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.

its midterm season somewhere

But here, it feels like finals. I have a laundry list of things due next week: unit plans for November, assessments for the end of November, lesson plans for the week after next, and first quarter grades.

Not to mention I'm trying to get my literacy centers up and running in a more rigorous way.

And then we just got an email that we need to revise all of our lessons for next week by Sunday night.

It's 7:48, the kids are about to arrive, and I just want to hang my head for the day.

Some days, one half of me wants to split away from the other and just shout, "WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE."

Even on a day when K pulls a chair out for a friend and S tells me he loves to read.

Bruins v. Hawks

Hockey is like kindergarten - if you hit each other, you get a time out.

a hell of a day at school, sir

Fifty kindergartners were left more or less unattended at lunch.

Poor N threw up in the bathroom like it was the most normal thing in the world and then when right back to playing. Literally not a single complaint. It made me wonder how often it happens.

Somebody slapped a teacher.

Oh, and a student brought a box-cutter to school.

It's Friday.

field trips

Taking a field trip is something I would love to do with my kids - their behavior is excellent and I know they could handle it.

First, I was told that we could only take free field trips. Then, I was asked why on earth kindergarten didn't have any field trips planned. I pointed out that free field trips appropriate for kinder might be challenging to find. Money was found. Life goes on. But today was the kicker.

"We would love to take them to LegoLand! They have such a great program for field trips."

"Can you explain how that relates to the reading curriculum?"

... hmm, ok.