What the kids actually need

In my class of 17 kiddos I have 13 boys and 4 girls. (Yikes) That alone presents several challenges. I am thankful for growing up with 3 very competitive brothers and having a competitive boyfriend because I am constantly making things into competitions, impressing the boys with my sports knowledge and twisting everything I can to be something that they would be interested in.  (lots of bugs, transformers, cars, sports etc…)

We have been in school for several weeks and I have all ready located the couple students (all three boys…) that are going to give me a bit of a challenge this year. I wanted to bring these parents in for conferences to try to understand a bit more of the “whole picture” for these students. I also wanted to see if they see the same behaviors at home.

In an effort to connect with Edward’s* parents for this exact reason I called his parent. Unfortunately the number was disconnected. I walked Edward out to get picked up that same day hoping to get an updated phone number. When talking to the mother, she volunteered to come in for the conference! (Without me asking) I jumped on that opportunity and was expecting her the following day.

The next day the mother came to have the conference about her son. I met her in the office. When laying my eyes on her, I knew something was wrong. As I got closer I saw, her face had been badly battered. Both eyes back and blue, nose broken, scratches on arms, jaw bruised and red. I was at a lost of words. I had never seen anything like it, except for on the news! And there she was right in front of me ready to conference with me about her son.

Here I was going to tell her that her son was not following direction and is having a difficult time listening; and this family had been going through a situation like this.  I would have never know any of this if I did not call her in for a conference on this particular day.

When reflecting on this situation, it makes me think what is really important. It is not the most important thing for these students to master putting words in ABC order or understand how to use greater than and less than symbols, it is important that they feel safe and loved at school. It is important that they see school as a safe place to have fun, and put any problems they have aside.

This was an eye-opening day for me, which I will remember. I think sometimes teachers get carried away about standards and external pressures but really it is all about the kids and what they need.

*Note all students’ names have been changed

The Whole Picture

My first, first days of school have come and gone! I work in an elementary school in Tyler Independent School District. My school is pretty small as there are only 3 classrooms per grade level. It makes for a very close knit staff that have been awesome to work with so far! My school is a Title 1 school that is approximately 93% economically disadvantaged.

Setting up my classroom was a very very busy week that would not have happened with out the help of my mom and brother who came all the way to Texas to help me. It was several long days but let me tell you it looks great!!!  My classroom is forever changing with the magical things my students are coming up with, I wanted to attach a few pictures of my classroom on the first day of school!

View of classroom from back corner.

This is my bulletin board outside of the classroom. The text at the top says, "Diving into First." Student work will be displayed on each of the patterned squares.

Word Wall- This picture was taken the first day of school, the word wall now probably was 30 - 40 words on it! :)

 Our school theme this year is "From Crayons to College." This board is melted crayons and then at the bottom says, "From Crayons to College." It was a very fun project.

A couple more views of the classroom. 

Ready, Set, Go

It all started as a silly assignment. One of my last semesters at the University of Iowa I had a professor who was adamant about blogging. She had a teacher blog. Her friends had teacher blogs. She believed everyone needed to have a teaching blog. An assignment in this course was for every student to… you guessed it … create a blog. Weekly we were to make a blog post about an assigned topic. This was to be an “interactive journaling experience” because we can view our classmates’ blogs where we were expected to comment and build upon their responses.

While it was in theory an awesome idea, at that time I did not have the classroom experiences to stimulate the content to write about, to me, it was just another assignment. You will notice that the first several posts of this blog were the “assignments” that were required.

Fifteen months later, here I am teaching in my very own 1^st grade classroom. Every week, maybe even everyday, I still have that moment of “Wow, here I am teaching in my very own classroom and also wow I live in Texas which is very far from my home in Appleton, Wisconsin.” Although it was a lot of change, I learned a lot very quickly and have been so fortunate to have an amazing support system both at home and at school.

As these first 4 weeks of school have flown by I have had many noteworthy experiences that I really want to write down and remember. This is where that little professor from Iowa was instilled my mind to “blog about it, blog about it, blog about it.” So that is exactly what I am going to do. I am not sure how often I will get to blogging, but I want to have a place where I can come to release all my thought, ideas, rants etc… As time goes by I will learn more of the trick to blogging and making it look cutesy but for now I am all about the basics. J Enjoy.