thinking big August 4, 2011

Our children are away at camp, so last night my husband and I had a Wednesday date for dinner and a movie (“Crazy, Stupid, Love” — highly recommended).  At dinner, he said, “Do you have any goals for this coming school year?”

And with that, I was off.

• I want to have a clean desk.  Every day.  I’m going to have to rethink a lot of things about storage and daily routines, but it would be so great to have a clean desk.
• I want to reduce clutter in the classroom.
• I want to have a class binder that has all my important info in one place, including…
• …my lesson plans, which I still want to figure out how to do on the computer.  I want to come up with a sort of spreadsheet/chart that blocks off the hours in the day, where I can write what we will be doing each chunk of time.
• I want to be better at teaching rhyming and alliteration.
• I want to write more repeated interactive readaloud lesson plans.
• I want to make time to do the RIRA discussions every week.
• I want to do water science with the water table.  I planned on doing it last year, but didn’t get around to it.
• I want to work on teaching vocabulary, and continue working on creating my own set of vocabulary cards.

“So, resting on your laurels, right?” he joked.

It’s August, and my time at home is slowly vanishing, but I am starting to get in the right mindset.  I think I will be happy to go back, when the time comes.

all the ways in which I suck as a teacher April 5, 2011

1. Monday rolls around, and I often don’t have my lesson planning done, so I have to wing it.
2. I don’t keep changing the centers activities to match our theme; it’s so much work and I don’t have the time.  Okay, sometimes I do.  But not nearly enough.
3. Sometimes I don’t keep a tight lid on the schedule, and we run out of time for recess.
4. My desk and all the surfaces around the edges of the room are a mess.  I’m not very good about putting things away after I’ve used them.
5. I don’t come in really early and stay late, the way most truly devoted teachers do.  I try to protect my personal and family time, but then I feel like I’m not giving enough time to my work.  And it’s impossible to be a really great teacher without putting in lots of unpaid time.
6. All my blog announcements to the contrary, I still don’t really teach science.  I have this amazing water science book I was going to put in action, but haven’t found the time to read the whole damn thing and do all the prep work.
7. I don’t contact parents nearly often enough.
8. I don’t always write my weekly newsletter early enough to get it translated into Spanish.

There’s more.  I’ll keep ruminating on my failings….

me vs. lesson planning April 3, 2011

Lesson planning is kicking my butt.  I was inspired by Jessica Meacham’s site to start doing my lesson plans on computer, and decided to use Google Docs so I could access them at home or at work.  Then I learned that I didn’t have the first idea how to make a spreadsheet into a workable weekly lesson plan.

So I googled it.  HA!  That totally didn’t work.  I googled “lesson plan templates” lots of different ways, and googled “how to make a google docs spreadsheet” and an hour later I still had bupkis.  One problem is that I am using my MacBook, and I’ve only got Pages on it, so I can’t open any Word documents.  But the main problem is that I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.

I emailed Miss Mellow for help; she has a nice template on her computer for her lesson planning; perhaps she can guide me out of the darkness.

Meanwhile, I’ve got laundry to do and TONS of stuff to get organized in my office (not to mention starting the dreaded signing my kids up for camps process).  And hardly anything written in my lesson plan.

a great kindergarten blog March 1, 2011

I found Chalk Talk while looking for 100th day of school ideas, and have been going back to it ever since.  The author is an experienced teacher with tons of great ideas, and the skills to put them on her blog in a useful way for other teachers.

Check it out!

Mapping the year September 6, 2010

Miss Mellow and I met at a coffee shop on Saturday morning to plan out our year.  We worked for an hour and a half and could have easily gone for another hour.  We were in the “flow” and having a great time discussing curriculum, how to balance all our frameworks and expectations (and all that is expected of us), and what really matters in preschool.

We plotted out the themes for the year, and each one will last for a month, which is different from what I have done in the past, with my 2-3 week themes.  We started fleshing out different things to focus on during each week of our themes, and realized that we need to ask guiding questions for each theme.  What is it, really, that we want the kids to know at the end of each month?

I went home exhilarated, and have been working on typing up my list so we can get it all down on paper and then share it with the rest of the preschool teachers in our district.  I’ll post it here, too.

teachers and time January 11, 2010

So I’m reading this Atlantic Monthly article about “What Makes a Good Teacher,” and thinking about the finding that good teachers spend a lot of time preparing for their classes.  And each morning lately I have had trouble getting through everything I need to do, so time is on my mind.

I understand why spending a lot of time on preparation helps a teacher be a good teacher, and I feel bad about not spending enough of my own time on preparation these days.  It’s harder for me to be willing to do it now — back when I had little kids at home and little kids at school my whole life and all my time was about little kids needing me.  Now my children are older and more independent, and I’m ready to claim some of my time back.  It’s hard to keep coming in to work early and staying late, and so I just don’t do it as much anymore.  I guard my private time fiercely — I think I’ve earned the right to read some novels, and I know that if I devote all my time to the needs of all the different children in my life, I will become stressed and unhappy, which won’t be good for any of them, whether they be my sons or my students.

Then when I’m at work, time is an issue.  There is so much that I’d like to do — or need to do — each day, that it is hard to get to it all.  Today we watched a clip from Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and we visited National Geographic kids to watch videos about fish (we particularly liked the one about the mola), and we visited Starfall to learn about the letter L, and those were just the things we did using the video data projector.  We also had gym class, and centers time (of course), and morning meeting.  In my role as mentor teacher, I am supposed to be assessing my kids for writing workshop (a pre-assessment to gauge their progress as we get into the writer’s workshop process, which is next up on our staff development plan), but I decided to put it off until tomorrow, and do an intro to writer’s workshop instead of reader’s workshop.  Or maybe try to do both, if I shorten centers time.  Argh.

There’s also my internal to-do list.  A person from the early childhood department came this morning to do a letters and sounds assessment with my class, because I’ve been to busy to get it done myself.  (It was great that she came — I know I’m lucky to have that kind of support.)  I remembered to track down the social worker who speaks Spanish to talk to the child I’ve been worrying about as a possible case of neglect.  I forgot to get any portfolio assessment done at centers time.  I almost forgot to write the morning message or teach the class about the letter L.  I ran out of time for story time.  And I have lots of things to do as a mentor — books about teaching writing to kids that I need to read, and observation reports that I need to finish.

At the end of the morning, however, there was extra time.  The bus was late picking up the children.  We huddled inside the door, waiting, and we sang songs, practiced counting in English and Spanish, and then talked about lunch.  I told them I was going to have chicken and rice for my lunch — and then the children helped me remember the phrase arroz con pollo to describe it.  The Latino children’s faces glowed, and they told me, “I eat that, too!”

Welcome back January 4, 2010

Today was for me — and for many, many other teachers — the first day back after winter break.  Other than feeling the pain of jet lag when the alarm went off early this morning, the day went really well.

Cherry and Chutney — alone of the whole class — threw their arms around me when they got to school.  Everyone else was more subdued, with shy grins on their faces.  When I picked them up from gym, they had formed an ABC line all by themselves in about five seconds, and were waiting quietly for me to come take them back to class.  Their good behavior lasted all morning.

At morning meeting, they wanted to know why there was a picture of a guy on the calendar (on January 18), so I explained about Martin Luther King, Jr., and we ended up looking at a poster about him, which led to discussions about racism, unfairness, Rosa Parks, the Montgomery bus boycott, voting rights, and his murder.  They were fascinated, and I told them we’d probably talk about Dr. King each day, because the day honoring him will be coming in two weeks.

Then we talked about our new theme, Under the Sea.  I showed them maps of the United States, Africa, and Asia, so we could talk about where we live now, where our ancestors (or in the case of my Vietnamese student, her parents) came from, and how the land masses are surrounded by water, which we call oceans or seas.  Then we looked at a poster about fish, and discussed the characteristics of fish, and how they are the same or different from people (for example, fish have bones, and so do we — the whole class started prodding their bodies and shouting out the locations of their bones — “my knee!”  “my fingers!” “my eye!”  “no, not your eye, honey, but you do have an eye socket in your skull around your eye…..”).

Then I introduced the math theme, which involves the numbers 1-5.  We learned our new math song, which involves the numbers to three, and I was very impressed that this class can march, hop, jump, or clap exactly three times and then stop.  Most previous classes have just jumped and jumped and not connected it to counting at all.

One girl showed me a nasty scratch on her upper arm in the middle of morning meeting.  Later, I asked her if she could tell me how she got it, and she wouldn’t.  I told her that she could tell me any time, and I would try to make her feel better.  Her only response was to throw her arms around me and give me a really long hug.  She sees a counselor once a week, so when the counselor comes to get her on Wednesday morning, I will tell her about the scratch.  It might be nothing, but maybe someone gave it to her….

Lesson plans, again October 21, 2009

Today in our leadership team meeting we discussed lesson plans again, and looked at the samples I copied — a lesson plan I wrote before we had the big discussion about what makes a good lesson plan, and one from after, with lots of detail, that references the standards.

We didn’t get much further, although it does appear that there are actually three kinds of lesson plans we’re talking about — and that teachers probably need all three.  One is a schedule — what you will teach, when you will teach it, and in what order.  The second is a detailed plan for each lesson that lists standards, objectives, your plan for differentiation, the questions you will ask, etc.  The third is a curriculum plan for the whole year that shows what standards the kids need to learn and when you will teach each one over the course of a year.

We ran out of time, but it will be interesting to see where we end up going with this.  Apparently some people at our school don’t even write lesson plans, and at a bare minimum, we need to make clear the expectation that everyone writes a daily lesson plan.

my brain is on fire October 7, 2009

I put out the fire with a nice glass of wine at the end of a loooong day, so now I’m just scorched.  Let’s look back on the day, shall we?

I started my day with a meeting.  (Always a great start.) I have a weekly meeting of mentor teachers, master teachers, and administrators.  The master teachers and administrators meet the day before to go through weekly business, and they make decisions for us to approve or not.  It cuts down on our Wednesday meeting time, so I appreciate that.

But.  Actually, I started my day at home, checking my work email, and reading an email about the agenda for the meeting.  And it made me furious.  It said that I had asked that the number of  observations I have to conduct be reduced (which I did not!) and that my request had been refused.  When I got there, we had to get through the first two agenda items, and then we got to the one that referenced me.  Here’s more or less what I said:

“I was quite surprised to read my colleague’s email about the business items to discuss.  I feel that I have been rather grievously misunderstood.  It appears that you discussed a request that I did not make, and that you did not discuss the request that I did make.  While I’m sure I said last week that I have too many observations to do, at no point did I ever request that you lower my number of observations.

“I wouldn’t dream of doing such a thing, for if I did, it would mean that the rest of you would have to do even more observations than you are currently scheduled for.  What I did request — and what you somehow failed to discuss yesterday — was that you figure out if we think it is more important to get into teachers’ classrooms to do coaching, or if we think it is more important to get all the observations done.  Given that we have fewer mentor teachers than ever, we have more observations to do in less time.  I had hoped to do some actual coaching, and am concerned that it will not be possible.  At any rate, I think it is important that we make a conscious decision, one way or the other.  And I did suggest, as a creative measure, that we reduce all teachers’ observations from three to two, which would mean fewer observations for each of us to do, which would free us up for more coaching.”

Alas, it appears that the rules will not let us reduce the number of observations for each teacher, which means that I have seven observations to do in five weeks.  Given that each observation requires a pre-observation conference, a 45-60 minute observation, 2-3 hours for writing up the evidence to prepare for the post-observation conference, and then the post-observation conference itself, I have at least 5 hours I will have to spend on each one, and that means 35 hours worth of work in the next five weeks totally aside from my teaching.

AUGH!!

The meeting moved on, and we switched to looking at the rubric for lesson plans.  It was a good idea — I’m not sure I ever read that part of our handbook, and I’m sure we as a team have never discussed what makes a good lesson plan before.  One of the master teachers showed a typical lesson plan from one of our teachers one the document camera, and we used the rubric to score it.  The problem?  This lesson plan, which looks a lot like mine (although not as detailed), and a lot like 90% of my colleagues’ lesson plans, got a 1 from all of us.  (1, for those of you unfamiliar with rubrics, is bad.  3 is good, 5 is exemplary.)  It didn’t reference the standards, it didn’t mention anything about differentiation, and it didn’t show anything like closure.

On the one hand, it seems like a good idea to take a good look at our lesson plans, and see if they are good enough.  On the other hand, my lesson plan is a working document that serves ME.  It’s my road map, my schedule, my list of what to do, in what order, and when.  There is another kind of lesson plan — the kind that you write out for one activity (usually when you are going to be observed) that lists in detail your objectives, the standards you are addressing, the differentiation you will do — but really, what teacher every does that for every day, every lesson?  It’s just not possible.

The meeting ended four minutes before my babies were to arrive, so I managed to get two minutes in the room to check in with Miss Slinger and go AUGH about the meeting.  After a really busy morning (during which a little girl reported that Pumpkin had said he hated me — which doesn’t seem to fit his personality, somehow, but prompted a little discussion with him about how it’s okay to be mad at your teacher sometimes, that everybody gets mad sometimes), and a quick lunch, I found a little time to work on the lesson plan conundrum.  Ms. Mellow took her afternoon class to lunch, so I spread out at a table in the room with my plan book, my math curriculum, and my folder full of stuff about teaching Fire Safety, and sat down to write an exemplary (or at least acceptable) lesson plan.

It was fun, actually.  I have been planning ahead (I know, will miracles ever cease?!), so I wrote out the plan for the week after next.  I had to write even smaller than usual to cram everything in — all the standards that my lessons meet, all the details, my goals for the week, and so on.  I’m going to make copies of it tomorrow, along with copies of my lesson plan for this week, written before the meeting today, and give them to the rest of the team.  I figure this will give us some fuel for our discussion.

Because while it was cool that I — for the first time ever — wrote my lesson plans with the standards at my fingertips, it took me more than an hour to write them.  Since it usually takes me 20-30 minutes, I’m not too sure that I’ve got the time for this kind of detail each week.  And frankly, if we tell the staff they have to do their plans this way, I think we could have a full-scale rebellion on our hands.

I also spent an hour each in two first grade classrooms, where I saw that both teachers have worked miracles in the last three weeks, that behavior is well under control, and some terrific learning is going on.

Then I went back to keep working on my lesson plans, until I realized it was ten minutes past the time when I was supposed to pick up my 9 year old from after-school care, and take him home with stops at the grocery store and the library on the way.

The only blessings were that at the grocery store I saw one of my students, who ran full-speed down the bags/wrap/plastic containers aisle to throw herself into my arms, and that there was that glass of wine waiting for me when I got home.