Grateful November 7: Reliable Guest Teachers and Personal Days

Good Lord, Monday was a long day.

Thirteen hours of a long day.

But, I'm ready for my work break (to you know, get married).

We have off yesterday (Election Day) and Friday (Veteran's Day), so I took off today (Wednesday), Thursday, next Monday, and next Tuesday.

That meant four days of sub plans and copies to prep.

I'm  not that teacher that just tosses together review sheets and calls it a day. I'm fortunate enough to not know my sub for the four days, but that she's also been in my classroom multiple times this year and knows my expectations.  The kids love her, which is a huge added bonus.  She'll follow my lesson plans and I know my students will actually be learning, which is really what matters.

I also cleaned my desk, which is normally a mild state of chaos.  I thrive well in that creative environment (go right brain!), but know that it's not appropriate to subject guest teachers to that.

March Madness, Teacher Style

Our own version of March madness has hit.  

Many of the teachers, myself included, have been stricken with an awful stomach bug, flu, and sinus infection trifecta.  I had to leave work early on Thursday for the second time in my career.  I'm so thankful that my grade level each took a few of my kids and were incredibly supportive.  Still, I wanted to fight through my illness and (foolishly) believed that since my temperature wasn't quite 100, I could stay and work.

I took a sick day on Friday (which always raises red flags) but actually wanted to be there. I missed a guest speaker (a doctor) talking about the negative impact drugs have on the human body.  Our next writing research project is on human body systems (see what we did there? High five for planning!)  My day consisted of a conference call in about a student, lots of medicine and breathe (DoTerra essential oil), and a half dozen naps.  Saturday consisted of a teacher training (all I did was sit) and helping a friend move tile (again, all I did was sit in the truck and be supportive).  As of Sunday, I'm starting to feel a little better and hoping for an easy week.  But this next week is the one before spring break, so we shall see...

There is a sense of martyr-ism with most teachers I know.  We, and I acknowledge that I am not only in this category but practically leading the whole parade, are such perfectionists that when it comes to trusting another person (especially if you don't know the substitute), it's darn near impossible.  There is a huge sense of guilt over leaving your students with another adult or feeling awful because you dumped more work on another teacher's plate.  I've had my prep sold several times this year because other teachers didn't have subs. There is hours of work put into sub plans and preparing powerpoint or smartnotebooks, all your copies, the whole time crossing one's fingers that 1, the job is actually picked up and 2, the substitute follows your plans and doesn't do something absurd like make up their own idea of what your students should learn that day.

(Substitutes going off book happens...a lot.  I get that part of teaching involves capitalizing on teachable moments, but at the same time, I know exactly where my students are in their educational journey of mastering the standard.  Don't throw something weird at them for a one day lesson that has no connection to anything else they've learned. That's not okay.)

 At the same time, I know it's something that I have to work on and get over because in the future (maternity leave, when I have kids), there will simply be days I can't go in to work and that will just have to be alright.

For every day that I'm gone from my classroom, it involves about two hours of prep work (for a six hour, eleven minute day with the munchkins.)  When I return, there is the joyous task of figuring out what actually got accomplished, what I need to reteach, and what students made unsavory choices and will spend their next recesses inside with me.

I don't know of any other job that requires this much work to prepare for a missed day. #teacher problems

Five days til spring break!

 

Substitutes

I will preface this post with the fact that I never student taught nor have I been a substitute. I only know the prep from a teacher's side and well, I put hours into prepping my activities for a sub. I get irritated when my plans are completely disregarded.

I know students won't behave perfectly with a sub.  However, today's sub was awful. It was for another classroom.

This sub fell asleep while proctoring an assessment. FELL ASLEEP. 

I'm pretty sure that's frowned upon in any situation, especially in a room with about three dozen ten year olds in the classroom.

What makes it worse is this individual used to be a teacher.

For shame.

Thank you!

I had a little bit of a rough day.  Our entire team had substitute teachers so we could administer AIMSweb RCBM benchmarking (oral reading fluency) and give the CORE test to students to see where they break down with phonics. 

It was also the second day of switching, so we are still working on procedures.

The students didn't make the best choices behavior wise and the substitutes didn't quite follow the lesson plans we left.  

Afterwards, we discussed as a grade level some switching that needed to occur between reading rooms based on student data and the next thing we knew, it was five pm.

Exhausted, I packed up my crate of things to work on this evening.  Tomorrow is open house, which means another late night.

However, I got home and received an email from donor's choose telling me another project had been fully funded.

This put things into perspective for me.

I am so grateful that I have supporters both near and far who are willing to help my students.  Whether it's classroom parents who donate extra supplies to corporations to strangers to family members and friends, I appreciate you all.  

Thank you for believing in me, but more importantly, in my students.

Thank you, Elder AWE, for supporting my students and donating to my project about copies of the amazing novel Tuck Everlasting.  

Thank you to Cynthia, Judy, Laurie and Kia motors for supporting my latest project on vocabulary centers and other resources for my classroom.  With my double dose of small group reading, I had to prepare for twelve different groups!  Your support makes this possible and I'm excited for trying out our new vocabulary centers with my students.

Thank you to my blog viewers, to my TpT supporters and to my fellow teachers who can always offer a kind smile or words of encouragement.  

Thank you all for reminding me about the joy in teaching.

-Ms. Vice

Writing Ideas

As a teacher, I think teaching writing is my weakness. I'm constantly in awe of my former co-teacher who is now in the general ed classroom. She makes teaching writing look so easy and her kids enjoy it.  I love picking up ideas from not only her, but the rest of my grade level as well.

This year we are starting using a new curriculum called Being a Writer.  I read through the teacher manuals this summer and I'm pretty excited by all the mentor texts that are used.  The lessons seem to blend nicely with the Common Core and are worded very similar to how I would start lessons.  I'm rarely a fan of a provided curriculum, but Being a Writer seems to make sense, spiral nicely and be student friendly.  Plus, there are sample anchor charts included which is great for days you have a substitute teacher.

At our school, we have writing conferences with our students and I keep all my information in a spiral bound notebook.

I use colored post-it tabs down the side with students' names.

I color code them for who I need to meet with more frequently.

I grade their essays and write my feedback on post-its.  I make a copy of the essay for the students to keep in their data folder, place the post-it on the student's page in my notebook, then we discuss their paper.  I try to have most of the conferences student-led by asking them the following questions:

What did you do well on?

What part are you the most proud of?

What did you take away from our mini-lessons that you tried in this paper?

Who did you peer edit with and what feedback did they give you?

How would you make this better?

What is still challenging for you as a writer?

However, I'm excited to try these new ideas this year:

Personalized word wall in their notebook.

 I'm awful at keeping up with word walls.  I try to do anchor charts of the vocabulary words we learn in our novels or our school's "power words of the week", but it's one of the things I tend to let slip through the cracks.  I love the idea of having students make their own because then the words are personalized.  With my inclusion classroom, some students are working on spelling sight words while others are working on multisyllabic words.  This allows students to feel empowered and write down the words they truly need help with.

On the subject of word walls, I also like this teacher's idea:

Instead of using a bulletin board (because I have so few and they're usually covered in anchor charts), a recipe box was used instead.  This would go great in our resources are of the room next to the dictionaries.  

This TpT freebie is great for students to organize different words and phrases:

I always teach "fanboys" with a fan shaped foldable, but I like this teacher's structure with an anchor chart:

I also found this idea on pinterest and it'd be a great review of text structure and topic sentences.

By using different colored sentence strips, you can review structures of a paragraph.  This idea also has potential with reading cross over by showing how to summarize an informational text.

This was developed by a primary teacher, but I love that it could be adapted as an extension center for early finishers.

It could also be used to review parts of a sentence with more struggling writers.

This anchor chart would be great for reviewing types of sentences:

I might modify it into a foldable in their notebooks because wall space is limited.

This is another great one for helping students with the different type of verbs, which is part of the Common Core standards:

I love new ideas!