How's It Going? (Chapters 1, 2, and 3)

When I initially found out we were using this book for our Book Blogs this semester, I was extremely exciting. Writing has always been something so very important and personal to me that I even use it as an outlet now as an adult whenever I need to express how I am feeling. Becoming an educator, I became particularly interested in the writing continuum, especially since I teach beginning writers. My first thought was "How can I teach someone how to write?" The thought was a scary thought for me. Joining my team at the school that I teach in now, I volunteered to plan writing for our grade level. Everyone warned me not to as a first-year teacher because of how difficult it is to plan writing and how they felt as if the curriculum used for writing wasn't as structured for Kindergarten. That's when I was introduced to Lucy. Lucy Calkins, that is. Upon looking through her texts giving teachers direction as to how to launch Writer's Workshop, I am became thrilled yet anxious. Although I agreed with the format and the way in which to introduce the mini lessons to students, I began to wonder how my particular group of students would adapt and respond to it. I think it started off great and I loved how my students got the chance to really show their skills as writers. However, I noticed that I really didn't know how to help my students or where exactly they were in the writing process. It was then I realized that I was lacking the most important part of Writer's Workshop, initiating writing conferences with my students. Now that I have read the first few chapters of Carl Anderson's How's It Going, I have a more solidified understanding of the importance of the writing conference.

One of the biggest takeaways that I got from the first chapter is understanding the purpose of the writing conference. Anderson focuses on two main points for the structure of the conference:

Conversation about the work the child is doing as a writer and Conversation about how the child can become a better writer (Anderson, 17, 2000). 

The author then dives deep into the three steps of conferencing where we focus directly on the work that students are doing as writers, making an assessment of what they are doing as writers, and putting together a detailed picture of the work that the child is doing as a writer.

From Chapter 2, the biggest takeaway that I got was the examples of the kinds of work that writers do when they compose pieces and the strategies that they might use to compose them. I thought that this was extremely helpful when thinking about ways to help students figure out what tools they can use when they are working on a certain piece of writing.

Also, the questions suggested on page 29 of Chapter 2 were really helpful in thinking abut how to start conversations in conferences because one of the main things I was pondering about was how to initiate conversations with students during their writing so things such as "How's it going? or What are you doing as a writer today?" seem to be really great lead in questions to initiate conversation and get students to begin talking through their writing process. I particularly liked the rationale that Anderson uses behind starting conversations this way. He states, "By using a predictable opening, I'm simply taking advantage of students' implicit knowledge of the nature of conversation, and that some conversations begin in predictable ways" (Anderson, 29, 2000). This then creates routine for students and they know what to expect during writing conferences.

In chapter 3, I was particularly interested in teaching students about their role in the conference. The chart on page 83 breaks down what is expected of the student in the first and second part of the conversation. In the first part, the student sets an agenda for the conversation by describing their work and then responding to the teacher's questions. In the second part, the students listen carefully to the teacher's feedback. I particularly like the way Anderson breaks down each role respectively so that everyone knows what they're supposed to be doing. I think the most important part of all this would be to explicitly teach and model for students what and how this conversation might look so that they understand when they begin their conversations.

All in all, I am really excited to continue reading the next few chapters and understanding how to make all of these great ideas practical in the classroom. I look forward to exploring ways to monitor which conversations to have with certain students and how to keep track. This book has given so much insight thus far and I'm sure it will become a very helpful tool for me in the near future.

New Year, New Beginnings

Commonalities Across the Board

What a month January has been! I can't believe so much time has gone by with my girls and that the year is almost done. There has been so much that I have learned from my girls thus far and we still have so much more work to do. Reflecting on my TiPs chart, I've been focusing a lot on my actual instruction and the lessons that went great and why they went great and they lessons that failed horribly. The main commonality that I noticed among last month was the fact that the lessons where I really prevailed consisted of students interests and choices being a main factor around the successes. In areas where I wasn't so successful consisted of times when my understanding of what I wanted students to gain wasn't clear or students lacked clarity of the objective or if it was just plain out boring to my students. Looking at all of these reflections give me better insight on how to plan for next month.

Venting and Frustration

I felt as if January was such a transformational month for me because not only did I have a better understanding for my class and what resources were available to me to meet their needs, but I had also enlightened myself about the parallel I had been facing at my school. I had been torn between the struggle of following suit with what the rest of my grade level team had decided to conform to because it is "easier" or stepping outside of the box and challenging myself to dive deep with my students and stimulating their inquiry. The issue that I have been constantly battling with is playing it safe or actually finding and making the time to do what I know works best for kids. I have become extremely frustrated with the ever-so-cumbersome testing that is "mandatory" for all grade levels.

I became a part of our school's Assessment Team in an effort to better inform myself about how grade level assessments are created and how the data is used to better plan for instruction. Although I believe assessments give us very valuable and usable data, I found the Kindergarten assessments particularly to be extremely problematic. Some of the questions I think were biased and did not cater to students' specific and unique experiences. Also, I felt as if the assessments were way too long for the attention span of Kindergarteners and that it was not thoughtful at all to only give them a multiple choice test. I could go on and on about the problematic factors of these tests and how much time from instruction was taken away because I had to complete them. I feel as if I was doing a disservice to my students and missed out on critical instruction time. Now I am grappling with how to meaningfully assess my students without it requiring them to miss so much valuable instructional time.

Celebrations
Besides some of the frustration that I have felt this past month and some of the criticism among peers, I have learned that my students are uniquely themselves and they enjoy coming into a classroom environment that they are welcomed to bring in all facets of their lives.

Using writing to teach others has been particularly exciting as students explore the meaning of American symbols

 

I also noticed that students lacked the opportunity to read books of their interest and engage in them just for fun

Lastly, I know my classroom may look very different from "traditional" classrooms but if there's one thing we know how to do well.....it's how to get down! :-) 

I'm excited to see where February takes us!

October Book Blog- Pathways to the Common Core Ch. 1-4

"Pathways to the Common Core" Reflection

Square

"The Common Core Standards are a big deal. Adopted by forty-five states so far, the standards represent the most sweeping reform of the K-12 curriculum that has ever occurred in this country. It is safe to say that across the entire history of American education, no single document will have played a more influential role over what is taught in our schools. The standards are already affecting what is published, mandated, and tested in schools--and also what is marginalized and neglected. Any educator who wants to play a role in shaping what happens in schools, therefore, needs a deep understanding of these standards. That understanding is necessary for anyone wanting to be a co-constructor of the future of instruction and curriculum and, indeed, of public education across America." (Calkins, 1)

When reading this book, this is one of the very first quotes that stuck out to me, mainly because the Common Core Standards are such a big deal. I remember when I was interviewing to become a teacher and every single principal must have asked me "So what do you know about the Common Core?" I remember being bewildered not having a clue what they were even talking about. I quickly learned and became very familiar with the standards. This quote resonated with me particularly because of what it says how the standards are affecting what is marginalized and neglected in schools. The new standards call for teachers to not just teach students the "what" and the "how", but it also requires them to dig into the "why" as well. For many years, that was often the big piece of the puzzle that many students were missing and were just in school just to be in school but not really understanding why they were learning what they were learning. Because of this was the main reason that this quote squared with my thinking about the implementation and use of the Common Core State Standards.

Triangle

"When NCLB expectations became the law of the land, there was zero emphasis on writing. Writing was not even mentioned in those mandates. What a reversal! Now, in these new standards, the emphasis on writing standards is parallel to and equal to the emphasis on reading, and furthermore, one can't help but think that reading will be assessed through writing, making writing even more critical." (Calkins, 10)

When I read this quote I initially got excited! Anybody who knows me, knows how passionate I am about writing and why I think it is so important especially with young children. The fact that in the past there was zero emphasis on writing really concerns me on how my generation and the generation before me was taught when the subject of writing was considered. It excites me to know that with these new standards, an emphasis is placed that reading and writing somewhat go hand-in-hand. As Flint says, "Children learn to read and write by reading and writing." Being that I am a Kindergarten teacher and that I plan writing for my team, I am grateful to have been able to engage with the text and understand how to better make use of the standards in the classroom and help my students to understand them as well.

Circle

"Undoubtedly students will need explicit instruction in high-level comprehension. They'll need a repertoire of strategies that undergird these reading skills. They'll need skills broken down into manageable steps, and then they'll need to practice these steps and get expert feedback along the way. They'll need lots of repeated practice, on a variety of texts. As they do this practice, teachers will need assessments that will allow them to carefully calibrate their teaching, to move kids up levels of skill and text difficulty. They'll also need structures that will make reading work visible--structures such as reading partners and clubs, which give students opportunities to have the rich literary conversations about fiction and nonfiction that the standards call for. Teachers will also need to focus on methods of giving feedback while kids are practicing these skills, with gradual release and decreasing scaffolds, to lead students to internalize these skills." (Calkins, 30)

This particular quote still circles around in my head because it describes the methodological process of how to explicitly teach high-level comprehension. Although I agree with the build upon process the author has set in place, that still doesn't lower my anxiety about properly executing this in the classroom. For some reason this year I feel as if I am constantly being observed and instead of focusing on if whether or not what I am doing is truly benefiting students and meeting their needs, I am more focused on "Am I doing this right?" I am working to shift my mindset about this but I can't help but to feel if I am one step off that my students might not fully learn and master all that they need to know before they leave my care and head toward First Grade. Because of this, I am thoroughly excited about continuing to read and learn about how to use the Common Core Standards in an effort to inform my practice and work for the betterment of my students.

April Theory in Practice Connections

April has seen to just come and go! With Spring Break taking up a week of our time together, I was nervous that my students would fall behind in this month, however, they surprised me so much with how far they have come! It's just very rewarding as an educator to see students who came in not even speaking have full on conversations about their learning and being very excited to share what they know to others. I am just honored to have had a helping hand in helping my little people blossom. I think that this month I was trying to make learning as fun and hands-on as possible also while trying to be culturally responsive to my students various backgrounds. I also have been trying to focus more on letting students take control of their own learning. The challenges I have been experiencing is their age level and them not necessarily knowing how to take ownership of their learning and looking to me for directions and answers all at once. I've been attempting to introduce strategies to show them just how powerful they can be even for little people.

I big subject that I really wanted my students to do more of this month was science. As I was going over the standards and everything we've covered so far. I noticed that they have had very little opportunities to really build their scientific thinking and act as scientists so I wanted to make sure that they got the opportunity to do just that.

                                                                

Recording the life cycle of a butterfly                                                        Experimenting with electricity

It was so great really engaging with a topic that they don't get explicitly taught as much and really being interested in the content.

In doing the Digital Storytelling Project, exploring my students' communities was also a big challenge for me as well mainly because my students do not come from the safest of neighborhoods. However, as I reflected when piecing the project together, I really that there are so many strengths that my students possess just by being a resident of their neighborhood and there is also value and knowledge that they bring with them to the classroom as a result of it. I wanted to expand upon this and let my students be able to see themselves and their communities within the realms of our classroom.

                                

I think that our classroom community has grown so much as a result of these projects! I am extremely excited to see how much further we will go together as we continue to learn and grow. By the same token, it saddens me to know that I only have one more month to make a lasting impact on these phenomenal students' lives. I am doing my best to make the most out of my time left with them and can't wait to witness their growth in the end.

March Theory in Practice Connections

March was definitely a month of growth for both myself and my students! I think collectively we learned so much about ourselves and what we could do individually and as a class! I can definitely say that this month was really centered on strategies around building students conceptual knowledge of mathematics as well as get them really thinking about their thinking. I can't believe how far we've come together and yet how close we are to the end. However, considering our late start I think that we've been making remarkable strides.

The biggest challenges that we were seeing in the classroom this month were getting friends to get along with one another and really learn how to show empathy towards each other. I remember discussing in our psychology class about how understanding the feelings and emotions of others can be a difficult trait to grasp for four-year-olds because most of them are still in that preoccupational stage. I really learned to leverage Bailey's text as a guide for a lot of strategies to help my students learn to be caring towards how they make others feel.

I think one of the coolest and most memorable lessons that we had during the month of March was watching my students learn to decompose numbers which I thought would be really difficult for them to grasp at first but they rocked it. I taught them all of the different ways to decompose numbers and then I let them explore with these different methods in their math stations.

They could find it in books!  

Build it!

Make it in the ten-frame!

Draw it on the number line!

And use the geoboards to make it!

Watching my kids actively engage in these math centers made me so very proud to watch! The only thing that didn't go as well as I would have liked for it to was the transition to the different centers the first time we engaged in the activity mainly because they were so eager to try all the centers because they were so excited! However, I can tell that students actually learned from these engagements because the assessments to follow up were remarkable.

      

My little people definitely surprised me with all of the great things that they were able to accomplish in mathematics and the biggest thing that I learned was when work is fun, engaging, relative, and hands-on to students, that is truly when they learn the best and are more likely to retain knowledge. Now my kids can spot the number four out a mile away no matter what form it comes in!

Can't wait to see where April brings us! :-)

Morning Meeting (1-100)

First off, let me start by saying how much I have enjoyed reading this book so far! I was so excited to actually have a copy of this book and to be able to use it because Morning Meeting is an essential part of Pre-K. It not only gives children the opportunity to see value and importance in all of their classmates, but it also really helps students to develop their socioemotional skills.

The author does a great job so far with providing little anecdotal stories throughout the chapters because it really helps you to visualize how this could actually play out in a classroom. I also like the fact that the purpose of each topic is discussed so that the teacher can understand why it is so essential. Including possible questions that may arise for teachers reading the book and providing the answers to each question was extremely helpful especially for somebody like me. However, the true treasure of the book (and yes this is me peeking way ahead) is the appendix provided at the back of the book that gives you boundless resources.

Now I am going to provide some key quotes that really stuck out to me in the book:

Research indicates that educators who establish firm boundaries, foster warm personal relationships in the classroom, and enable students to have an impact on their environment strengthen students' attachment to their school, their positive behaviors. (Elias et al. 1997, 44)

This was one of the first quotes that I definitely wanted to take note of mainly because when I started in my classroom I had to get acquainted with my students and I knew the best way for me to do that was to immediately attempt to form relationships with them. I knew that that a way to do this was through Morning Meeting. It was just really comforting to know that research has been done to prove that by establishing the positive relationships with students it benefits them in more ways than one.

Meetings are rich with opportunities for students to assume responsibility and actively participate. (Kriete, 1999, p. 23)

This quote stood out to me because it was accompanied by a photo of two students up writing on the Morning Message. Reading this quote and looking at the picture just made me think about how the meeting is really less about me and more about students. They should be able to run the entire meeting while the teacher is just there as a facilitator. However, I know that for my kids they would need a lot of modeling and opportunities to practice before they could virtually run the morning meeting with less guidance from me. But, it is a great thought to have in mind for the beginning of the year because you have more time to really teach students how to take ownership of Morning Meeting.

Most teachers find it helpful to have a sign-up system which ensures that each child is a sharer at least once a week. Children sign up to share the day before Meeting or that same morning. Another way is to assign each child a regular day for sharing. (Kriete, 1999, p. 61)

I was sooooo happy to read this!! I have been having a huge issue in my class with children not being able to understand that not everyone will get a chance to share all at once and that we all have to take turns to share. Also, it helped me to consider the children who never get a chance to share at all. I think a sharing sign-up sheet is totally doable for my students. However, I think that the first couple of implementations of this would definitely consist of me assigning children to share for that day. I also do think it could work with students signing up for a day once they understand the method of how signing up works and the guidelines that go with it. I think this idea could be really beneficial for some of my more chatty students and it would also give them a reason behind why they have to take turns sharing.

Younger children tend to blurt out what they need to say when they need to say it. With the help of their teacher, however, they are very able to recognize that some news is serious and demands a different kind of response than other, lighter news.

This quote was very relevant to my classroom setting because my students always tend to blurt out things when students are in mid-sentence of presenting. I have found this to be something very difficult for me to get around during Circle Time. Lately I've been trying to give some students something else related to the topic to discuss while I am talking to the rest of the students about the topic. It seems to have been working in terms of blurting out but I'm not sure if it's really effective in terms of them paying attention. However, I am glad the book touched on this a little. I just wish they would've suggested more resources about how to teach young children to begin to take turns in conversations.

All in all, I have really enjoyed reading the first couple of pages of Morning Meeting and like I stated earlier, I am extremely excited to have the book! The information that I have been discovering from it has been priceless and I cannot wait to see what other considerations are present when thinking about how to facilitate  one of the most important parts of the day.

 

 

February Theory in Practice Connections

February has definitely been such an eye opener for me! I've learned so much about myself and my kids in this short but sweet month (the snow days didn't help much with shortening the month even more lol) All in all, I must say this was a big month for WRITING! I want my students to engage more with pleasure writing so I allowed for them for them to have ample opportunities to write whenever they want and for whatever reason. I really wanted my students to have journals so that I could make free writing easily accessible for them, however, of course my school doesn't have the funds to provide for such a resource (yes this is sarcasm) But despite that, I had to get creative so I made notebooks for my kids using construction paper and by placing writing tablet paper on the inside. I also put my students' names and pictures on the front of them to add its own personalized flare. Students have started off by recording things they learned about in the stories we had been reading:

These writing engagements have been really remarkable to watch and are perfect ways to assess students to see for one, if they were actually interested in the story (because they want to write about it) and for two, whether or not they understood the objective that was at hand.

The Strategies that Work text has been working wonders for me so far and I'm so excited to try out and fail, succeed, and experiment with many more strategies. The ones that were really fun was my first attempts with the List/Group/Label strategy and also the Turn & Talks. At first my kids were really confused as to how to turn and talk to their neighbors but now they seem to really like it and it gives them an opportunity to get those talkative jitters out. 

This month we really talked a lot about Famous African Americans which I thought may have been a difficult concept for my students to grasp but they were so interested and engaged. They didn't know that they, too, could grow up to invent something or be famous for an awesome reason. My goal in the future is to not only talk to them about Famous African Americans during February, but make it an ongoing discussion throughout the year. 

I noticed that a lot of my lows this month were  in mathematical instruction. I'm really excited about diving deep in the Van de Walle text and finding more innovative ways to really effective instruct my students and create an excitement about math for them. 

I also really benefited from reading Conscious Discipline this month and addressing my idea of Positive Intent and what Choices mean in my classroom. In reading these chapters, I found out about a lot of great new ideas that I plan to really try to implement in my classroom to make it a better place for both my students and myself. I'm nervous about entering March mainly because I feel like it's grind time and it's so many things I still haven't covered yet that they need to know before they go to Kindergarten. I feel so much pressure on myself especially for some of my students who are still falling behind a little bit. However, I plan to make the best of this month and learn all I can about my students and ask them about the personal goals that they have for themselves and what they want to learn and try my best to meet those needs so if I am not able to do as much as I wanted to, above all else, I was able to do something that matters to my kids! :-)