How to make your kindergarten teachers feel valued and appreciated………

• Give all other grade levels a common preparation period every day.  Don’t give the 4  kindergarten teachers any, not even one,  but expect them to collaborate
• Have kindergarten be last for everything; last for breakfast, last for lunch
• Call full staff meetings that everyone is required to attend, but talk about things that don’t apply to kindergarten
• Do the same on staff development days
• Over 4 years gradually take away all the aides and support for kindergarten, but give them 30-32 students
• Increase the amount of testing and evaluating,  then expect the curriculum to still be taught  while the teachers are testing,  don’t even supply a substitute for the teacher so that they can test while the class is  being taught, even though subs have been provided in the past and still are at other sites in the district.
• Tell them to identify the 5-6 lowest students in their class and commit to having them “at grade level” by the end of the year
• Don’t provide any help or support to the teachers for the 1-3 highly disruptive students in each class
• Pass a law that says any student will be retained that misses 20 or more days in a year but don’t retain anyone, even the ones missing 60 or more days
• Pile more and more assessments and programs on the teachers but take very little away; add to – don’t replace
• Fully implement Common Core State Standards in Kindergarten through 2nd grade, but don’t really train anyone.
• Change the expectations half way through the year.
• Continue to use the old text books even though they aren’t aligned to the CCSS
• Tell your kindergarten teachers that they should transfer to another grade level if they don’t like any of this, even though due to cuts, there haven’t been any other openings in 3 years.

And this is why I haven’t posted much lately………….

More Universal Breakfast

In addition to the negative time factors with the breakfast, there are a couple of other problems.  Frequently there is juice as one of the items.  Frequently some or all of the juice is frozen. All of the juice was frozen on Monday, and at least 50 percent of it was frozen today.  If it’s only some of it, then the kids take extra time going through the juices looking for the ones that aren’t frozen.  Except kindergarten is last, so it’s pretty picked over when the kindergarteners get there.  Then between the breakfast and the lunch menus, the kids get whole apples 4-6 times a week.  Kindergarten kids don’t have good teeth for eating whole apples.  To keep my kids from just throwing the juice and apples away, and since the entire rest of the school is eating their whole breakfast in their classrooms,  I started allowing my kids to take unopened frozen juice and whole apples back to class.  In an hour or so, after the juice has mostly melted, they then can drink it.  I also bought one of those apple corer/slicers that you just push through the apple.  Five and six-year olds have a lot of loose teeth, they really have a hard time with whole apples.  They have eaten a lot more of the apples when done this way.  BUT.

Apparently, the custodian thinks that kindergarten shouldn’t take any food into their classrooms.  He says that it will attract ants.  Never mind that EVERYBODY else is eating breakfast in the classroom. Anyway, today the principal told us that we couldn’t take any food into our classrooms.  We threw away all the juice and all the apples.  Most of them drank the milk and ate at least the frosting off of their cinnamon rolls.  We threw the rest of breakfast away.

Kind of defeats the whole purpose for having the breakfast in the first place.

Universal Breakfast

We offer “universal” breakfast this year at our school (a Title One school), Kindergarten eats last.  They begin the breakfast when the bell rings for school to begin.  So, breakfast occurs during “instruction time”.  All other grades pick up their breakfast and take it to their classroom.  Kindergarten gets theirs and eats it in the lunch room.   Prior to this week, the bell would ring to line up at 8:45, and by the time we dumped our backpacks and got across the school to the line we didn’t have to wait much.  They had four lines going for breakfast pickup.  Someone from the district visited and decided that there wasn’t enough accountability with the kids moving through so quickly, so they made the lunch lady cut it down to two lines.  We found that really slowed us down and had us waiting in line for too long so we started doing more things in the room prior to going to the lunch room.  After some trial and error, we found that if we waited 10 minutes before leaving the room, we wouldn’t have to wait in line so long.  But now, instead of getting back to the room around a quarter after, we get back to the room 30 to 40 minutes after 9:00.

We were losing maybe 25 minutes of instruction, now we are losing 40-45 minutes.  Of course they do expect us to somehow teach the same amount in a day…………..