To be an Excellent Teacher...

To be an excellent teacher, you must:

--Be willing to learn from your colleagues, your students, and YOURSELF.
--Be flexible. Lesson plans frequently need to be modified, meetings will need to be changed, and collaboration must happen.
-- Stay current with instructional strategies and technology integration methods. After all, if you don't, you are doing a disservice to the students.
--Be a team player. Noone knows it all.
--Communicate effectively with parents, students, and colleagues.
--Have passion for teaching, your subject area, and children.
--And, without a doubt...have a LIFE. Do things for yourself...enjoy time with loved ones.

I know that there are many more thoughts to add to this. I could probably go on forever!

Any thoughts? Please leave a comment ;)

That time...

It's getting to be that time...back-to-school sales, class lists formed, classrooms waiting to be organized... In other words...it's August. For teachers, August is a time to squeeze out that last bit of summer fun while spending time preparing for the upcoming year. By now, most teachers feel refreshed, but are still anxious about giving up their summer freedom. Before we know it, we will be buried in every day school duties. With that being said... I think I'm almost ready to get back into the daily grind.

Through my web-surfing, I came across this wonderful website by eThemes. It has a multitude of resources from grade 1-12. I tagged many of them on my delicious account for later viewing.

Happy August...I definitely will squeeze out the last bit of summer. ;)

Don't Stop, Keep Reading!

A couple of months ago, I posted a video of a middle school singing "Gotta Keep Reading." Well, I was inspired by how wonderful it was to have a group of students singing about reading and learning, so my grade level partner and I decided to have the kids re-write the words to Journey's song, "Don't Stop Believing." Although this video is a practice and they are not holding their fancy glittered microphones, they were still amazing. So, with not much more to say...here is MA's 3rd grade (minus 2) singing "Don't Stop, Keep Reading."


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJb8BQhtdbo

Homographs at its Best!

After picking my kids up from ENCORE last week, they settled into their seats for independent reading time. During a brief moment with my desk, I was greeted by a rock and post-it labeled "you rock."













The next day, this rock and note appeared.

Homographs at its best!

Later, I discovered that one of my creative and funny boys placed these rocks on my desk. How cute.

They don't miss a beat!

There are a couple of things that I have learned about teaching over the last five years. First, most of what you learn about teaching doesn't come from college classes...it comes from on the job experience. Second, a teacher's work is NEVER done. Third, a teacher plays many roles each day. And finally, and quite possibly the most important, the kids will never forget the silly mistakes you make.

Case in point: During Writer's Workshop, we are working on our essay unit created by Lucy Calkins. (I'll get to her in a minute). As I was modeling how to develop ideas, I wrote my name on the board and had the kids come up with three things about me that they could write about. Here is what they came up with:

1. When a humongous spider crawled out of my bag; I screamed and went running to get someone to kill it.
2. When my computer had a run-in with a semi-open gatorade bottle.
3. When I forgot to put our egg in our contraption for our egg-drop experiment.


Forget reading, writing, science, social studies and math...what my kids will remember about me is that I make mistakes...and that they were pretty funny. In actuality, isn't that what teaching is all about? Something to ponder.

3rd graders don't miss a beat, and that's what I love about them.

Back to Lucy Calkins. I love this woman. She knows everything about reading and writing. I don't have a single child in my class who is a reluctant writer. They all like to write. Maybe that's because of my enthusiasm, but my excitement stems from the fact that "I love Lucy."

I don't have a resource to share that is relevant to this post. However, I have tagged some many awesome sites on my delicious account.

5 weeks left. Pretty unbelievable. Have a good week!