And then there’s this.

Apparently one can get quite involved at circle time.

I neither SAW or FELT this going on…………I have no idea who did it…to me…..

OK, I haven’t Really dropped off of the planet……

Last week was Spring Break, and I’m also in a year-round school setting where right after Spring Break we do our turn at vacation time.  Instead of one long summer break we get three smaller breaks throughout the year.  I’m out for another two weeks.  The unfortunate thing is that it’s my LAST break until the end of the year.  So I haven’t done much about thinking school.  In fact I haven’t done much in the vicinity of the school.  Like I’ve been literally on the other side of the planet.  My wife and I took a trip to Italy over Spring Break and although we are back, my head isn’t really back.  Other than earthquakes (of which we were thankfully not too close too) I would definitely recommend Italy.  In capital letters…….

Today we had perfect attendance… well almost

The first time since early January I think, but alas, it was not to be.  One of my kids got sick after lunch and threw up in the middle of our math lesson.  Fortunately, it wasn’t much volume wise, and he didn’t get any of it on the manipulatives, just mostly on himself and the floor (and as luck would have it, he happened to be on the tile….YES!!!).  So after I had him sent off to the health office, and the floor cleaned up and disinfected (I keep Clorox Wipes around for just this kind of thing, a side on that, the principal suggested the other day that the Clorox Wipes weren’t on the “approved list”,  I replied, “What Clorox Wipes?”) we had the class discussion again about what you are supposed to do if you THINK you might throw up… Namely, go stand by the trash can.

Apparently this kid has a really bad gag reflex, both the times the nurse has tried to take his temperature, she has made him throw up again…….

Her comment was, “I just HAVE to get one of those thermometers that reads their foreheads……”

On a different note, “Twilight” came out on DVD this weekend.  I have, and have read all of the series, but some of the people at my school are a little crazy.  In the lounge at lunch earlier this week I heard one teacher complaining that she had gone to Walmart early for her copy and was really bummed that they didn’t have the “deluxe” edition.  Then, one of the office workers mentioned that over Saturday and Sunday she had watched the entire movie SIX times.  That’s just goofy.

My Kids Are Weird

We were having a discussion in preparation for writing our class “Morning Message” and we were talking about our favorite foods.  One little boy said his favorite food was………  you guessed it, broccoli.  I said, ” You like broccoli more than ice cream?”  He said, “Yes.”  Now that’s just nuts.   I mean, fine, like broccoli, but as your FAVORITE food?  Then this other little guy raised his hand and I asked him what his favorite food was.  “Meat.”  I asked what kind of meat?  I’m thinking, steak, pork chops, fried chicken, hamburgers, fajitas, ribs…….  He said, “Cows.” 

I don’t know, that just made me laugh.  I explained that normally we called “cow” meat “beef”.  Maybe you had to be there…….

What a Week

Four days of Reading First, and one day of Administrator observation.  I’m tired of it.  If I was paranoid, I’d think they didn’t think I was doing a good job.  Well, with the Reading First people, that might actually be the case, but the administrator has to evaluate once this year anyway and that evaluation has to be based on a minimum of three observations.  Reading First I’m not worried about, I’m making the changes that they want, and with them, I think it’s mostly procedural.  Anyway, if for some reason they really turn on me, it’s not like I don’t have options, I have two hundred sick days accumulated for one thing……………….

Kindergarten Kids and Their Spelling

If you start to help them spell, then they want you to spell all of their words. With one teacher, no help, and 23 kids that gets insane. So I tell them to use phonics, sound the words out the best they can. At least for the initial draft.

They were writing today and one of the kids wanted me to help him spell puppy. I told him to sound it out.

He thinks for a minute and I hear, D–O–G………

Every day I’m responsible for the health, safety and welfare of 23 kids and the parents do something like this……

Sometimes parents amaze me. Why would you send a 5 year old (well, maybe 6 at this point in the year, but still….) to school and have her verbally tell the teacher that suddenly, after two months of NOT taking the bus, (as in never, since she transferred in) that today, she is supposed to take the bus. I asked her if she had a note from her mom, she said, “No.” So I told her that without something from mom, as far as I was concerned, she wasn’t taking the bus, end of story.

Only it wasn’t of course…….

This happened on the playground before school and with one thing and another I put it out of my mind.

Later in the morning some of the kids let me know that one little girl was crying, but she wouldn’t tell me why. I got my digital thermometer out and took her temperature, 98.6. I sent her back to work. A while later she was crying again. Remember, the morning episode was clear out of my mind. She wouldn’t talk to me, but finally she told one of the other kids that she was crying about the bus thing. She was worried about how she’s going to get home and how I wasn’t going to let her do what her mom clearly told her to do.

Good grief.

I called the front office, they called the mom and then transportation (who mom was supposed to have registered with but hadn’t), and then the mom again, and finally we got it all cleared up and she got to ride the bus. But why would you DO that to your child? As the teacher, I can’t take the word of a 5-6 year old on ANYTHING like this. What are they thinking?

Tomorrow they’re back and some thoughts on reading

Tomorrow, we get back to work. The kids come back. I’ve only seen them for 5 days out of the last 31 days. We had spring break, then a week of school and then track break (ours is a year round school, which might be confusing for some. The kids go to school for the same number of days as kids in a regular 9 month schedule, it’s just that they have several breaks scattered through out the year instead of one long summer break, this allows the school to 20% higher enrollment than in a regular school with the same number of rooms. At any given time, only 80% of the students and staff are at school). It’s usually pretty nice, but being out one week, back one week, then out two weeks was just goofy.

We’ve got so much to cover and learn before the end of the year, and it’s good to get back at it. Of course report cards are due at the end of the month so we will be doing some assessments to see what progress they’ve made since last time. We do report cards three times a year. A lot of the data can come from testing that we did prior to our break, but there are some areas on the report card that weren’t covered in the testing.

I am so impressed by the level of progress that my class has made this year. I THINK part of it is that I get better and better at what I do, but I’m sure part of it is also the group of kids I have this year. Some years are just harder than others. I don’t know if it’s sun spots during their mother’s pregnancy or what, but there are some years where the WHOLE grade level is just messed up.

I’ve been reading about reading. It’s something I’ve really been interested in as a teacher. I first started teaching kindergarten back in 1990. It never made any sense to me to do the letter of the week thing, even back then. I knew there had to be a better way. I graphed out letter usage in the Dolch list and started with the most frequent usage and worked down to the least frequent. It was a start.

Then in first grade I took a course on a modified version of Reading Recovery (Marie Clay) which comes out of New Zealand. About that same time, I was doing some research on reading, beginning with Articles published in the field, primarily in the journal of the International Reading Association.

Now that I’m back in Kindergarten, things have changed. There seems to be a little more consensus on, if not HOW kids learn to read, at least on WHAT they have to learn in the process. We might have a better idea of what good readers do. Some of what they have us doing as teachers is to try to give the non or low readers those skills. There are some thought provoking observations over here.

Everything prior to this post is from Archives

Everything from here on out will be current new stuff.

April 11, 2008

Cartoon today

There is this cartoon in our paper called Cul De Sac, it’s about a bunch of preschool kids, who often are a lot like kindergarten kids. Today the dad is reading a bedtime story to the little girl.

He says, “Once upon a time.”

The little girl says, “Hey Dad! This will be practice for when you read to my class! I’ve piled all my toys here like they’re listening to you! See how they stare unblinkingly, their eyes boring into you. just waiting for you to make a mistake!”

He says, “Is your class this tough a crowd?”

She says, “Heck no! we never pay attention to anything for more than five seconds.”

They say that generally, you can count on an attention span something like one minute for every year old a child is…..