“Busy” seems to be the way I am describing my life more and more these days. As we come again to the end of another month and pass the milestone of the 100th Day of school, it is hard to believe how far we have come. I hope everyone had an enjoyable break. Reentry has been difficult for some of us, but as we have moved through the week, we are getting back into the swing of our kindergarten days.
I spent last weekend in Atlanta at the NEA Leadership Summit. It is always re-energizing to be with committed professionals who enjoy talking about creating student -entered schools and goals. We had Daniel Pink, author of the book Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us as the keynote speaker on Friday. People become more motivated when they see progress being made and when they helping to make that progress. The second term report cards will be coming out in just a few weeks, which has made me think differently about how I will share with the students about their progress during this term.
Another term I learned was “profersonal” during a digital media seminar. I have always found this blog to be both a little personal and a little professional, which I hope helps you see my thinking as a teacher with the students.
This marks the part of the year when our learning being to “click” for many students and when learning becomes more complex as we build upon skills we have previously learned. Just this week, we began to practice and understand the concept of skip counting by 5s. Many students can skip count by rote memory, but it takes it to another level when you are putting it into practice with manipulatives or use of tally marks.
We will also be doing more spelling and more with sight words in the coming weeks. I am making it a personal goal to have the students write everyday with modeling, whether in their journals, or on writing paper of their choosing. I want to see if this practice will make them apply more of the skills they are learning (i.e. lowercase handwriting, sounding out of words, sentence punctuation.) You can encourage this practice as home by making homemade cards, books and signs with your child.
Lastly, I hope you saw my invite to our Term 2 Coffee Chat, which will be held next Friday morning, March 7 from 8:20-8:50 a.m. in our classroom. I think our term 1 chat was informative, and I hope this to be as well.
Here’s to Spring starting three weeks from today!
