Ants

We have had an ant problem.  I have put in two requests for spraying.  When they started dropping on us from the drop ceiling I decided it was too much.  I invited the custodian down to watch them crawling around in the light fixture.  He allowed that I really did have a problem, but couldn’t say when the district might get around to doing something.  He said that I “could” put out ant bait for them.  So I bought about a dozen of them.  I put a bunch up in the ceiling, and  all along the wall by the outside door where the nest is, just outside.

Since even when they do vacuum, they don’t do a “real” good job, I have about a 6-8 foot section of wall now with the little carcasses piled up like this………

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.

I was doing something

And this one little girl says, “Teacher, you’re crazy.”

And I said, “Well, maybe just a little bit.”

And she shook her head and replied, “No, you are a whole BUNCH of crazy……”

Gotta love ‘um.

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 Took My Class to the Library……

 

Our special today was library.  I always potty break them before dropping them off at specials.  You never know how busy it will be at the bathrooms.  Today we got done early and had to wait a few minutes, so I had them sit down in line along the wall.  I sat accross from them and played a game where I would do something new and they would have to figure out what it was and copy me.  Finally the librarian came out to get them and as she was taking them into the library, she asked if I was going to be able to get up off the floor.  Honesty!  But to add insult to injury, one of my kids pipped up,  “He’s OLD!”

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.