Sixteen

In January of 2006, Franki and I started blogging at A Year of Reading. We had no idea what we were doing, but we jumped in and gave it a whirl. The blog was intended to be a place where we would chat about books and make our Newbery predictions.

The first few months of posts sound like a text thread. We were definitely just talking to each other when we started. Comments weren’t really a thing that first year.

In June of 2006, the term Kidlitosphere was coined.

We figured out hyperlinks in the first month, but our first post with a picture didn’t happen until July. Also in July was the first time we posted a Poetry Friday post, but there’s no mention of a roundup and no comments. In July 2006, we started our “100 Cool Teachers in Children’s Literature” list.

In August we were tagged by another blogger.

September was big — we wrote fib poems AND received a comment from Greg Pincus, the inventor of this then-new form!

October brought the first Cybils.

There is mention in November of a Poetry Friday roundup, but no link.

We hit 150 Cool Teachers in December.

Between 2007 and 2021 there is a decade and a half of great content, but also many broken links and innumerable images that need to be resized, replaced, or deleted. Hence, the reason we left Blogger and came over to WordPress.

So here we are, but now what?

Now that we’ve retired from full time teaching, we’ll continue to try to figure out who we are and/or what we’ll become.

As for this blog, because information now flows in so many streams and channels and tidal waves, we’re going to go back to the way we started: we’re just going to keep giving this a whirl and let it evolve as we do!

Here’s to whatever’s next for however long it lasts!