To ease us back from the break, I have just a short post for you. In fact, I am giving you a little window into my weekend scrolling through social media. I often save photos and charts that I find and tuck them away for a good time to share with one teacher or a team or the whole staff. Here are a few random resources that I saved. Hopefully you will find at least one thing that you can use or that will inspire you to try something new in your classroom... Love this chart of open-ended questions! Great vocabulary to help kids self-assess themselves and let you know their confidence level with different skills... For our upper elementary readers, love the thought of a reading strategies choice board. Maybe it doesn't have all of these on it to start with, but you could build up to something like this. We definitely see how our kids become more engaged when we incorporate play into our lessons. It's a good reminder to always be thinking of how to include wonder, exploration, and agency into as much of the lesson as we can. And I feel this image so much this year. I know there are many of us who might also relate. Good reminder for all of us... I have been in a bit of a reading funk lately. My to be read pile keeps piling up! But I am enjoying listening to Heartland. It's a memoir about growing up poor in Kansas. I have also been skimming through the new Six Shifts book. I read the first one which focused on K-2 and now this one is geared towards grades 3 to 5. Looking forward to talking about this book and sharing resources for teaching foundational literacy skills.
0 Comments
This weekend, a teacher that I worked with 10 years ago reached out to me. She was in a rough place and needed to just talk through some things with me. She was feeling down, like maybe teaching wasn't the job for her anymore, or at least being a teacher at that school was not for her anymore. I did my best to listen and then to try to lift her back up because she is an amazing educator who is always doing what's best for kids. I tried to remind her of the impact she has on her students. I also reminded her to give herself grace, and to be honest with herself and others. And I did tell her that if she really felt like she needed to leave, then that was ok too since she needed to do what was best for her. She appreciative of the time I took with her, and I was grateful that she is just one of many educators that I have connected with over the years. I am glad that she still feels like I am someone she can turn to when she needs to talk or simply needs someone to listen to her. Our jobs as educators are so incredibly hard. It can all feel overwhelming at times. We can get discouraged. We can lose our patience with our students and each other.
This time of year, we all talk about gratitude and being thankful. We really shouldn't only talk about it now, but since it is the popular topic in November, let me remind you of the health benefits of practicing gratitude. Studies have shown that gratitude can improve our sleep, boost our immunity, and help our moods. Practicing gratitude can help with depression. It can make us less anxious, and it can even help reduce chronic pain. Our brains are hard-wired to problem solve. Our brains are not always designed to appreciate. So we might need some reminders to stop trying to solve problems and start appreciating others and even showing ourselves some gratitude. Here's my quick list of things I am thankful for... I am thankful for my job. I love my job. I am truly grateful that I get to be the lead learner of Clough Elementary School. Every day is different. Every day I learn something new. Every day I am challenged to think and grow. Best of all, every day I get to interact with some really great kids. And the adults are pretty cool too! I am thankful for dedicated teachers. The teachers at our school are extremely dedicated. They go above and beyond for our students. They collaborate with each other and share their learning with each other. I am thankful that we have teachers who work hard to make a difference in students' lives every single day. I am thankful for books, books and more books! If you know me at all, then you know of course books would be on my thankful list. I love that I have a house full of books, an office full of books, and even an Audible account full of books to listen to. I love to read, and I am thankful that my job supports my reading addiction. I am also thankful that I get to share my love of books and reading with the teachers and students in my school. I am thankful for a supportive husband and two kids who keep me on my toes. Thank goodness for Mr. Garden. I am so glad that I have a husband who understands that being a school leader means I don't get to clock in and clock out at a certain time. Too often, I bring work home, I am grateful for a loving husband who realizes that he often has to be patient while I am spending time with my laptop and my never-ending emails and long to-do lists on our couch. I am also grateful for a husband who encourages me to sometimes close the laptop and ignore the never-ending emails and the long to-do lists. He reminds me that there is always tomorrow and eventually things will get done. I am also thankful for two healthy kids who sometimes drive me crazy but who have also given me the best job title ever, Mom. I am thankful for our students. Our students put a smile on my face. They are the reason that I get to work as early as I can. They are the reason that I continue to read as much as I can about best practice. When I am having a rough day, it usually only takes a few minutes in a classroom talking to a student to forget about what was stressing me out before. I am so thankful that I get to watch when it clicks for a student. I am also thankful that I get to be involved in helping a student when they are struggling. I love our students! So what are you thankful for? This is certainly the time of year where we focus on gratitude and giving thanks. And if I ask our students about Thanksgiving, chances are good that they will have lots of stories to tell about family traditions, special visits with relatives, eating certain foods, maybe participating in turkey trots, or watching parades and football. I am willing to bet that our youngest learners, our preschoolers, kindergartners, and first graders don't know a whole lot about the first Thanksgiving. They might be able to tell me that Pilgrims and Native Americans ate a meal together, but they probably don't know much else. For many of us, we were taught that the first Thanksgiving was about the Pilgrims and the Native Americans sitting down to have a feast together. We learned about how Pilgrims landed and began to settle. We learned about Pilgrims meeting Native Americans and how helpful they were to the Pilgrims. But we didn't learn about how the Native Americans were already settled here and the Pilgrims took their land. We didn't learn that it was a time of suffering and even death. Instead, we were only told one story while we made our stereotypical feather headbands out of construction paper and acted out a peaceful Thanksgiving meal. We didn't know any better. But now we do. And we have the chance to undo years of damage and start encouraging our kids to ask questions about who is missing from the traditional Thanksgiving stories. I love the quote from Maya Angelou: "Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better." Now that we know better about the story of Thanksgiving, it's time to do better. The first step is educating ourselves. Have you taken the time to learn the real story? It's ok if you haven't. I am including some links at the end of this post. I encourage you to take some time to read about the first Thanksgiving as told from the Native American perspective. The next important step is to take a look at the books and materials that we have in our classroom and share with our students. I encourage you to consider doing an activity or leading a discussion with your students where you help them start to question whose story is being told. Whose story is missing? Let's get our students to start questioning, to be curious, to wonder and to seek out all sides of the story. Besides being the month of Thanksgiving, did you know that November is Native American Heritage Month? Do your students know that? This is also the month that we all have experience with focusing on gratitude and giving thanks. And that is important to continue to do with our students. I hope you will continue to tie in gratitude to your lessons during this month, but I also hope you will begin to help change the narrative that we grew up with around the story of Thanksgiving. Teaching The History of Thanksgiving with Equity An Authentic Look at Thanksgiving American Indian Perspectives on Thanksgiving Thanksgving: Practicing Gratitude and Honoring the Real Story Here is just one of many lists of books written by Native American authors that you can share with your class: https://socialjusticebooks.org/booklists/american-indians/ I am including pictures of two beautiful books that I have in my office if anyone wants to borrow them and then the book about the first Thanksgiving told from the Wampanoag perspective, I just won some copies of it and hope that they will arrive in the mail this week. It seems like every other week I have friends or family members come up to me and either ask about is going on with math in schools or more often, I have had them vent to me that they don't like what is going on with math in schools. Everyone keeps talking about how they just don't get this "new math." Or they are struggling to help their children with math homework because they do not actually understand the homework themselves. I just had a parent in a meeting the other day tell me that he doesn't know how to help his middle schooler with math.
This made me think back on my experiences with my father and math. I am realizing now that I think my dad was ahead of the curve. (Dad, if you end up reading this, don't let it get to your head!) I can remember in 2nd grade I really struggled with understanding greater than and less than. I just could not comprehend it. So I would ask my dad for help on my homework. Back then, math homework was always the same. All of the odd problems on a page the one night and then all of the even problems the next night. Actually, that was my homework from elementary all the way through high school. So my dad would start to help me, and he would begin by explaining the concept and then it would turn into why I needed to know this concept in order to understand the next level up, like if I could figure out that 5 was greater than 3, then eventually I would be able to determine that 3+2 was greater than 2+1, and then I would be able to figure out that x + y was greater than 3. Meanwhile, all I heard was wah wah wah wah wah...you know the Charlie Brown teacher? And I would repeatedly say to my father, or actually yell at him, "I don't need to know why, I just need to know the answer to this problem!" Now, 40 some years later, here I am, explaining to family and friends that we want our students to know why 5 is greater than 3, not just that the answer is 5 > 3. My dad was not teaching me "new math" back then. He did not have a math standards crystal ball that showed him what the future of math would be. He understood that in order for me to truly learn these math concepts, to truly understand the purpose behind all of those practice odd and even questions...I needed to be able to explain my thinking. I needed to be able to make sense of number sense. I needed to be able to break numbers down and build them up. But what I was taught, what most of us were taught, was to simply memorize steps and move on. How did I move up the math ladder? Well, I was a good student and I memorized individual steps and I aced tests. And then I moved to the next math class and did that all over again. I got to my senior year, and I remember being excited that I didn't need to take a math class. So for my last year of high school...no math for me! And that meant no more of the same conversation that I had been having with my dad for almost 10 years! And then I went to college and tested into an advanced Calculus class...not really sure how that happened. What happened during my freshman year? I just about flunked out of the class. Talk about a total shock to my system. I was a student who got all A's. I learned what the teachers taught me and then I spit it back on a test no problem. Suddenly, I had to supposedly apply all of these concepts...even from way back in 2nd grade, greater than and less than...and I had to actually think for myself to solve problems and I had to explain my thinking and I had to actually demonstrate higher level math thinking in a lab once a week. All of my "hard work" and completed homework assignments and perfect tests scores...well they amounted to nothing in that college course. I was not prepared for that class. So my answer to friends and family that ask...no, this is not "new math." Having kids solve thousands of problems by simply memorizing steps will not allow them to independently think on their own and demonstrate critical thinking skills. The research shows us that if kids are taught concepts, the why of math, they will retain the information much better. Clearly, what we were teaching before, how we all learned math, has not worked. As a country, we have consistently scored well below other countries who have taken a more conceptual approach to teaching math. I wish I had had the opportunity to learn math the way our students are learning it now. We, the adults who were taught in a very different way, need to make sure we aren't falling back on our experience with math instruction. Pretty sure, many of you reading this had the same experience I had. We need to engage our mathematicians in dialogue, encourage them to take risks and make mistakes and then learn from them. We need to do more starting with the answer and pushing them to figure out how we got there. We need to let them collaborate and build off of each other. And to my father I say, "Sorry dad. I should have listened to you." But I get it now, and I can't help but smile when I find myself saying to my own daughter...don't you want to know why this is the answer? (And the voice in my head says...you have become your father!) I may not have been able to admit it back then, but now I can say it...you were right dad! Here are some articles I have read recently about math instruction, math trauma, and helping kids (and adults) overcome math anxiety. 5 Ways to Overcome Math Trauma A Powerful Rethinking of Your Math Classroom Reinforcing Elementary Math Lessons with Movement |