May 2008 - Posts
I mentioned M. once before — it was her birthday and I forgot to check the calendar, and missed it. And she is so non-verbal most of the time that she never mentioned it. M. is one of my special ed children, with developmental delays, speech difficulties,
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A few years ago, I was in the teacher’s lounge, feeling exhausted. A middle school teacher (my school is preschool through 8th grade) asked how things were going, and I told her all about how difficult my kids were being. I then asked her how she
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We’ve finished learning the whole alphabet, and some of my little friends actually know the whole damn thing, so we’ve been celebrating our accomplishments with some spirited readings of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. On Monday we made a mural,
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Now that we’re in the home stretch, our theme is “Ready for Kindergarten,” and all the books on our shelf are about kindergarten and school. Z. commented that some of them looked familiar, and I told her that we’d had a bunch of
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How’s this for a headline? “Teacher tries to help preschoolers stay alive.” I nearly spit out my coffee this morning when I saw that one.
Preschool teacher Marisol Sierra, who teaches in the Chicago neighborhood where schoolkids are
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Well, duh, yes of course it does. But when I saw that that was the title of an op-ed piece in the LA Times, explaining why Reading First isn’t working, I rolled my eyes and figured it would be more moaning about how parents aren’t doing their
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New Connecticut teachers are going to have to take a test to prove that they know enough about teaching reading. I’ve been following this with interest, and have read several angry comments from CT teachers. I’m for it, and would have no problem
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It’s available at Yottoy, and I saw mention of it at Mo Willems’s blog.
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I had a formal observation today. What I mean is, I was the one being observed. (Usually it’s the other way around. I do 2-4 observations a quarter.) Every one of us, even the master and mentor teachers, needs to be observed once each quarter, and
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Today we had a visitor. It’s a common occurrence in my classroom, only today, our visitor was four years old. We’ll call him Charley. Charley’s dad brought him to school so that I could watch him play in my room for an hour, and evaluate
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My fellow preschool teacher, Mrs. V., at the fabulously named Don’t put boogers in your neighbor’s cereal, has a funny off-topic post about ice cream bars, and the use and abuse of the English language. Check it out here.
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We had the best time today.
The entire school and almost the entire staff went to a big celebration in a park, and we had the school to ourselves. Three kids were absent today, as was Ali, so it was me, Jan (my para), and 12 preschoolers.
We went on an
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Some weeks ago, a person from the early childhood department was visiting my classroom, and she saw me doing story time using the repeated interactive read-aloud strategy, so we talked about how it works, and I offered to do a little workshop on it for
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As a part of Joel at So You Want to Teach?’s Blog Revolution Project, I am tasked to write a post in the form of a list. Try as I might, I could not think of a title that involved a list. I like the ‘diary of a preschool teacher’ title,
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A few months ago, while at a lesson waiting on my kid, I started chatting with another parent. He told me all about his son’s ADHD, and commented that “women teachers just don’t know how to teach boys.”
I’ve been thinking
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There was an article today about what children read most often, listed by grade level. I was surprised by how prosaic the list was, and realized that these are the books that teachers (and children) are so familiar with, we hardly notice them.
Green Eggs
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I read in the paper yesterday that schools designated as Reading First schools, who get extra funds to do extra work in teaching reading, are not getting the hoped-for results. My school isn’t a Reading First school, but my heart sank when I read
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Yesterday a kindergarten teacher in my mentoring group turned to me at our weekly meeting and hissed, “you should just come and observe me and get it over with, I don’t care when. Actually, just skip it and give me all twos, because I don’t
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On a walk to the local library for preschool storytime, we saw a robin. D., who speaks very little English and has some special needs to boot, pointed, and said, “chicken!”
At first I told him it was a robin, and then decided to simplify,
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