I am back, ready to jump headfirst into the blogosphere. Last year, I managed to make it to day 2 of the school year before I was completely engulfed with teaching and my Masters program. But, let's just try this again.
Over the past few weeks, I have been meaning to start up a blog not realizing that I already had one. To my surprise, I found this blog (which needs a serious name overhaul). Anyway, I wanted a place to put my thoughts about teaching, funny moments, things I want to remember, and other random thoughts to share with anyone who cares to read about it.
So, here goes round 2...
I'll update on the beginning of the year and then share some ideas I am having. You know in the beginning of every school year... all the copies, labels, folder-making, organizing, and inputting... it always seems as if you have too much to do and not enough time to do any of it. Well, this year, for me, it seemed even worse. It seemed as though I already had a stack of papers and my year hadn't even begun.
A new school was built just down the street from us and opened just in time for the new year. Our school boundaries had changed and with that, our school was in mass transition, bringing kids in from another school and transferring them to the new school. On top of this, our district decided to implement a new software program for school management which has been nothing less than a migraine for everyone. Needless to say, this was a recipe for quite the bumpy beginning of the year. As educators, we are expected to be flexible, but everything felt so chaotic and disorganized, I was really struggling to hang on this year.
Now, it is nearing the end of September and I feel as though I am slowly catching my breath. Not quick enough. The other day, I started to fret about the end of the school year rapidly approaching (yes, I know. It's only September). You see, October's coming quickly which marks the beginning of the holiday season. You can pretty much say goodbye to October, November, and December with all the holidays and other festivities. Before you know it, it's January and by that time, you only have about 3 months to prepare for the end of the year testing. Does anyone else ever feel this way or is it just me?
Besides my beginning of the year "freak out", I have some other ideas that I am excited to try this year. My focus last year was "beefing" up my writer's workshop. I was really happy with the results from last year and my new focus this year is actually understanding reader's workshop and creating an effective literacy block. I am currently reading a book called "Reading With Meaning" and I LOVE this book. The author is amazing and it is super "reader-friendly".
One thing that has been constantly pressing on my mind is this notion of understanding ourselves as learners. I had quite the eye-opening experience in the beginning of my masters program with this concept and yet more ideas came to me while reading this first chapter. Applying this to reading, if we can understand what type of reader we are, how we read, why we read, and what we do with what we have read, we might have a better gauge on how our students feel about reading and what they do with the information. I would really love to conduct some sort of professional development on understanding ourselves as learners as a way to get teachers to feel like a learner again, inviting a deeper understanding.
My ideas are spewing out of my head so fast that I can barely keep up. Over the next few days, I'll update on how my reading is going and some of my thoughts.
