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………….

M.L. King Day

We were doing calendar on the SmartBoard this morning.  I have the numbers for all school days on the calendar in black and the weekends and holidays in red.  One of my kids noticed that the 17th of January was red. She asked, “What is M. L. King?” So we had THAT discussion.  Which got into SO many things.  Prejudice, slavery, inequality, on and on, and then we had to talk about where Dr. Martin Luther King fit into all that.  They had no concept of slavery, and after slavery the continued prejudice that has existed.  It was compounded by the fact that 24 of my 32 kids are Hispanic and many of them have limited English vocabularies.  So we had to keep defining our terms as we went along.  I have 4 African-Americans in my class.  When we talked about how slavers caught people in Africa and brought them here and sold them as property, I stopped and asked the class if they knew what an African-American was.  “Who are the people in the United States that are African-Americans?” 

They didn’t know.  Not even the African-Americans.  Finally I had one of my African-American students stand up, and one of my lighter Hispanic students stand up side by side.  I asked the class, “How are these two kids different?”  Here’s what I got.

“Casey is shorter than Samantha.”

“Samantha’s clothes are different.”

“Their hair is different.”

“Their shoes aren’t the same.”

“Casey has barrettes in her hair.”

Nobody saw color as a difference.  I finally had to ask them about color.  They they finally said, “Well, yeah, Casey had darker skin than Samantha.”

Kids don’t see color,  they are taught it.  Wouldn’t the world be a wonderful place if they never learned about “color”  of for that matter any other ways that people marginalize others?

We can learn a lot from kids.  Yeah, they aren’t perfect, in fact, they drove me nuts today.  But this discussion was wonderful.

Sometimes some of the best things we teach or learn in a day aren’t even what we started out to teach or learn.

Annual Event……. shoelaces……again

How is it that they can’t tie their shoes the “right” way but are so successful at this?

Michael has an Ow-ee

Samantha came up to me today to tell me that Michael was bleeding.  “Mr. T, Michael is bleeding.”  So I asked her where he was bleeding.  “On his Bad Word finger…..”

After teaching kindergarten for 9 years……..

I don’t know WHY I never made these sooner.  I was getting SO tired of them copying off of each other.  It’s not that they think they are cheating,  they just think getting the right answer is more important than how they get it.  But they aren’t using their brains if they aren’t thinking.

They weren’t that hard to make, I had them cut the main cuts on the boards at Lowe’s before I brought the boards home.  They had the saw that  could make nice straight cuts better than I could at home.  You can buy or make them at a teacher store out of cardboard, or make them out of file folders, but I like these better.    Currently, they have their sight words and numerals to 20 up, but next year we will start with the ABCs and other things.

I did my first test whole class instead of in small groups of the year on Friday, it was great.

My SMARTBoard

Have I mentioned here how much I LOVE my SmartBoard?  We use it for Calendar in the morning, for Language arts and for Math in the afternoon.  One of the things that has really helped my kids with their scores on the Nonsense Word Fluency test in DIBELS is a page I made with some random letter “dice”.   Almost every day we do CVC words using three dice, two that generate random consonants with one in the middle generating random vowels.  We practice sounding out what ever comes up.  Only occasionally do I have to quickly change the result when it’s inappropriate.  they are getting too good though and sometimes catch the word……….

 Last time we did the Nonsense Word Fluency we smoked it as a class.

I would have a hard time giving up the board, it’s become such a part of the way I teach.  And the principal told us today that next year we will all have Elmo’s in our rooms.  Between the two, I think it will be great.

Email from a first grade teacher at my school…….

Samantha didn’t think the teacher was being helpful enough…. (i.e. giving her the answers)

If you really want to add to your day I can send you Samantha and she can lay on the floor and scream “JESUS WILL HELP ME!!!! HE WILL TELL ME THE ANSWERS!!! HE THE ONLY ONE WHO KNOWS ME!!!” I know that made my day cheery.

 

Ahh, yes, I KNEW there was a reason I went into teaching, kids crack me up!

Worms

In our Trophies reading series there is a book called Wonderful Worms.  It’s a non-fiction book about worms,  where they grow and how they are good for the soil.  As part of the unit, I went to a fishing supply store and bought some night crawlers.  After lunch today I got out some paper plates and put them in the center of each of their tables, but didn’t really say anything.  It was hilarious, they were all speculating on what the “treat” was going to be…….

After explaining to them that the worms were living creatures and that we didn’t hurt living creatures.  And we talked about how that might or might not happen, I then put a couple of night crawlers on each table.  It was fun to just listen and watch as they explored and observed.  One girl was determined to pick one up, but every time she would get it part way up, it would wiggle or feel too slimy, and she would squeal and put it back down.  She finally managed it.

Why is it that the bravest ones in my class,  are the girls?

Money

We were talking about math this morning  and how important being able to count was.   This came out of our calendaring activities on the Smart Board where we add a penny for every day in school.  We are getting close to 100 days and  so we have a bunch of coins up there.  As part of our discussion I said that if they couldn’t count money, then I could trick them out of all their money.

One kid  laughed, her reply, like it solved everything…….. “We don’t have any money…..”

Anyone who’s been around 5 year olds for any length of time………

knows how gross they can be.  We’ve got this one little girl who is cute as a button, and has the character to go with it.  If we have a treat at the end of the day, she will often save part for her older brother who picks her up.   It was drizzling the other day, and she had just put her last cookie in her mouth when she saw him coming.  She quickly took it out, and when he got there, she gave it to him.

As they walked off we heard him say, “This cookie is wet…”

Her reply, without missing a beat was, “Well, it IS raining……”