Today we finished our read-aloud book that we’ve been reading for a few months now. It was fun, because the ending is very dramatic and involves a couple cliffhangers plus some false foreshadowing that our heroes lost the big game. But in the end they win, and it’s very exciting. My kids were too funny,…

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…

On the 100th Day of School, we did some writing to make two class books. The first book was about how you would spend $100. That one was cute to read, as I have a few students who are generously planning to buy both me and their parents a new car with their imaginary money.…

One of the best decisions I’ve made recently is to record myself reading a lot of the little easy readers for our listening center. After listening to the libritos so many times, the kids are way more apt to pick them up and start reading them by themselves…. and more apt to pick up other…

There is something inherently emasculating about revealing oneself as a preschool teacher in conversation with strangers.  It’s always an interesting social experiment, however, and I usually take one of three routes: simply state that I teach pre-K, go vague and say that I work with younger elementary students, or drop the TFA bomb and let…

There is the day that takes place from 8:20am until 3:00pm. That day brings me a lot of joy. Today it looked like this: It was our 100th Day of School, so we began the morning by making a huge deal out of Calendar Math, presenting our 100th Day of School projects, and making crowns…

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…

Sometimes on a Sunday evening, you need some motivation… A Pep Talk from Kid President And if that doesn’t work, a funny story from last week: My school is, among many other things, a STEM magnet school. So once every four weeks or so, we go to Engineering Lab for a half hour a day…

It was the summer of the read aloud. I can’t remember exactly how old I was, somewhere between first and third grade. And I have no idea how it started, or why he chose this book. But my family has a boat, and when I was a kid we’d go out on the boat nearly…