We are a month away from World Read Aloud Day. World Read Aloud Day happens on February 7, 2024 this year. You can read more about this day and begin to plan for it here. While it's great to have a day devoted to read alouds, we should be making read alouds a priority every day. I love this article that talks about 10 recommendations for teachers to build knowledge. Number 4 on the list says that we should give read alouds a central role. Personally, I would move that one up to the number one spot, but I think I can live with being 4th on the list. The question is...are we giving read alouds a central role? Are your students hearing you read aloud to them every day or at least most days of the week? I do worry that the pandemic changed how we all did read alouds with so many being recorded and able to be viewed on screen. I admit that I even became more comfortable recording myself and sending out read alouds to everyone. It is very easy now to search up many titles and find a recording on YouTube. But our students need to hear the adults in their school reading directly to them with actual books in hand, not on screens. And we shouldn't wait until special days like World Read Aloud Day. The image above is a simple, important reminder of why we need to be reading aloud to our kids as much as we can. I need to get better about doing more read alouds. I have let me calendar and meeting schedule take over and I want to plan to do more read alouds in your classrooms. Please reach out if you want me to come in and read to your class. It can be a picture book that you are using as part of a lesson or I also would love to read a chapter from the books that some of our upper elementary students are listening to. It doesn't take long to read a book, and the benefits of this instructional practice are so worth it! Happy reading! Forgot to add this article in here as well...all about making sure that read alouds don't get lost in the science of reading focus. Some new picture books that I have in my office if you are looking for a new read aloud...
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2024, a new year. Over the break, I did a lot of thinking about this past year. 2023 was not exactly one of my favorites. I came across a quote from a friend and jotted it down: Don't dismiss 2023, learn from it. I am going to try my best not to just try to push 2023 into the background, I hope to learn from it. But I do like the thought of tabula rasa. My mother would tell us that Latin phrase means "blank slate." A new year does mean we get to start with a blank slate. A new year is exciting because it's so full of possibility, of potential. We get to fill out blank slate up. I wrote about why I chose this word in my journal over break. There are many reasons but a main one was because for much of 2023 I kept using a different word to describe how I felt...suffocating. The pain and sadness that I experienced at times often made me feel like I was suffocating. So for this year, I decided I need to breathe. I also like that the Latin root word "spir", which means to breathe, comes up in so many other words that I hope to focus on this year. Inspiration - I hope to breathe knowledge and ideas in. Aspirations - I hope to breathe towards my goals. Transpire - I hope to breathe goals and wishes into reality. And of course all of this will require some perspiration - hard work that will cause some sweat to breathe out. I am going to breathe in 2024. What will your one word be? How will you fill your blank slate? I did more writing than reading over the break, but I am focused on getting back into a better reading habit this year. I had started a book before my mom died, but I had to put it away because I know it was too relatable and too sad for me. I picked it up and finished it on the last day of the year. And I am glad I did, I needed to read it and have a good cry. The book is called The Probability of Everything. A sad book about an awful loss for a family, but also an amazing book to read. I also finished listening to the Matthew Perry book, another tough one to listen to. And I started listening to a new memoir called The Faraway Nearby.
I thought it was a good time to remind us all of our promises that we wrote back in August during our first staff collaboration time. I will be returning your card to you in January so you always have it as a reminder. How are you doing with your promise you made? Winter break will be a good time to check in with yourself, reset your focus, and return to school ready to do what you said you would do. I was excited to join Mrs. Clark's 2nd grade class during their virtual visit with some special authors last week. The book was called Rescue and Jessica and it's all about an awesome service dog named Rescue. I also read some new picture books that are being discussed in the Principal's Clubhouse with Bookelicious. One book is called What's Sweeter and one is called The Lights Than Dance in the Night. Dear Clough Staff, Last week, to get ready for National Card Day over the weekend, and for our Speak Now stop on the Holiday Eras tour, many of you took the opportunity to write positive messages to several of your colleagues. Now it's my turn to write a letter to all of you. This school year seems to be flying by. We have already experienced some really great things this year, including collaborative writing work with Memorial, meeting as family groups, a whole school assembly focused on kindness, new community events, and many more. It's hard to believe that we only have two weeks until winter break. This is certainly an exciting time of year. I know both of my kids are counting down the days until the Big Guy visits. They are also excited that this time of year brings the potential for snow, although Sunday morning's weather was deceivingly warmer than usual. I also know that parts of these next few weeks can bring some challenges for us and/or our students as we approach an extended break from school. With that being said, please know that we don't want to ever just survive any part of the school year. Rather, we want to help each other and our students thrive through all the parts of the year. In order to do so, we need to know that we are here for each other at all times. Please know that I, and the rest of the office staff, are here to support you. If there is something you need over the next two weeks (or anytime), I hope that you do not hesitate to reach out. Looking forward to continuing the fun over the next two weeks during our Holiday Eras Tour! Hope the different theme days will help us all thrive, and not just survive, during these next two weeks. Thank you for all you do for our students every day. Your dedication and care is greatly appreciated. Sincerely, Liz I am almost done listening to Matthew Perry's memoir. It is definitely a tough one to listen to. I attended an SEL PD on Friday and won a book! It's called How To Navigate Life: The New Science of Finding Your Way in School, Career, and Beyond. Can't wait to dive into it! I am going to be part of the district book club, so I am also reading the book Unlocking English Learner's Potential. It's that time of year when we leave the Christmas lights up until January and we sometimes feel like we need to shake it off, all the energy and excitement leading up to the holidays. I thought it seemed like we needed a Holiday Eras Tour to get us to where it feels like 22, as in the 22nd of December! These next few weeks can be stressful, busy, exhausting, but also fun and joyful so let's make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it. We've got no reason to be afraid. You're NOT on your own kid, Yeah, you can face this... First 3 of 13 days done, clearly still time to have more fun. Nothing lasts forever, but this is getting good now this week... One more week! Look what you made me do. Time for our staff holiday party this week and other fun at Clough because clearly you belong with me...
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.
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 Unconditional positive regard. I first heard this phrase from my writing professor over the summer. She talked about believing in unconditional positive regard and using that philosophy with each of us as we grew as writers with her. I have this same professor this semester and she continues to interact with each of us with the same unconditional positive regard. Then I was listening to a podcast and heard the phrase again. Third times a charm; I felt like it was a sign that I needed to share this philosophy with all of you.
Listening to the podcast, I couldn't help but think of many of our students. We talk a lot about how the pandemic has impacted many of our students in terms of their social and emotional behavior. I have heard teachers share stories of students being disrespectful, not engaging, making bad choices, and a long list of other negative things. Each day I spend time with different students who have made a bad choice, like being physical or getting frustrated and acting impulsively. It's hard not to take it personal or to feel frustrated that some of the same students are continually not following expectations or seeming to choose to misbehave. I said our theme this year is about connection and belonging, and I understand how these interactions with students don't make it easy to connect or improve relationships. This is where unconditional positive regard comes in. This idea comes from a book called Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education by Alex Venet. In her podcast, Jennifer Gonzalez shares: "Venet explains that unconditional positive regard is a stance that communicates this message to students: “I care about you. You have value. You don’t have to do anything to prove it to me, and nothing’s going to change my mind.” In her book, she asserts that taking this stance and putting it into practice builds the foundation on which our students can thrive." You don't have to tell me how hard this philosophy is at times to put into practice every day. It doesn't mean not holding students accountable for their actions. It simply means we have to keep this mindset when interacting or responding to student behavior. One of my favorite comments from the interview on the podcast is the thought that students don't have to earn our care, it's just assumed. Everyone gets care. Kids are allowed to make mistakes. They are going to make mistakes. They are going to struggle. They are going to have bad days. But no matter what every kid is worthy of care and love. And they need to know that we feel that way. There are many times when I am talking to a student and I ask them if they know why I am upset or why I expect more from them. I tell them it's because I care about them. I often tell them that here at school, we love them, and just because they made a mistake, it doesn't mean I don't care as much about them now. In fact, I sometimes tell them I care even more about them because I don't want them to start seeing themselves as the "bad kid" or the "kid who always makes the bad choices." In the podcast, they talk about what this looks like in action in a classrooms. And sometimes what it looks like is taking time, which is always hard, but finding the time, to connect and find out what kids care about. Using their interests to build those connections and show them that you care about what they care about. I also think with our new family groups that we formed, we will be able to do some of this work of practicing unconditional positive regard, building connection, showing kids that no matter what, we care about them. In our house, we have a sign that hangs in our family room. I bought it around the time we adopted our son. I walk by it every day and some days I stop and read it and think about the words: "Being a family means you will love and be loved for the rest of your life no matter what!" If you get a chance, listen to the podcast. Think about unconditional positive regard and the power that can have within our school community. What if we loved them all no matter what? |