After An Educator's Journey

Out of the classroom & into the universe

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about

Once upon a time, I taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders. Now I’m retired and working on new ventures.
I taught second, third and fourth graders. Teaching was my passion and joy for 30 years. And it didn’t hurt that they called me “mom” sometimes.

Author: amybisson

  • Where the responsibility lies

    Junia Yearwood wrote in an OpEd piece in the Boston Globe this week that it takes a culture that values learning to educate a child. I couldn’t agree with this more. What is valued in our culture? I don’t believe it is intelligence and learning if pop culture is any indication. What struck me as…

  • Adventures with Flat Stanley

    We’ve read the book, we’ve done the project with our kids (honest truth: not one of the 25 got a single Flat back!). This week my class has been hosting my niece’s Flat Stanley. And we are having a blast. Sorry, can’t post pictures of kids, but trust me on this. Working on multiplication riddles?…

  • No, They’re Not Kidding Me

    Yesterday during the first of three meetings I attended, we heard the news: next spring third and fourth grade teachers can expect their report card grades to be correlated to student performance on MCAS. And, I suppose, since that’s what happened last year, graphs and tables will be created into Powerpoint slide shows identifying each…

  • How in the heck did this happen?

    I’ve been confronted with my age ta couple of times this weekend. It was not an altogether pleasant trip down memory lane. Woodstock Then and Now was on the History Channel last night. In the summer of 1969, I was a junior, about to be senior, in high school. A couple of my classmates went…

  • A Thanksgiving Tale

    It’s really easy for me to get wrapped around the axel over lack of parental support in a school where poverty is pervasive. I’ve had 3 teacher assistant team meetings for one child so far this year. The parent never attends and never responds to the meeting invitations. This parent continually writes nasty notes about…

  • When All Else Fails….

    We’ve been learning how to round numbers…. rounding in the tens and hundreds, and – dare I say it – even in the thousands. This morning, I revisited rounding with my third graders and from the reaction, a few of them even seemed to “get” it. However one of my students was really struggling to…

  • If life hands you apples, make…. applesauce!

    Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been investigating the colonial period through our guided reading groups. With my Safety Net 1 group (yes, I have two safety net groups), the texts’ readability levels are far beyond instructional level so mainly it looks like a shared reading session.  The book we’re reading, the most basic…

  • Visualize This

    Our strategy focus at this time in the year is making a visualization. Have you ever stopped to think about how useful this strategy really is? For my money, it seeps into just about every area of the third grade curriculum. In Word Study, we ask the kids to Look-Say-Cover-Write-Check.  In other words, look at…

  • A Reason to Vote

    I heard a statistic over the weekend: just short of 60 percent of registered voters will vote in this year’s hotly contended elections. That statistic, 60 percent, would be considered an overwhelmingly successful election. But consider this back-story:  the 60 percent is about half of those eligible to vote. That right — there are adults…

  • It’s the vocabulary, stupid

    Well, not just the vocabulary, but for my urban kids, that surely is a major factor.  This week, our writing focus – visualizing a text – was driven by a poem written by Carmen Lagos Signes: Pumpkins in the cornfields, Gold among the brown, Leaves of rust and scarlet, Trembling slowly down; Birds that travel…