Almost every teacher I know (well, at least the ones who like children) have a “take home” club. These are the kids who you love so much you would take them home in a heartbeat. I had one last year, and I have another couple this year. Let me tell you about one of them.…

Here’s my favorite adorable kid thing that happened today. We are reading Holes as a class, and my kids LOVE IT. They keep taking it home to read ahead, and even though this is a book about a year above most of their reading levels, they are reading and comprehending it anyway through the sheer…

Those of you who’ve been with me for a while may remember that my kids this year are an especially challenging bunch, with low attention spans and lower test scores. Today, 3 weeks from the end of their fourth grade year, we worked on the following concepts: story structure including conflict and climax, vocabulary words…

It has been a REALLY long time since I’ve written, and I think it’s just because I am so incredibly busy and exhausted that I haven’t had the time. Rather than try to catch up on stuff since the last post, here are some little things that I am grateful for. The notes my kids…

I was playing hangman with my kids in afterschool for a few minutes before the bus left. One of my kids chose, as her puzzle, “Ms. EMinNM love’s us!” and I thought it was so cute that I overlooked the improper apostrophe. My favorite was this one though. My puzzle was “Chicken Noodle Soup” and…

Today we finished our read-aloud book that we’ve been reading for a few months now. It was fun, because the ending is very dramatic and involves a couple cliffhangers plus some false foreshadowing that our heroes lost the big game. But in the end they win, and it’s very exciting. My kids were too funny,…

Last weekend was our last elementary school basketball tournament. Our boys had some issues, because they are actually way more sensitive than our girls. This happened last year too. When the girls encounter difficulties, they toughen up and prove they aren’t scared by playing harder. It takes a lot more to break our girls. The…

My kids had to take a Nation’s Report Card test today. It was a disaster. First of all, no one met with us or gave us any information about what we should do to prepare things. They said they would take care of everything. But then they got here and it turns out we need…

Here are some stories my kids told me yesterday: From my kid who has been sick for two days and got back yesterday. She kept complaining that her legs really hurt (which, as someone recovering from the same bug, I know is really painful) but stuck it out for a while. Then she started being…

I don’t want to talk about the awful mess of crud that made me sad today. So instead let me tell you about the spectacularly subpar aerobics class I went to Monday. So this was at the gym in Gallup, which is totally decent. There’s some weights and some cardio equipment and way around the…

I just watched a short HBO documentary called, “I Can’t Do This but I Can Do That,” which is about 8 different kids with learning differences, generally ages 9 to 14. They’re talking about what school is like for them, how they’ve been dealing with their academic issues, how it feels to struggle with school,…

Today we discussed metaphors and similes in Walter Dean Myers’ “Love That Boy.” Nearly every student was engaged, excited. They smiled and giggled when the poem said the boy “grins like his Uncle Ben,” connecting it to when relatives say they look like their mothers or fathers. I was blown away when we got to…

After winter break, we are going to be reading a poem-based novel that refers to a lot of poems, so we are previewing these poems with the kids to get started. We’ve read “Dog” by Valerie Worth and “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams, and the kids wrote their own wheelbarrow-style poems which I…

Secret we don’t admit to our students: most of the time, teachers love snow days EVEN MORE than kids do. It’s supposed to snow today. I mean, 40% chance means supposed to, right? It could be inches! Feet! So much we couldn’t possibly go to school tomorrow! There is next to no chance we will…

I have three students who have missed 11, 11, and 13 days of school each. This is 14-17% of the school year. Situation #1: Kid is incredibly smart, would probably be making all As if he were here everyday. He misses school for a bunch of reasons (meaning that his mom tells me different reasons…

I am so proud of my lowest readers. We finally got our DIBELS materials in just before break let out (this is a really quick basic test of reading fluency, or how many words they read correctly in one minute) and I quickly tested my lowest kids. Admittedly, I did this because I want to…

Here’s the other scary thing I’m doing with my kiddos (again, scary for me, not them). We’re reading a book. Now, last year this would have been scary because it would mean we weren’t reading our basal reading curriculum. But this year it’s scary because of the book I chose. We’re reading Never Say Quit…

I’m trying to do something scary with my kids. Actually, two somethings. And it’s not scary for them, it’s scary for me. Here’s something number 1: This is the last week of school before Thanksgiving break, and I’m allowed to read whatever I want (let’s be honest, I’m pretty much always allowed to read whatever…

I drove two of my students home the other day after afterschool tutoring. One of them turns out to live all the way out almost in Arizona, which was a little farther that I had bargained for. We pulled up to see her little barefooted 3-year-old brother trying valiantly to push the baby around in…

Between my 19 students, we have missed 11 days of instructional time this week. And it’s only Thursday. 2 of those days are In-School Suspension for messing around on the bus and hitting another kid in the head with a jacket (which I don’t think merits 2 days ISS, especially when another kid got in…

Here’s what it’s like teaching kids who pretty much have no first language. That means the kids who speak no language other than English, but who missed out on enough language exposure as a little kid to speak even conversational English proficiently. All of my kids are English Language Learners for academic English, because most…

My kids are so cute when they get into books. My intensive kids (i.e. my lowest readers. They range from a mid-first to a mid-second grade level but all have decoding and fluency issues) started a new book today. The target audience of this book is 6-7 year olds, fully 3 and 4 years younger…

One of my girls is having a rough time right now. She apparently had a lot of behavior issues last year and would have hysterical yelling or crying episodes because she felt like her teacher was being unfair and not treating her well (I know this teacher, and in all honesty he might have been).…

One of my kids cheated today, and it’s making me really upset. It was on a little nothing assignment. We do multiplication facts every day for 5 minutes. They work on a sheet of 100 facts with all one number (i.e. all the 2s problems) and they have 4 minutes to finish it. If they…

I’ve always made wishes on eyelashes. It’s a silly, childish thing, where you find an eyelash on your face, hold it on your finger, make a wish and blow it off. I’ve always made eyelash wishes, ever since I was little, and over time it’s become an instinctive thing I do without even thinking, like…