It's back to school time.
One of my college sorority sisters in Kentucky (hi Steph!) sent her little peanut off to her first day of Kindergarten earlier this week. Another sorority sister in Florida (Hi Trisha!) sent her baby girl to Kindergarten, too. And my best friend's oldest sister (Hi Jessica!) in Nebraska sent her two oldest boys to school just yesterday.
Yes, Facebook has confirmed what Target has been telling me for weeks: it is officially back to school time, no matter what part of the nation you live in!!! But I didn't need Facebook or Target to tell me that because I'm a teacher, and we've had that "back to school" feeling since July.
For everyone else, the Back to School Jitters settle in somewhere around mid-August when it's absolutely do or die time for school supply shopping (we were out yesterday and let me just say good luck finding a 3-subject notebook on the shelves!) and the excitement of class lists starts bustling through the neighborhood (our class lists go up today!). Parents and students alike start feeling that nervous feeling about a new school year because, let's face it, new school years mean LOTS of new questions and procedures. The kids start to wonder if their new teachers will like them, while the parents start wondering if the new teachers are going to give out as much homework as the old teachers. The kids wonder what new books they'll read and how much cursive they'll have to write, how much computer time they'll get and what day library check out will be. Parents begin fretting over the costs of school registration and setting up parent-teacher conferences and what if the new teachers don't call home as much - or worse, what if they call home TOO MUCH??? And what if the new teacher doesn't let kids have water bottles in class or doesn't take bathroom breaks or what if MY BEST FRIEND ISN'T IN MY CLASS THIS YEAR???!!!!!
Yes, there are plenty of things to panic about.
And now, I'm going to let everyone in on a huge secret, one that will probably break the sacred code of teachers.....
Teachers worry about all those things, too.
Seriously, I just got the LAST class of kids conditioned! They laughed at all my jokes, knew when they should sit down and be quiet, had finally stopped asking what time lunch was, and recognized both the joke and the truth in our class motto: It's all about Mrs. Yeagle. They "got" me.
What if the new class doesn't like me? What if they don't think I'm funny? What if they can't read my cursive? What if the new parents want me to call home more often - or worse, what if they want me to call home LESS??? What day will library check out be and what if I forget to have the kids change into their PE shoes and what if I run out of slots for parent-teacher conferences and what if MY BEST FRIEND DOESN'T HAVE LUNCH WITH ME THIS YEAR????!!!!!!!!!!
Yes, friends, teachers also get the Back To School Jitters. Big time.
As for the student-parent jitters, it's OK. I have read some recent posts about how difficult it is for parents to hand their kids over to someone else for 8 hours a day - especially those first timers, sending their first babies off to the big, wild world of Kindergarten. I feel for you - I'm sending my shy, gentle-natured Charlie off to Kindergarten this year, and I'm worried. He gets scared in new situations and doesn't always make friends easily. He doesn't like loud noises (even though he is the loudest one in the house!) and he can take 90 minutes to eat one piece of toast and a yogurt tube, so this 15 minute lunch thing is not going to work out....
But it'll be alright, because I know the kind of person I'm sending him to and I know she'll take care of him. It'll break my heart when I have to read the email that he cried for 20 minutes on the letter rug during center time, but even getting that email will mean one very important thing: his teacher noticed he was crying and did something about it because she cares for him, too.
And this is important for us all to remember: your child's teacher may not be you, but your child's teacher cares for him and will always have his best interest in mind.
Teachers aren't perfect, and I guarantee that I'll mess up at least once this school year.....ok, at least 50,000 times.....but we DO care and we DO try our best to help your children succeed. So let me calm your fears:
I'll be there when your baby comes in after recess crying because the other girls were mean to her, and I'll hug her tight and remind her that she's wonderful inside and out and that she can't let other people make her feel like she's any less than that. And I'll be there when your buddy fails his math test because he doesn't understand fractions, and I'll remind him that I myself have failed a math test or two and that I turned out OK and I'll walk him next door to set up a one-on-one tutoring time with the math teacher. And I'll be there to preview your child's library books (too easy....too hard...too mature...hey, did you get this from the junior high side of the library?!...) and to help him pack his bookbag so he's not late for the bus and to celebrate with her after winning first chair in the band challenge. AND I'll be there to see them holding hands on the playground.....and I'll be the one to remind them that holding hands is PDA, and we don't do that at school.
And tell your kids it'll be OK, too. Yes, they'll have to write in cursive, but Mrs. Yeagle isn't some sort of handwriting Nazi, so we will make it work. We'll have some extra computer time, but not much, and library check out will probably be on Friday. Water bottles are allowed at your lockers only, bathroom breaks happen after PE and lunch, and if your best friend isn't in your class, it will still be OK....I promise.
School is stressful for everyone, but if we all work together we can make it through. Let's make the deal that I won't judge you when your child's assignment book comes back to class unsigned a time or two, and you won't judge me when you see me in the grocery store check-out line with my bottle of wine and bag of Oreos....
The new school year is starting - sooner than I think we'd all like - but hopefully your Back to School Jitters have calmed.
Now, can somebody PLEASE calm mine down??!!!
Showing posts with label back to school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label back to school. Show all posts
Friday, August 12, 2016
Sunday, July 31, 2016
Less IS More
School's starting in a few weeks.
There. I said it. School is starting, and summer is slipping away a lot faster than I'd like to admit.
I made a short stop in my classroom yesterday, just to drop off some boxes of things that had accumulated in my house since May, and as I looked around the semi-empty classroom I started feeling pretty overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done before August 18: nametags, seating charts, locker tags, posters reattached to the walls, safety maps and rules posted, last year's vocab words removed from the word wall, my parent brochure and website updated..... Sometimes it gets to be too much!
Kind of like those darn My Little Ponies....it's just too much!
Somewhere along the lines, education turned away from the idea of teaching something for mastery and instead began focusing on teaching for exposure - kind of like buying 35 My Little Ponies instead of really enjoying 1 or 2. So, instead of teaching a few skills all year long until the students can practically complete those tasks in their sleep, we started skimming through things: teaching many, many skills in the course of a year and never actually stopping to consider if the students actually mastered any of them.
I'm definitely guilty of this. It's so easy to look at a novel or a chapter in the textbook and think about all the millions of activities we could do instead of considering which activities would be best suited to the topics or novel at hand. Even this summer as I sat down to tweak my Reading curriculum and create a new Language Arts curriculum, things began ballooning wildly out of control until my yearly overview looked more like I was teaching for 12 hours a day instead of just 7.
Less IS more. So, I've gone back to my curricula to consider where I could pare things down and teach for mastery instead of exposure. A few less new texts, a few less huge writing projects, a lot more time for student mastery. Less is more.
I'm also guilty of saying, "You did this last year, so you don't need me to reteach it, and we'll just breeze over it..." It's easy to do, and easy to assume that a topic covered in a previous year is already mastered. But if I just admitted to teaching for exposure rather than mastery.....chances are pretty good that my colleagues are doing the same. And it's no one's fault - we've been conditioned to believe that we must teach every standard every day, and this means that we are often frantically throwing more and more skills into a single project, leaving little room for mastery of one skill, let alone 10. And this idea that they're experts because they passed the previous year just makes for trouble...
Yesterday I sliced open a peach that we had picked off the tree in our yard. I started by peeling the skin off - my kids hate the fuzzy texture - and then started shearing off some of the juicy flesh. (The pit had a large crack in it, so I wasn't going to just cut it down the middle and separate it like I normally would.) At first, everything was fine. I shaved off a few more slivers of yellow peach, just dropping them right into the bowl, when suddenly a long black earwig came wriggling out of the pit. I gasped - because seriously, earwigs are disgusting - and barely had time to inhale before ANOTHER EARWIG game sliding out of the pit. AND THEN ANOTHER.
Cue the hyperventilating.
It's not like I'm scared of earwigs. They can't really hurt me. But dang there were just so many of them!!! So, there I am carrying this bowl full of peaches and earwigs to the kitchen sink, screaming, whimpering, gasping...and of course LAUGHING because it's so ridiculous to be completely losing my mind over a few earwigs. That peach pit was like a clown car - it seemed that with every step I took another earwig was squirming his way out of it to see what the commotion was about.
Thank God for garbage disposals is all I can say.
Anyway, that disgusting clown-car of a peach pit is kind of like what happens in my classroom when I say (either out loud or in my head), "You did this last year, so we won't spend much time on it..." The small issues and skill gaps start pouring out, and soon I'm covered in itchy little pests that all need my attention before we can move on. (And the missing skills are way harder to take care of than a bunch of slimy earwigs!)
Less is more, and taking the time to teach for mastery - and to check for prior knowledge before jumping into something! - is going to make my school year a lot better off. For instance, I'm spending the first 4-5 weeks of my Language curriculum working on complete sentences and summary writing. You're probably saying, "But Karisa, you each SIXTH grade. Surely you don't need to review complete sentences and summarizing??"
Remember that peach pit full of earwigs?
The past few years I thought the same thing: a quick review of complete sentences, a glance at summaries, and we'd be good to go, ready to move onto higher level skills and major essay construction. And then there I was in mid-November backtracking to review those very same ideas that I had assumed the kids already had mastered. Not this year, friends.
Aesop was pretty wise when he wrote that story about the tortoise and the hare: slow and steady will win the race, and starting the year off with a gentle but in-depth review of some basic skills might slow me down, but will surely save me time and headache in the end.
So, yes, school is starting in a few weeks. Two, if you want to put a REAL numerical value to it.
But, I'm actually kind of excited about it. It's a new school year where I can start off fresh and make changes and try new things. And this year I have very big new things to try - like my two new mantras:
There. I said it. School is starting, and summer is slipping away a lot faster than I'd like to admit.
I made a short stop in my classroom yesterday, just to drop off some boxes of things that had accumulated in my house since May, and as I looked around the semi-empty classroom I started feeling pretty overwhelmed with everything that needs to be done before August 18: nametags, seating charts, locker tags, posters reattached to the walls, safety maps and rules posted, last year's vocab words removed from the word wall, my parent brochure and website updated..... Sometimes it gets to be too much!
Kind of like those darn My Little Ponies....it's just too much!
Somewhere along the lines, education turned away from the idea of teaching something for mastery and instead began focusing on teaching for exposure - kind of like buying 35 My Little Ponies instead of really enjoying 1 or 2. So, instead of teaching a few skills all year long until the students can practically complete those tasks in their sleep, we started skimming through things: teaching many, many skills in the course of a year and never actually stopping to consider if the students actually mastered any of them.
I'm definitely guilty of this. It's so easy to look at a novel or a chapter in the textbook and think about all the millions of activities we could do instead of considering which activities would be best suited to the topics or novel at hand. Even this summer as I sat down to tweak my Reading curriculum and create a new Language Arts curriculum, things began ballooning wildly out of control until my yearly overview looked more like I was teaching for 12 hours a day instead of just 7.
Less IS more. So, I've gone back to my curricula to consider where I could pare things down and teach for mastery instead of exposure. A few less new texts, a few less huge writing projects, a lot more time for student mastery. Less is more.
I'm also guilty of saying, "You did this last year, so you don't need me to reteach it, and we'll just breeze over it..." It's easy to do, and easy to assume that a topic covered in a previous year is already mastered. But if I just admitted to teaching for exposure rather than mastery.....chances are pretty good that my colleagues are doing the same. And it's no one's fault - we've been conditioned to believe that we must teach every standard every day, and this means that we are often frantically throwing more and more skills into a single project, leaving little room for mastery of one skill, let alone 10. And this idea that they're experts because they passed the previous year just makes for trouble...
Yesterday I sliced open a peach that we had picked off the tree in our yard. I started by peeling the skin off - my kids hate the fuzzy texture - and then started shearing off some of the juicy flesh. (The pit had a large crack in it, so I wasn't going to just cut it down the middle and separate it like I normally would.) At first, everything was fine. I shaved off a few more slivers of yellow peach, just dropping them right into the bowl, when suddenly a long black earwig came wriggling out of the pit. I gasped - because seriously, earwigs are disgusting - and barely had time to inhale before ANOTHER EARWIG game sliding out of the pit. AND THEN ANOTHER.
Cue the hyperventilating.
It's not like I'm scared of earwigs. They can't really hurt me. But dang there were just so many of them!!! So, there I am carrying this bowl full of peaches and earwigs to the kitchen sink, screaming, whimpering, gasping...and of course LAUGHING because it's so ridiculous to be completely losing my mind over a few earwigs. That peach pit was like a clown car - it seemed that with every step I took another earwig was squirming his way out of it to see what the commotion was about.
Thank God for garbage disposals is all I can say.
Anyway, that disgusting clown-car of a peach pit is kind of like what happens in my classroom when I say (either out loud or in my head), "You did this last year, so we won't spend much time on it..." The small issues and skill gaps start pouring out, and soon I'm covered in itchy little pests that all need my attention before we can move on. (And the missing skills are way harder to take care of than a bunch of slimy earwigs!)
Less is more, and taking the time to teach for mastery - and to check for prior knowledge before jumping into something! - is going to make my school year a lot better off. For instance, I'm spending the first 4-5 weeks of my Language curriculum working on complete sentences and summary writing. You're probably saying, "But Karisa, you each SIXTH grade. Surely you don't need to review complete sentences and summarizing??"
Remember that peach pit full of earwigs?
The past few years I thought the same thing: a quick review of complete sentences, a glance at summaries, and we'd be good to go, ready to move onto higher level skills and major essay construction. And then there I was in mid-November backtracking to review those very same ideas that I had assumed the kids already had mastered. Not this year, friends.
Aesop was pretty wise when he wrote that story about the tortoise and the hare: slow and steady will win the race, and starting the year off with a gentle but in-depth review of some basic skills might slow me down, but will surely save me time and headache in the end.
So, yes, school is starting in a few weeks. Two, if you want to put a REAL numerical value to it.
But, I'm actually kind of excited about it. It's a new school year where I can start off fresh and make changes and try new things. And this year I have very big new things to try - like my two new mantras:
Less IS more.
Slow and steady.
New school year? I got this.
Peach pit full of earwigs? We're going to need some help....
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Hodge Podge of Crafties...
I know, I know, I have loads of school stuff to be doing. Let's not talk about that, because honestly sitting here knowing that my classroom isn't finished, that I have no key to get into the building, and that I just NOW got my new school email account up and running (which had emails in it since May, mind you, so I'm just a little behind here!), I'm pretty stressed out about the new school year. I'm trying to take it a day at a time, a project at a time....but it's freaking me out! I've worked some on my Writer's notebook, but it's not beautiful enough to post anything on here yet (will it ever be beautiful? probably not, but it WILL be finished...I'm halfway through, so that counts for something, right?), and instead of spending all my time working on school, I thought I'd take a little more time off and do some scrapbooking - crafts are good for the soul, yes? (So is shopping, but let's not suggest that I go do that!!!)
Here is a page I just finished about our wedding party. I had this idea that I wanted a long, sort of panoramic shot of the wedding party in the middle that was surrounded by single shots of them individually and with us. I like how it turned out, but after the fact I thought it may have been more fun to use shots of us in college with them and then include little captions about them as individuals - like their favorite beer or a funny memory of them. Anyways, there's always time to add that in the form of another page, right?
I hand-drew the frame around the big picture and purposely made it wavy, not only because I can't draw a straight line to save my life, but because I like how things look when they have squiggly lines all overlapped like that. Then I added the brackets, because brackets are so "in" right now. I printed out the title and the names and pasted them where they belonged. Super simple, but I really like it.
Here's a close up picture so you can admire my squiggly hand-drawn border....
Apparently I'm going through a "white background" phase, because here is another page I did recently. It took a lot more time and thought than the previous layout, and I'm pretty sure it's just because it was a very specific picture I was using. It's a page about losing my own dad very young and not having him around for the wedding, but being blessed with the best father-in-law in the world. I think really highly of John, so I needed this layout to be perfect. (My type-A personality coming out in full force.)
I normally dont use such tiny pictures when they are the only photo on a layout, but in this case, I did for two reasons: I already had the 4x6 print, so it was totally free to use, and I thought the smaller picture lent itself to the closeness of the hug and the feeling I was trying to express in the journal.
"How's the kitchen coming?" you may ask. Well, here is the test run for the chalkboard that will soon be taking the place of my boring all white cabinets. John stopped by late last week and we did a few tests and then just threw the paint up there, so the job is pretty sloppy and the color isn't right (I promised Jonathan no more green in the house.....) but I love it so far. It's a handy place to write quick lists and notes, and Ollie was super excited that maybe she could ALSO write on it some day. Some day, baby. Some day.
PEACHES!!! Deb went up to Dave's Supermarket in Fairbury some time last week and got us loads of peaches since we couldn't financially swing a trip to Southern IL to get our own. Needless to say, my whole house smells pretty great (much like heaven, I think!), and I've been spending a lot of free time peeling, slicing, and freezing these beauties so I can still eat my most favorite fruit even in the dregs of winter. YAY!
Yet another home project.....this time made out of a cereal box! I had pinned this a loong time ago on Pinterest and actually forgot about it, but I came across it last week some time and realized I had the perfect spot for it! THis is the side of my scrapbook table that John promised we could attach shelves to (hasn't happened yet, but oh well!). I had a small drawer thing that was supposed to be in Ollie's room under it, but it wasn't being well utilized and all of the papers were piling up everywhere. So I cut a cereal box in half (the back is a little higher than the front) and covered it in a picture that I'd already had printed that used to hang in that very spot! Anyway, it was super easy, amazingly cheap, and solved my problem! I made 2 more as well and hung them lower to stash drawing paper for the kids and colored pencils that they can grab easily. It made the side of the desk look way nicer than before, and all for ZERO dollars!!! I'm finding places to add more of these around the house - like one for the dry erase boards and markers, maybe one for coupons....the possibilities are endless! and when they get too junky, I'll just toss them and build a new one!
I wonder if I should work on writing shorter blog posts that focus on ONE thing instead of a million....but guess what, that's how my brain works! 50,000 different things all happening at once! Now back to the school stuff.......EEEEEKKKK!!!!
Here is a page I just finished about our wedding party. I had this idea that I wanted a long, sort of panoramic shot of the wedding party in the middle that was surrounded by single shots of them individually and with us. I like how it turned out, but after the fact I thought it may have been more fun to use shots of us in college with them and then include little captions about them as individuals - like their favorite beer or a funny memory of them. Anyways, there's always time to add that in the form of another page, right?
Apparently I'm going through a "white background" phase, because here is another page I did recently. It took a lot more time and thought than the previous layout, and I'm pretty sure it's just because it was a very specific picture I was using. It's a page about losing my own dad very young and not having him around for the wedding, but being blessed with the best father-in-law in the world. I think really highly of John, so I needed this layout to be perfect. (My type-A personality coming out in full force.)
I wonder if I should work on writing shorter blog posts that focus on ONE thing instead of a million....but guess what, that's how my brain works! 50,000 different things all happening at once! Now back to the school stuff.......EEEEEKKKK!!!!
Tuesday, July 23, 2013
The School Year Cometh...
Most people feel like teachers have it easy. We work from 8am-3pm for 9 months a year and then have 3 full months off to kick back and do nothing.
HA. I don't even want to delve into all the inaccuracies in that last sentence. Let's just say that as teachers (good teachers) we work hard ALL year long and earn the breaks we get. I'm not saying that I'm not blessed to have a full summer off with my kids to spend at the pool and the zoo, and I wish my husband were that lucky, but I do think that I earn that break. And it's rarely 3 FULL months!
It's usually around this point in the summer when teachers start having "teacher" moments, where we're constantly thinking about the up-coming school year and what we need to do to get ready for it. Just the other day at the pool one of my teacher friends was telling me about the nightmare she had that it was the first day of school and the new principal was already mad at her and she didn't have any of her work prepared.....yep, it's officially school season. Heralded by crazy school dreams and middle of the night panic attacks, back to school arrives well before the crazy school supply sales at Staples. (Which I'm totally excited for, PS.)
For me, I've been having these teacher fits all summer since I'm moving to a new grade and a new school. I'm trying to organize a reading and writing curriculum for myself so that I don't feel totally lost come September, and it's been fun, but stressful. There are too many ideas out on Pinterest and not enough time in the day, and I finally said to my husband, "Why do I spend all my time pinning new ideas when I just need to sit down and DO some of the ideas I have??!" (His sage advice? "I was wondering the same thing.")
So I sat down and started this Interactive Writer's Notebook. I have grand ideas to have notebooks like it for reading and math as well, and maybe even social studies, but those will have to wait. For now, I'm trying to focus on finishing up the Writer's Notebook. It's got neat little flip-tabs where notes about punctuation go, some fun charts that we're going to make and glue in, and a few places where we get to bridge the gap between subjects and analyze writing within our social studies content. My latest addition to my lessons (not necessarily to the notebook) are my Publishing and Peer Editing anchor charts. Take a peek:
Truthfully this is one place where I scoured the internet and couldn't find anything that I was happy with, so I created my own. They aren't gorgeous by any means, but I'm planning on creating them as large anchor charts with my class and these just served as a formatting guide for me anyway. Plus now I can throw away the ratty notebook paper that I scribbled all my notes down on.
I'm trying to set up Daily 5 in my classroom for the fall, and these anchor charts and the notebook go along with the writing mini-lessons I'm creating to teach. So far I have pretty much the whole year mapped out and I'm just going back in and actually designing the lessons and making the notebook entries so I have a sample book to teach from. I'll be sure to add more about it once I get it finished.
I'm especially nervous this year because I'm going back to middle school, where I haven't taught since I was a student teacher. It's common knowledge that most third graders are just pretty happy to be at school and have a teacher who smells nice and gives good hugs, but something tells me that the 6th graders are going to be a little more discerning. I'm trying to gear up some more behavior incentives and some start of the school year activities that they'll enjoy. And I guess the bright side is that if they don't like it.....there's always next year to get it right! (Good thing I'm a Cubs fan and am used to that mantra!)
HA. I don't even want to delve into all the inaccuracies in that last sentence. Let's just say that as teachers (good teachers) we work hard ALL year long and earn the breaks we get. I'm not saying that I'm not blessed to have a full summer off with my kids to spend at the pool and the zoo, and I wish my husband were that lucky, but I do think that I earn that break. And it's rarely 3 FULL months!
It's usually around this point in the summer when teachers start having "teacher" moments, where we're constantly thinking about the up-coming school year and what we need to do to get ready for it. Just the other day at the pool one of my teacher friends was telling me about the nightmare she had that it was the first day of school and the new principal was already mad at her and she didn't have any of her work prepared.....yep, it's officially school season. Heralded by crazy school dreams and middle of the night panic attacks, back to school arrives well before the crazy school supply sales at Staples. (Which I'm totally excited for, PS.)
For me, I've been having these teacher fits all summer since I'm moving to a new grade and a new school. I'm trying to organize a reading and writing curriculum for myself so that I don't feel totally lost come September, and it's been fun, but stressful. There are too many ideas out on Pinterest and not enough time in the day, and I finally said to my husband, "Why do I spend all my time pinning new ideas when I just need to sit down and DO some of the ideas I have??!" (His sage advice? "I was wondering the same thing.")
So I sat down and started this Interactive Writer's Notebook. I have grand ideas to have notebooks like it for reading and math as well, and maybe even social studies, but those will have to wait. For now, I'm trying to focus on finishing up the Writer's Notebook. It's got neat little flip-tabs where notes about punctuation go, some fun charts that we're going to make and glue in, and a few places where we get to bridge the gap between subjects and analyze writing within our social studies content. My latest addition to my lessons (not necessarily to the notebook) are my Publishing and Peer Editing anchor charts. Take a peek:
Truthfully this is one place where I scoured the internet and couldn't find anything that I was happy with, so I created my own. They aren't gorgeous by any means, but I'm planning on creating them as large anchor charts with my class and these just served as a formatting guide for me anyway. Plus now I can throw away the ratty notebook paper that I scribbled all my notes down on.
I'm trying to set up Daily 5 in my classroom for the fall, and these anchor charts and the notebook go along with the writing mini-lessons I'm creating to teach. So far I have pretty much the whole year mapped out and I'm just going back in and actually designing the lessons and making the notebook entries so I have a sample book to teach from. I'll be sure to add more about it once I get it finished.
I'm especially nervous this year because I'm going back to middle school, where I haven't taught since I was a student teacher. It's common knowledge that most third graders are just pretty happy to be at school and have a teacher who smells nice and gives good hugs, but something tells me that the 6th graders are going to be a little more discerning. I'm trying to gear up some more behavior incentives and some start of the school year activities that they'll enjoy. And I guess the bright side is that if they don't like it.....there's always next year to get it right! (Good thing I'm a Cubs fan and am used to that mantra!)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)