year.  Make goals, keep yourself accountable, but provide support in case your forget or leave things behind. I think I will try to include this in my first training sessions this Monday. If Rick should happen to read this post, THANK YOU!  You made my day, reminded me to think back, and got me excited for the beginning of the year.