Back to school ready in July!

Long time no blog!

I'm working furiously this summer getting ready for another wonderful year with my third graders!  Here's what's on my plate right now:

• Daily 5 - Second edition!
• CRAFT (instead of CAFE)
• PALS Reading
• PALS Math
• The new Everyday Math

I'm taking a few classes this summer, one is the new Daily 5, another is a short class on CAFE, (finished them both already!) and the last class I'm currently taking uses the book Never Work Harder than Your Students by Dr. Robyn Jackson.  It's making me think a lot about how to do all the work in less time, and that's my motto for the coming school year:

Be efficient, be thorough.

Why?  Well, for a few reasons: 1. I spend too much time at school and my kids are getting older and starting sports, I need to be there for them!  2. We are working on a data cycle this year, and I want to make sure I'm putting the necessary time into properly assessing and intervening, and I have to have my ducks in a row for that.  3. I want to synthesize several reading books I've read into a curriculum that works for me and is rigorous and pushes kids.  Those books are Daily 5 (second edition), CAFE (with CRAFT modification), Notice and Note, Reading with Meaning (I see now there's a second edition available!  Goody!), Making the Most of Small Groups, Practice with Purpose, and (eventually) Literature Circles.  I know this seems like a lot, but it's all stuff I either do or half-do, and I want it to be deliberate and less haphazard.

I'm going to also (you won't believe this) start doing MINDFULNESS in my classroom!  I went to a conference in June and it was so good, we practiced mindfulness for our own good, and talked about how important it is for kids' brains.  I'm sold!  So I'm going to try and take a course this year to help me practice it in my classroom, and hopefully a few other teachers from my school/district will go so we can be a small community to support each other.  I'm most excited about how this will help me be a better teacher by being a better person!

My next few posts will be about the process I'm going through to implement all this.  Remember, it's a lot:

1. Reading curriculum
2. Math curriculum
3. Data cycles with PALS intervention in both
4. Mindfulness

Last, but not least, I recently got the book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by Marie Kondo.  I had heard it was good, but that's such an understatement for a person like me!  Having lived in Japan and married a Japanese man (tidy, loves to declutter) this is a great book for me.  In addition, people I work with and love dearly are tidy declutterers and I always look at their classrooms in envy.  Now I've started decluttering at home and I'm excited about how this will work in my classroom and how to teach my students to be tidy -- not just how to throw stuff away, but how to really organize based on "KonMari"s principles.  (Let me just brag for a second: I threw away 3 large bags of clothing that didn't spark joy, and managed to fit ALL of my remaining clothing into one dresser and a few bins, plus a few jackets and aprons hung up -- that's it!  And I got two big bags of stuff from the bathroom, like lotion, cleaners, old stuff I've had "organized" in bins for years that were moved from house to house.  No more!  The bathroom cabinet is CLEAN!  Okay, I'm done.  For now.)

Thanks for tuning in!