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I am back from a long vacation, the first part of which was spent at the beach with my husband’s family, and the second part of which was in a big city with my sister and her family. I had the opportunity first to observe my sister-in-law talking
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This article in the San Jose Mercury News reports that only 15% of preschol-age children living in poverty are in high-quality programs. This is where I want to tear my hair out and rant that we should more like the French and the Italians, and have universal
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I’m glad we had Monday at the park, because the last day of school wasn’t so great. Our plan was to walk to the library for storytime, which would have been really fun (and would have taken up most of the morning). Alas, it rained heavily,
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On Monday we went to my favorite coffee shop in the world and got treats (cinnamon twists for the kids, coffee and scones for the grownups) and then went to a cute neighborhood park to play all morning. The weather was gorgeous, and the morning could
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It’s Friday night, I’ve got three days of teaching left, and I’m one glass of chardonnay down so far. In my role as mentor teacher, I did an observation cycle (pre-observation conference, observation, post-observation conference) with
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I asked the children to tell me the story of our year yesterday, so they told me things that we did, played, learned, and sang, and I wrote it all down. Here are some samples:
This year, we: had a necklace of nametag on the first day of school
didn’t
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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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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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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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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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