Mommy! I want 2!

The other day I was cutting up some pound cake for the kids. One piece for each, everyone gets the same.  Easy enough.

Until the 4 year old decides that he wants to be difficult.
I can see the temper tantrum coming on.
"I want 2!" (Anything to have more than his older brothers).

I looked at him. I looked at his piece of cake.
Remembering something we talked about in class the other day, I picked up the cake knife, made two cuts into his one piece, and then handed the plate back to him.

"Wow! I have 3!! That's better than 2!"

Guess where he is on the CGI trajectory?
Funny kid.

The Spelling Police

This past week I experienced something at school that made me cringe. It made me squirm in my chair and wish I could curl up into a ball, or mysteriously teleport myself some place else.

It wasn’t the teacher, or the student, that was making me cringe. It was a loving, well meaning parent.

I was observing a goal setting conference for a 4th grade boy. At the beginning of the conference introductions were made by the student and samples of well executed, self-selected school work were taken out and shown to the parents. It showed us all what a great job the student has been doing. After looking at his writing journal entries, this particular student decided that one of the goals he would like to set was to get better at brainstorming for new ideas and writing first drafts of his small moment stories. It was to do his best to get his ideas down on paper and not worry so much about what it looked like in the first draft. This was something that his teacher had been trying to stress to the students; that rough drafts don’t have to be perfect, it’s all about getting your ideas down on paper. Grammar, spelling and punctuation can be dealt with later. That’s what revision and editing is for, after all! What is important is writing about things that are interesting to you, and working at how to get it down on paper.

Knowing this particular student, the teacher (and I) agreed that this was an important goal for him. We knew he had lots of great ideas in his head, if he could only just get them out! From looking through his writing journal and seeing all the erasing, rewriting, erasing, and rewriting, it was not hard to imagine that this might stifle his creativity.

So, after talking through this goal, the student began to write down it down on the worksheet in front of him. And at this point, his mother started correcting his wording, his spelling and his punctuation as he went. All while saying what a great goal he had set.

You can imagine how my eyebrows shot up as I met the eyes of my master teacher after the 4th or 5th “helpful” correction suggested by the mother. My heart went out to this poor kid. It’s hard enough to be the center of the room’s attention without someone pointing out every minor mistake you make!

It brought to mind many of the things that we discussed when we were reading “How to Talk so Kids Can Learn” by Faber & Mazlish. I could feel all the positive energy that we had all just poured forth on this kid go swirling around the drain.

It also served as a reminder to me about how our words can have an enormous effect on how a student looks at himself or his ability as a writer. After the first 5 minutes of the conference, I saw a boy who knew he had great potential as a writer. He was a creator of narrative and expository writing. He was smiling and proud of his work. Five minutes later, that same boy was slumping in his chair, chin on chest, eyes aimed at the desktop.

Now extrapolate that to a classroom full of kids who aren’t sure that they can write. I can either choose to be the teacher who gets her students excited about telling all about themselves, their interests, and their ideas; or I can be the teacher who has to make sure that there is proper punctuation at all times. Don’t get me wrong, writing conventions are important. But they are important not as a way to tie students down, but to enhance what they have written in the final product. After all, it’s that was revision and editing is for?

I didn't realize that was there...

This week I was once again reminded of how much I haven’t been paying attention to the things around me. It’s so easy to take everything at face value without stopping to think about why things are the way they are.



This week I read the first 3 chapters from “Word Identification Strategies” by Barbara Fox and I began looking at the classrooms I went into in a whole new way. I walked into Ms. Bunny’s room for the first time since school ended last spring and examples of what I had been reading about began to jump out at me. I had been in this classroom more than any other over the last four years, and until now, my mind just took for granted the things that I saw! I have spent too much time seeing the forest and not the trees that make it up.

There are words and labels all over the room. “Desk, chair, calendar, clock, red, blue, green, flower, and airplane”; the list goes on and on. The words within the posted daily schedule are words with corresponding pictures. It’s the same with the tables and graphs that are part of the daily morning routine on the Activeboard. The students' names are everywhere throughout the classroom. On their pencil boxes, on the white board, under pictures they drew of themselves.

When I first entered, the students were presenting their homework for the week. This week’s letter was “F”. Their kindergarten homework consists of a letter of the week that they need to make a “project” for. It is usually a standard piece of paper or construction paper with words starting with that letter. They can be cut out of magazines, clip art from the computer, small glued objects, or pictures drawn by the student. During sharing, they tell their classmates about what they did, then they get in groups of 2 or 3 (including someone who “forgot” their homework) and they talk about it “knee to knee” on the floor. I had known about this homework since my son was in this class 4 years ago, so it was familiar to me. But this is the first time I actually considered WHY she arranged the “homework” like this!

I could envision the higher level of thinking the student needed to use to complete this (as opposed to just coloring pictures given to them or tracing words). I saw the opportunity for different learning styles to come into play (draw, write letters, computer skills, verbal, possible 3D projects as well). And I saw it as an important way of incorporating families into the importance of learning together and a way to get the students to think about words at home. I saw that by having students "teach" what they knew, they were advancing their own understanding. I hadn’t realized any of that until I began to look at it in a new way through my own learning of literacy.

To quote Kevin Henkes, "all I can say is "WOW"".

What other trees have I not been noticing? It’s a huge forest…

Sesame Street: African Alphabet

Why Blog?

I spend a good part of everyday just GOING NONSTOP; doing readings for school, doing homework, doing housework, feeding my kids, making sure they’ve done the work they are supposed to have done, working in the classroom and taking care of all the minutia of my daily life. GOING, GOING, GOING. There are many times that I just collapse at the end of the day and I am too tired to reflect on much of anything other than who is going to be voted off of Survivor this week! Whether it’s for a class or just for my own self reflection, the physical act of taking the time to sit down and write for a blog requires that I stop and take a deep breath; it makes me reflect on some part of what I am learning and experiencing. It helps to give me a format to put down things that I want to remember and be able to reference in the future. It's too easy to go through life and forget things if you don't take the time to think, reflect, and write down.

I am hoping that this act of reflecting will help me to concentrate on WHY I want to put myself through all this hard work and effort. I’m hoping it will help me to remember what is important to me and give me the motivation to keep going. I’m hoping that it gives me the pat on the back I need to feel like I am accomplishing something important.

And just like those kindergarteners who are looking back at the writing journal they have created throughout the year and the progress they have made, I am looking forward to being able to look back at what I have written here to see how much I have learned throughout this adventure I have undertaken.

"Who wants to share what you wrote?"

I have always been fascinated by the fact that a kindergartener can start the school year out unable to write their own name and by the time the year is over they are reading and writing. Reading about emergent literacy this week has reminded me more about some of the reasons why I love Kindergarten!

One of my favorite teachers (I’ll call her Ms. Bunny) once told me that every child has something to say, and they love to talk about themselves. How true! Every year she has her kindergarteners start a writing journal. Yes, most of them don’t know how to write their own names yet, but they have a writing journal that they write in at least 2 times a week, if not more! She tells them that they will be writing stories about themselves, their families, the things they like, and the activities they enjoy doing. They start out by using pictures, words with made up spelling, whatever they are capable of doing. She gives them a writing prompt such as, “what is your favorite animal?” or “what did you do this weekend?” or “if you could have any pet, what would it be?” and off they go. Sometimes she has them sound out words themselves; sometimes in the beginning, she will have them dictate to her what they want her to write to go with their picture.


From time to time she has them share what they have been writing with the class. “Who wants to share with us what you wrote?” Even the kid who only drew a picture the first week of school raises his hand to share. They bring their journals up to the document camera and tell their classmates all about the “story” they wrote. Their classmates ask questions and they proudly answer. Ms. Bunny is sure to give very specific praise for something that they did well, for all to hear, and they are now confident that they can be a writer, too.

As the year progresses, I love to look through the journals from beginning to end. The progress they make is amazing! Words start to show up, then sentences and whole stories. From time to time, Ms. Bunny has them look back in their own journals, pointing out to them how much they have learned and how hard they have all worked. “Remember when we first started Kindergarten….? Look at what you just wrote. WOW!”

This is just one of the literacy activities I have observed in that classroom. Reading “just right” books to themselves, their parents, and their classmates, written words posted on items all around the classroom, fabulous interactive activities on the Activeboard to learn sight words, daily reading opportunities built into the routines of the day, and the list goes on and on.

It’s an intimidating prospect, taking on the literacy education of these young minds. What we do early on has such an effect on their future as students. I only hope I can learn from those good examples I see as I go along, and always keep my eyes open for further opportunities to learn.

This is a link I found for a first grade Writer's Workshop in a real classroom:

A Day in the Life of our Writing Workshop

And another that introduces the idea of Writer's Workshop by Reading Rockets (http://www.readingrockets.org/)

Watch and Learn: Writing

From Kindergarten Chaos blog:

evolution of writing workshop