Are you ready for World Read Aloud Day? It’s an annual celebration of sharing stories from the amazing folks at LitWorld and Scholastic. This year’s World Read Aloud Day will be February 7, 2024! If you’re new to this page, I’m Kate Messner, author of more than sixty books for kids. I’m also a former middle school teacher and a forever reader. Each winter, I help out with LitWorld’s World Read Aloud Day by pulling together a list of author & illustrator volunteers who would like to spend part of the day doing quick virtual read-aloud visits with classrooms around t ..read more

LitWorld’s amazing World Read Aloud Day is coming up on February 7, 2024! One of the fun traditions of this day of sharing stories is for authors and illustrators around the world to Zoom into classrooms & libraries for short read-alouds. For a while now, I’ve helped out by compiling a list of author and illustrator volunteers so teachers & librarians can connect with them to schedule virtual read-aloud sessions on that day. Teachers & librarians: Please hold tight for right now… the list will be coming soon! Sign up for my email newsletter if you’d like early acces ..read more

The first two titles in our new series THE KIDS IN MRS. Z’S CLASS are now available for pre-order – and we have a special offer for educators, librarians, and home school families. Just pre-order the first two books, EMMA MCKENNA, FULL OUT and ROHAN MURTHY HAS A PLAN from The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid, NY and you’ll get a two-part virtual author visit with authors Kate Messner and Rajani LaRocca! Here’s how it works… Part 1… When your order your books, we’ll use the email you provide to the bookstore to send you a note in early May, with a link to a 20-minute recorded virtual author visit ..read more

Meet THE KIDS IN MRS. Z’S CLASS – an exciting new multi-author series launching in June ’24! One third grade classroom. 18 amazing kids. 18 secrets. 18 stories, each written by a different beloved author. I’m absolutely thrilled to be heading up this new series with an incredible team of authors, along with Pura Belpré Honor illustrator Kat Fajardo and the team at Algonquin Books for Young Readers. I’ll be writing the first and last books in the series as well as coordinating the team and our overlapping stories. Book one, EMMA MCKENNA, FULL OUT and book two, ROHAN MURTHY HAS A PLAN by Rajan ..read more

It’s hard to believe that Teachers Write wraps up this week! Today, we’re talking about one of the things that makes a poem different from prose — the way it looks on the page. Mentor poet Margarita Engle joins us for a mini-lesson on line breaks.  The Power of Line Breaks in Free Verse  Line breaks are one of the most misunderstood aspects of poetry. Beginners often attempt to write verse novels by simply inserting random line breaks into prose. Since poetry is musical, arbitrary line breaks cannot substitute for the varied rhythms and melodies of free verse. Even when there is no m ..read more

Reading aloud is a great way to revise a poem, listening for the magic. The sounds that make a line sing. As today’s mentor poet Nikki Grimes tells us, poetic devices such as alliteration and assonance help to create that magic. Tiny Tricks to Make Your Writing Sing Using words with the same letter or sound in close proximity—whether words with the same/same sounding consonants, or the same long vowel sounds—makes your writing sing. In the following poem, I’ve underlined such consonant pairings, and set a few paired vowel sounds in italics. This is “Sweet Sister” from Legacy:Women Poets o ..read more

One of the great things about being part of a writing community is that we’re constantly learning from one another. Today mentor poet Rajani LaRocca shares a challenge that’s all about how putting constraints on our writing can spark creativity — an exercise she learned about in a workshop with award-winning author K.A. Holt. Say It Without Saying It In poetry and verse novels, we use figurative language and sensory detail to evoke emotion—and to say things without being too on-the-nose. During a recent conference, amazing author K. A. Holt shared this exercise, and I absolutely loved it. Firs ..read more

This week, we turn our attention from poetic forms to subjects. Mentor poet Rajani LaRocca joins us with a challenge to write about names.  What’s in a Name? Names are important in the real world and in fiction. When I write, I do a lot of research when I’m trying to choose character names. In verse novels in particular, the way that characters think about their names can reveal important aspects of who they are. Consider these poems from Red, White, and Whole: And these poems from Mirror to Mirror: Think about what each of these poems reveals about the characters. How do they feel abou ..read more

Welcome back to Haiku Week at Teachers Write! Today, mentor poet Loree Griffin Burns shares her own haiku experience and offers up a writing challenge with lots of bonus resources to explore!  Finding Haikus My haiku journey began in the summer, near a beach in Rhode Island. Not on the beach, because it was raining there and had been for days. But in a library near the beach, where a used book sale was underway. I was coaxing three kids through another wet vacation day with a new- to-them book when a slim paperback about writing haiku—Seeds of a Birch Tree by Clark Strand—caught my eye. I ..read more

Welcome back to Teachers Write, friends! I hope you had a great weekend and are ready to write. This week, we’ll be focusing on haiku, a form many of us learned in grade school, but now it’s time to take our three-line poems to another level. Mentor poet Joseph Bruchac joins us for today’s mini-lesson!  Attempting Haiku Let’s try writing haiku. It’s something that I do often. I’ve attempted to write at least one haiku every day for the last three years. Haiku? Are you kidding me? Yes, I know, it’s probably something you’ve already done. Haiku is perhaps the most used —or, perhaps, overuse ..read more