"Ms. Haley! Ms. Haley!! Look how I remembered to write the small r's!"

"S, remember that writing is quiet time. We don't yell."

With those words halfway out of my mouth, I was already kicking myself. Even as I read them now I hate myself for it. S and I have been working to perfect her name-writing for a whole week. The only thing she has left to learn is to remember to use lowercase r's. Not one of my finer moments.

As I get more used to the everyday flow of teaching, I have developed standard responses for dealing with smaller things. Let's think of it as a coping mechanism that I use to reduce the overwhelming stress of making hundreds of decisions every day. However, these coping mechanisms are not in any way responsive to individual students. They do not encourage or foster learning. I need to remember that teaching is not just about getting through material and actually stop to appreciate the small moments, Lucy Calkins style.

wishlist shortlist

I am so excited to say that very little from my wishlist is still wished for! I basically only need the table and chairs and I will have a dramatic play station!

Thank you, gpas.

I asked for more chairs

You know what I got?

Avoided. All day.

field trip status

Proposal 1: Rejected because we need to give four weeks advance notice. Something that wasn't mentioned until it was rejected.

Proposal 2: Rejected because there is no money. There was never money. Only the empty promise of money from someone who clearly did not verify their information.

Alas.

upcoming unit: non-fiction

wishlist

• child-size table and chairs
• old phone book
• lots and lots of menus
• an apron or two (kicking myself for throwing out my server aprons "when will I ever need those again?")
• serving tray
• optional: fake food, plastic flatware, pretend stove, checkered table cloth, restaurant check pads

I am sitting writing my unit up for non-fiction and my head is swimming with ideas, if only I had unlimited time and money. I am imagining a nook in my classroom (because, who doesn't have extra room?) with a little spot set up that could be a restaurant or a kitchen so that they can explore with making lists, writing dinner orders, reading and creating menus, reading and creating recipes, making shopping lists... the possibilities are endless, as they say.

I wish I had time to write another grant, but this unit starts in a week! How can I make this happen?

The Land of I Can

From the beginning, I knew that I wanted a flashy tracker for my kiddies. I wanted them to be very invested, so I new I needed something visual. A week before school started I came across a video from the unstoppable Ingrid Siss and I knew it was love.

Essentially, over the course of the year we will all work to make The Land of I Can (LoIC) beautiful by adding elements as students master certain benchmarks (a ray on the sun for naming all their shapes, a petal on one of the flowers for counting to 100, etc.). Of the maybe 40 precious hours I had in my classroom before school started, I probably spent 10 of them on this board.

Ever since that moment, I have been patiently waiting for when we could start adding to LoIC. And finally, the day came.

As of Friday, three of my babies can name all of their upper- and lowercase letters, so we added their hard-earned leaves to the tree. I'm hoping to have many more by the end of this week!

mr. agitated moves away

Unfortunately, it is his last day at our school. He mentioned that he was "not coming back to this school ever again" on Monday, but I didn't pay much attention until his mother picked him up on Wednesday and confirmed that they bought a house in the suburbs and are moving this weekend.

Of course, I don't want any of my babies to leave, but he is my comic relief, and since lately humor is not an enormous part of my life I am really going to miss having him around. The funniest children are really the ones who have no idea that they are funny.

I hope his new teacher finds him just as amusing as I do.