Last Monday
was a true Monday. I felt like I was dragging my students – and myself –
through the day. I questioned whether they had internalized any of our
practices from the first twelve weeks of school. I braced myself for another Monday today. A
Monday after a full moon last week, after being out of the classroom for a
day and a half for a sick kiddo, and
before a cold weather front moves in? It was bound to be bad… and yet, it
was awesome.
There were
moments, of course. Moments where kids rushed in to tell me what rule they had
broken when our guest teacher (substitute) was in last week. Moments where they
told me they hadn’t read or written over the weekend. Moments where they shared
with me a disagreement they had on the playground before school. I sat there,
as these moments washed over me in the first five minutes of our school day, and
began to despair. And then, I realized something big.They rushed in to admit they had done
something wrong, to own up to their mistake. They were honest about their
homework not getting done, had not made any excuses, but told me so I could
deduct a point. They told me about the problem on the playground so they could
discuss how they handled it and get advice on what to do next time. Those
moments show a lot of growth since that first day, just twelve weeks ago. With
that, my Monday began.
It moved on
with the introduction of our Mock Caldecott unit. We are doing this unit in
corroboration with Margie Myers-Culver’s students in Michigan. This will be our
third year in a row, and it is a unit I look forward to all year long. Margie
is awesome to work with. You’ve got to love a friend when you both look at your
list of twenty, know there are some books you wanted to include, and say, “Let’s
just make it 25.” Awesome!
Here’s the
twenty-five books we selected:
Today we read our first book from the unit, Sam
and Dave Dig a Hole. We’ve already shared this title this year, so today we
were able to read it critically. This is a crowd favorite in all three of my
classes. After sharing the book, the kids added their reactions to a class
Padlet so they could see what their classmate’s opinions were. This was the
first time I have used Padlet for the whole group at once. Oh my! Twenty-seven
kids typing away at the iPads at once? It was a bit crazy.
You might
notice when reading some of their reactions that they’ve been influenced by
Travis Jonker’s theories as to what happened at the end of the book. The kids
loved reading Travis’s post (HERE) and now want to meet him just as much as
they want to meet Klassen and Barnett!
Mondays.
Some days they make me want to curl up and sleep for another week. Other days
they give me a chance to reflect on growth and make me want to teach until I am
seventy. Grateful today for one of the latter.
