I feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty……….

I had 29 students, now I have 28.  And I’m not sad.  One of my lowest of the low boys moved out of zone and had to transfer schools.  Apparently my principal has a NO ZONE VARIANCE policy.  Mom wanted to keep him in my class, but they moved clear across town, and for four days she either hasn’t been able to get him or his sister here, or has been late picking them up…….every day.  That wasn’t going to fly IF the principal had given them a variance.  Mom wanted to keep him here because we are a Title One school and as such, have full day kindergarten.  Their new school apparently isn’t Title, so kinder is only half day.   The boy NEEDS full day kindergarten, and more,  much, much, more,  but I don’t need the disturbance he created in my class.

I was reaching the end of my rope with him.  He couldn’t keep boundaries,  by that I mean, I gave up trying to get him to stay in his chair or in one spot a long time ago.  I would have been happy if he had stayed in a zone or area.  He wouldn’t or couldn’t stay on task and pretty much did what he wanted in the room.  I would tolerate it as long as it wasn’t a violation of another student’s space or materials.  But it often was.  He wasn’t malicious, he was often even trying to be helpful.  You know, by taking all of my carefully stacked piles of papers and putting them into ONE stack.  Sort of shuffled as he did it……..The only other name heard in my room as much as my name, was his, ALL the other children knew his name.  And you would hear it all day.  If it wasn’t me, it was one of the other kids, even the ones in the other kindergarten classes. 

The sad thing is, I really liked him, he just drove me crazy and although he was making some academic progress, he wasn’t keeping up with the class.  Having 29 kids in the class made it really hard to give him the individualized help he needed.

Classroom Management

I mentioned in a previous post, the system that I am currently using for classroom management.  I really like the “rules” that I use here.  We spend a fair amount of time going over them at the beginning of the year and then revisit them as needed.  They are prominently displayed in the room.  Every year the class has a different flavor to it though and the system has to be tweaked.  This year we have been in school almost 1/3 of the school year and the kids just will NOT stop hitting each other.  I think it’s because, generally my class this year is really immature.  It’s usually not a major argument or fight, just the occasional “HIT”, for whatever reason.  And of course reasons really DON”T matter.  Hitting is unacceptable. 

So far I have handled episodes in house. That is, I have worked out consequences within the room, without referring anyone to the Principal.  But it hasn’t stopped, and if anything has actually escalated lately.  So today, my two most frequent culprits were actually hitting each other as I picked them up from lunch and one of them started to cry.  So I marched them over to the office and wrote them up, with the whole class watching.  One father came right down after the assistant principal called the house and picked his child up. “He will not do THAT again…..” the father said as they left.  I hope I don’t have to refer the parent to Child Protective Services, but I do want the behavior to stop and nothing I was doing in the room seemed to work. 

The assistant principal got real mad at the other one as she brought them back.  He was entering the room with a smile on his face and she thought that was inappropriate.  I had to explain that a) he was probably going to be special ed. and  b)  I don’t think the smile is defiant, I think he is a clueless little Hispanic boy (and by that I just mean that he is very limited in English) who just doesn’t understand and his response is to smile and nod at everything that’s said to him.  She thought about that for a minute and it changed her attitude a lot.

At the end of the day dismissal

At the end of the day, parents gather outside the gate to the kindergarten playground to pick up their kids.  It’s too congested at the gate, so when the bell rings, the gate is unlocked and they come to our rooms or in the case of two of our classes without outside doors, to the hall doors and we release them to the parent or older sibling.  Normally the teacher next door opens her door, takes about three steps and unlocks the gate.  But for the last two weeks and for the next week, her class has been on break.  I have to leave my class in the room, walk down, unlock the gate and then walk back.

At first they were pretty good about sitting there on the floor with their backpacks and waiting for me to get back.  But lately, they have started sneaking over to the door and peeking out.  They think it’s great fun (they are SO scared of me).  The other day I walked out, then quickly turned around and waited by the door, then jumped out and scared them.  The timing was just right, a whole bunch of them were almost to the door and I caught them in mid stride.  All the parents thought that was hilarious.

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.

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.

Open house tomorrow

We will be having open house tomorrow from noon until three.  Yesterday they finally gave us our class lists, with the disclaimer that, “things change”.  This is my 19th year of teaching, I KNOW things change, just give me the list…….  Every single one of those children has known since they registered what class they were going to be in.  Why is it so hard for them to tell the teachers?  There are so many things in the room that get kids names put on them,  homework folders, glue sticks crayon boxes, cubbies,  etc.  Just give me the names, the 10% or so that don’t show…. that’s OK.  The room is 90% ready, we could start class if I didn’t get another thing done. 

I don’t know what has been so difficult this year, we still don’t have our classroom supplies, no pencils, no crayons, no paper clips, no staples.  School starts in basically two days.  The custodian brought copy paper around yesterday, I’m in good with him, he gave me an extra case to start the year off.  It pays to take care of your custodian, my kids do NOT leave a messy room for someone else to clean up.  Momma doesn’t work here is our motto.  Right along with, “If you can MAKE the mess you can CLEAN the mess.

So far, I have 17 girls, and 10 boys.  27 is not the best, but is doable, and if it’s got to be out of balance, I’d rather have too many girls than too many boys.  When you get too many boys there seem to be more behavior and discipline problems, at least that’s my experience.  Not that girls can’t be a handful.  It will be interesting to see how many show up tomorrow, last year I had about 50%.

End of this year, beginning of next…..

My kids have 12 days of school left in kindergarten.  They are ready for first grade.  I’m in awe of how much they have grown in 168 days of school.  All but about three are reading.  Most of them very well.  I spent last week at the “I Teach K” National Kindergarten Conference and had a great time, lots of great ideas for starting off the new year.  THAT’s coming too soon.  Over the last couple of days, my kids have been reporting that they have received their class assignments for next year.  Since most of our kinder classes are at around 25 kids, and all the first grades are mandated at 16 to 1, they will not all be together next year.  The school is shifting some of them onto different  year-round schedules so it sounds like there will only be three or four of them in each class together, but they know most of the other kindergarten kids so it should be OK.

The hard part is going to be the SHORT time between the end of this year and the beginning of the next.  Seven non-contractual days (counting one weekend) between when we are done with this year and when we have to report back (two non-student days on the end of this year and three on the front of next year).  Two weeks without kids.  That’s almost too short of a time to make the mental adjustment from the kids at the end of kindergarten and the babies coming in.  But it’s not as if I get a choice whether to adjust or not…….

We were going to take a short trip, but my wife said tonight that mentally it’s starting to pile up on her and she doesn ‘t think she wants too now.  I’m afraid I’m going to agree.  I’ve got so much to do to wrap this year up yet, I can’t even begin to think about next year, but I find myself doing it.  I asked in the front office about supplies for next year, and they won’t fill the requests yet…….  Bummer.

Oh yeah, and forget about class lists, naturally the incoming kindergarten kids know who THEIR teachers are going to be,  why does it always have to be such a surprise for the teachers?  Although one of the cute little girls next door told me yesterday that I was going to be her sister’s kindergarten teacher next year….

New Student

I know, I know, you are all going on summer break, and I’m getting a new student.  I’m not happy about it either.  In the year round setting, we still have 1/3 of our year to go.

Today was his first day.  Part way through the morning he asks, “Do you do green, yellow, and red for my mom?”  I asked, “Humm, what do you USUALLY get?”

Him, “RED.”

He is already NOT sitting at a table with the rest of the kids, but at a separate desk by himself.

 

Oh, Joy.

The Moon

My son posted this image of the Moon and Venus from yesterday.  His three year old was arguing with her older sister (12) about whether or not the solar system had 8 or 9 planets.  The three year old maintained that people had decided that Pluto wasn’t a planet so there were 8 planets not 9.  I want her in my class.  Well, maybe not.  She would probably be correcting me all the time.

Speaking of the Moon, one of my kids mooned the class on Wednesday, so she has been taking a little break from school……..  It’s been peaceful and nice the last few days……….

Nacho Party

So a couple of weeks ago I created a prize package for my kids.  I wanted something motivational going on that would be kind of fun for the kids.  I told them I would place a colored marker star on the white board every time they did good in specials (art, music, P.E. Library), or if they won for best behaved class in the lunch room, or any other thing where they got recognized for good behavior within the school.  I told them that when they got 10 stars, they could have a nacho party.  Things were going kind of slow for a week or so.  They only picked up 5 stars in two weeks and I was beginning to worry that it was taking too long for them to win.  For young children having the reward out there too far for too long  sort of defeats the purpose.

But today they blew the top off the reward.  At the monthly schoolwide awards assembly they were recognized for two things, they had the highest percentage of attendance on the grade level, and the Specialists collectively recognized them as the overall best behaved class in the school.  Then at lunch they were selected as the best behaved class for the day.  They got a “5″ (best number of points) at Music and they had a sub for the day while I did Mid-Year Benchmark DIBELS testing.  I told them that if the sub gave them a “5″ I would give them a star.  They ended up with 5 stars for the day and got to 10,overall  so now I have to do the whole Nacho Party thing with them.  They were pretty stoked.