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Lola went to art today, on Black Day, to draw pictures with white crayon on black paper. I had stencils for city buildings with window cutouts, so she made a lovely picture with lots of buildings. Then she cut it into lots of small pieces. Was this frustration?
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Anyone reading this who is already a teacher (I know I have some fledgling teachers reading this blog, as well as some non-teachers) knows what teaching is like. Teachers are well-acquainted with the experiences of being bombarded by stimuli all day,
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Alas, it was another difficult morning. Most of the hour I had before school started I was at a tech meeting in the computer lab, where we learned how to do a behavior screener on each child. I got all mine done — which was good — but only
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Actually, things went okay today, on this, our eighth day of school. On Friday I passed out the Friday folders to the children as I was lining them up to go out in the hall to get their jackets for recess. They started opening their folders, dropping
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There are two boys in my class who know each other from last year and are giving me a run for my money. Let’s call them Max (as in Where the Wild Things Are ) and David (as in No, David !). Max has a face like an angel and also likes to screech.
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How many times do you write your new students’ names? How many sets of name tags do you make? I spent the day making name tags. First there are the name tags for their cubbies. Then there are the name tags (on cute froggy shapes) that go up all
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Every day, at the end of our morning together, my class stands up and holds hands in a circle, and sings the “School Family Song,” to the tune of “You are my Sunshine.” You are my family, my school family, I feel happy when you
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Perhaps because I started out teaching in a high-poverty school, and such schools tend to be law-and-order places, I am fairly strict about my students’ hallway behavior. Now I work at a school where people are pretty lax about the halls, and my
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On the first day of school — my least favorite of the year, but that’s a different story — my centers are all closed. The house corner gets roped off with a sign that says “Closed” even before the open house, so the children
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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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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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When I taught preschool at a daycare center, during my first official year of teaching, I had a big classroom with a large area where we could sit on the floor for circle time, in an actual circle.
Now, many years later, I am teaching preschool in a public
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Perhaps because I really started out teaching in daycare, before I taught kindergarten at that inner-city school, I still obey the rules about licensing and ratios and proper supervision. I never want to have my students out of my sight, because if something
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