My kids are so cute when they get into books. My intensive kids (i.e. my lowest readers. They range from a mid-first to a mid-second grade level but all have decoding and fluency issues) started a new book today. The target audience of this book is 6-7 year olds, fully 3 and 4 years younger…

One of my girls is having a rough time right now. She apparently had a lot of behavior issues last year and would have hysterical yelling or crying episodes because she felt like her teacher was being unfair and not treating her well (I know this teacher, and in all honesty he might have been).…

One of my kids cheated today, and it’s making me really upset. It was on a little nothing assignment. We do multiplication facts every day for 5 minutes. They work on a sheet of 100 facts with all one number (i.e. all the 2s problems) and they have 4 minutes to finish it. If they…

I’ve always made wishes on eyelashes. It’s a silly, childish thing, where you find an eyelash on your face, hold it on your finger, make a wish and blow it off. I’ve always made eyelash wishes, ever since I was little, and over time it’s become an instinctive thing I do without even thinking, like…

I made my kids have totally stilted conversation today. We had a whole class conversation over Morning Meeting about what we did over the long weekend, and whoever was the designated Responder had to ask the Sharer what they did. The Responder was then required to make one response (Wow! That sounds fun! Interesting. Oh.…

I know I said yesterday that I wanted to move to China, but today I’m really glad I didn’t. They were AWESOME! Relatively speaking. They worked hard, they mostly focused, they used transition words to write How To essays in 30 minutes (whaaaat??? That’s lightning for us!), they checked their answers with the inverse operation.…

Today I want to move to China and try something easier for a change. Like curing cancer. While riding a unicycle. And juggling flaming batons. Math almost made my brain explode. We’re working on subtraction with regrouping, because two thirds of my kids couldn’t do it (yes, they should have learned this 2 years ago.…

It’s been a long week and I’ll tell you about it later, but here’s my favorite thing that happened today. I was on playground duty and one of the sweetest kids was chatting with me. He’s in first grade and was pretty much not talking at all when he started kindergarten last year, so it’s…

One of the (many) benefits of not being a first year teacher is that I know a little bit about my students this year because I saw them around last year. For example, I know that they were very cliquey last year, that the girls were really sassy and would spend 15 minutes in the…

Phew. Week 1 is done. I’ve been thinking about writing something all week, but I didn’t want to write a post that was only ranting about how difficult my kids are, which is pretty much how I was feeling by evening every day, so I held off. Today, for the first time all week, I’m…