Experts

For our next unit in writing, we'll be doing "expert projects." The idea is that the kids choose something they consider themselves to be "experts" in (video games, drawing, taking care of dogs) and write a little book all about that thing. It's really fun and I'm looking forward to modeling my "expertise" in running.

Our genius administration decided that, just as we give pretests in math, we should do a kind of pretest for this unit. This is known as "Writing On Demand," and in the past we've given the kids one full period to write a complete "small moment" story and then grade them on it. This time around, though, we were supposed to instruct them to write an expert project book, which seemed a little ridiculous. We were e-mailed a rubric for grading, which I'm still not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with, given that it seems fairly obvious that their 50-minute Writing on Demand effort will be far inferior to what they could produce in a month-long unit. That's a lot of extra grading for a "duh!" effect.

Anyway, though, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of what they were able to produce. 95% of my class did this same expert project writing unit in first grade, so they were able to draw on that knowledge and include some nice effects. Here is a sampling of my favorite excerpts!

"I know all about reading in reading you need a book to read and when you are dune with the Book take a nuther book out. if you like reading a lot you can read allmost every Day or allmost every year."

From an "all about babies" attempt: "Then she did poop my grandma had to clean her butt. With baby whips." Baby whips? Ouch!

"Do you want to run fast. like sonic then try as hard as you can. Whare Jordens, Nikes, Levis. then if your in a race you can do it. Now let's get started step one...get one of thease Jordens, Nikes, Levis & try hard to run with them step two try to get style's on your shoes step three run & what i mean by run is run super super super fast or maybe you might be even faster."

"People love run because they don't want to be fat."

"Rule to not get bitin by a shark: Do not bring jreley to the bech." (If anyone can help me decipher what he means by 'jreley,' I would love your assistance.)

"The play station game is the best first I am going to show you the best game ever that goes with the playstation you need to buy it. It looks like this and in the next page I am going to show you how to use the control. In the beginning the X is for racing square is to slow down of course you don't want to do that because you race with challanger."

"I am a expret at singing frist you have to do vace warmups unlless you are doing jazz. then you pick out a song to sing or you could make one up. Then you sing! Last if they like you you could have a chance at being a star at singing!"

"I'm a exbrt at reading I can read up side down, with my eyes clowes." Really?

And now a sampling from that small section of my class that kind of really knows what they're doing:

"To make birthday cake First you need all of the ingredents. You need flour, eggs, cake mix and milk. Then mix it all together. Then put it in a pan. then take it and put it on a tray. Then make the frosting. use whatever kind of frosting you like for example chocolate. Then when you mixed it all up put it in the oven until 9:00. When your done share it with your family and decerate it."

"I am a expert at art if you want a big painting you use a fat brush if you want a small painting use the skinny brush you should use ole you pass stell [oil pastel]. you should only use crayola crayons you should use the paint brush lightly so you don't wast the paint. you should use pencils before you use crayons because you can mess up. use the crayons lightly so you don't mess it up do all thees tips and you will draw grat."

"I am an expert on how to make peperroni pizza. all you need is cheese peperroni and some tomato sause. first you need to put the tomato sause on the pizza. then put the cheese on the tomato sause. then if you like peperroni pizza you can put the peperroni on the pizza. then you can put it in the oven or in a microwave you put it for two minets and then take the pizza out of the oven or the microwave. you now have a really good pizza now you can eat your fantastic pizza."

"I know all about swimg it is very simple and esay. I will tell you what you need. The first thing is to put on a pair of Goggles. The secend thing is a swiming cap some pools are very clean and they don't want hair in the water. Third thing is a bathing suit you can't go swimg without a bathing suit. This is how you swim you put your figers together and kick your feet strait if you don't you will sink and go noware. When you want to flaot you could move your hands and feet how ever you want. If you don't learn how to flaot it is go to be a problom. Another thing about floating is to relxt at then you will sink into the water. When you float backwards you have to put your chest up high. if you don't you will sink deep down into the water. and you have to relax. you have to put your head up for it could be looking up to the sky and you will not sink. this is how you swim." Can you tell this one was written by Leah?

100 acts of kindness

After I found out that the 100th day of school wasn't going to be the extravaganza it has been in years past, I had to come up with a way my class would commemorate the occasion. Some teachers ask their students to do projects where they bring in 100 of an item, but I honestly didn't want my classroom cluttered with collections of 100 coins or crayons or toothpicks in ziplock baggies. So I decided to make that an optional project, with a note on the homework sheet that says children who do participate will be "eligible for a special prize."

I am giving a 100 days homework sheet with very simple fill-in-the-blanks: "I wish I had 100 _______. I could eat 100 ______, but I would never eat 100 ______." My favorite one is "Miss Brave has told me 100 times to _______." (I gave the class a special preview of this one, and one of my chattiest students shouted, "Be quiet!" Ding ding ding, we have a winner!) I also have a few activities for us to do in class that shouldn't be too taxing: Write the letters in your name over and over in a grid with 100 squares and then color in the first letter to see what the pattern looks like; count up the tickets in our class ticket jar to see if we have fewer or more than 100; lick a lollipop 100 times and see what it looks like, etc. But everything else I found online seemed too expensive (I spend a fortune already on school supplies, am I really going to buy 100th day glasses?) or too complicated (each of the 28 students in my class is going to make a necklace with 100 beads without making an enormous mess? yeah right).

Then I found this great lesson plan, for which I can't take credit, about collecting 100 acts of kindness in honor of the 100th day of school. (The lesson plan ties in to Martin Luther King, which I didn't explicitly do.) So I set up this giant posterboard with a grid of 100 numbers on it. I printed labels (which I bought at Staples) that say, "I caught _____ being kind! Here is what I saw." Each label is the size of one of the numbered boxes on our posterboard. On Monday, I told the kids that we were going to be "kindness detectives" and try to catch each other (along with our teachers, friends, family members, etc.) in the act of being kind. We talked about how all the little things we do for each other every day (like lending someone a pencil or helping someone pick up something they dropped) is an act of kindness. Then we got the ball rolling by writing about a time when we were kind to someone else. (I wanted to get all the "I did something kind!" stuff out of the way right off the bat, and for the rest of the project they are not allowed to catch themselves being kind.) Anyone who is "caught being kind" gets to wear a smiley sticker that says, "I was caught being kind!"

I was a little nervous about how they would react to all the touchy-feely kindness stuff -- for young kids, my class is usually a pretty skeptical group -- but I have to say they are doing a fantastic job. We are up to 82 acts of kindness and counting -- everything from lending someone an eraser to sitting with someone who was alone. Jason -- who says things like, "Move it, sissy" to other boys in the class -- has been caught being kind multiple times and has been thrilled to pieces about it. Ariela, who is always kind to her classmates and who has already been Student of the Month, told me with a shy and proud smile that she had seen her name on the "kindness board." During our science experiment, when I against my better judgement trusted my kids to be able to pour dirt/rock mixtures into containers, I witnessed Bryce (the king of personal space) and Felix working together: "You hold the cup still! I'll pour!" When they were done, they said, "Yay, we did it!" and gave each other a high five. I swear to you, it was like an afterschool special. I "kindness boarded" them myself for that one.

I love this project -- which, by the way, I researched in my own time and bought my own materials -- far more than I have ever loved (or even liked or merely tolerated) any of the boring, repetitive, droning, rote learning teaching points that are supplied to me by my administration. I don't have any way of checking it off on a checklist, or of entering into a data field, but to me it's still a lesson that's valuable, and I'm so glad I've taken the time to teach it in my classroom.

Read aloud time

One of the areas in which I've been striving to make my teaching more thorough is our read aloud time. In our schedule, read aloud time is paired with science and social studies, and because my class has been so successful with science and science typically takes the bulk of the period, read aloud time has sometimes gotten the shaft. And while I've managed to read my students a whole lot of what I consider classic children's literature (including nearly everything by Kevin Henkes and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs before it became a movie), there's never been any kind of structure to our read alouds. I stop and model, we turn and talk, blah blah blah, but it's been lacking the substance I feel that read aloud time deserves.

So recently I showed my students how to set up their reading notebooks with "frames" in which they could stop and jot their thoughts during read aloud time. I modeled how when I was having a thought about what we were reading, I would stop and jot it in one of my frames, being sure to put the date inside the frame and the title on the top of the page. I modeled abbreviating the names of the characters and of my thinking (like "C" for a connection I was making). Then, as I read, I would stop and ask them a question: "What do you think will happen next?" or "How do you think this character is feeling right now?" and ask them to jot down their answers. Let me tell you, there is hardly a lovelier vision for a teacher than the sight of her 27 students bent over their notebooks, carefully scribing their thoughts instead of screaming them out for everyone to hear.

Now I'm easing them off the prompts -- I still ask them to stop and jot in response to a question, but I'm also encouraging them to jot whenever they have a thought instead of waiting for my direction. This way everyone is jotting at some point, but I've caught sight of Leah scribbling away and I know she's doing more than what's being asked. Since I ask a lot of predictable questions, some of my students have started jotting down their predictions and their thoughts before I ask.

What's really helped this to grow is that we've been consistently reading the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. I adore Frog and Toad, and my students do too. The Frog and Toad stories are simple, funny, touching, and full of lovely little messages about friendship -- when Toad is sad because no one ever sends him any mail, Frog sits on the porch with him feeling sad too (before running home to write Toad a letter); when Frog tells Toad that he looks funny in his bathing suit, dignified Toad answers, "Of course I do," and marches home with his head held high. The characters are consistent, but never boring -- downtrodden Toad prefers the comfort of his warm bed, while adventurous Frog is always trying to get him up to enjoy the outdoors. Today I read "Down the Hill," in which Frog wants Toad to go sledding with him. Toad demurs, protesting that he has no winter clothes, but Frog is one step ahead of him: "'I have brought you some things to wear,' he said. Frog pushed a coat down over the top of Toad. Frog pulled snowpants up over the bottom of Toad. He put a hat and scarf on Toad's head. 'Help!' cried Toad. 'My best friend is trying to kill me!'"

By the time I got to the high point of the story -- in which Frog falls off the sled and Toad, unaware that Frog is no longer behind him helping him to steer, chatters on about how much he is actually beginning to enjoy winter, until he realizes that he is "ALL ALONE!" on the sled -- my class was in hysterics. What a sweet sound to start the weekend.

Science and social studies

At my school, we're so hyper-focused on reading, writing and math that science and social studies toooootally get the shaft. Which is unfortunate, because taking a strong interest in a particular area of science and social studies is often the catalyst for progress in reading, writing and math.

One of the things that's surprised me in my first year as a classroom teacher is how much I really enjoy teaching science. Science was never my thing when I was in school, but as a teacher I get to see the "Eureka!" of discovery on a daily basis, which is pretty cool. We use the FOSS science curriculum, and unlike Teachers College, I can honestly say I love it. (And my students do too.) The kits come packaged with almost every supply we need, which is fabulous because it means I don't have to run around trying to find plastic cups or clothespins for our experiments. All the lessons are hands-on, and they tend to surprise me even more than my students. There have been many times when I reviewed a lesson ahead of time, rolled my eyes and thought, "My kids will never be able to do that" -- but then they can! I usually test out the lessons ahead of time so I'll be able to demonstrate them for my kids, and half the time my kids can make the experiments work better than I can.

In our current unit, we're studying rocks. This has been great (albeit slightly messy -- the rocks come all dusty and then we have to drop them in water to see what happens, which creates puddles), especially because of all the rich vocabulary we're getting to use to describe our rocks. Even though I don't technically have ELLs in my class, many of them speak other languages at home, and I'm noticing that they lack vocabulary for description. So we have a growing "rock words" wall where we're collecting words like shiny, bumpy, dusty, chalky, sharp, flat, smooth, rough, and so on.

Recently, after a few days of observing different kinds of rocks under a microscope and how they react in water (FOSS came with enough rocks for each kid to get their own bag of rocks and a mini microscope -- brilliant!), I got to "reveal" the names of the rocks and their origins. When they found out they'd been handling three different types of rocks that all originated from various stages of a volcanic eruption, they were awed. Then I brought in photos of my visit to Kilauea, the Hawaiian volcano. We could see the types of rocks we were studying in the photos! It was pretty neat to see the progression from talking about "the reddish rock with the holes" to talking about "scoria."

But of course, volcanoes will hold anyone's attention; social studies is a little trickier. This week, we took a break from studying map keys (boring) to discussing Martin Luther King, Jr. I'm like 99% sure that they have to have learned something about Martin Luther King in first grade, but none of it seemed to ring a bell when we started our discussion (except for the fact that he was shot and killed -- that everyone always seems to remember and wants to talk more about).

I started out by saying that just like we have rules in our classroom, our country has rules called laws. And there was a time before we were born, but not very long ago, that some places in our country had laws that said that people who had black skin couldn't go to school with people who had white skin, or ride the same buses, or drink from the same water fountains. Their reactions to this ranged from shock to outrage to puzzlement (how could that be the law?). We talked about how laws can be unfair: I asked them whether it would be unfair if I made a rule in our classroom that only children born in February could be allowed to use our bathroom. Then I asked them to think about how they could convince me to change the rule. Because this is where the boys start saying grandiose things like, "If someone told me I couldn't go to the same store as other people, I would just punch that person in the head and run inside!" I said, "If you thought the new rule was unfair, and you decided to run up to me and kick me really hard so that I would change the rule, do you think I would feel like changing my mind because you kicked me?"

So then I explained how Martin Luther King tried to use words instead of violence to change people's minds. Jason remained unconvinced, and in fact is probably at home right now plotting how he will achieve whatever he wants in life by brute force. But anyway. We listened to a very brief part of the "I Have a Dream" speech: "I have a dream that one day my four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," and we talked about what it means to "judge" someone. We read the fantastic Martin's Big Words, and talked about how the things he said were "big words" because they were words that got people to change. Then they wrote their own little "I have a dream...I can help by..."

Jason's dream was peace on earth, but he couldn't think of a way that he personally could help acheive it. I was like, "Hmm, maybe you could start by not calling Felix a crybaby so I won't have to pull the two of you out of the classroom on my prep to discuss how we respect our classmates by not making them feel sad."

Happy weekend, everyone!

Differential

In addition to the sixty lessons I am dutifully planning (ahem) each week, I'm also supposed to be taking notes on all the strategy lessons I'm doing with my small groups during independent working time in reading, writing and math. I have a sheet for every student in each subject that lists their three goals for the unit, and every time I meet with that student for a strategy lesson, I fill out a little box with the date, my teaching point, my observations of the student, other "things I notice," and whether the student has "mastered, attempted or not mastered" the teaching point.

So, let me break it down for you. Let's say I have five students who share the common goal of developing strong conclusions to their stories. And my teaching point for the strategy lesson is "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." That means for each one of those students, I'm taking out their piece of paper and writing that same teaching point in the little box. "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story."

Did that just drive you crazy to read that five times? Imagine how I feel writing it five times. I feel like Miss Brave the Trained Teacher Monkey, that's how I feel. Not to mention that I still haven't figured out how to write notes on my observations and other "things I notice" of five students while simultaneously trying to, you know, teach the lesson. Plus, keep in mind that this is one strategy lesson, for one subject, and I'm supposed to be doing two strategy lessons per day in three different subjects, which means that if each strategy lesson has five students, and I'm doing six strategy lessons a day (in an ideal teaching world, of course), I'm filling in little boxes of observations and things I notice and teaching points thirty times. Per day.

The point of all this is that I detest that sheet full of boxes that we use for writing, so I attempted to redesign it to make it work better for me. I basically took the same sheet we use for another subject, which is slightly more manageable, and modified it for writing. Then I sent it off to my AP in a groveling e-mail in which I asked permission to use my sheet instead because I thought it would work better for me. Note italics.

First let's set aside the small indignity that I had to ask permission to modify my own note-taking procedure (hello, Miss Brave the Trained Teacher Monkey). My AP e-mailed me back that she would bring it up at the next cabinet meeting (um, whatever that is) and get back to me.

Rrrrrghhh. It literally has to go before a committee before I can use it, and if the committee decides it's a good redesign, they will probably foist it upon every teacher in the school. One of my co-workers recently redesigned our reading sheets, and she said it took about a month before her design was "approved," and when it was, it was handed down to us like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments -- this was The Reading Sheet We All Had to Use.

As my colleague dryly noted, "They want us to differentiate instruction...but they don't." Seriously, all I'm trying to do is organize my own way of collecting my own data in order to drive my own instruction, but God forbid I'm not doing it in the same little boxes as everyone else. I'm starting to feel like that dude in Network.

Back to school

I have heard stories about teachers who miss their students over break and look forward to getting back to school, but alas, I am not one of them. I was touched to receive several more thoughtful gifts from my students (some of them appealingly edible!), including a surprisingly fashionable earrings-and-necklace set from Arianna (who had also happened to stay up half the night hand-writing cards for the other students in the class), who presented them to me like this:

Arianna: "Miss Brave, I got you a gift. Guess what it is."
Miss Brave, looking around at the frantic hustle and bustle of morning unpacking: "Um, I don't know, sweetie, that could kind of take all day. Is it...a block of cheese?"
Arianna: "No. I'll give you a hint. It's for your ears, and your neck."
Miss Brave: "Ooooh, is it a pair of shoes?"

Heh, heh, I crack myself up.

The last day of school before vacation was our best day in school yet. My two most irritating troublemakers were absent (a gift in itself!), along with several other students, and it also happened to be Pajama Day and Bring a Stuffed Animal to School Day. I wore my snowflake pajama bottoms and my panda bear slippers, which were received with fantastic shouts of glee by my class. While they were at gym, I played Santa, setting out gift bags filled with small treats: a pair of gloves (two pairs for $1 -- thank you, Target), candy canes, pencils and a miniature tub of Play-Doh. After gym, we lined up outside the door and I very seriously gave instructions about packing up. As I sent them inside to discover their little gifts, I felt like the Grinch when his heart grew three sizes -- they were swooning with joy, hugging their pencils to their chests (I believe I literally heard someone utter the words, "A lead pencil, just what I've always wanted!"), swearing they weren't taking their gloves off until bedtime, and thanking me spontaneously. It was pretty fabulous -- well worth the loooong afternoon I spent at Target loading up my cart with 27 of each item (several people mistook me for a Target employee shelving items) and the small fortune I spent on all the trinkets.

Naturally, I managed to dream about school several times during the vacation; as always, I dreamt that I was late to school (school starts at 8 am. I arrive before 7 every morning. I am never, ever even close to being late for school). Other than that, though, I spent less time than I had planned getting organized and doing work. My assistant principal is collecting our writing and math binders in the next few weeks (major eye roll), and I had wanted to double-check everything in my binders to make sure it was all copacetic, but of course I lugged my gigantic binders home and left a lot of the individual student papers I need to file inside them at school. Our current reading and writing units end next week, and as I haven't received my checklists for the next one, there's not much I can do to prepare. One of the most frustrating things about my school is that my teaching points for each reading and writing are literally placed in my mailbox (usually approximately one day before the first day of the unit); I have zero input into the shape of the unit itself or any of the individual teaching points we use.

I did spend a long and puzzling Tuesday morning trying to get my math stuff up to speed. In my first year as a teacher, I taught writing, and in my second year as a teacher, I taught reading. Math (a subject I've never liked) is still my weakest area as a teacher, and it doesn't help that my school no longer has a math coach.

We use the Everyday Mathematics curriculum, and while I appreciate its methodology, it can be a little overwhelming to follow. It's like some mad mathematician outlined every single thing that second graders need to know in math and dumped it all together in no discernable order whatsoever. Like, one day we'll do temperature, and the next day, estimating costs. And nine times out of ten, the assessment for a particular lesson or unit doesn't align with what was being taught. Like, I'll teach a lesson on telling time, but the "secure goal" I'm assessing that day is whether students can correctly record tally marks. Or, I'll teach a unit on all these various concepts, and then the post-test will assess their ability to count by 5s, a skill that wasn't really addressed in the unit.

The philosophy is of a "spiraling curriculum," which I understand makes sense in the real world because everything in the real world is mathematical and it's not like mathematical concepts come in a vacuum, blah blah blah. But all the jumping around is still confusing. And my school's new push for strategy lessons is to give each student a goal that is addressed "over three days, three different ways." So it can be hard to come up with three different ways of teaching a particular mathematical goal that doesn't just end up confusing everyone, especially when some of the things that Everyday Math asks students to do is just, in my opinion, unnecessarily complicated. So I spent some time outlining strategy lessons for our next unit.

I do have to say that, even though I remain dissatisfied with my job, when I think about where I am mentally compared to last year at this same time, this feels better. I don't know if it's because I no longer have to deal with the frustration of endless coverages and schedule changes, or if I'm just doing a better job mentally "checking out" of all the bullshit of work when I leave.

I'm not ready to go back...but go back I must. And I will.

Trickle-down pressure

I've been feeling really disconnected lately -- from my students, my job and from teaching in general. I feel like I'm starting to take out on my students all the inner resentment I have for the BS I'm asked to deal with, and I hate feeling that way because we do still have some lovely moments of clarity together that are unfortunately overshadowed by all the other nonsense. There is definitely a system of trickle-down pressure at work in my school -- teachers who are under pressure from administration then put that pressure on their students -- and I can't shake the feeling that I know I shouldn't be blaming my students or expecting more from them than they are capable of just because my administration has completely unrealistic expectations...but somehow I can't help it.

This month, for instance, we are working on a non-fiction science unit in which the kids will be researching a topic (say, plants) in reading and then writing about it during writing. The first problem with this unit is that there are multiple grades doing it at the same time, and there just aren't enough books to go around. Some of my teachers were gracious enough to make sure they had enough books for my group as well as their own and we just intermixed our kids, but others assumed I would be bringing my own books for my own kids...where am I supposed to unearth these mythical books from, you ask? Yesterday I made a trip to the public library to check out mounds of books, and today I made a return trip, and I ended up with the maximum number of books allowed. I even pleadingly asked if they could make an exception for schoolteachers, but no such luck. Now I have to impress upon my students that under threat of death they will take exceedingly good care of those library books.

The second problem with this unit is that, like everything else my school does, it is over-ambitious and rushed. Today, for instance, our readers were supposed to browse the books in their topic and ask themselves, "What smaller topics inside my big topic do I want to gather information on?" -- basically, they were supposed to choose six sub-topics to research. We talked about examples of good sub-topics, like, "What They Eat," "Where They Live," "What They Look Like" (the "They" being dependent on one's actual topic, of course), and some of them did an admirable job. But realistically, can you expect a seven-year-old to decide on six good sub-topics in fifteen minutes of non-fiction reading when this is only the second day they've ever seen the books at all? I feel like that's a concept that some high schoolers and college students would still struggle with. And these are the topics we're expecting them to stick with and research all month! I felt like I was telling them, "In other words, if you do a half-assed job today, you're screwed." One of my colleagues suggested that we ask permission to carry the lesson over to tomorrow as well, and I thought: Why should we need to ask permission to make a judgment call on a lesson that we didn't think went as well as it could have?

So when my usual troublemakers were stirring up trouble, I was more short-tempered than usual with them -- trickle-down pressure. There were the kids who had been daydreaming during the mini lesson and missed the point of it completely, who went off to their science reading and began to complain, "I don't know what to do." Then one of my lower readers, in an attempt to follow my suggestion that he use the table of contents to help him choose his topics, chose "Index" as one of his sub-topics.

I just see the whole month going this way -- one disaster after another, because the workshop model is not going to help them learn how to research a topic when we model it once and then just charge ahead and expect them to do it. Oh, and let's not forget about the parade of interruptions from running records and NYSESLAT testing. If I had my way, we would focus on fewer things, give them more time and attention, and I would meet with students individually and in small groups to help them with their research instead of pulling them for these ridiculous "goal" strategy lessons.

But of course, I don't have my way.

The cycle of reading

School has been a whirlwind of stress and a mountain of work lately (with the obvious exception of our glorious snow day). For one thing, our unit of study this month is "series book clubs." No one has done book clubs in second grade before -- typically they don't start until third grade -- let alone book clubs centered around books that come in a series. It is next to impossible to find quality series books below level J, and even those that we did manage to scrounge up (Maisy is an H, Rigby Brand New Readers come in levels A-E, Nicky is allegedly an F although this website lists it under "picture books for 2-5 years old" :::buries head in hands:::) don't really give my readers much to converse about in their book clubs.

I don't mean to whine, but book clubs generate a huge amount of work for me. Each of my five classes has three separate book clubs (based on reading level), and each student in each book club is supposed to read the same pages in the same book each day, so I have to figure out how many pages to assign them, and because the books are fairly short, they're going through them fairly quickly, which means I have to keep doling out more books and trying to keep up with who's reading what and when. Even though I tried to make it easier on myself and assign the same series to multiple clubs (I think I have every single copy of every Henry and Mudge book in the school), and even though I'm forcing my lower readers to read the same book multiple times just so I won't run out of books altogether, I've still had to be hyper-organized to keep it all straight. Why, why, why do we have to launch experimental book clubs in March, the longest and dreariest month of the school year? And why do we have to do it with running records and assessments coming up next week? I don't know how we're supposed to listen in on their book club talks when we're also supposed to be doing running records...and don't even get me started on the fact that our teaching points are the same old "Readers infer by paying attention to characters' actions, how they speak to each other, blah blah blah BLAH," and meanwhile we're not doing any teaching points on how they should actually behave in their book clubs -- like how about looking at the speaker when he or she is talking, or not interrupting when someone else is talking but instead waiting to say, "I have something to add to what ___ said" or "What ____ said reminds me of..." These are all critical things that I need to be teaching them in order to have a successful book club conversation, but instead of teaching them during my mini lesson I'm struggling to sneak them in elsewhere.

It's all especially ridiculous because technically I'm supposed to be invisible during the book club talk, but instead I'm totally breaking in because hello, they're in second grade, they don't know how to organize and run their own book club. Supposedly we're doing this to prepare them for third grade book clubs, but as far as I can see there's nothing really modified about what we're doing -- we're doing the same third grade version of book clubs without really preparing them to be ready for it.

Book clubs are also stressing me out because in some ways they really highlight the gap between my struggling readers and the average and above average readers in the grade. Even though a lot of my readers have made tremendous progress during the year, and even though some of them are doing really well, it's still disheartening to be in the same classroom with kids who are all, "I infer that my character is feeling glum" while my kids are all :::blank stare:::

Meanwhile, my new student who speaks no English cries all day long, and it is the saddest thing ever. I have him paired up with another Spanish speaker who speaks a pretty good amount of English now, and I have a Spanish/English speaker to translate for him during the mini lesson, but he is still sad and misses his mom and constantly asks when it will be time to go home. Today during my mini lesson the other kids were asking why he was crying, and we got into a discussion about what it's like to be new in a place where you don't speak the language. One of my beginner ELLs confessed, "When I come here, I so scared, I only know yes, no." And I said to her, "And now you talk so much in English I have to tell you to be quiet!" It did make me realize how far some of my ELLs have come; I remember a few of them from first grade when they didn't speak any English at all, and now they are D and E readers.

Coming up next: running records, assessments, report cards, parent/teacher conferences, and book clubs -- many, many more book clubs. Is it April yet?

My reading goal is to remain calm

Because I'm such a winner (well, also because it was in the single digits outside and I didn't feel like leaving my apartment for the evening), I spent most of Friday evening rephrasing my students' goals into kid-friendly language. Their goals are lifted right from the state standards, but it's not like I can expect my second graders to walk around saying, "My goal is to check the accuracy of my decoding using the context to monitor and self-correct." So this is what I've come up with to "translate" their goals:

Check accuracy of decoding using context to monitor and self-correct.
My reading goal is to sound out tricky words and then ask myself: Does that sound right? Does that make sense?

Blend sounds using knowledge of letter-sound correspondences in order to decode unfamiliar, but decodable, one-syllable grade-level words.
My reading goal is to use what I know in Fundations to help me sound out tricky words.
My reading goal is to practice reading tricky words by looking for chunks of letters I already know.

Increase background knowledge by elaborating and integrating new vocabulary and ideas from texts.
My reading goal is to use words from the story to help me talk about my books.

Answer simple questions (like how? why? what if?) in response to texts.
My reading goal is to practice answering questions about my book, like: How did that happen? Why did that happen?

Use comprehension strategies (such as predict/confirm, reread, self-correct) to clarify meaning of text.
My reading goal is to read my books over to make sure I understand the story.
My reading goal is to stop and make a prediction about what will happen next and then read on to find out if I am right.
My reading goal is to listen to myself read the story to make sure all the words sound right.

My tentative plan is to print all these goals out on big labels that I can stick right on their book baggies. Of course, all the kids break their book baggies by swinging them around, so I was considering getting them all new, durable book baggies (and by "book baggie" I mean they cram all their books into a flimsy Ziploc bag, so I was going to buy durable Ziploc bags, and between those and the labels I am looking at spending a fortune of my own money, since the copier at school is still broken and I have been using my own paper and ink to print and make copies at home on my own time, thank you very much Department of Education).

I'm still on the hunt for high-interest/low-readability books. Most of the ones I've found online are for upper elementary or middle schoolers reading at a second or third grade level, but I'm looking for late first grade or early second grade readability. If I can find good ones, I'm going to look into doing a Donors Choose grant, so please send any suggestions my way!

Parents are the first teachers

In all the excitement over our neverending assessments, I realized I never wrote about parent-teacher conferences back in November. Out of my 50 students, I saw 32 (sets of) parents (plus additional guardians, siblings and translators). I think I saw the most parents out of all our AIS providers, and I was pretty pleased with the turnout. My fiance had encouraged me to make up some kind of handout to give them, so I quickly put together some tips on "How to Help Your Child Succeed in Reading" -- read with them at home, ask them questions about what they're reading, etc.

A few things really stood out while I was talking with parents. First of all, even though I am constantly stressed out by my administration, by my students' agonizing lack of progress in reading, and by the little day-to-day behavior issues that can make Readers' Workshop a frustrating experience (i.e., when I'm working with a small group of readers and from the corner of my eye can tell that no one else in my group is actually reading independently as they are supposed to be doing), for the most part I have really great kids. For the vast majority of parents with whom I spoke, I was able to say things like, "He is a pleasure to have in my reading group, she always takes the strategies I teach and tries to apply them, sometimes he has a little trouble focusing but I can tell that he really cares about his progress," etc. Just recently I was discussing with one of my colleagues the enormous difference between last year's second graders and this year's; sure, this year's has their moments where they're immature and disruptive, but I will take immature and disruptive any day over defiant and disruptive, which is what I dealt with last year.

The second thing was how much these parents really want their children to succeed, but don't have the tools to help them do so. Sure, I do have a few parents who have the attitude that their child's education is entirely in my hands and it's not their problem (probably these are the parents who didn't bother coming to see me in the first place). But most of the parents seemed genuinely concerned about their children...but at the same time they were at a loss about what to do. First of all, a lot of the parents who came to see me didn't speak English all that well, and although they listened and asked questions, I got the sense that they didn't entirely understand. With some of my kids who are really far below grade level, I was trying gently to infuse a sense of urgency into our conference -- I showed the parents a Junie B. Jones chapter book and said, "This is an M book, where we would like your child to be reading at the end of second grade," and compared it with, say, Harry Goes to Day Camp, which is a level F. (And level F is pretty good for my readers -- I would say the majority of my students are in the F/G/H range, but I do have some students stuck at C and D who have been there for ages that I am very concerned about.) And one of the mothers nodded at me and said, in broken English, "Okay, teacher. We do what you say."

It was a little heartbreaking, because I know she wants her son to do well, but it's obvious that she can't help him with his homework or read with him in English. Which is why (tangent alert!) I was so ticked off to read an obnoxious letter in Time magazine today that said the only reason teachers are against merit pay is that they are "painfully aware of their collective ineptitude." Just for kicks, let's compare a student at my school (we'll call him Student A) with a student at a middle- or upper-class school (we'll call him Student B). When Student A goes home, his parents can't help him with his homework, because they don't read English. They don't have the money to get him a tutor. They don't have a lot of books in their home, other than the ones that Student A brings home from school. And they both work, so they don't sit around quizzing him about what he's reading. Now, when Student B goes home, his parents are around to make sure that he's doing his homework. Maybe if he falls behind, they get him a tutor. And they speak to him in the language that educators use, so that he's used to hearing all these comprehension questions.

I don't want to get caught up in a trap that says my students can't succeed because of their backgrounds. But I do believe that they are already at a disadvantage -- not because they have "bad" parents, but because there is a cultural gap between their backgrounds and the backgrounds of those of us who are in positions of power in the educational system. And I do believe that it's deep-seated and informs so much of how we measure our students' success and knowledge. For example, just recently I was reading a D level book with my students that was taking place around the house -- a garage, a garden, etc. I had to spend a long time just talking with them about what a garden is and what a garage is because none of our students live in actual houses and none of them has a garage or a garden. Yet it would be so easy on a comprehension test to ask a question like, "Which of the following belongs in a garage?" and score them wrong if they didn't choose the car. And that's why merit pay for teachers makes me a little suspicious -- not because I don't want to work hard to improve my students' scores, but because there's only so much I can do before I send them home and whoops! -- nobody at home can get on top of them and make sure they're doing what they're supposed to. I spoke with one father of a girl whose major problem is comprehension -- she'll read a story and then sort of invent her own retelling of it. I suggested that they ask her questions at home to monitor her comprehension. He told me that the problem with this is that he works at night, so he isn't at home, and his wife does not speak English, so if she asks her questions, "whatever Noelle says is right!" So many of my kids already speak better English than their parents do, and it was their siblings who did the translating. I think the parents have a sense of this and it translates into some kind of a power difference between us. I definitely met parents who were a little embarrassed that they didn't speak English that well, and therefore they didn't advocate for their students the way a native English speaker would. And the kids know it, too -- my obnoxious second graders from last year would use that when I told them I would have to send a note home or call home: "No one at home speaks English," they would say tauntingly.

So, even though I meant this to be a post about parent-teacher conferences, it ended up being a post about the broader problems with our educational system, of which there are many, and which I am sorry to say cannot be fixed by offering me more money to educate my students. I mean, let's say I worked in the financial sector and I could earn more money by staying really late at the office to work long hours. Would I put in the extra time? Sure. But I can (and do) spend long hours working before and after school, only the kids aren't there. Does that benefit them? That's why I'm coming around to the concept of longer school days and/or year-round schooling. I don't know if I would want to be the teacher who works over the summer, but there is no doubt that my students' reading levels dropped dramatically over the summer and it took months just to get them back to where they were in May. I just read Malcolm Gladwell's new book, The Outliers, and after I finished I buried my head miserably in my hands and moaned, "He's right, they need to be in school more." They need tobe in school because they aren't getting it at home, and no amount of merit pay can make up the difference.

(More) guidance for guided reading

Recently someone commented on my post about guided reading, hoping for more information on what it is and how it works. I am by no means an expert on guided reading, but I will do my best!

So, first there's the defintion of guided reading provided by this handy little article I found on Scholastic.com. What it means in my day-to-day teaching life is that I gather up all the students in my group who are reading at a certain level -- say, E -- and we get together to read a book that's a level F. So it's more challenging than their independent level, which is why we work at it together and I give my struggling readers lots of support.

Personally, I love guided reading. I really get to see every day how it helps my struggling readers -- it is scaffolding at its best. When I meet with my really low readers to do guided reading, I do a lot of scaffolding. First we talk about the book without even opening it -- what do we notice about the cover, etc. I try to connect their prior knowledge to what the book will be about. For example, with my E level readers we just read a book called My Haircut, so we had a little conversation about who cuts our hair and if we ever had a bad haircut.

Then we take a little "picture walk" through the book -- we slowly turn through the pages and notice things about the pictures, making predictions about what might be happening in the story. As we're going I point out some tricky words that I know will give them trouble (either because they're hard to sound out or because they have an unfamiliar meaning), and I have them put their fingers on the word and repeat it.

Finally before they start to read I give them a "purpose for reading" -- this is fancy Teachers College talk for a comprehension question that I plant in their minds before they read, like, "While you're reading today I want you to think about how the boy is feeling when he's getting his hair cut."

Then they start to read the book independently. While they're reading (theoretically they are reading "with the voice in their brains," but most of my readers are still reading out loud), I listen in and "coach into" them. So if a reader is stuck on a word, I might prompt them to try a certain strategy.

Usually my low readers make it through a book pretty quickly, and then we come back together to have a discussion -- first we talk about the comprehension question I asked them before we started, and then I choose a teaching point to leave them with. For instance, if I noticed that all the readers in my group were stuck on words where they could have used the picture to help them, I might show them how next time they can try to use the picture to help them tackle a tricky word -- I give them a quick chance to practice that strategy, and then off they go!

My commenter asked how guided reading can be effective when children don't have exposure to phonics. I think the answer is -- it can't! Everything works in conjunction with everything else. Our kids get the majority of their phonics work not during Readers' Workshop but through a program called Fundations (which I also happen to love). I try as best I can to integrate that phonics work into guided reading -- for example, today in a guided reading group, we talked about the "oa" vowel team and how "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." In another guided reading group today, I coached a girl who was having trouble with the word "morning" -- when I asked her to look at the end of the word, she immediately recited, "i-n-g, ring, ing," which is straight out of the Fundations script.

I have even done some successful guided reading groups with really low-level readers -- kids who don't speak a word of English. In that case, we all kind of read the book together and I modeled reading techniques like one-to-one correspondence and matching pictures with words. In that case, of course, guided reading isn't going to be the thing that teaches them how to read. But along with word in phonics, it can be the thing that bumps them up to a higher level!

I hope this was an adequate response!

Guidance for guided reading

Yesterday was like a black hole of a day. I was so busy every second and so discombobulated that at the end of the day I realized I couldn't remember a single thing I had taught. So is it any wonder the kids can't either?

Today I learned that I am doing a lot of things wrong. And it's not because I'm a bad teacher or an unintelligent person; it's because the procedures for teaching reading at my school are so arcane and so intricate that I feel like I need a second master's degree in how to fill out all the paperwork I'm expected to maintain. One of the things we have to do when meeting with a guided reading group is set out a "purpose for reading." We tell the kids that before they begin to read the book independently, they should keep in mind X or think about Y while they are reading.

(Quick tutorial for those of you who don't teach elementary reading: In a guided reading group, you pull all your kids who are reading at a certain level, and you read a book with them that's one level higher than their "just right" level. You sit down with them and preview the book, give them the gist of the story, show them some of the tricky words they'll encounter, and then you coach them and "guide" them as they read independently or out loud to you. Then you wrap it up with a teaching point you want them to remember. And then on the third day of a guided reading group, you do some kind of word work or word study activity based on the text.)

My students are all reading fairly low level books, and they finish them pretty quickly. So on the first day of a guided reading group I've usually made the "purpose for reading" some kind of comprehension question or a "pick your favorite page" thing. But then on the second and third day, since my kids have such big issues with fluency, I've asked them to think about reading in a smoother voice or pay attention to the rhyming words they hear.

Apparently this is a no-no, which is kind of a bummer for me, because it was going really well. During literacy coaching today our coach told me that the kids should not be reading the whole book on the first day of guided reading, but honestly, how do you split a 6-page book with one sentence on each page into three days of guided reading?

I think I am really doing my best to stay on top of things. I read all my memos and discuss them thoughtfully with my colleagues. When they started pulling out huge chunks of my AIS group during reading this week, so that I only had 3 kids there instead of my usual 10, I re-arranged my guided reading groups and strategy lessons so that I wouldn't be caught unexpectedly with nothing planned for the kids I had remaining. When we somehow ended up three teaching points short for the month of September, I planned my own mini lessons based on what I thought my kids needed to learn.

But unfortunately, all I ever hear about at my school is covering myself -- making sure I have enough labels on each kid once they come looking at my binders, making sure I'm planning my strategy lessons based off our reading checklist so that I can show evidence of why I decided to teach the lesson in the first place, making sure I'm checking everything off and filling everything out the right way. It makes me feel a little under-valued as a professional, like I can't be trusted to plan anything using my own discretion and judgement about what my students need. It's frustrating because in order to fit everything in (a mini lesson, guided reading, a strategy lesson and a share), I feel like by the end of the period I'm talking so fast and everything devolves into a half-assed, rushed lesson, even when I notice things that I really want to address. In fact, I find myself not really caring whether the kids actually got it or not, as long as I have something to write down on my checklist and labels! And some days I feel like a trained monkey could reel off the Teachers College mini lesson script as well as I can: "Readers, we have been learning that good readers ____. Today I want to teach you that good readers _____. Watch me as I show you how good readers _____. Did you notice how I showed you how good readers _____? Now it's your turn to try it. Take out one book from your book baggie and practice _____. Readers, I noticed how some of you ____. Today and every day I want you to remember that good readers _____. Off you go!" In fact, funny story: Today I sat down to guided reading with one of my beginner ELLs who's reading at a level B. With our beginner ELLs, we're doing a modified guided reading where we read the text aloud to them. So I read him the book, and then he grabbed it from me and said: "Now I will try!" because he's probably heard that "Now it's your turn to try it!" line so many times.

Even though I'm still having a much better time of it this year than last year, I will say this: Last year I had a lot more freedom to be creative, and that showed in my lessons. This year I'm starting to race through everything in order to follow the script, and my lessons are suffering for it.

Alphabet of woe

The other day I saw one of my (mildly annoying) students from last year. "Miss Brave," she said with interest, "are you a teacher now?"

"Am I a teacher now?" I repeated, slightly put out. "I was a teacher last year, too, my friend!"

"No, not a writing teacher," she replied with exasperation, "like a teacher teacher."

"I'm a reading teacher this year," I said.

"Oh," she responded, "so you turned into a reading teacher?"

Poof! Like magic, I've turned into a reading teacher! And I really enjoy it, too. Even though all I've done so far is running records (if I have to hear one more kid butcher his way through Fancy Dance -- in which the lines "They wear beadwork and bells. They wear feathers and fringe" frequently get mangled into "They were badwork and bells. They wear fathers and fingers" -- I might scream), I think I'm getting into the groove and gearing up for what's ahead. So far, that entails writing everything down in multiple places (I swear I am going to start dreaming of lists of kids' names that have letters of the alphabet -- representing their reading levels -- next to them) and color coding everything. I'm fully prepared for the fact that my administration is going to count all the labels in my binder to make sure I'm seeing my students enough times a week and that they're going to grill me when my kids don't move up on their running records.

Today we had an Academic Intervention Services meeting in which we discussed how many kids each of us could expect to have in our groups. I thought AIS groups were supposed to have no more than ten, hence the phrase "small group instruction," but it turns out we can go up to 15. Theoretically, we are supposed to be servicing the kids who are below grade level, but in some classes this can be up to three-quarters of the kids in the class. In one of my classes, 16 of the 22 kids are below grade level. So I asked, am I supposed to take 15 kids and leave 7 with the classroom teacher? We all agreed that this did not make sense.

Just to give those of you out there who are not reading teachers an idea of how this works: In reading, kids are assigned reading levels that correspond to a letter of the alphabet. Theoretically, kids should come into first grade at a level C and leave at a level I. (If you think that sounds like a big jump, you're right -- first grade is widely considered the most crucial year for reading progress. I've heard it said that if kids aren't reading on grade level by the time they leave first grade, they'll never catch up to grade level.) In second grade, they should enter at a level I and leave at a level M. The kids I will service in AIS range from A to H.

In order to find out what a kid's level is, you do something called a "running record." When you do a running record, a kid reads a book out loud to you while you sit there with a teacher's copy of the same text and record all his or her mistakes (or "miscues," as the running record calls them). (My favorite miscue so far has been "mother" for "mouth," so that a sentence about someone trying to whistle became "She puts two fingers in her mother and blows.") A handy little chart at the bottom of the running record converts the number of miscues to the percentage of words the child read correctly. Then you ask them some comprehension questions. In order to achieve a certain level, the child has to read with 96% or above accuracy and answer three out of four comprehension questions correctly.

We do running records five times a year, in September, November, January, March and May. Unfortunately, right now a lot of our kids are experiencing what we call "summer slump" or "summer slide," in which they don't read over the summer and forget how. I've had a lot of kids take dramatic tumbles from H all the way back down to E. On the one hand, this is disappointing, but on the other hand it probably means that they'll jump right back up pretty quickly (I hope).

The other day, a sweet boy for whom English is obviously not a first language said to me, "Miss Brave, when are you going to use me?"

Trying not to laugh, I asked, "What do you mean?"

"I've already read all these H books from Ms. C's class," he said, indicating his book baggie, "and I am ready to be an I!"

Awwww! Let's hope so!

Knowledge is power

In one of the other teacher blogs I read, a second grade teacher revealed that she is spending her summer getting acquainted with the sorts of books her second graders will be reading in the coming year: Horrible Harry and his ilk, etc.

"What an excellent idea!" I thought. "The next time I hit the library, I'll make sure to check out a good number of those books!"

Then I remembered that as an AIS teacher, my second grade students won't exactly be at a second grade reading level. Based on what I know of them from this past year, the great majority of my students will be reading at a level F when I meet them; that's about an early-to-mid first grade reading level. And if my students ever do achieve grade level (yay for me!), they get switched out of my group and I get another low performer.

So I don't think I'll have to worry about pre-reading Poppleton anytime soon...which is somewhat of a bummer, as I love Poppleton, but at least it gives me something to strive for.

Solving the missing equation

Today I was working with a first grader whose teacher unsuccessfully argued that he should repeat first grade next year. The administration decided to pass him onto second grade because he had already been held back in kindergarten. If I stay next year, he'll definitely be one of my reading kids.

Anyway, Will danced over to his seat and sang out, "I'm almost finished!" I looked down at his paper; it was blank.

"Will," I said, "you didn't write anything on your paper yet."

He looked up at me and blinked. "Oh. Right," he said.

Oy.

In the same classroom, some incident sparked a fellow teacher to say, "You know what we should be teaching them? Problem solving skills. Like, what do you do when you spill juice all over the floor, or your pencil breaks?" I got so excited at hearing this, I can't even tell you; it's exactly the sort of thing, along with social skills, that I think our kids desperately need to learn. Because right now they don't know what to do when they spill juice all over the floor or when their pencil breaks. I can't tell you how many times I've happened upon a student staring blankly into space, ten minutes after everyone else has been scribbling away. "Student," I'll say, "why aren't you writing?" Student will look up at me helplessly and shrug. "I don't have a pencil." I will sigh hopelessly, and then patiently say, "Student...how can you solve this problem?" Thoughtful face. "I could...ask my neighbor for a pencil?" Or how many times I've been on one side of the classroom only to hear a student on the other side repeating a singsong refrain: "I need help...I need help...I need help..." without raising his hand or making any other effort to actually get my attention. And these are second graders I'm referring to.

That's what we should be using our extra 37.5 minutes after school for; when everyone's brain is shot from all the academics, that would be the perfect time to work on this kind of stuff. Hmmm.

Sharing is caring

Yesterday during our Brooklyn-Queens Day professional development, my administration announced a new vocabulary initiative. Each grade had to come up with 200 words from various subjects to introduce to the kids in a 5-words-per-week breakdown. So that makes 5 vocabulary words a week, on top of their weekly Fundations words, Dolch words and word wall words...my colleagues and I figured out that it amounts to about 20 "words of the week."

The idea is that teachers will introduce these five new vocabulary words each morning before first period starts, from 8:00 to 8:10, which makes me think that my administration has never actually been in a classroom before first period starts. First of all, at our school, attendance and punctuality are mere mirages, so that kids are drifting in and unpacking all through first period anyway. Second of all, that teeny sliver of time from 8:00 to 8:10 is when kids are eagerly vying to tell you every single thing that happened to them since the last time you saw them (yesterday), and is it really fair to take that away from them just so we can cram five more words into their already overloaded brains?

Do you know what my students really, really need, more than 5 new vocabulary words clapped out to them? Because I do. What they really, really need is some direct instruction in social skills. I cannot stress this enough. The other day, I did "Game Day" with my kindergarteners, where I give each table some word games. Sometimes they surprise me with their creativity and their willingness to work together, but on this particular day there was fighting, grabbing, screaming, the whole nine yards.

I took everything away from everyone and conducted a little demonstration. I sat myself down at the blue table and proceeded to steal things from other kids and refuse to share with them. Fortuitously, I happened to sit across from our kindergarten's resident prodigy, who soon schooled me in the art of getting along. "No, Miss Brave!" she explained patiently. "Other kids want to play too. You have to share with them!"

Then I gave everyone a game card and made them practice nicely asking their partner if they could borrow theirs.

I can't even tell you how many of my students tell me that their parents tell them to hit back; it's no wonder they're confused when they're getting mixed messages. And I think that instead of learning five more vocabulary words, we should learn some life skills.

I am a swift wind sweeping the country

Yesterday in the schoolyard, one of my few soft-spoken, mild-mannered students ran up to me. "Miss Brave!" she said. "Remember when we made our flat selves and we sent them to your friend and your friend took a picture?" (How could I forget?) "I have the picture, and when it's vacation, I'm going to visit my cousins and my sister in Santo Domingo and I'm going to show them!"

My boyfriend has been telling me for months that the Flat Stanley project was one my students will remember for ages to come, but I don't think I really believed him until that moment.

Today, in that student's ESL class, I played the R. Kelly song "The World's Greatest" as part of a lesson on metaphors. I had printed out the lyrics on big chart paper and accompanied them with lots of pictures so that there would be visual aids, and we talked about what kinds of metaphors we might hear in the song before we listened to it.

It was fabulous. They really, really liked listening to the song, and they begged me to play it over and over again. And it was just awesome to see them all sitting there, all quiet for once, their lips moving as they followed along with the lyrics, grooving a little with the music.

Even though I was really not looking forward to returning to school after vacation, I've been surprisingly chipper these last few days. I've been keeping my cool over things that might have driven me over the edge before the vacation, and I've been working on reacting to challenging situations in a calm, non-threatening way. Plus, I got observed doing my "World's Greatest" metaphor lesson (in a different class), which means I only have to survive one more observation before the year is out.

Maybe I really am the world's greatest!

Round and round the roundabout

On Friday, I started to have nightmares about returning to school. In one, I was frantically trying to pick up a stack of paper that I needed for my classes, but my hand kept going through the papers like I was some sort of ghost; in another, I arrived in class only to realize that I had no idea what I had planned to teach; in all of them, I was desperately, woefully late.

The better vacation is, the harder it is to return to work, so between that, the dismal forecast, and today's after-school faculty conference, I was really not looking forward to school today. But for a Monday after vacation, it wasn't so bad. My special kindergarteners are always delightful after a break: just dazed enough to be relatively calm during our first period class and full of fun (and possibly fabricated) stories about their vacation. (My favorite? "I brushed my teeth!" Like, hmm, I'm hoping that wasn't a unique spring break activity.)

My special fourth graders are always detestable after a break: insolent, rude, and generally opposed to learning of any kind. I started second period with an off-the-cuff discussion of Iron Man and transitioned into a cheery "Welcome back, I hope you all had a great vacation, now please come and meet me at the carpet" and was met with the kind of groans and glares I might expect after announcing some kind of hideous exam. I've started doing more read alouds with my classes, though, and they got into Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, which is one of my favorite books ever, so I hope we're able to keep the momentum going next week.

My third graders were fine; one of them had a sourpuss face on and I scored some giggles by modeling it back to him. That's always dicey because I don't want my students to feel like I'm mocking them, but I went for it because he and I are on good terms and it worked; he laughed and the glower disappeared.

My first graders...oy! All 25 of them still think they're the only one in the class who could possibly have anything of value to say. So as a consequence, when I make an announcement like, "Please make one pile out of your papers so I can collect them, and when I see that your table is ready I will ask you to come to the carpet," at least 8 kids are up and out of their seat to surround me with follow-up questions and comments: "Can I go to the bathroom? Can I share?
I'm not finished! E.J. hit me with a pencil!" And no matter how many times I explain to the chattering masses that they all need to be in their seats, general mayhem ensues. I think I need to work out some kind of system with them.

And my second graders, the ones who drive me to the brink nearly every single Monday, were amazingly well-behaved! Possibly because I bribed them with a potential reward at the end of the period, which they all earned with the exception of one. I pushed my luck by reading them Jane Yolen's Owl Moon at the end of the period, which is a beautiful book but one that really requires calm and quiet in the room to be appreciated. (Before I read it I always make a big deal about how the language is lovely and relaxing and so we all need to be relaxed and quiet to let it sink in.) And they were into it!

Lately I've been teaching similes by reading Audrey Wood's Quick as a Cricket ("I'm as quick as a cricket, I'm as slow as a snail, I'm as small as an ant, I'm as large as a whale") and asking the kids to try out their own similes, which they've done to great success (some of my favorites: "I'm as dirty as a pig," "I'm as small as a mouse"). I decided that, to teach metaphors, I'm going to play the R. Kelly song "The World's Greatest" that was performed at the Opening Ceremonies of the 2002 Winter Olympics Games: "I'm that star up in the sky, I'm that mountain peak up high -- hey, I made it, I'm the world's greatest!" I suspect that they'll really enjoy listening to the song; now I just have to think of an interesting activity to go along with it.

And for my fifth graders, who have been reading about Anne Frank and who thus are probably a little too mature for Quick as a Cricket, I'm going to try out the two Langston Hughes poems about dreams: "Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" (simile) and "If dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly" (metaphor). And then next week, to continue with the theme of descriptive language in all my classes, we're going to listen to a neat audio recording of Mem Fox's Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge that I found on Power Media Plus and draw pictures to go along with the descriptive text.

And that's the round-up!

A raisin in the sun

April is National Poetry Month, and in the interest of helping my budding poets use descriptive language, I decided to revisit a lesson I tried with minimal success back when I was a completely naive, inexperienced teacher (i.e., in October): Writers describe by using their five senses.

The first time I tried this lesson, it was with my first graders, and I collected various items of minimal significance (like an empty water bottle and a pencil) and dropped them into brown paper bags that I optimistically billed as "mystery bags!" I broke them into pairs and instructed them to use their senses to describe the objects inside their mystery bags.

If you are also a teacher of young children, you probably don't need your five senses to tell you what happened next: The mystery bags mysteriously ripped; the mystery objects were mysteriously strewn about the classroom; and much grabbing, shouting, and general chaos not so mysteriously ensued.

But never let it be said that Miss Brave does not learn from her mistakes! This time around, I was standing in my kitchen at 5:30 in the morning, blankly wondering what I could give my kindergarten students to describe, when in the cabinet I spied my savior: a box of California golden raisins.

Should you ever find yourself alone with a group of young children whom you aren't quite sure what to do with, remember this one rule: If you act like something is unbelievably, indescribably cool, they will start to believe you. So believe me, I talked up this raisin. Using my five senses, I described the living daylights out of this raisin. And it worked: They were captivated, their little mouths watering.

Then I paused, for effect, and dramatically announced that I would be giving each student his own raisin.

OK. Imagine announcing to a group of young children that they are going on a trip to, say, an amusement park. Can you picture it? The gasps, the screams, the excitement? Now imagine announcing to a group of young children that you will shortly be giving them a raisin. Except imagine that they have the same reaction as they would to the amusement park announcement. That's what it was like.

So I gave everyone a raisin, with strict instructions not to taste it yet. They were like little scientists, examining their tiny raisins and noticing every bump, every spot, every wrinkle. Slowly, some of them started to think like little poets: "It looks like a cloud," or "It looks like the sun" or even "It looks like a balloon with all the air taken out." We introduced fun words like "wrinkly" and "squishy" and "juicy." And then, at long last -- after a trip to the garbage can to throw away all the raisins that had fallen on the floor in the course of our examination -- on the count of three, we all tasted our raisins.

It was the most blissful kind of brief silence I have ever experienced in a classroom. And my favorite reaction came from a sweet, round-faced little boy who threw up his hand excitedly. "When I tasted the raisin," he said, "I could feel it all the way down to my toes!"

Gimme an A

Lately I've been doing "alphabet stretches" with my kindergarteners. We stand up and try to stretch our bodies out to resemble different letters of the alphabet. The kids are really enthusiastic about it, and they come up with great and interesting variations. Sometimes I select one child to come up to the front of the room and choose a letter for the rest of us to imitate.

My most exuberant class, which also happens to be ESL, is particularly into it. Today I saw them just as they were returning from a field trip to the aquarium, so all I did was open up juice boxes and bananas as they ate their lunch and talked with their mouths full about the big turtles and purple fish.

Of course, as they finished eating, they got out of their seats and started to run around. And then my naughtiest troublemaker scurried up to me and, out of nowhere, blurted: "I can do a Y!"

And lo and behold, he did. And then the other kids jumped in: "X! B!" Before long, they were laying down on the carpet to bend their legs in all sorts of interesting ways, and a few of them -- this was the kicker -- actually worked together to form letters they couldn't make on their own.

It was great!