Friday, August 22, 2014

The 1st Week: Building a Foundation

My simple reflection from the first week back in the classroom is this:

Building a foundation for learning takes time.

The pressure to "start _______ (fill in the blank yourself)" is great. And yet, in order for the learning community to function smoothly, the foundation must be carefully built. The way I explained it to my students is that you don't build a house on the dirt; you first pour a foundation that will support it.
I spent this first week with my students building the foundation that will support our learning community and help us thrive. I'm amazed (always!) how much time everything takes.

This is the FOURTH blog post I've written today (!) as we reflect weekly on a faculty Ning, and I update both the 4th and 5th grade classroom blogs. In each of those posts, I reflected from a different vantage point (and for a different audience) on this creation of the foundation for learning.

From the 4th Grade Classroom Blog (parent audience)

One main difference between learning in school and learning outside of school is that in most schools, students are consistently grouped with their same-aged peers. Imagine having the same eighteen people come to your house every weekday! The opportunity to learn together extends beyond academic subjects and into developing the important life skills necessary to be a positive member of a community. Building a foundation for social learning is one of my main teaching goals for the first weeks of school.
To this end, we did many activities this week including introducing classroom norms, mentor sentence of the week and “read to self” which is the first component of the Daily 3.

From the Faculty Ning (colleague audience)

I will confess that I am a notorious "step-skipper" meaning I have little patience for detailed procedures and drawn-out step-by-step plans. My mind works creatively and I am very non-linear, which can be a blessing or a curse. So, it may seem odd that I am such an advocate of the Daily 5, which is nothing (in the beginning) if not detailed, linear and repetitive. 
I know that this is good teaching, and I know it because I have seen how well it works. If we had time to teach and model everything this thoroughly it would be great, but the truth is that teaching is a constant process of deciding what is worth the time. As I am beginning the process of building the Daily 5 foundation with my students, I am again seeing for myself how well this series of lessons works to create a structure for personalized literacy instruction. 


I also asked my students to reflect on the week.








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