Better!

Two posts in less than a week! I'm on a roll. This would have come last night if I hadn't gone to yoga. I'm so glad I'm making time for that, even though it takes up time I could be working or, you know, writing in my journal. It's so good for me to take care of myself. I'm a better teacher for it.

Yesterday was a great day at school. TOWER TUESDAY! I love tower Tuesdays. Tower Tuesdays are new - just instituted last week. So many of my students were avoiding tower work - language and math both - that I decided that one morning a week we would do nothing BUT tower work; thus tower Tuesday was born. It was awesome. Almost everyone got at least three towers done, and there were students who completed six, seven, eight in the morning. It was amazing, and the students, for the most part, thoroughly enjoyed it.

In the afternoon we had story on line and then music. While all that was going on, I put a tree up in the hall - kind of mosaic-like out of butcher paper. It looks dimensional and cool. When the students were ready to go back to work, I reminded them of the winter works on the shelves. There are several black line outlines of holiday items - an ornament, a gift box and a stocking - that the students fill in with free-verse poetry about winter or Christmas and then color. The gifts go under the tree; the ornaments go on the tree; the stockings go over their hooks. I also got out the snowflake templates for the students to create adjective snowflakes. Then most of the students spent the remainder of the afternoon working on holiday projects. Afterwards, we decked the hall. I'm rather pleased with how it is turning out.

Finally, before I left for the day I spoke with Diana about the math teams. RB's mom had asked me to tell her about "the whole math team thing:" what her daughter is studying, when and how much homework she ought to be bringing home, etc. My answer: "I don't know; she's not in my group." THAT IS RIDICULOUS! That I, as a child's teacher, can't answer such a basic question as, "Does my kid have homework tonight?" is absolutely ridiculous. So I went to Diana. I told her I wanted to touch base about math teams, that things were going fairly well, but that I have a huge concern. I told her that I hate not having my students in my classroom, that I hate not knowing what's going on with them, that I feel disconnected from them. I told her about the conversation with RB's mom. I asked what the thinking behind mixing students from the different classes is and why we can't do math groups with our own students in our own classrooms on our own schedule. She seemed receptive to change and asked if we can have a meeting on Thursday to talk about the teams.

After that I was walking on air. We're going to get rid of math teams! Woo! Of course, we'll still do math groups, and we'll be stuck with Everyday Math for the foreseeable future, but it is going to make mornings so much more manageable. YAY!