Hallowe’en!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that the standard spelling these days is Halloween. I like the old-timey feel of spelling it with the apostrophe. This is also very much related to why I prefer to use endings like -our, -ise, and -tre.
Anyway, today is Hallowe’en. Our school has a parade and then classroom parties in the afternoon each year. Nearly all of the students in my class had costumes and those who didn’t acquired some from the store of costumes that are hidden away in the building. I broke out my high school graduation regalia, complete with mortar board, tassel, and gold honours cords, and walked around with the class. I don’t think the other intermediate teachers dressed up, but most of the primary teachers did. One teacher was a box of crayons, another was a frog on a lily pad, and another one was dressed as The Cat in the Hat. Not the Cat in the Hat, mind you, but the book itself.
My students had a wide variety of costumes: werewolf, witch, dark faerie, Greek goddess, Duct Tape (TM) monster, vampire, knight, hobo, Rapunzel-as-a-corpse, Venom (from Spiderman), and other such characters appeared. One of my favourite costumes, though, was from a student in another class: a homemade Dalek costume, complete with flashing lights. All of the students in the building lined up and paraded around the sidewalk surrounding the building before heading into their separate classrooms for parties.
Our class party was just lots of treats (cupcakes, cookies, brownies, apple slices, and string cheese) and letting the kids sit around and talk. I had It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! but the students seemed content to just eat their snacks and chat with each and their parents. In the course of the party, I overheard one of the funniest conversations I’ve heard in the room this year:
Student 1: Mr. Valencic is chomping down on a cookie.
Student 2: Really? I thought adults were too old for cookies.
Mr. Valencic: Wait… you mean you’ve never seen an adult eating a cookie before?
Student 2: I’ve seen adults eat cupcakes before, but never cookies.
Mr. Valencic: Um… okay…
After this conversation, I told the second student’s father and he just looked really puzzled. The entire discussion reminded me of the time a couple of weeks ago when a student expressed shock upon learning that I drink soda. It would seem that children really are incredibly aware of the world around them. Events like these result in what is known as “anchoring and adjusting” in cognitive psychology. Individuals have to find something that they understand, like an adult eating cupcakes, and adjust their understanding to include cookies. Upon further reflection, though, I’m not sure why this was so surprising, seeing as we had cookies in the class for someone’s birthday just last week!
The day was fun, the students enjoyed dressing up, and they enjoyed seeing me dressed up, as well! The parents who came to help out did a great job providing treats and helping out! I know we didn’t do much, but what we did was fun!
Happy Hallowe’en, everyone!
Parent-Teacher Conferences Part II
Today was the second day of Parent-Teacher Conferences. Officially only scheduled to go from eight to noon, I was at school from about 7:45 am until 6:00 pm, due to the fact that my wife takes the car to work and she had to stay a little late today.
Fortunately, I had plenty to do to keep myself occupied while waiting. Also, I was able to schedule a late conference with a parent who worked into the early afternoon. So it worked out really well! While waiting for my wife to finish work, I did a lot of reading (finally finished Debt of Honor, leaving me with just three more books in the Jack Ryan universe before I’ll finally be done), and I did some organising of the classroom. I meant to sort out all of my nonfiction books, but I was busy doing other tasks. They can wait, I’m sure.
Now that I am all done with conferences (well, essentially… still have a half-dozen parents to try to meet with), I can relax this weekend. I have a brother getting married tomorrow, and then I have a band concert on Sunday. The concert is at Wesley United Methodist Church on Green Street in Urbana from 4 to 6 pm, for those interested in coming. I told my students I would give them five extra credit points on their social studies research project if they came with their parents and had me sign a copy of the program. It’ll be interesting to see how many, if any, come!
Anyway, I’m off to catch Game 7 of the World Series! Go Cards!
Parent-Teacher Conferences Part I
Today was a bit of a scary day for me. Well, okay, not really scary; more of a “holy cow I have no idea what I am really supposed to do” kind of day. Actually, not even the whole day, just the end of it.
You see, Parent-Teacher Conferences began this evening. And even though I am in my fifth year of professional teaching–one year as a student teacher (which totally counts, even if I wasn’t being paid), three years as a substitute teacher, and now my first year as a full-time teacher–I have somehow managed to never be present at Parent-Teacher Conferences. Until today.
I had most of my students’ parents sign up for conferences, so I knew that I would at least have parents coming in. I had the first quarter report cards, projects we’ve worked on and projects currently underway, but, really, what to actually do at a conference was a mystery to me.
But I did know what to do to prepare. First, my students had a fairly typical last day of the week routine. We had P.E. in the morning, did some silent reading, had a math test, cleaned desks and tidied the room, went to lunch, read more of Over Sea, Under Stone, and had our weekly Read, Write, Think! activities. As part of the tidying the room, I had half a dozen students work under the direction of a parent volunteer to organise all of the fiction chapter books we have in the room. During the previous quarter, the books that had been so meticulously organised had been moved, removed, and replaced so many times that they were just a huge mess. I couldn’t find the books I wanted when I wanted them, and students were just grabbing books at random.
Now they are all organised again and ready for new selections to be put into the mix. I straightened the rest of the books (large picture books, nonfiction, poetry, etc) and will try to actually sort them all out tomorrow when I have down-time between conferences. So I had that taken care of. I also displayed the class science reports/posters so that parents could see what was done. My grade level partner had some students bring in several of the Dr. Seuss books so that we could have those on display again, and I made sure that the room was neat and cleared of clutter.
But I still didn’t really know what to expect from conferences. Fortunately, I’ve developed the talent for thinking quickly on my feet, and I not only survived, I had several very positive, productive conferences with my students’ parents. We discussed academic and social performance, class policies, curriculum, projects, concerns and strengths, and how much my students seem to really like having me as their teacher. (Always nice to know!)
Nothing was a huge surprise to me, except perhaps how many parents do read my blog (thanks again, by the way!) and how very little some of my most active, talkative students tell their parents when they get home. Yet another reason that this blog is useful: parents can use what I am writing as talking points. I think I may take advantage of this and start posting daily questions related to what we’ve done each day. I also learned that the fact that I wear a tie to work each day is a Pretty Big Deal. I suppose I should clarify that I don’t actually wear a different tie each day, at least, I haven’t. Maybe I’ll do what Kevin Lambert did at Mix 94.5 WLRW in Champaign and wear a different tie each day until I’ve made it through all of them. I’ll tell the class on Monday and have them keep track. Should be fun.
Anyway, round one of Parent-Teacher Conferences was awesome, the PTA provided an excellent dinner (and I don’t even like soup), and now I am very ready for bed and then doing round two tomorrow! Cheerio!
Field Trip
Today we had our very first field trip (or excursion, for those who prefer the term) of the year. We, along with the rest of the school (with the exception of Kindergarten) went to the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts to watch a show called Tales of the Pacific Rim. In preparation for this, my grade level partner and I have been teaching our classes about the nations of the Pacific Rim, discussing their cultures and stories, mostly by reading from a wide selection of books on the topic.
The students were pretty excited, and we worked hard at establishing a high level of expectation. I don’t think a day went by during the previous two weeks that she or I didn’t remind our young charges that they had to show that they could handle going on a field trip by showing that they could be respectful, responsible, and safe in the classroom. I am pleased that they stepped up and showed that they could do it.
After returning to school, we talked about what the students most enjoyed about the performance and also the parts that surprised them or left them with questions. The favourite part was almost unanimously Brenda Wong’s telling of the story of Sun Wukong (the Monkey King), focusing on the mischief he caused in the Heavenly Kingdom (scroll down through the Wikipedia page to find a good synopsis). Several students were surprised to see just one actor on stage, so we talked a bit about the difference between watching a storyteller and watching a full stage production.
The rest of the day passed quickly, with the students getting back, going to lunch (about half an hour later than usual), and then doing our read aloud and some silent reading while I worked with a couple of students on the math assessment we did yesterday. And then they went to fine arts, we had our daily class meeting, and that was that!
It was a good day with great student behaviour at the Krannert Center. I am hoping we will have opportunities to return again, as well as to go on other field trips throughout the year. The students definitely showed that they can handle themselves outside the school!
Industrial Ear Muffs
For all but roughly six months of my entire life, my mother has worked at the plant in Morton, Illinois, that processes and cans Libby’s Pumpkin. (As an aside, I find it very distressing that the official web page for this product does not show up on the first page of Google when searching for “Libby’s Pumpkin” but it does when searching for “Nestle Pumpkin.) When Mum first started working there, it was actually Libby’s Pumpkin. Then Carnation bought out Libby’s and then Nestle USA bought out Carnation. This is also why many Carnation products (like their sweetened condensed milk) now carries the Nestle logo, in case you were wondering. However, Mum has always just worked at the pumpkin plant, generally referred to as a factory in our family.
As a result of this career, there were items in my home that we always found commonplace that, apparently, weren’t common in most kids’ homes. Things like bump caps (different from hard hats), hair nets (more of a gauzy material than an actual net, though), ear plugs and, of course, industrial ear muffs. These items would accumulate around the house as any one of my parents eight children would spirit them off for various reasons and Mum would just get new ones. We always thought they were cool, especially the ear muffs.
Flash-forward to a couple of weeks ago. A parent, in an effort to help alleviate the oftentimes excessive noise levels in the room, offered to bring in some ear muffs for the students to use. It seems that many other teachers have used these in the past (or are still using them) and it has been successful. I am never one to turn down a suggestion to do something that will most likely help in a huge way, so I gladly accepted. Just a few days ago, these ear muffs made their way into the classroom. I unpacked them and put them in a box, not quite sure how I would introduce them to the class.
I shouldn’t have worried.
My students, as interested as they are in everything new and shiny (hey, I like shiny new things, too!) immediately caught sight of the box and started asking if they could use the ear muffs during silent reading. I’ll admit that I found this slightly odd, since silent reading is, by its very nature, already silent, but hey, if they thought they’d help, I wasn’t about to stop them! I doled out the eight pairs as randomly as I could and the class got started.
While we have been very successful in building up our silent reading stamina (I’ve mentioned before that the students once read for 35 minutes with just a few breaks), this seemed to be one of our best days. Not only was everyone silent for the duration of the reading (just 15 minutes), but I was also able to pull a small group to the back table to do a quick math check on place value without a single interruption.
However, there has been one downside to the use of these industrial ear muffs in the classroom: everyone wants to wear them. We only have eight pairs at present. However, at $3 a piece, I am seriously contemplating going out and getting a bunch more, or maybe seeking out either a donation or a micro-grant or something of the sort to get them. If external noise cancellation is all it takes to help my young charges focus and work independently, it is worth the investment. Besides, these are industrial ear muffs. I expect them to last a very, very long time!
Math Review
For the past several days, the students in my class have been undergoing a massive review of the math concepts we covered during the first quarter of the year. (I can still hardly believe we are already in the second quarter!) One of the things I have noticed as we have done this is that it is really easy to tell which students are self-motivated to improve and which students will simply float along doing the minimum.
My goal, of course, is for each student to be self-motivated. But the reality of the situation is that I am working with children who are nine- and ten-years-old. They are still learning how to learn and learning how they learn. So it is my job to help them along the way. And that is I find myself stepping back, reviewing what we’ve done, and seeing who it is who needs a little extra push to really give their best.
Of course, to really know who needs the extra push, I have to take the time to work with students either one-on-one or in small groups. While doing that, I also have to make sure that the students who are not meeting with me in conferences have something worthwhile to work on. The “worthwhile” part of that is the hard one. Years ago, it was not at all uncommon for teachers to hand out photocopies (“ditto sheets” were what they were called when I was a kid) to give students something to do to keep them busy. But I don’t want my students to just be kept busy; I want them to do something meaningful.
So while I am working with students in small groups, or working with them in one-on-one conferences, the rest of the class is expected to be silently working at their seats on review. Some days are better than others when it comes to following these expectations but, over all, I think that most of my students are learning how to work independently. Once we’ve firmly established working independently in an acceptable way, we can move on to working in small groups. While there were most definitely be days full of frustration, there will also be days full of excitement at our successes. And each day will be a new day to learn and improve.
And to think, all of this because of a simple desire to finish some math review. Have I mentioned how much I love my job?
Friday Friday
A few days ago, I was discussing with my class the various ways we would be engaging in authentic writing experiences. We talked about the pen pals they will have with my mother-in-law’s fifth grade students in Champaign, which many are excited about. I also mentioned how I was thinking of having one or two students write a blog update once a week during our Read Write Think activities on Friday afternoon.
First I had to set the ground rules: No names (except mine), and I wanted it to be positive. Also, I reminded them that I have absolute editorial authority, but I would try to keep the writing as authentically theirs as I could. What follows is the update written for today by two of the girls in my class:
Today in Mr. Valencic’s class, at lunch recess, we had an extremely bad problem. A loose dog, chased kids on the playground. There was one student in particular that got hurt badly! He got bitten on the face. It was scary and quite sad. But that wasn’t the only thing that happened today!
We also had so much fun in The Thinks You Think project. We were split into small groups of four or five. What we did was find explicit and implicit details in books that we got assigned to. It was really fun and awesome. We also had a fun period of Read, Write, Think. There are some enjoying chess, some playing bingo, Battleship, Guess Who?, Connect 4, and origami. I hope the rest of Friday will be wonderful!
There was a letter sent home to parents to explain what happened during lunch recess, and the teachers will be doing some major follow-up teaching with the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grades to help better model how to respond to an emergency, particularly when there is a loose animal on the playground during lunch recess. We are very fortunate that none of the injuries were serious!
The students really did do an amazing job finding explicit and implicit details and discussing the differences between summaries and main ideas. The principal even came in and observed, then told me and my grade-level partner how impressed she was with how well the lesson went.
I can hardly believe the first quarter ended a week ago! I just finished report cards and am now preparing for parent-teacher conferences next Thursday and Friday. However, I am really looking forward to taking a break this weekend! My baby sister is coming down to attend the Illinois Marching Band Championships. It is looking to be a great follow-up to a great day!
It’s Been a Long Day
My days start at 6 am when I wake up. Now, I realise that many of my colleagues get up even earlier. Heck, I was just talking to one of them this evening about our schedules and he mentioned he gets up at 5:15 each morning. But still, I wake up at 6:00. It isn’t that early, but I also tend to stay up until 10 or something 11 pm. As a result, I am fairly tired by the time I get home.
This is especially true when I get home at 6 or 7 pm, like today.
I’m not complaining, though! I actually had a really productive morning and a pretty awesome afternoon/evening participating with a teacher inquiry group run through the Center for Education in Small Urban Communities. The afternoon had its ups and downs, but that is what elementary education is all about. Two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back, three steps forward, two steps back, and on and on in various conversations of forward and backward.
The main focus of the morning was our guided reading groups. I was able to meet with each of the groups and have very positive discussions with each of them. Each group has made quite a bit of progress, and I fully expect each one to be done with their current books by the end of the week. We are going to try to start new guided reading group selections on Monday, hopefully focusing on early European explorers (which will tie into our social studies research unit).
The afternoon was a mix of math, reading, and writing, with fine arts thrown in at the end. Our class meeting took longer than expected, though, so we didn’t get an afternoon break/recess like we had hoped. Tomorrow is Friday, though, and I am hoping to have a great day with my entire fourth grade family in the morning and my class family in the afternoon!
Through Small and Simple Means
You know, great things are possible! This was the message that my grade-level partner and I shared with our 55 fourth graders this morning. It wasn’t our original intent, though. Our original intent was to teach them how to look for, find, and interpret implicit details in a text. We got started with this, and we will continue to do so until we feel our kids are comfortable with the concept, but, in the meantime, we seemed to have found ourselves passionately advocating for youth empowerment.
The awesome thing is that we didn’t even plan to do it, or talk about it. It just… happened.
It all started when we decided to do a lesson on implicit details and, since we are teaching English/Language Arts concepts through Dr. Seuss, we decided to use The Lorax as our text. This had more to do with the fact that I have a plush Lorax than anything else.
As I read the story to the class, we would stop and discuss the hidden details that would help us to know the main idea of the story. We started with the point that the Once-ler seemed to be mysterious and cranky. Then we talked about the dangers of cutting down trees, polluting the air, and ruining fresh water. This got us to think about how small acts, while seemingly harmless, can lead to a chain reaction of events that can easily cause great harm to our world. After all, the Once-ler didn’t start by cutting down all the Truffula Trees. No, first he just chopped down one.
But then I asked the students why the Once-ler gave the boy in the story the last Truffula Tree seed. Someone pointed out that the one seed could turn into a tree, and that tree would produce more seeds, so they could grow more trees. And then came the money question: What was Dr. Seuss really trying to tell us when he wrote The Lorax? Was he trying to warn us about cutting down Truffula Trees in order to knit Thneeds, or was it something else?
Then answers from our young charges was awesome. They talked about small things making the world a better place, not just harming. I told them about the work I do with Operation Snowball, Inc. and the idea of empowering young people to change the world through small actions. We had them do a quick write about what they can do to make a difference. Sure, most of them wrote about planting trees and not polluting, and others wrote about recycling, but we planted a seed of an idea. Nobody has to wait until he or she is a “grown up” to change the world. They can do it right now, right here.
I definitely want to find a way to build on this. It would be awesome for our students to come up with their own Community Action Plan and see them make a difference!
Picture Day
Today was Picture Day.
For those who are not familiar with this annual American school event, it is the one day a year that nearly everyone in the school dresses extra nice in order to sit awkwardly on a stool for five seconds and have a picture taken.
This was my first Picture Day since my student teaching days back in 2007. (Well, actually, not quite–I was there for Picture Day a year ago when subbing, but the photographers wouldn’t let me have my picture taken. I was sad.) It was fun watching as the students entered the building.
Most of the girls were wearing dresses or skirts, although some were not too happy about it. They also had their hair done up to look extra nice. One girl told me immediately that her mom did her hair, in a tone that clearly implied that it was her mom’s idea not hers. I spoke to her mom later and learned that it was very much my student’s idea to do her hair the way she did. Kids are funny that way.
The boys were mostly wearing polo shirts, although one boy wore a button-down. Alas, there were no ties on my students. I guess my wear-a-tie-every-day policy didn’t quite rub off on them. Some of the boys also had their hair done, although for them this meant mohawks and spikes. Yep, those are my kids!
Of course, the teachers were also part of this fun ritual. Fancy duds all around! Of course, I wear fancy duds every day, so all I had to do was decide which clothes I wanted to wear for a picture that would be hanging on the hallway for the next year. My wife suggested I wear my blue shirt with my gold-yellow tie with blue and white accents. I was leaning more toward my blue shirt with my orange and blue striped shirt. When it was clear that the choice could not be made between the two of us, I did what every rational young adult would do: made an appeal to the Internet. Of course, only one person responded with an actual answer, but that was good enough for me–orange and blue! I also finally got a haircut last night, something I had been neglecting for several weeks.
Despite the school holiday-that-was-not-really-a-holiday, we did take time to get real work done today. The morning went very well, particularly when I met with my reading groups and had the students working independently on literacy assignments. While working with one of my literacy groups, a girl in the class made this gem of a statement that I jotted down so I could remember:
All you have to do is read 50 pages a day!
When the group saw me write it down, they asked for me to post it on the blog. So there you go, members of the Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH reading group!
The Cat in the Hat
Today we continued our Thinks You Think unit. It went really well. In fact, it went really, really, really well. We had planned on spending about 30-45 minutes each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as a combined fourth grade. The students, though, would have none of that.
Our lesson today went from 8:30 to 10:30 am.
That’s right: two hours. 120 minutes. Nearly three to four times longer than we had planned. And not because the students weren’t focused or because of disinterest. Oh, no, not at all! In fact, we had all of our fourth graders (plus or minus however were absent, we are talking about 55 students) focused, on task, and discussing the explicit details they could identify in the text.
So, what text was the source of this power meeting of intense 9- and 10-year-olds? There were four, actually. First was The Cat in the Hat, followed by either Green Eggs and Ham, Fox in Socks, or One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish. If you had asked me three years ago, when I first started teaching professionally, or even two months ago, when I first started teaching full-time, if I could have a large group of fourth graders deeply interested in reading such simple texts, I probably would have laughed. Not now! These kids are amazing, and they really enjoy what we are doing. (At least, so far!)
We started off with a discussion of what explicit details are, and then took a quick side-trip down the road of figuring out what iconic is. (In case I haven’t mentioned it before, I have a habit of using adult vocabulary with my students and then guiding them to an understanding of what the words mean.) Once we had established what explicit details are, I read The Cat in the Hat to the entire group and guided them in identifying explicit details in the story.
Then we broke the classes into groups and had them work together to read and identify explicit details in their stories. They were given about 25 minutes to find at least 15 explicit details and record them in their Thinks You Think notebooks. Everyone did a great job working and following the expectations. It was awesome! I think that most of the students were surprised by how many details they could find in such simple books; after all, The Cat in the Hat has slightly more than 220 words. Even One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish and Fox in Socks have a vast number of explicit details in the text. It’ll be cool to see how they build upon this skill and continue to improve as readers and writers.
Overheard in the Classroom I
I don’t know if this will actually be a regular feature, but I figured that, just in case it is, I ought to start numbering now.
As you may recall, my students did an Animal Inquiry Project at the beginning of the year to learn about the various characteristics of a wide variety of animals. One of the groups was lucky enough to be able to study the quagga. (I had used the quagga as an example to get them thinking about questions they should ask. All I said is, “The quagga is a real animal. What would you like to know about it?” After coming up with the questions, I did a drawing to assign a group to study it since everyone wanted to do it.)
One of the boys in the quagga group was one of my more reluctant readers. He prefers drawing, usually Pokemon characters. He recently grabbed one of my giant nonfiction books from my shelf, Our Continent: A Natural History of North America and was flipping through the pages and, I hope, reading here and there.
Suddenly he raised his hand as I walked by and said, in a quiet whisper voice because it was a silent reading time, “Mr. Valencic, look! This looks like a quagga!”
It was actually a picture of the pliohippus, but since they look awfully similar and are distantly related to the quagga, I was quite happy that he made the connection.
Oh, and now he is reading the book every single day. Awesome!
The Thinks You Can Think
When my grade-level partner and I first began discussing our Super Duper Awesome Top Secret Collaborative Project, we wanted to find a way to bring all of the SafetyNet Skills and the Core Content State Standards into one place and to do it with all of our students. Our first step was to break the skills and standards into specific objectives, rather than broad concepts. As we did so, we realised that we were going to need to find an author who has a wide selection of stories from which we could draw and would keep our students interested and engaged throughout the unit, regardless of their individual reading abilities.
In the midst of this, my GLP suddenly remembered something she had recently read about: The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry has a long-running exhibit called Dr. Seuss and the Art of Invention. As soon as she said it, we both looked at each other and said, “Of course!”
And thus the unit began to take shape. Dr. Seuss was a brilliant writer. His stories are easy to read but many have a depth that reaches across all ages. What better way to learn about reading and writing than by studying the life and works of Theodore “Dr. Seuss” Geisel?
We officially began the unit with a reading of Oh, The Places You’ll Go, followed by a discussion about what we would be doing, what our goals were, and how we were going to work together as a fourth grade family of 55 students and 2 teachers who will be working to move mountains.
I am excited, my GLP is excited, and, most importantly, the students are excited! Oh, the thinks we can think! As I told the boys and girls, we are going to be working hard this year: we are going to be thinking, thinking about thinking, and thinking about the thinks we are thinking about as we think.
And if that doesn’t make you think, I don’t know what will!
Super Secret Awesome Collaborative Project: The Beginning
I wonder what the word limit for a blog post title is. I can apparently cram seven fairly large words into a title and still have it all show up in the permalink. Fun times.
So today was the official beginning of the Super Secret Awesome Collaborative Project that my grade-level partner and I have been planning for several weeks. We were originally going to start first thing in the morning but, due to some unplanned circumstances, we had to bump it to the afternoon. I gathered my class and brought them into the other room, since my partner’s room is considerably larger than my own.
We spent the first collaborative meeting discussing group norms, such as what constitutes acceptable behaviour and how we would respond to it. The students suggested three basic expectations:
- Treat others the way you want to be treated.
- Respect each other.
- Be safe.
Surprisingly, we discussed this for nearly 45 minutes, but it was a great conversation. We also talked about the foundation for what we are doing: teaching the district SafetyNet Skills that are rooted in the Common Core State Standards. Remember those? We are going to teach all of the English/Language Arts SNS to the entire fourth grade. As far as we can tell, we are the only fourth grade in the district and, quite possibly, the state, that is going to attempt this. We are convinced that our 55 or so students are capable of learning, mastering, and using the core standards by the end of the year. By comparison, the CCSS aren’t going to be officially implemented nationwide until 2014. So we are going to give the class a great leap forward!
Everyone in the class has agreed to try it out and to learn along with us. Everyone committing to upholding the group norms. And everyone is excited to learn in a massive collaborative effort.
So, how are we going to go about doing this? We are going to bring our classes together every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday morning to learn, practice, master, and use the skills and concepts. We haven’t officially announced how we are going to do this, but we’ve started with a hint: we had several Dr. Seuss books out and I was wearing a button with Thing 1 and Thing 2 on it. Also, I brought in the plush Think that my wife and I got from Kohl’s last year. The Lorax will be coming later.
I’ll leave it at that until we gather again on Friday.
Preparing for a Substitute Teacher
I am going to be gone tomorrow. One of my best friends is getting married in Seattle, Washington, and it just so happened that I was able to arrange things so that I could go. I’ll be flying out of Chicago tomorrow afternoon with two other friends while our wives take an extended weekend vacation in the city. We are all looking forward to the trip, but that means that I had to prepare my class for having me out of the room for a day.
All week we have been talking about classroom expectations, rehearsing procedures and discussing what works and what doesn’t. I had a brilliant idea this morning when I had the class sit down and line up again after the first try resulted in talking and jostling in line. There are quite a few students who tend to grumble when I have them sit down and try it again the right way. Then I had my flash of brilliance.
I wrote a simple math equation on the board and asked them if it was correct. The equation was this:
10 + 10 = 16
Of course the students said it was wrong. I said, “But it’s close! Isn’t close enough good enough?!” To which they said, “No!” So I rewrote it:
10 + 10 = 19
Again we had the discussion that close enough wasn’t good enough. So then I asked, “If close enough isn’t good enough for math, why should it be good enough for our routines for behaviour? Shouldn’t we be exact in everything we do?”
There was a moment of silence. Then nods and mental lights going on. So then we tried it again. And everyone did it the right way. It was pretty cool. Sure, we’re going to have to practice it again and again, but they are starting to get it, and that’s what keeps me going.
Later on in the day we talked about the expectations for having a substitute teacher. Now, of course, I expect the very best of behaviour every day; I can’t expect the students to do less than the best, right? But I also expect the very best of the best of the best when I am gone, and I let them know that. I also let them know that the younger kids in the building look up to them and mimic their behaviour. As an example, I told them that as we came in from recess, the third graders were in the hall, also. My class was talking, and then the third graders started talking. I asked one of them why they were talking in the hall and she responded, “Well, the fourth graders are talking.”
Yikes.
My class definitely paused at that thought. I also told them about the second graders who are trying to finish their restroom breaks in five minutes or less because our class is doing the same.
I wrapped the day up by asking them to rate their behaviour in class on a scale of one to five, one being “Needs Improvement” and five being “Great.” We have five basic expectations in the classroom and I just happen to be a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, and particularly a fan of the character Faith. So I suggested that we should strive to have each day be a five-by-five day.
As my final preparation for having a substitute teacher, I left a message on the board for the class and then wrote positive messages by the class expectations and the RESPECT board we have to encourage them to have a great day. I have no idea who the sub tomorrow is going to be, but I hope that the class really does have a five-by-five day!
Cloudcuckooland
Those who don’t know me as well, or haven’t known me for long, probably don’t know about my work with the drug prevention field. If you’ve dug through my archives, though, you may have come across a post or two on the subject.
I am a man of many different passions. My students have surely caught on by now that I have an insanely large number of favourite books, favourite authors, and favourite people in the world. I talk about them a lot. I also talk about the things that I love doing. Oddly, though, my work with the volunteer drug prevention field does not come up nearly as often as one would think. But it really is something that gets me quite excited. (What doesn’t get me as excited is how slow my computer at work seems to be when I am trying to update my blog because I am done with everything else at work and I am still waiting for my wife to come get me!)
Anyway, one of the organisations with which I volunteer regularly is Operation Snowball, Inc. This is a program for high school students that I first started working with in 1998. The main focus of the chapter I work with the most, Washington Community High School’s Operation Snobwall, is their weekend lock-in in January. During the weekend, teens are placed in small groups and come up with a group name. One year, the group names got so ridiculously long that the Powers That Be decreed that group names could only be one word.
Enter my introduction to cloudcuckooland (sometimes spelled cloud-cuckoo-land).
As at least one of my students can tell you, cloudcuckooland is a domain of imaginative thought. The land of make-believe. Alternately, it is a world in which everything is topsy-turvy.
I love my job. I love my students. And I love that there are days when I feel like we have all gone through a rift in the space-time continuum and entered cloudcuckooland. It is taxing and frustrating and tiring, but it is what I love doing. I have my students go from doing exactly what they know they are supposed to do to bouncing off the walls and I can’t help but wonder how this happened. Then they manage to pull it all back together again and I marvel that they can so easily switch between model students and a substitute teacher’s worst nightmare and back again without batting an eye.
The oddest part of it all? I often hear that a first-year teacher spends the year just surviving. I don’t feel like that is what I am doing; I feel like I am thriving, that I am exactly where I have wanted to be since I was in my student’s place some 19 years ago.
And today I learned that there are some boys in my class, and girls as well, who may come to take my place. That’s pretty awesome, if you ask me!
Reading Logs
I really don’t mean for this blog to be all about reading but, dang it, we do a lot of reading in my class, and I am really impressed with what my students accomplish each day! Besides, it is my blog and anyone who knows anything about me probably knows that I love reading to a degree that is almost absurd. So it really shouldn’t be much of a surprise that I tend to write about reading a lot.
I told my class last week that we were going to start using reading logs each week so that I could better understand what they were reading, when they were reading, and how much they read each time. We talked about it as a class and decided what the reading log should look like. The class was also informed that the reading logs would be collected each Monday morning and that a new one would be sent home each Monday afternoon. This way, I would be able to track their home reading habits each week. In addition to all of this, it was made very clear that I expect each student to be reading every day at home.
Or so I thought.
I had about six students turn in their reading logs this morning. Several others said that they forgot them. Others told me that they didn’t know they were supposed to turn them in because they weren’t completely filled out. (I allowed for 15 different reading sessions to be recorded.) Yet others said that they didn’t understand how to fill them out, despite the sample that I had written on the board when I first handed them out.
Le sigh.
This is just more evidence that a teacher must explain a concept of skill several times before it is fully understood.
Still, the reading logs are already giving interesting insights into my students’ reading habits and their understanding of what it means when I send a paper home. Some students think that papers sent home aren’t actually meant to go home, and therefore stuff them in a folder in their desks. Some students take papers home but never bring them back. Others take them home and return them partially completed, claiming that what they do at home is their business and not mine, even though they have an assignment to complete a reading log and turn it in each week. And then, of course, I have the students who take papers home and return them promptly as expected.
I’ll keep working with them on the reading logs. Hopefully I will have more students tomorrow turn in their completed logs, with a record of what they read, how long they read, how many pages were read, what days the reading took place, and a parent’s initials to verify that reading happened.
That’s the plan, at least. I’ll hope that next Tuesday (since there is no school on Monday) will net better results than a first foray into reading logs this year.
Hopefully.
Teacher Inservice
So, I wrote on Thursday that I would not be updating until Monday due to the teacher inservice meetings I had yesterday. When I was in school, we always knew when teachers had these inservice days, although I don’t think I ever knew what the word itself meant, other than the fact that my teachers had to go to school and I didn’t.
A friend of mine asked me today what an inservice day is. And since I am working mightily to procrastinate other tasks I really need to do this weekend, I figured I’d do a quick post about what teachers do on these days.
First of all, a teacher inservice day is, quite simply, a day that teachers attend professional development meetings during the school day. That’s why it is an “inservice” day–most professional development meetings are held after hours or on the weekend. I believe that there are a total of four inservice days each year, at least in my district.
Most of the meetings this year are going to focus on auditing our curriculum materials and seeing how well they align with the Common Core State Standards which have been recently adopted by Illinois and 43 other states. Without boring you too quickly with the eduspeak that is my professional world, the CCSS are replacing the Illinois Learning Standards that were adopted in 1997. The ILS set forth the specific concepts and skills that were to be taught in each grade level in Illinois from K-12. The CCSS do the same thing, but they have been aligned with standards in other nations that will, hopefully, allow the United States to be more competitive in our global society.
I actually really, really, really like the CCSS and am excited to see national standards being implemented. My next hope for public education in the United States is for a kind of national teacher certification process that is adopted by each state, but that is most definitely a soapbox topic for another day!
In addition to the CCSS, my school district, as part of its Strategic Plan, has recently adopted what are being called the Safety Net Skills for each grade level. These are the learning standards that are absolutely fundamental for students to succeed. These, too, are pretty awesome, and very useful to have as the foundation of everything else we teach.
The inservice meetings yesterday had two parts: the first was meeting with all of the teachers at my grade level across the district; the second was meeting with all of the teachers in my building. I spent the morning discuss the Core Content and Safety Net Skills with my fellow fourth grade teachers, trying to develop a framework for understanding how they will be implemented. Then we began to explore which standards are already part of our curriculum, and whether or not the materials we have are able to support us in our efforts to teach. Believe it or not, this was a lot of fun! My grade-level partner and Wiley and I are going to start team-teaching some of the standards, and we have some pretty awesome things in the works!
The afternoon was spent with my building colleagues in a kind of extended staff meeting. We spent good portion of the afternoon discussing ways to identify students who internalise and students who externalise their emotions so that we can better serve their social and emotional needs (SEL being a big part of the 21st century curriculum). Then we wrapped up the day with training in implementing Visual Teaching Strategies in our classrooms. (Odd… I thought I had mentioned VTS before, but I can’t find any posts about it. Oh well.) I have done a bit of VTS with my class, but I want to do more in the future, and am hoping to get some more formal training soon.
Anyway, that was my first teacher inservice day. Lots of meetings that would probably seem dreadfully dull to others, but are so important to the philosophy and methodology of what I do as a professional educator!
And now I really do need to start grading those papers!
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