It's the first day of spring and new life is coming! The white (and sometimes gray and even black) snow is almost all gone, soon to be replaced with lots of new colors...life seen in blooming ways. After this winter, many of us can't wait!!
Common Core has seemed to clobber our classrooms with 8 to 10 feet of anchor standards, evaluation systems, testing, bullying, and so many other changes! How will we ever dig ourselves out?
Common Core has seemed to clobber our classrooms with 8 to 10 feet of anchor standards, evaluation systems, testing, bullying, and so many other changes! How will we ever dig ourselves out?
You have to plant the seeds of new learning that comes from your own learning. Katie Wood Ray tells us in What You Know by Heart, (Heinemann, 2002) that you can create new curriculum by engaging in your own writing. Try this out.
Sit down and try something new in your writing. Maybe you can think of a new way to generate ideas. Maybe you can find a way of elaborating, or mixing images that are concrete and abstract, or of combining sentences to make meaning. Then, in the margin do some writing called a teaching story.
A teaching story is a 3-5 sentence reflection on how the strategy worked for you. Part of it is thinking how you would apply the strategy to your students. Sure, you were able to mix concrete and abstract images by saying, "I sent her all the patience I had," but how can you help 8-year-olds gesture toward this?
If you can figure out a way to do this, new learning is born! It's as invigorating as the first spring breeze--you know the one--the one you feel for the first time on a March afternoon!
Sit down and try something new in your writing. Maybe you can think of a new way to generate ideas. Maybe you can find a way of elaborating, or mixing images that are concrete and abstract, or of combining sentences to make meaning. Then, in the margin do some writing called a teaching story.
A teaching story is a 3-5 sentence reflection on how the strategy worked for you. Part of it is thinking how you would apply the strategy to your students. Sure, you were able to mix concrete and abstract images by saying, "I sent her all the patience I had," but how can you help 8-year-olds gesture toward this?
If you can figure out a way to do this, new learning is born! It's as invigorating as the first spring breeze--you know the one--the one you feel for the first time on a March afternoon!
When I taught 3rd and 4th Grade, I tweaked the idea of this into other areas. For example, I had kids evaluate strategies they used in other subject areas...reading, math, spelling, even science. We called them reading stories, math stories, spelling stories, science stories. Kids wrote for themselves about how strategies worked for them, and how they could modify them to other situations, or about how they can improve them! We're always trying to become more metacognitive, and teach our kids to do the same!
It's a good reminder that our learning has to have heart in it, like Katie Wood Ray tells us in the title of her book. Like with any relationship, you have to bring romance, some newness, or that old black magic back into it. How hard it must be to teach the same grade level the same way for so many years! Engaging in your own reading, writing, and other types of learning helps you create new curriculum, to make it always seem like a new spring!
So, finish digging yourself out and get back to the garden! Start up on your own garden again--your own reading life, writing life, learning life to reinvigorate your teaching!
It will make spring really feel like it's here in your classroom!
It will make spring really feel like it's here in your classroom!
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