crazycatgirl's blog

 As intelligent people in the business world, be it hedge funds, like Salman Khan, or computer programmers, begin to give back more and more free online tools are becoming available to teachers.  Since these folks are intelligent, they actually work with teachers to design the interface that students and teachers or parents use.

My school was involved in a three-year collaboration with a local, Seattle museum. We, the teachers, learned about and taught a program called VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies), a K-5 program that uses fine art images of growing complexity that encourage our youngest learners to describe what they see.

This year I am even more determined to move and teach abroad than last year.  Last year and this I have been applying to jobs and contacting recruiters, getting letters of recommendation and updating my CV.  However, this year I am determined to focus on everything I need to do to prepare, especially getting rid of a house full of stuff.  Like many people, the less clutter that I have around me the more focused and happier I feel, the easier it is to find things and focus on the important stuff in life.  

On Christmas Eve, I read many inspirational blogs and a magazine article about people living a minimalist lifestyle.  Two days later I got started.  Here are the strategies I followed:

My school is in it's third year of implementing writer's workshop.  Each year, our students know more about writer's workshop and have improved stamina and skills, which is really exciting.  In kindergarten, however, it's a different story; with a large free and reduced lunch population, our students come with a huge range in pre-academic skills like drawing, letter formation and recognition and knowledge of sound letter recognition.

Sometimes, I can be a bit of a perfectionist.  I want things to be aesthetically pleasing, neat, error-free, etc.  But I also struggle to have a life outside of my job, as many teachers, especially elementary teachers, do.  So, I look for models of exceptional teachers who instead of taking painstaking hours to create class books or classroom displays, hammer out the many projects that I dream of doing.  Why don't I find the time for all the projects I want to do in my classroom?  Probably, I waste my time striving for perfection on just a few projects.  

  In many classrooms, there are never enough materials to do our job.  So we teachers go to the library -school and public, we borrow from other teachers or our home and we especially create materials.  Unfortunately, teacher created materials take a lot of time.  To lead a balanced life, teachers must work to become more and more efficient without lowering the quality of our instruction.

There are so many terrific books and therefor so many terrific read alouds.  Most of them, with a little ingenuity, can be used for various comprehension think-alouds, turn 'n talks, stop 'n jots or stop 'n acts.  What can be tricky is when you're trying to find a book for a particular comprehension strategy.  For example, if I want to do a reading workshop unit on making connections because my 1st graders have a limited understand of it, or because I want my 5th graders to go deeper into activating their background knowledge and making text-to-text and text-to-world connections that matter, then I need to find books that allow me to model the strategy through a think-aloud AND allow my students to access the material, find relevance and make thei

For literacy, I love this school district site: www.wrsd.net/literacy 

On this site, I find scripted mini-lessons for those really important lessons and a year-long calendar of readers workshop minilessons which contains the meat of a teaching objective.  Go to the left-hand side of the page and hover over Elementary Curriculum, then look at both the focus lessons, which are scripted, and the unit trajectories, or curriculum maps. 

Even though it's January, some of my third and fourth graders still frequently struggle with generating or brainstorming ideas on what to write about.  (We did do a "detour" from Lucy's plan and do expositiory writing for a while.  So, we're just getting back into the swing of narrative writing.)  I know part of the problem is that many of my students have so much to worry about every day that they see many stories in their life as being too old and therefore not relevant.  But I cannot do anything about that.

Well, as I continue with the Daily Five, I have been amazed how motivating the Listen to Read center has been for students.  Most curiously, the ten year olds seem to love it as much as the first graders.  Though of course, the ten-year olds require different listening materials for the most part.