Inch by inch

I had a melt down the other day after school - just sat at my desk and cried.  The pressure of How am I going to get all of these children reading by the end of the year? got to me and I cried.  There are still a significant number of my students who do not know all of their letters yet.  You're probably asking, "Isn't that what Kindergarten is for?  Learning letters?  It's only October!"

Over the years, expectations have changed.  By the end of Kindergarten, students are expected to be upper emergent readers - reading texts with sight words, sentence patterns, and picture support.  I'll address changing Kindergarten expectations in a future post.

The next day I did what I always do when I freak out about student progress - I assessed them!  Remember, I'm a math geek and so collecting data on my students is an obsession of mine.  After working with every student one-on-one I discovered that we are moving forward!! YEAH!  Progress is being made by every single student in my classroom!  Even my struggling student who I discussed in an earlier post learned the letters in his name!

We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but a garden doesn't grow overnight.

Inch by inch

Row by row

I'm gonna make this garden grow!

Up in the air

To be honest, I throw like a girl.  I can't really catch either (I've been known to duck).  But put me in the classroom and I can juggle with the best of them!

I have twenty students this year with the widest variance in abilities and readiness I've ever seen in one classroom.  I spend three hours every day juggling my students up in the air - desperately trying not to drop anyone and keep the momentum going forward.  I write little notes to myself all over the place:  A can't put the numbers in order, B's hand gets tired when we color the math sheet, C & D & E need to be screened for articulation problems, F wants harder homework, G's parents want a conference ASAP, etc.

At the end of each day I take my little notes and copy them into My Notebook.  My Notebook keeps me sane.  It is a paper record of all the things I need to remember about each individual child, but if I just  kept them in my brain it would probably explode.  OK not really.  If I didn't write things down in My Notebook, I would just forget them and not be able to do my job effectively.

The psychologist Lee Shulman compares the complexity of meeting the needs of your students during a normal teaching day to a physician "in the emergency room of a hospital during or after a natural disaster (p. 147 Waiting for 'Superman')."  I can't stand the sight of blood, so I think I'll stick to the craziness of teaching twenty adorable Kindergarteners.

It's all in the delivery

Every Monday we forego our usual calendar routine to share about our weekends. I enjoy learning more about my students - what they like to do at home, movies they enjoy, important people in their lives.  It also serves the dual purpose as an oral language and listening activity.  Everyone has to share and everyone has to show good listening skills.  I model first by telling the students about my weekend including the fun and the mundane.

I'm beginning to think it might be better to vary our topic a little bit.  I have one little guy who tells me every week that he goes to the zoo.  If I ask if he did anything else, he tells me he "went to the 'quarium and saw mermaids swimming with the sharks."  Yes, every week he tells me the same thing.  Then there is one little girl who always repeats the same activity as another child in the class.

Today I had little girl take the cake.  Usually she has a hard time thinking of something to share, but today she looked directly at me and stated matter of factly that over the weekend she went to Europe.  I asked her, "What did you do in Europe?"  Without skipping a beat she responded, "I saw reindeer."  I couldn't help but smile.