Something Fun and New (SFN)

I read about this great idea over the weekend and decided to implement it this week.  The students get to nominate a word to be added to the list for the weekly spelling test.  Each student nominates one word, then the class votes for their favorite.  The ground rules are...there are no ground rules.  They may suggest any word they desire.  It can be from a TV show, or a favorite toy, or something they read in a book.  The idea is that when students are given power over choice, they take more ownership of their language arts experience and it becomes infinitely more interesting to them.  The only stipulation is, it must be school appropriate.

They looked a little stunned when I explained it to them today.  They weren't used to being in on that kind of power-play decision making.  The deer-in-the-headlights looks told me this was foreign territory and no one wanted to be the first to dip into the water.  So I lead the way by throwing out a wide variety of words.  Words that never (ever) had made their spelling lists before.  Words like Sponge Bob, and Cocoa Puffs.  "Any words???"  They were still so unsure of this daring experiment.  "Any words," I assured them.  I braced myself for Booger, and Poop, and Underwear.  What I got was Eyes, and Mrs. Dahl, and Eight and Joey.  The winner was Joey.  It will be interesting to see how the word choices change as they get more daring and become more comfortable with me.  

I'm guessing some week our bonus word will be Booger.

Some pics of my Magic Tree House themed classroom

Memorable Moments From Week Two

It is such fun to begin to become familiar with their individual personalities and quirks.  Here are a few instances that stood out this week. 

The Full Body Tackler – One of my more energetic students somehow manages to come at me with full momentum.  When he comes to my desk to ask a question, he has a way of bumping into me at 20 mph EVERY TIME.  Granted, he cannot seem to keep his shoes tied, but after hitting me like I’m a Crash Test Dummy, he ends up half-sprawled across my desk. When he rights himself, he likes to be standing so close to me he’s practically in my lap.  I let it slide the first week, but now I think it’s time for some conversations about personal space (he also likes to feel my shoes during story time.  A very tactile child…..)

The 21^st Century Girl – This little sweetie came back from music with the second graders on Tuesday declaring that she had a crush on one of the second grade boys.  “He’s in my heart,” she told me with stars in her eyes.  On Wednesday, she came back from music with his phone number written in her notebook.  Holy cow, they start young!

The Dyslexic Faker – We had our very first spelling test this week.  I thought it went well and overall, they did very well.  When I was grading the tests after school, I came to one that looked odd.  Like it was written in a different language.  After staring at it for a minute, it finally dawned on me what was wrong.  He had written every single word BACKWARDS.  I mean, SDRAWKCAB.  Where do they come up with this stuff?  I was laughing the whole time I gave him a zero (orez).  He and I will have a chat on Monday.

“And The Award Goes To…” – We celebrated a birthday this week!  On the morning of his birthday, I realized that I didn’t have any Happy Birthday cards or certificates.  The kindergarten teacher told me not to panic and quickly printed a beautiful, personalized certificate for him.  During lunch I signed it, added a birthday wish, and laminated it.  I had it sitting on his desk with a pencil, a small book, and a piece of candy.  He was overjoyed when he saw it.  He held it up and declared that his parents were going to be “so proud of him.”  He was so sure of it that he told me twice that day how proud his parents were going to be.  I didn't have the heart to explain the difference between a birthday wish and an award.  D-A-R-L-I-N-G!

It was such a great week.  I hope next week is just as wonderful. 

Getting the Hang of This Teaching Thing...

Yesterday completed my first full week as a first grade teacher.  To be perfectly honest, things have felt more than a little chaotic in the classroom.  Until yesterday, that is.  Yesterday was the sort of day I envisioned when I dreamed about what teaching would look like for me.  In a nutshell, I think learning should be a joyous journey and students should eagerly anticipate the school day.  I’m not naïve enough to think that every day will be full of rainbows and golden moments.  But I do think that when you ask a child to describe school, the first word out of their mouth should not be “boring.”

Yesterday (and today), were my dream fulfilled.  I felt in charge, confident, and much more at ease with the schedule.  The students actually showed signs of getting the hang of our class schedule.  Bless their little hearts, it has been a real adjustment for them to change teachers, classrooms, and schedules mid-year.  It seems like every 20 minutes one of them would pipe up, “that’s not the way our other teacher did it!”  What I think at those moments is, “ I don’t really care how your other teacher did it.”  What I say at those moments is, “I can’t do everything like your other teacher because I’m not her.  We are going to do things differently because we are different people.”  But I know it’s been hard for them and their teacher and I did discuss before the changeover that we needed to make the transition as painless as possible. 

To that end, I have kept their daily schedule almost identical to the schedule they had in the combined first and second grade room, with a few minor adjustments.  As we sail through the next weeks and months, we may adjust even more, but for now, I want to focus on maximizing learning, not putting my personal stamp on day-to-day minutia. 

The very best part of feeling more “at home” with my role as teacher is having the freedom to play with the lesson plans.  Yesterday, our science unit was focused on The Sky, but an activity centered on finding the main idea of a paragraph, led to a mini lesson on butterflies.  The kids were luvin’ it!  We googled a Youtube video clip of Monarchs drinking nectar, and did a language arts activity of sequencing sentence strips.  At the end of the day, I was energized and satisfied with how the day had gone.  The time had flown by!  Today was more of the same.  I am very encouraged.

At the end of today, I told my students (I love saying MY students J) that it was time to put their things away and get ready to go.  “Go where?” on of them asked.  “Go home!” I answered.  “NO!”  a couple of them said.  “We don’t want to leave yet!”  I about fell over from sheer joy. 

As a side note, my round table arrived today that the Superintendant had ordered for me at my request.  I am moving the desks (“little islands of isolation,” I call them) out as soon as the big table gets put together.  It will free up even more floor space and encourage cooperative learning.  We spend A LOT of time on the floor.  Wow, would I have loved to go to school in a room with a carpeted floor and been allowed  to and even encouraged to study away from my desk.

In case any fellow educators read this, I think it would be fun to share ideas.  Good teachers plan, teach, then reflect.  As I try new things, I’ll let you know how they go over in the classroom.  Please feel free to share your best ideas with me in the comments section.  An exchange of ideas would be amazing and wonderful!  Or if you’re not a teacher, share with me your best and worst school experiences.  We’ll get the group therapy thing going J

Here’s my latest brainstorm.  I really want to get my first graders turned on to the newspaper.  We are one of those schools that get a bundle delivered everyday.  I have noticed that most of them are left untouched at the end of the day.  So first thing in the morning, I grab a paper for each child and make this the first activity of language arts time.  The students get a highlighter out of the marker drawer, find room to spread out on the floor, and then must find the featured sight word of the day.  I usually give them 5 minutes or so.  I really like this activity!  They are getting exposure to printed text, learning about the world at large, and finding things that interest THEM in each paper.  They are constantly calling out interesting things they find while they are at work.  When they are done with the activity, we place the used papers in a recycling box.

Freaky Friday

Part of the beauty of the open prairie is being able to see for miles with an unobstructed view.  I can look out the window of the second story of my house and see the lights of Bismarck, which is thirty miles away.  Part of the bane of the open prairie is when there is snow present and the wind blows, (which is pretty often in North Dakota), it creates a condition called a ground blizzard, meaning it doesn't have to be snowing to have blizzard-like conditions.  

 This morning was typical for January and conditions warranted having the buses head out an hour late in order to run in daylight hours.  The main highways are generally well-maintained, but there are an impossible amount of gravel roads that do not see the snowplow for hours or days at a time.  They can become drifted in in a very short amount of time. 

An hour late doesn't sound like a big deal, but schedule-wise, it is the proverbial wrench in the works.  Our elementary school has set-in-stone bands for reading and math, and reading intervention, so an hour late meant our reading hour was robbed, reading intervention blasted out of the water, and math was late getting started.  It seemed that I spent the entire day trying to play catch-up.  

Plus, I'm really tired. Not just physically, but mentally and emotionally.  I don't think it's just because of my hectic days and short nights of sleep in the last couple of weeks.  I've been coping with a crazy-busy schedule for a year-and-a-half (during one intense week of classes I only got 15 hours of sleep in a 4 day period.  Yikes!).  No, I think this level of tired comes from finally beginning to relax after such an extended period of living on adrenaline and caffeine.  I could do it better when I was in my 20's.  My middle-aged body really wants more than 4 or 5 hours of sleep a night, and I have been forcing it to live on that kind of sleep deprivation for way too long.  Now that I no longer have the mill stone of course work hanging around my neck, I think I just need some catch-up sleep and re-learning how to relax (another thing in short supply in my life).  Unbelievably, I haven't been sick since I went back to college, for which I have been deeply grateful.

Back to my Friday.  As we wrapped up our first week together, my students created a mural of themselves in our classroom.  It is completely adorable.  I was blown away by the minute detail they added and was touched by the stick figure drawing of one student hugging me (so glad he represented me as a stick figure instead of round circles :)  This same student tugs at my heart anyway in that almost exactly one year ago, his mother was killed in a car accident.  Her funeral was held on his 6th birthday.  He told me yesterday that he thinks about his mother every time he plays with his neighbor.  "Why is that?" I asked him.  "Because she tells me every time I play with her that I can't talk about my mother."  Sitting in front of me sat a bruised, bleeding heart wrapped in a seven-year-old body.  I assured him he could talk about her to me anytime he wanted to.  My mother's heart longs to tuck him in the safe folds of my love and protect him from the storms of life.  But my role as teacher has limitations, of course, and I will have to do my best to be nurturing and be a safe harbor for him, while fulfilling my role as educator in his young life.  The best I can hope for is to make a positive difference.  My prayer is that he will leave my classroom in four months knowing that I will always be in his corner.  

Still Standing After Day Three

I have now finished my third day of full instruction, grading papers, TRYING to keep on schedule, getting to know my students, an after-school Writing Committee meeting, arriving early to prepare for the day, trying to get students to their pull-out services on time, and on and on (and on).  Good thing I'm still loving it!  My principle warned me that this would be an overwhelming month.  Looks like he's right.  There's just so much to learn and stay ahead of and adjust to.  NEWS FLASH!!  Teaching is NOT an 8 to 4 job.  I have been putting in 12 hours days and think that "hitting my stride" will be somewhere down the road.  It isn't going to happen for awhile.  I can't imagine how stressful it would be if I were also trying to adjust to a new school and new staff.  At least I am in a place that is very comfortable and familiar to me.  It is a joy to go to work everyday and be among friends.  Double joy that my daughter is also a student there.  I love seeing her everyday in her school environment!

I smiled today when I opened a package containing my Who's Who in American Universities plaque.  It's fun and funny to be in Who's Who at nearly 50 years of age.  I thought it was really generous of the University to recommend me for acceptance.  Life is just so interesting and full of surprises sometimes.

I'll close with a journal entry from my student teaching describing my worst day.  Enjoy!

"I had promised the kids a party today for being so well behaved over the last several weeks.  I had arrived early this morning and I got cheese sauce going in the Crock Pot for nachos later in the day.  It's an ancient building, which translates to virtually no electrical outlets, so I had plugged the darn thing into an outlet at the front of the room.  I had just begun my math lesson this morning, when one of my very rambunctious students asked if she could raise the projector screen up.  What could it hurt????? (kind of like saying to the captain of the Titanic, “Sir, its just a SMALL iceberg...”) I'm standing in the back of the room watching her do this simple task.  Bless her heart, she gave that projector screen the snap of its life.  As it went flying back into its cylinder, it hit with such force that one end of screen came off its hook, swung down like a scythe, slammed into my Crock Pot, the Crock Pot became airborne, and half-cooked cheese sauce and milk went sailing through the air like it had been shot out of a cannon.  I'm STILL standing in the back of the classroom, watching this horror with my jaw resting on the floor, 9 shocked students startled into complete silence, and milky cheese sauce soaking into the carpet, the globs of Velveeta dotting the floor like some Martian landscape.  I'll shorten it enough to say that I spent the next 30 minutes scraping congealed cheese of the floor, scrubbing carpet, and comforting the poor student who had set all of it in motion.  We got zero math done.  Ahhhh, I CHOSE this, didn't I…."

Beginning Your Career at the End of Your Life

My name is Vonda.  Today was my very first day as the first grade teacher in a small, rural school on the North Dakota prairie.  I have a grand total of seven students.  I graduated from college just four days ago with a bachelor of science degree in elementary education.  My teaching license was issued the same day.  I was hired by the school in December, contingent of course, on my finishing the required elements for licensing.  It was quite a thrill ride hoping all components would be in place by my starting date.  I cut it just a wee bit too close for comfort, but I made it, and here I am documenting my first day on the job.  I AM the first grade teacher.

Did I mention I'm a 48-year-old mother of four?

What made me decide to begin a career when most people are beginning to think about retiring at my age?  That is a great question....

I have a great answer.

As I document this, my first year of teaching, I will also answer that question in bits of information.  It's not so much that my story is so terribly exciting, but it IS unusual in that I have bucked societal trends in arriving where I am today.  If I had the last 30 years to live over would I make different choices?  The answer is no.  I have no regrets.  

The truth is, I believe with all my heart that I will be a far better teacher BECAUSE of my delay in beginning my career.  I will share my story a little at a time and you can be the judge.

For today just know that I awoke @ 5 AM with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.  My FIRST DAY of teaching!  I drove to school with a prayer of thanksgiving in my heart.  I served quiche and croissants to the staff for their unwavering support and encouragement.  I welcomed a steady stream of student and staff visitors who wanted to see my newly decorated "Magic Tree House" themed room.  I greeted my first graders with joy and we began the process of becoming a cohesive group.  I watched their shining faces as I talked about the fun adventures I have planned for them.  

And I fell in love with seven precious first graders who are already threading their way into the fabric of my life and heart.

I can hardly wait for tomorrow.....

Share this journey with me and the ups and downs that will be a part of this adventure I have embarked on.