Last weekend was our last elementary school basketball tournament. Our boys had some issues, because they are actually way more sensitive than our girls. This happened last year too. When the girls encounter difficulties, they toughen up and prove they aren’t scared by playing harder. It takes a lot more to break our girls. The…

My kids had to take a Nation’s Report Card test today. It was a disaster. First of all, no one met with us or gave us any information about what we should do to prepare things. They said they would take care of everything. But then they got here and it turns out we need…

Here are some stories my kids told me yesterday: From my kid who has been sick for two days and got back yesterday. She kept complaining that her legs really hurt (which, as someone recovering from the same bug, I know is really painful) but stuck it out for a while. Then she started being…

I don’t want to talk about the awful mess of crud that made me sad today. So instead let me tell you about the spectacularly subpar aerobics class I went to Monday. So this was at the gym in Gallup, which is totally decent. There’s some weights and some cardio equipment and way around the…

I just watched a short HBO documentary called, “I Can’t Do This but I Can Do That,” which is about 8 different kids with learning differences, generally ages 9 to 14. They’re talking about what school is like for them, how they’ve been dealing with their academic issues, how it feels to struggle with school,…

Today we discussed metaphors and similes in Walter Dean Myers’ “Love That Boy.” Nearly every student was engaged, excited. They smiled and giggled when the poem said the boy “grins like his Uncle Ben,” connecting it to when relatives say they look like their mothers or fathers. I was blown away when we got to…

After winter break, we are going to be reading a poem-based novel that refers to a lot of poems, so we are previewing these poems with the kids to get started. We’ve read “Dog” by Valerie Worth and “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, and the kids wrote their own wheelbarrow-style poems which I…

Secret we don’t admit to our students: most of the time, teachers love snow days EVEN MORE than kids do. It’s supposed to snow today. I mean, 40% chance means supposed to, right? It could be inches! Feet! So much we couldn’t possibly go to school tomorrow! There is next to no chance we will…

I have three students who have missed 11, 11, and 13 days of school each. This is 14-17% of the school year. Situation #1: Kid is incredibly smart, would probably be making all As if he were here everyday. He misses school for a bunch of reasons (meaning that his mom tells me different reasons…

I am so proud of my lowest readers. We finally got our DIBELS materials in just before break let out (this is a really quick basic test of reading fluency, or how many words they read correctly in one minute) and I quickly tested my lowest kids. Admittedly, I did this because I want to…