Changes and an awesome Dollar Tree find!

I haven't posted in quite a while. Shortly after my last post, I heard from a friend about an opportunity to work at a preschool in our town. The school is a daycare/preschool which serves children with special needs as well as children who are typically developing. I started as a substitute as they didn't have any full-time positions available at the time. About a month after I began subbing, a position became available to be an Education Specialist in the 3-4 year old classroom. Since then, I have grown to love working with little ones. I have been in the classroom for a year and a half now - we have so much fun every day!

Like most teachers, I have an obsession with Dollar Tree. You could say that Hobby Lobby, Dollar Tree, and some stores on TPT should just take most of my paycheck and deposit it directly in their accounts/registers. Sigh. Our local DT doesn't carry many new items, so these might have been around for a while before I found them :)

Anyways, I found a great new item at DT yesterday when I was out trying to kill some time before picking my up my son. I wasn't shopping my local DT as I was in a different town - it was a MESS. Apparently the whole store was out of stock because they had about 5 full pallets of boxes to put out on the shelves. Needless to say, I wasn't expecting to find anything good. Lo and behold, I walked by the teaching supplies section and down on the bottom shelf were these cute little test tube sets! They had green, red, and blue so I got 2 sets in each color. Think of the amazing things you can do with these little boogers! I'll be sharing some of the ways I'm using them in my class this week :) Stay tuned!

A new start

Have you ever had a year so challenging that you questioned your career choice? Yep, that was me this past year. I had 3 very successful years at my previous school but had to make the difficult decision to leave. I was offered a position at a closer school, still 25 min from home, but I was excited for the shorter drive.

This year was the hardest year of teaching I've ever experienced. When you set personal goals for yourself and your students, and it seems as if none of them were accomplished, it is extremely disheartening. I tried every trick in the "teacher" book only to feel as if my efforts were in vain. I left the classroom in April with just 9 weeks left in the year. I was emotionally, mentally, and physically beaten down. Yay for upbeat posts, right?

The school I was working in did not have a healthy morale. Teacher bullying was prevalent and there was little to no support. There is a lot of craziness going on in the school system right now, so it doesn't surprise me to see people leaving. It just makes me sad to leave the profession. I loved teaching. Someday I might go back, but many things will have to change before that happens.

I have decided to stay at home with my sweet kids for now. I'll be able to help out my son's school as a parent(!) and although it hurts my heart, I won't be returning to teach this year.

I hope some of the tips I share help you have an easier, more enjoyable school year. I'll also be sharing some of the products I create for TPT!

Success!

About a month or two ago, I ran across a suggested page on Facebook for a company called Studentreasures Publishing. You can check out their website here. They will publish books for K-12 students for free! You can choose to make a class book or you can have each student write individual books. All you have to do is request a FREE mail-in kit or you can create your book online! I requested 3 mail-in kits in case some of the teachers at my school were interested in creating a book with their classes. Once the kit arrives at your school, you have about a month or so to have your students write and illustrate their stories on the pages provided. They even send you a sample book to show your students an example of what the book might look like. Teachers will receive a FREE copy of the book once it is published if all parents return their order forms. Parents are able to purchase a copy for $19.95 but there is no obligation to purchase one. The company just asks you to send the order forms and get them signed (yes OR no) with money included if the parents decide to buy a copy. This was one of the more difficult tasks for me to complete with my students since unfortunately, even with reminders, some of my parents will not return papers that need to be signed. :(

Since we have been studying fairy tales and folktales and we already wrote our own versions of Jack and the Beanstalk, I decided that our book would be a fractured fairy tales book for Jack and the Beanstalk! Some of my students are very reluctant writers and need a lot of encouragement to put forth effort in their writing, but all of them were excited to be published in their very own book. I even had some students who wrote stories that were two pages long and if you've seen the small lines on the pages in Kit 34A, you understand my amazement! My students have grown so much in their writing this year and I am incredibly proud of the great job they did on their stories. Here is an example from one of my students who is a reluctant writer:

As you can see, the students will have to write their stories in marker or pen. I had my students go through the writing process and write their final draft on a separate sheet of paper before using the paper provided in the kit. I think the next time I use this resource, I will be making copies of the papers provided so I know exactly how many pages my students will need for each of their stories. Anyways, they will have to write their story on the lined paper provided in PENCIL first. I bought several extra fine point Sharpie markers for my students to use when going over their pencil markings. It dries quickly so no fears of the marks smudging on the glossy papers provided in the kit. 

I wrote a story inspired by my son for the end of the book. I also included a letter to my students and their parents explaining how proud I am of their hard work this year. I will be mailing my completed kit (along with two of my fellow teachers' kits) tomorrow and I CAN'T WAIT to see the final product. I am hoping it will be a treasured keepsake that they will read for years to come!

BIG news!

It has been quite a while since I have posted and there is a very good reason for that! I have not only been extremely busy and exhausted from two Saturday make-up days and other extracurricular activities at our school after hours, but I also found out something HUGE for me and my family :) Well, tiny...

About three weeks ago, I found out that we will be adding a new member to our family! We are happy to announce that our little bundle is due in October! This will be our first child together and so it will definitely be a different experience since my son will be starting Kindergarten in the fall. I have a lot of decisions to make regarding my job situation. I commute an hour to work each morning and it has been difficult on my family for the last three years that I have been working at my current school due to the long hours, long commute, and extra activities that we have after school almost every day. I love my co-workers and I feel like I finally have a "home" at school, but I am already exhausted when I come home each day so I know it will be even more difficult in August, September and early October. 

Snow, Snow, Go Away!

If you're in NC or another southern state like me, you've likely been out of school more this year because of snow and ice than any other recent year. In January, we were out for four days in one week (only went to school on a Monday!) and this week we were out another four days. The first time we were out, the Monday we went back was very chaotic. We had to shorten our lesson plans from the week before and somehow merge the next week's plans in with them. I have a feeling this Monday will be similar. So many things have to be rescheduled for this coming week... a Valentine's dance for K-2 and 3-5, Candy grams, Valentine's Day celebrations, a staff soup lunch. It is definitely going to be an exhausting week.

I have not been a very good teacher this week. I have been more focused on spending time with my family at home, going on walks through the neighborhood in the snow and trying to not get sick (still fighting it!). Our dog got out of the yard yesterday and we spent a good part of the afternoon looking for him before calling the front gate. Someone took him in and my husband went to pick him up that night. I guess he felt like going on an adventure. He loves being outside, even in the snow and cold weather. He is very much an "outside" dog.

Even through my laziness, I updated my blog to include a widget for my TPT store (thanks to this awesome tutorial by Ms. Fultz's Corner! Check it out!) and FREE social media icons with a tutorial (thanks Beautiful Designs! Tutorial and Icons). Their tutorials are so easy that even I figured them out and I am by no means an HTML expert or even close to knowing how to use it).

Now my family and I are off to Sam's to stock up our pantry since we have used a lot of our food this week during the snowstorm!

Fluency

Wow! Time has flown by this year! I haven't updated this in so long but one of my resolutions is to become better at updating, so here goes.

My little group of 2nd graders have been AMAZING this year. I am blown away at the great readers that I have in my class. Unfortunately, I still have a few friends who struggle with their reading skills. Improving their fluency was a big part of this school year and based on assessments, most of them have shown significant growth! So excited! I am passionate about fluency and stress to parents that it is a very important component to their children's understanding of what they read.

I began using fluency passages for homework last year and that seemed to help many of my struggling readers. I would love for all of them to have help from parents at home so that they could hear their children read, but I know that it isn't always feasible. Each year is an improvement on the last in teaching, so this year I also added a fluency center in my literacy time. I use poems and short passages that follow our unit of study. The students work with a partner and read it once to themselves silently. Then they take turns reading to a partner. Finally, they read the passage together. It is a very simple center to set up and maintain throughout the week.

Occasionally, I will have fluency assessments for my struggling readers and students with IEPs. There are some simple assessments you can perform with them 2-3 times each. I do not have a teaching assistant in my room and it can get difficult to pull these students over for an assessment each week. I try to get an initial read with them, using a timer and recording mistakes and omissions on Monday. They practice reading the passage with their partners and then Wednesday or Friday, I will pull them back over to read again to see check for improvement. These are good for documentation for students who are having difficulty with their reading.

Another activity I use is a flipbook for nonsense word fluency. We do not assess NWF after the beginning of the year, but we still progress monitor this skill with struggling readers. I created several notebooks for a NWF center. For each notebook, I wrote a letter (a-z) on a flashcard and punched a hole at the top of the card. I put the consonants on the first and third ring and the vowels in the middle (making sure that the combinations didn't create a word that was inappropriate!). Then the students will flip the cards to create CVC words and make a list of real and nonsense words. They have to read the word and write it in the list where it belongs. My students love it! I'll add pictures later because the notebooks are at school and we've been out since Monday because of inclement weather here in NC.

There are so many great resources for fluency passages online. I have bought several packets from teachers on TPT and have created some of my own using excerpts from stories and books I already have in my classroom.

I hope this helps give you an idea of how I am working on improving fluency with my students.

New Kid on the Block

I have been checking out all of the wonderful blogs out there and I am AMAZED at all of the great ideas that my fellow teachers share. I wanted to join in on the fun and I hope I can be as helpful as everyone has been to me over the last few years!

Just an intro: This will be my third year of teaching 2nd grade. I graduated from UNC Chapel Hill in 2007 (GO HEELS!) and I taught 6th grade for one year after graduation. I have to say, teaching middle school was not my thing and I have to give props to all of you amazing middle school teachers out there. I took a year off to take care of my newborn son and after some soul-searching and random other jobs outside of teaching, I decided that I needed to get back into education in the right grade-level for me. An opportunity teaching 2nd grade (MY FAVORITE!) became available and I ran with it! Now I've been there for the last two years and even with all the difficulties that come with teaching, I still wouldn't do anything else!

I got married this past June to the most amazing man who loves my son like he is his own. I'm still getting used to being called Mrs. Dull and sometimes I forget when I'm calling parents and give them my old name! They were so confused on our Meet and Greet night since my name on the outside of my door hasn't been changed and my id badge still has my old name! Haha, oh well, it will be fixed in good time :)

I look forward to another great year in 2nd grade and sharing funny stories and ideas with everyone in the teaching community! Love all of you fellow teachers out there!