After having a wonderful and relaxing Christmas break, I went back to the grindstone on Monday. I feel relatively prepared, however, for what lies ahead of me this time. Immediately before Christmas I was starting to feel a little anxious (or in other words, I was on the edge of a nervous break down). Before the break, I had slipped back into the tough position of knowing where you want to go but not really knowing how to get there, and was barely surviving each day. Fortunately, I took advantage of some extra time to plan and prepare myself over the break. I can now say with a reasonable amount of confidence that I more or less know what will be taught each day through about the middle of February. I also have planned several lessons ahead of myself, which has left me feeling a little more comfortable.
Right now we are doing a reader’s theater in our class and the kids are loving it. Yesterday we learned about how paying attention to punctuation can help improve our fluency. After instruction they practiced reading aloud from short book excerpts, and then they practiced reading dialogs quoted from The Princess Bride. The kids went crazy with this activity, and not in a bad way. They were extremely devoted to reading the dialogs with as much expression as they could muster and after we had practiced each dialog, several partners would then come to the front of the classroom to demonstrate their great new skills.
Today we discussed the text features found in a script, and the students had the opportunity to write a “vocabulary” reader’s theater of their own. They chose their own groups and had to write a script (following the text features we discussed) that included sixteen of their twenty-four vocabulary words, used in context. I thought I’d have to do a lot of monitoring to ensure that they were staying on task, but to my amazement, every period that I had was completely absorbed in the project. The kids all became extremely involved in the activity and are overly anxious to perform their play tomorrow. I walked around a few times to check their progress and make sure they were meeting the criteria, and spent the rest of the time grading papers at my desk. They were so excited about what they were doing that they hardly needed me at all. It was fantastic! I think I’m just as excited to hear their performances as they are to do them tomorrow!
Also, since some of my kids have been having a hard time turning in their WRLs on time each week, I awarded all of the kids who have never missed a WRL and never turned one in late by inviting them to an early morning breakfast in my classroom on Friday. It will be simple… donuts, muffins and orange juice. But hopefully it will give some positive reinforcement, as well as provide some motivation for the other kids to improve their work habits so they can join us at the end of next term.
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