It's incredibly difficult to believe we have already completed a month of school! Time is absolutely flying this year. 

It has not been easy for me to transition to this inclusion model. I am pretty high-strung (anxiety, a need to control things, stressed due to both of the former) and it can be difficult for me to adjust to new situations where I cannot see a potential outcome. Having all of the adults in my room that we do all day has caused me to have incredibly high bouts of anxiety on a daily basis, simply because I do not know from moment to moment what each person will be doing and it makes me feel anxious. Fortunately, as this first month of school comes to a close, I'm coming to terms better with this new model and finding positives where I was struggling before. It's all about growth; I'm changing as much as the kids are.

Something that I am incredibly grateful for, despite my anxiety surrounding my new teaching environment, is that the students in my classroom this year are compassionate and kind for the most part. They are children, of course, so they are sometimes not nice and sometimes are downright mean. The difference with this group and other groups of students I have had is that they are willing to listen and change when someone else says "hey, this didn't work for me or hurt my feelings." It's beautiful to watch.

We have had some issues this week in the class with friends being excluded from a game at recess. We called an emergency classroom meeting yesterday afternoon to discuss the situation. Our school does a culminating task to close out each lesson in our literacy program. The current lesson focuses on volunteering or community service. So our culminating task is going to be brainstorming a service project or way we can help our community. Due to our friendship issues at recess, I suggested we brainstorm ways we can make a Buddy Place on the playground. So if someone doesn't have a friend to play with, they can go to that spot and others will know to go ask them to join their play. It's like a Buddy Bunch but I don't necessarily envision it being a bench. 

I'm excited to discuss this with the students next week and see what ideas they come up with. I'm lucky because I have enough connections on the West Side where our school is located that we can likely get some volunteers to come help us make this a reality once we finalize our idea. We wanted to use our iPads (we are 1:1) for this culminating task so what we are going to do is create a proposal with our final idea and put the ideas together using the app Clips to show why we need a Pal Place or Buddy Spot at our school.

I cannot even begin to express how happy my heart feels to see these kids take a real situation and hold it close and come alongside their teachers to solve a problem that does not just affect our class. I had told them that the first week of school, I saw two first graders who were sad that they didn't have a friend to play with and how I matched them up and now I see them playing together often. They love the idea of the Pal Place/Buddy Bench and I do too.

I'm excited to see where we are able to take this and grateful that I have students who, even at 8-9 years old, can see outside themselves and feel empathy in a way that makes them want to solve problems. 

**Note: I did not invent this idea. When my youngest was in third grade, her teachers did this and I loved it and thus adapted it for my own classroom. So credit for the original idea goes to the third grade staff at Chandler Woods Charter Academy.

I love to read. It is one of my very favorite things to do. When I was a child, the most effective way to punish me wasn't to ground me from the television or playing outside. It was to ground me from books. It was really the only thing that ever got through to me. (Of course, as a teacher now, I cringe at this punishment, but truly it is the only thing that worked on me so I don't harbor ill will toward my mom over it...especially because I know she's likely to read this post. [Hi, mom!]). 

This summer, I read 17 books. It was glorious. Usually when I tell my students these statistics, their mouths drop open in utter disbelief. Sadly, the longer I teach, the less my students tend to really be readers when they arrive to my classroom. Some really don't have decoding down pat yet (EL students after all), but when I say they aren't readers, I mean they don't LIKE to read. They find it arduous, boring, repetitive and/or pointless. It makes me so, so sad. But really, I also understand that school is partly why they don't like to read. We kill their love of reading by over testing, making every book be tied to some kind of learning and just suck the joy right out of reading for them.

Several years ago, we were blessed to have multiple literacy coaches in the school I was teaching in. It was great. We had support, we also had many interventionists to help pull small groups and really focus on the skills our kids needed. I do remember one time at a staff meeting, they were telling us (per what the district said) that even our read aloud had to be "instructional." We were required to do these lessons where when we read aloud, we dissected the books and overanalyzed them. I dug in my heels. I knew this was not a way to build readers. Sure, shared reading is great and has it's place. But making every single read aloud be interactive and full of educational tasks? Nope, I wasn't feeling it.  I knew if I did what I was being told to do, I would be part of the reason why most kids hate to read. And I did not want that on my conscience. 

So, I did what many teachers do. I smiled, nodded and said I would do it, but within the walls of my own room, I did what I felt was right. I love to read to my students simply for the sake of enjoying a book. I might ask them to help me review the previous chapter before we read a new one or make a connection to something that happened, but for the most part, I read these books to my students for the simple pleasure of sharing a great story with them. Nothing sparks a child's interest in a book more than someone sharing that book with them. 

I'm a big advocate of reading all kinds of books to kids: chapter books, picture books, student created books, you name it. I want them to see that there is print everywhere and not only can that print teach us things, but it can also be enjoyable to read it. At the beginning of the year, I read a lot of picture books to my kids. Some do serve a dual purpose of having lessons/morals included, but many of them are just books I enjoy reading and they end up loving them too. As the year goes on, we begin to read novels. Some of my absolute favorites are The One and Only Ivan and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. The first time I read Edward aloud to a third grade class, they dissolved into giggles when I said Edward was naked (don't worry, he's a bunny, it's not an inappropriate book!) or when I said Edward found himself in the company of a hobo. When I read Ivan for the first time to a class, they were enthralled by his relationship with Ruby. The children came to love these stories and beg for me to keep reading because they wanted to know what happened next to these characters they came to love. They would have been less interested if there were worksheets to fill out or long, arduous discussions where they had to dissect the motivation of the characters. Sometimes, it is okay to read simply for the pleasure of reading.

To that end, however, I also realize some children need some motivation to pick up a book at home. Often they don't have books at home or models for reading at home. Thus, incentives are okay if they are carefully crafted and not designed to make students hate to read, but rather to find books they enjoy reading and want to read.

Enter Read Around the World (RATW). It has been a few years since I used this program. Actually, I haven't used it since I moved down to third grade (the first year I had third grade, we used a 30 books in 3rd grade challenge). The concept of RATW is pretty simple: as students read, they earn "miles" and those miles are added up to help them "travel" the world. 

I began by setting this up in the hallway and not talking about it at all. The students pass by it on our way home every day and it has already piqued their curiosity.

On Tuesday, when we return from our long weekend, I will formally introduce RATW to the students with this adorable reading log (available in English and Spanish to help the parents know what it is). Don't you love how the little frog is holding a globe?

Finally, as the students turn in their reading logs each week, I will tabulate their minutes and calculate their miles. They earn 20 miles for each minute that they read. So if they read the requested 20 minutes per night, they will earn 400 miles per night for a total of up to 2,800 miles per seven day week. Each Monday, after I calculate their miles, they will be added to our tally board that will be in the hallway next to the map. (I will add their names, just didn't want them out there publicly.) 

It is amazing to me how motivating this is for the students. They love to see where in the world they have traveled to. And since I have smaller students than I had when I did this previously, I am going to put the names of the countries on index cards and connect them with string so the students will be able to easily find which country they are currently visiting. I had a colleague who taught 4th grade with me who did that and I think it's a lovely idea that I will use for my current class. 

The last fourth grade class I did this with, one student traveled around the world 3 times before the end of the year! Once around the world is 45,000 miles which is approximately equal to 37 1/2 hours of reading over the course of the year. This student was so motivated to keep traveling that he read and read and read (and his end of year MAP scores showed that yes, he really did do all of that reading; his growth was tremendous).

​ I'm so excited to introduce this to the students and see how far they travel this year!

Some time last spring, I got the idea to implement a Gratitude Circle for this year. I just remember thinking how vital the opening circle was to our day and wondering why closing our day in the same fashion hadn’t occurred to me before.

Of course this year, I am co-teaching so things can’t just be my way. They have to be shared and owned by the other adults in the room. If something is going to be successful, the entire group has to buy in. Fortunately my intern and my co-teacher are all about it too. It has been so much better than I even could have imagined it would be.

We have a lot of English Learners (ELs) in our class this year (I’d say roughly 75%). Practicing speaking is really important for these friends to help develop their language. These circles are a perfect time to practice. We even toss in a little learning by demonstrating using a complete sentence (using the question as part of our answer too) when it’s our turn to share. It has been a powerful way to close our day together.

We have kept it simple so far. The students just share something they are grateful or thankful for. (Thursday two of the girls said they were thankful for their teachers who obviously work hard for them. How adorable is that?) As the students get better at the circle idea, I will ask them to pick someone to keep their eye on that day so they can give that person some positivity before they go home. I think once we move into the next phase of the circle, having the children praise each other’s efforts, it is really going to revolutionize the way they look at each other. Building that empathy and learning to genuinely support each other is going to be huge for them.

I’m so glad I decided to give this a try and honestly can’t wait to see how it works out as the year goes on.