Student Writing in Kindergarten

I was doing my lesson plans tonight and I had to interact with this calendar of writing prompts from my school.  I get so irritated I want to spit every time I look at it.  First off, it’s just too broad of an age spread to combine K-2nd grade.  Note the current prompt for my kids:  

Explain the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Give two examples of each.

Never mind that our current science unit is FABRIC…….  My kids can hardly put the sentence together, “I like (insert something here)”   I would have to do a whole unit on solids, liquids and gases just to get to the point where we could put a sentence together.  THEY WANT TWO EXAMPLES OF EACH.  That is so ludicrous that it defies words.  I’ll  just shut up now……..

Writing Prompts

2009 – 2010

K – 2^nd Grade 

9/8/09 – 9/11/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
9/21/09 – 9/25/09	My favorite holiday is _______ because…
10/6/09 – 10/9/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
10/19/09 – 10/23/09	In a letter to the President, persuade him to change a law of your choice.
11/3/09 – 11/6/09	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
11/16/09 – 11/20/09	Explain the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Give two examples of each.
11/30/09 – 12/4/10	Think about what you like to do the most. Write a paper telling what you enjoy doing and at least three reasons why you like this activity so much.
12/14/10 – 12/18/10	Dear Santa Friendly Letter
1/11/10 – 1/14/10	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
1/25/10 – 1/29/10	Light is very important because…
2/8/10 – 2/12/10	Sometimes we give help, and sometimes we get help. Think about a time when you helped someone or when someone helped you. Tell a story about what happened.
2/22/10 – 2/26/10	Write a poem about your favorite food. Use all your 5 senses to describe your favorite food.
3/8/10 – 3/12/10	A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away lived a…
3/22/10 – 3/26/10	If you were given a free two-week dream vacation, where would you go and why?
4/12/10 – 4/16/10	Write about the butterfly life cycle.
4/26/10 – 4/30/10	Write a personal narrative about an event you enjoyed doing with family members or friends. Give details and tell what happened in time order.
5/10/10 – 5/14/10	Write about how plants grow.
5/24/10 – 5/28/10	Write about your favorite animal. Be sure to include descriptive details about your animal.
6/7/10 – 6/11/10	On a deserted island I’ll need…
6/21/10 – 6/25/10	Write a description about your favorite place. Use your five senses to help describe the place for the reader.
7/6/10 – 7/9/10	No Prompt – 4 Day Week
7/19/10 – 7/23/10	Write about what you’re looking forward to next year.

 

I could DO all that…. if I didn’t have an already full curriculum (which this of course isn’t alligned to).  Building the background knowledge for half of these would take most of my day. Many days.

I found my little beaver with the pencils.

One of the other kids said, “Mr. L,  Sammy’s chewing on a pencil!”  I looked and, that pencil looked a lot like the one featured in a previous post.  I said, “Sammy,  why are you chewing on that pencil?”

His reply?  “Mr. L, They are DELICIOUS!”

So once again we had, “The Germ Talk“

The lunch lady has got to feed them more…………

They are just gross though,  for snacks most days, I give them a choice between a 4 oz cup of dry cereal, Gold Fish, or animal crackers.  We do other things on other days but that is one of my basic stand bys.  It’s cheap, and since I’m usually doing it out of my own pocket, that’s the primary factor.   Anyway sometimes kids don’t eat their whole cup full and will toss the rest.  Yesterday one of my favorite little darlings was digging some of it out of the trash and EATING IT.  He’s the same one that has to swab down the entire toilet with Clorox Wipes after using it because he doesn’t seem to get the idea that he needs to lift the seat and his aim isn’t good.  He’s marginally potty trained at best, I could go on, but won’t.

Disgusting!

Note from our Principal about Halloween next week

Email from the Principal this morning.

“Classes may have their Halloween parties on Friday, October 30th. Some intermediate teachers have elected not to have a party. If you are planning a celebration you may draft your own note home. According to the guidelines, parties are the last 20 minutes of the school day. Students may dress up in their costumes. ONLY kindergarten and 1st grade will parade through the school.  Students may change into their costumes no earlier than 2:45.

There are many academic games you can play during your party with a festive theme. Remember there may be students in your class who will not be able to celebrate Halloween.”

The three kindergarten teachers who will be here next week got together  and decided that if the party was only for 20 minutes, and they can’t get into costumes until 2:45, and we get out at 3:10, we didn’t want to even TRY to do the parade.  As grade level chair, I went to the Principal and told her we didn’t want to do the parade.

1.  SHE thinks the kindergarten kids are “cute” in their costumes.

2. SHE thinks we should do the parade.  She wants to see them.

3. But she isn’t giving us any help. 

Hummm, lets see, 29 kids and one teacher…..  

She said, but you will have lots of parents. 

I said, I had ONE parent last year…..

Oh yeah, and don’t forget the academic games for the 20 minute party.

 

Art Today

How do you convince the specialists that they shouldn’t send kindergarteners to the bathroom by themselves?  Today while my kids were in art, one of the teachers brought one of my students to me that she had found crying in the hall.  The little girl has been in my class (and our school) for less than a week.  You can get lost in our newer  ”indoor” schools until you learn your way around and this little girl had gone to the bathroom and couldn’t find her way back, either to Art or to our room.  She was sobbing uncontrollably.  I walked her back to the Art room and suggested to the Art teacher (for the second time) that she shouldn’t let kindergarteners out alone – especially new ones…..

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…….

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.

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.

How I almost died

 

I don’t have a current picture of my closet,  but this one shows some of the things I need.  See the brown wardrobe to the left of the filing cabinet?  OK, first off, I’ll just say it.  I did something really, really dumb today.  Besides the normal dumb stuff.  Never mind why, but I found myself standing on top of that wardrobe.  In my current closet configuration, the wardrobe is where the filing cabinet is and there is a dead space back in the corner that wasn’t being used.  In a moment, when I wasn’t really doing much thinking at all, I decided to put a rolled up carpet back in that dead space.  Apparently at the time, I thought the best way to do this was to stand on top of the wardrobe and pull the carpet up and over.  Dumb idea, the carpet got stuck a little and while trying to reposition it, OK, I was yanking on it, I managed to pull myself off balance and fall off of the wardrobe.  It all happened kind of in slow motion, and I remember thinking, “OK, so this is how you DIE…..”  But I managed to get my feet under me and landed on my feet.  I don’t seem to have hurt anything, but if I’m in pain tomorrow morning, I’ll  at least know why. 

And I’m SO not telling my principal that I got hurt falling off of a wardrobe, from six feet up in the air.  We are NOT having that conversation.  Fortunately, I probably won’t have to.  I mean, that makes teachers who stand on rolling chairs look smart……….