After An Educator's Journey
Out of the classroom & into the universe
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Once upon a time, I taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders. Now I’m retired and working on new ventures.
Category: Classroom organization
I was unprepared for my first ever teaching job in 1974…. why didn’t those children sit in rows with their hands folded waited for the next drop of wisdom from my brain?
Here’s how things have evolved over the last 20+ years. Maybe what I’ve learned can help you.
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It’s a good news/bad news thing….. At the end of the school year, there was a rumor that our ratty carpeting would be replaced by tile. Good news: the carpets are gone! Bad news: the replacement required some serious sanding before the new tiles could be laid. Everything in my classroom is covered with a…
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Yesterday, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Scholastic Warehouse Sale. Armed with a listing of my newly reorganized Leveled Library inventory, I forced myself away from the picture books and materials more suitable to second grade independent readers in order to focus on increasing nonfiction texts. 20 year old buying habits are not easy…
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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…
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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%…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The lists of books that need to be leveled has been completed! That would, under normal circumstances be something to celebrate; however, right now things feel pretty overwhelming. The nightly task of typing a book title into, first Scholastic Book Wizard, and then one or more of the other databases is quite tedious. Many of…
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This week – and most likely next – has been spent in the tedious exercise of listing any book in the classroom that will remain in the students’ library. Coming from a lower grade level, I am amazed at the quantity of books that I have for Reading Levels A-J…. too many in fact. So…
After An Educator's Journey 