Next Week is a Four Day Week…….. for the kids.

Teachers on the other hand, have to show up on Monday, at the usual time and be bored to tears all day.  At 2:09 today, they sent out an email that said this:

On Monday we will have an all day training on Personal Narrative in the library from 8:30 – 3:16.  Please bring your Write Tools Binder. It is requested that you bring 2 sets of student samples if you have them available as we would like to quickly review writing strategies we used last year. Also, please check and let me know if you need a personal narrative insert for your Write Tools Binder.

At 2:09….. and school gets out at 3:10.

One of my favorite sayings is, “A failure to prepare on YOUR part, does not constitute an emergency on MY part.”  Heck, they knew we would be doing staff development  last spring.

And I just have oodles of  FINE examples of Narrative Writing from my kindergarteners that have been in school now for lets see…….TWENTY EIGHT days.  Some of them can even write their names.  Wanna bet, they don’t have anything else planned for the kinder and even the first grade teachers?  What a stinking waste of time Monday is going to be…….

My annual shoelace post.

 

 

It seems like AT LEAST once a year one of my kids does this…….  This year I must have over achievers, this was in the first two weeks…….

I have two of these board books that teach how to tie your laces.  The directions are right there, in pictures, step by step.  AND THEY DON’T HAVE YOU ENDING UP ANYTHING LIKE THIS.  But this is a pretty good indicator of how well they all follow directions this year………

Somethings about the beginning of the year I hate:

I’ve barely got my kids settling into the routine of school, (we were on day 18 today) and they are really pushing us to get into small group differentiated instruction.  That’s fine, but the problem is, what are the rest of the kids are doing while you are doing differentiated instruction?  They aren’t set THAT well into the routines of school yet.  Many of my kids are still coping with the sheer joy of being around a bunch of other kids for the first time in their lives in what they view as a social setting.  And I agree, they really need that socialization.  But they don’t know how to control themselves and make good choices yet.  Many of them can’t stay on task doing  their seatwork when I am NOT doing small group instruction, when I start the small group instruction, their behavior and amount of time on task will not improve.

It wouldn’t be so bad if they would let us ease into centers, but they want to micro manage the center activities as well.  They have placed so many conditions on what the centers can or cannot be that it’s almost impossible to comply.   None of the old traditional centers are good enough, or academic enough anymore, no puzzles, no housekeeping, no blocks.  During the reading block of time, the centers had better be language based.  During math, the centers have to be math.  The math centers they have for kindergarten that come with our math series, are two kid centers, take longer to explain than they do to do, and all require manipulatives.  So if my intervention group is 5 or 6 kids, that means I have to have 12 or 13 centers set up for the rest of the class, with the manipulatives all counted out……..  And of course the math lady sees nothing wrong with doing her centers during language arts and the language arts specialist really doesn’t have a problem with you doing language arts centers during math, but they really have a problem if you do something else in THEIR time block.  And anymore, you hardly can fit the required number of minutes of ANY subject into the week.

I was looking at how many conferences I need to set up for kids I have concerns about.  Nine.  Nine out of 29 kids I have concerns about how they are going to do if they don’t have some serious help at home.  And of course most of them haven’t had any of that help yet, that’s why they can’t do anything.

Some Children……….

Nineteen out of my twenty-nine students are girls.  At LEAST three of my boys are going to have trouble keeping up this year.

Today we were doing a math page from our math series.  Our current unit is numbers 0-5.  This  page was showing the different number combinations for the number 4.  1 and 3, 2 and 2, 3 and 1,  and finally on this side, 0 and 4.  This is how they should have done it, and most of the kids did this, or pretty close to it.

But this is one of my poor babies, and he is this way on almost EVERYTHING he does.  (At least he knows HOW to hold a pencil, or in this case a crayon) Definitely following a different drummer than most of the rest of us.  When he messes up he really looks puzzled like he doesn’t have a clue………… which of course he doesn’t………

Can’t sit still, doesn’t listen (or can’t), wants to help EVERYBODY, but manages to do it wrong of course.  He is the only person in the room that hears HIS name more than I hear mine…….

I just don’t know what I’m doing to do with him.  Different kid and different problem, but the school itself wasn’t very helpful with my problem kids last year, and I can only do so much in my room.

Using a SmartBoard in the Primary Grades

I am really excited about having this.  Although they really didn’t think it all through very well.  I’m not sure where the money came from for these, but they bought about a dozen or so of them for our school.  They didn’t buy them to install on the wall, so they came on legs, no laptops to go with them, and  the project wasn’t a good fit for my room.  It would probably work in a smaller room, but in order to have the projection fit on the SmartBoard, I would have to cut the distance between the screen and to projector in half and that would put my projector right in the middle of my 30 kids.  My personal projector works at this distance just fine.  I had to get an extra 15 feet of USB cable to make it reach from the SmartBoard to the laptop.  I ran the wires along the top of the bulletin board and the white board on the wall to the side there.

I needed to find a way to  really have the projector rock solid stable.  Getting jiggled just a little can unsync the projector from the board.  So I moved these two filing cabinets out into the room and put a table between the cabinets and the wall.  That way the wires can come out to the projector and laptop from the wall without being in a traffic area.

With my sound system (and Ipod dock) attached to the laptop, and the laptop connected to the internet on the wall to the left, I can play DVDs, access the internet, and do other Smartboard activities all from one setup.  Today was our first day (it took a couple of hours on Labor Day to get everything set up).  We were doing the letter Mm in our Trophies Reading Series, so I used the FrogStreet Press DVD to introduce the letter Mm.  The DVD also demonstrates how to write the letters too.  I then pulled up a print program that I use to print practice writing for them that can be printed out.  We then practiced writing the letters right on the SmartBoard.  We also did the same thing in the afternoon with the numbers 4 and 5.  I’m the only kindergarten teacher that they gave a SmartBoard to, and I think I got it because I used to be a Tech Specialist and they figured I’d actually use it.  I am really excited about the possibilities.  There’s still a couple of glitches to iron out.  For example, I can access the teacher resources on the Smart website from home on my laptop, but the school firewall seems to block access when connected at school.  Something to have my resident tech work on I guess, I no longer have those “rights” now that I’m a classroom teacher.

I have to laugh at my kids.

They are really getting adjusted to kindergarten.  Well, MOST of them anyway.  But it’s a struggle for some, apparently they have spend most of their 5 years of life as the center of SOMEONES  universe, and can’t understand why they have to compete for that role with 27 other kids now. (YES! if you have been keeping track, that means I lost one today. Apparently he moved out of state)  And silly kids, somewhere, a lot of them got the idea that if they didn’t want to do something, well, they just didn’t have to do it.  Huh, that doesn’t go over real well in MY class.  One little boy didn’t want to write his name, he hadn’t finished a single thing all morning.  I told him if he didn’t get something done, there would be no lunch recess.  He said he was just too tired, I told him to go to bed earlier and come to school ready to work.  He threw a real fit.  I had to practically drag him out of the room to sit in timeout on the playground so that I could go eat MY lunch.  I guess he persisted in that so long that he had to throw away half his lunch when I went to pick them up.  That made him real happy as well.

The first few weeks, the kindergartners hate the PE teacher.  Once they learn how to listen and follow directions, they love him.  The problem is that he has over 50 of them at one time for PE (two classes, if they are all there, it’s almost 60) and they don’t listen very well or follow directions very well, so he isn’t very fun.  Once they behave, he lightens up and everyone is happier.  But the little kids (mainly girls) who don’t like mean and gruff, don’t like him at first, even if he isn’t being mean and gruff to them specifically.  Two of my girls today tried to hang on me when I dropped them off.  They were perfectly happy  by the time I came back to get them.

And I have three who are probably going to be special needs kids.  One little boy doesn’t have a clue about what is going on in the class.  Hardly any language foundation at all.  He doesn’t seem to be able to even trace his name and there are only four letters in it., I finally taped his picture on his cubbie, because he can’t remember which one is his, doesn’t recognise his own name, and has no strategies to find it, like looking at his name tag and comparing it to the name on his cubbie.  In fact, I don’t think he can visually discriminate between one name and another.  He is pretty street smart though and swears like a sailor, not that he seems aware that anything is wrong with that……  He is always trying to be the leader, getting the other kids, or trying to get the other kids to follow him.  Although he has no clue where he’s going or what he is supposed to be doing.

Funny thing, his sister says he doesn’t listen at home either.  The only problem is, that I suspect that there is more to it than that he just doesn’t listen.

Continuing Education

It’s one of the things we do to get more pay, and since the economy is in the tank and there are no raises in sight, more education moves one up the pay scale (at least until they figure out how to take that away too).  Anyway at the end of last year I put in for the step increase, then found out I was 3 credits short.  I had to take 3 credits and have them completed by the end of August.  So I signed up for an online class.  It finishes today, August 31st.  How’s that for cutting it close?  It’s an online class that normally runs for 5 weeks, only they condensed it into 3 weeks.  Which just happened to be the same three weeks as the end of last year, and the first week and a half of this year.  Now that’s just a dumb thing to do to yourself.  I see the light at the end of the tunnel though, three one page article critiques before midnight.  It wouldn’t have been so bad, except 50% of the grade fell on work done the same week as the first week of school.   Twenty-nine kindergartners.  Twenty-nine baby kindergartners.  Crying baby kindergartners.  They looked at the weekend last Friday with some relief.  When this morning rolled around and they realized that they were coming back to school to do the whole week over again, some of them were not happy.

It has been a tough week.

The first week of school

The week is finally over, and I even got home by 7:00 pm! On Friday…. (had to get those pesky homework folders set up and loaded for Monday).  I do homework, but it’s really not much, a reading log for the week, name practice sheets right now, one number writing practice sheet, and that’s about it.  Later on, it’s mostly practice with their sight words and a little math.  Homework goes out on Monday and comes back on Friday.

I spent a lot of MY time with my kids this first week.  I spent my entire lunch period helping them in the lunchroom (until yesterday anyway, more on that later) and part of each of my preps getting them settled with the different specialists, so they wouldn’t freak out.  It might have taken up my time, but I think it paid off in keeping them from stressing out.  In each instance, they came back to me calmer and less stressed than they otherwise would have.   Still the first week of school takes it’s toll, a number of kids had meltdowns throughout the week,  One little girl was fine the whole week, and today was just too much for her.  We had to pry her off mom this morning, and have mom leave and then she threw a fit for about a half hour before she quieted down.

They have been amazing this week.  They have really started to come together with the routines and procedures.  I’m actually teaching now.  But I’m still having a hard time adjusting to the babies at the beginning of the year though.  I was still teaching my previous class just three weeks ago, and they are first graders now, so I have to get my brain into the right place, I’m still trying to get them to do things that are too hard for them.  Like write their names……….

These little guys crack me up.  I have at least 6 out of my 29 who have to sing in the bathroom every time they go.  I had a talk with the music teacher, apparently it’s not coming from her……

There are some seriously wacky kids in my class.  I have one boy I can’t understand a word he says.  The speech teacher was coming into my room to visit one of the kids she will be working with and I asked her to listen to him.  She pulled him out into the hall and did a quick diagnostic with him and OH YEAH, he’s a candidate.  In her short 5 minutes she also thinks he might be learning disabled as well, but it’s hard to tell with kindergartners.  Most of them anyway.  I have another little boy who can’t do ANYTHING with paper, glue, pencils or scissors.  He had one paper he was supposed to cut some parts out of and glue onto the other paper, he made confetti out of both papers.  I got him a couple more and demonstrated the task, he did it again.  He’s everywhere in the room too. Can’t sit still and is into everything.

I’ve been going into the lunchroom and helping my kids get their lunches, seated, and helping them with opening their milk,ketsup, etc.  One little boy had been a bit of a whiny pain all morning.  When he got to lunch yesterday, he deliberately poured his milk on the boy next to him.  So I chewed him out, and made him move over to a vacant table to eat his lunch in “timeout”.  A mother who was in the lunchroom, saw me and complained to the principal that I had yelled at him, (I did speak sternly, but I didn’t YELL) shook him (NOT true), drug him by the arm over to the other table and “slammed” him onto the bench( again not true, but probably her perception) all for no reason.  She didn’t know what he had been doing all morning, she didn’t apparently know about the milk, and frankly, I could not care a bit whether she thought I was “mean” or not.  But I did have to explain to the principal what happened and told her to talk to some of the other staff who were present and hear their side.  Never-the-less, I was uninvited from helping in the lunchroom.  Apparently, I need more time away from my children.  Like THAT will make me cry……

The First Day of School

What’s to say.  It went pretty well.  We got nothing done really, they don’t listen, they won’t stay put, they can’t walk in a line,  they don’t answer when you say their name. Normal kindergarteners on the first day of school.

Why would you give a kid one name on their birth certificate, then spend the next 5 years calling them something else, and then not even teach them their last name?  And spelling, you can tell which parents know something about phonics  They would be the ones whose children have names spelled aproximately the way they sound. Who spells Toby this way, Toba? (not the real name, but the vowel example on the end is accurate) (correction, the vowel spelling at the end is actually with an “E” instead of an “A”, the clerk in the office did a typo, so that rant was all for nothing).  I have one little Hispanic girl who I can’t pronounce her name correctly,  I HEAR it, and my ears THINK I’m reproducing the sound accurately, but it is clear by the looks on her face  that I am not.  I can not reproduce that rolled “R” sound.  After struggling with her name, when her mom picked her up, I told her mom I was having trouble saying her name right.  The little girl had been listening to me, she told her mom, “He can’t say the “R”.

I’m ready for bed.  It’s 7:30.

I spent a chunk of my Saturday at school…. :(

But I did get a bunch done.  I got  the name tags done, the lunch cards done (had to glue the barcodes onto some card stock then laminate them- laminating consisting of using clear packing tape and putting two layers on each card), all the names on the cubbies, names on the glue sticks, the crayon boxes and the tables, and most of the room cleaned up so there isn’t stuff laying around.  Other than lesson plans, I think we’re ready.  Humm, lesson plans, I guess I should do something about them………