After An Educator's Journey
Out of the classroom & into the universe
recent posts
about
Once upon a time, I taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders. Now I’m retired and working on new ventures.
Month: April 2009
-
The calendar may be telling me that we “only” have 36 school days left, but this week we celebrated a new year — at least a new year as far as our classroom library is concerned. The book baskets have been labeled and, when needed there are level reminders on the baskets. On Monday, we…
-
Every year we scour our standardized test scores wondering what we can do so that our students look as good on paper as they appear when we are assessing them day-to-day. I hate that standardized testing, in this case MCAS, is considered the measure for success. I think of some of my colleagues who took…
-
This week is April School Vacation Week here in Massachusetts — we celebrate Paul Revere’s ride, the Battle of Lexington and Concord, the Marathon, and a Red Sox Home Day Game all on one day. We also have a school vacation. Why is it that whenever I am on school vacation, I spend about 20%…
-
This week I spent most of a “day off” in school sorting through the books that had been labeled and logged and organizing them into color coded baskets – red for fiction, green for nonfiction, blue for poetry and yellow for special collections. Using both the small nesting baskets from Really Good Stuff and the…
-
That’s the question under consideration this week. According to some of the readings out there on the topic, the recommendation is 20 books per student in the library. For a typical classroom that’s somewhere between 500 and 600 books. Since I’ve already hit the 500 mark on the database using just books I’ve brought into…
-
Two disasters – or near disasters – this week: First, I’ve been updating the Excel database file that I copied onto my school computer (a MAC). That seems like a reasonable thing to do when adding books that got missed on the first pass through a book box. I also have been bolding the titles…
-
With about 400 books that were previously unleveled now identified by genre and reading level, I was feeling pretty good about the progress in the classroom library. Machine-like, I’ve been able to go through 2 or 3 boxes of books on the white book shelves each morning. Last night, however, as I was checking on…
After An Educator's Journey 