Counting my blessings

I just got back from my Christmas in Cape Breton and I've been thinking of all kinds of things I should write about on my blog. I opened it up and realized I hadn't posted in a month. I'm going to try to post more often this coming year.

In a later post I will write about what has been going on in my classroom, why I was out sick for almost a week and what is coming up in 2012. But for now I'd like to write something a little more personal.

While I was away, I was thinking about just how lucky I am to have grown up in the family that I have and to be surrounded by so much love. I think that Christmas with my family is just about the best thing ever. Growing up, I thought that everyone had Christmases just like mine and I was confused when people would complain about going to see their families or when they wouldn't be excited about big family get togethers. Now that I'm older and I've seen some examples of families that are not like mine I can understand where they're coming from, and I feel grateful that I am so lucky.

My husband and I left on Saturday, Christmas Eve, because we had school right up until Friday, Christmas Eve Eve, and drove for 6 hours to get to my aunt's house in Cape Breton. This is my husband's least favourite part, the drive. I don't mind it that much. Growing up it was about 4-5 hours and we did it several times a year. This year we grabbed some CD's and took turns choosing which one to listen to.

Christmas Eve was spent at my aunt's. Normally we go to my aunt and uncle's down the road but they weren't there this year because my cousin has a baby. Instead we hosted, had some snacky foods, played a game of wizard, then some of my aunts and uncles and cousin's showed up. We spent the whole night in the kitchen eating, drinking and playing a game called "Violence" which in some other circles is called celebrities. When everyone left, my parents, my aunt, my husband and I opened our stockings and exchanged gifts. For the last few years we have cut back on presents. We mostly donate to charity and give things to each other in our stockings. We started opening our presents on Christmas Eve some time when I was a teenager. I, who was always the keeper of traditions, fought against it for a long time but now I enjoy it. The main reason for this is that we host Christmas dinner and Christmas morning is too busy with cooking the turkey and vegetables.

Christmas day we had 15 people for dinner. My brother, his wife and their 2 year old son came up. I was so happy that they were there this year. It was my nephew's first Cape Breton Christmas and he provided most of the entertainment for the day. We do crackers, we wear the hats in the crackers, we sing karaoke, play more silly games, and of course eat way too much.

Boxing Day we relaxed all morning and too the dogs for a snowy walk on the golf course and then headed up to Glace Bay to my aunt and uncle's house. Another feast plus a game of Apples to Apples. Lots of laughter and catching up. My mom has 5 brothers and one sister. All of her brothers have at least 2 children and one family has 5 children. I have lots of cousins and most of them are around my age. There isn't one person in my family that I don't get along with. We laughed so hard we cried several times over the weekend.

I'm so lucky to have grown up and to continue to have a loving, supportive family that is so close. We've known tough times but have become stronger for it. Many of my relatives are teachers or are retired teachers.

In some ways, I feel like my experiences have not prepared me for helping my students with what they are going through. I haven't live through a life that resembles theirs. I haven't had to deal with divorce or poverty or racism or violence or abuse or neglect. I've had some difficulties in my life, but nothing major. But I think in another way, my safe, secure life has made it easier for me to help them. I was taught to be empathetic and caring by empathetic and caring people. I was shown how to love and be respectful by people modeling these things in my life. I hope that I can give even a small portion of that love and respect to my students.

I hope that everyone is having a wonderful holiday.

Not just treading water anymore

I haven’t had much chance to write lately. With report cards going out last week and parent teacher interviews and I got sick at the beginning of last week and NaNoWriMo going on and life in general just got away from me. I felt bogged down and to be very honest I was starting to lose hope about how well this year was going to go. I felt like I was just treading water and not getting anywhere. I always knew this year was going to be a challenge and I knew that I was up for it but of course I was worried at the same time.

Stress is an awful thing to deal with. And despite the absolutely amazing support I’ve been getting, from my principal, from my co-workers, and my husband, I was starting to feel the effects of being stressed. It’s not just school, there are other factors causing stress of course, life is like that. Even though things were getting better I was finding myself less able to cope. It would take me longer to wind down at home and it was affecting my digestive system.

Luckily, things are looking up. As I said, my principal is amazing. I’ve been lucky to work for a few great principals and they all have their different qualities that make them great. This year my principal is very hands on and involved. She’s in my classroom about once a day checking up on how things are going, taking kids out to talk about various things with them, she has been a wonderful resource and sounding board for me and I know that she wants these kids to succeed and she wants her teachers to be happy.

I’ve been reading quite a few blogs written by teachers in the States and it does make me realize how lucky we are in Canada that our Education system has not yet degraded that far. I know that my teaching situation this year is not unique and in comparison to some situations I’ve read about, it’s not that bad. My main struggle is that I have twenty-five grade five students in my class, a few with behaviour issues and possible undiagnosed learning challenges. I have three possibly soon to be four students on IBSP’s, four others who are on modified programs and I don’t have an EA with me, it’s just me. Again, I realize this is not a unique situation and lots of people get by teaching classes like this on their own and I could have done this on my own it was just very difficult.

And so my principal got me Mrs. W. She’s not an EA, she’s a teacher who didn’t get a position this year. She was back to supply teaching and was volunteering in another class. She’s been hired on to work with me every morning until at least March Break and I couldn’t be happier. This was her third week with me and the change in our classroom environment has been wonderful. It was slow to start of but my goodness, having another set of eyes, another voice in the classroom has been amazingly helpful. Now there are two of us reinforcing the classroom expectations. Now I can keep teaching while she pulls a child aside to remind them of what they need to be doing. Now we can separate the class into two groups to help focus on their needs when they’re trying to work independently. 

Luckily, her teaching style and her way of interacting with students is similar to mine. I think if we had very different styles this arrangement wouldn’t work so well but right now it’s working just great.

The other big change that happened, also because of my principal pushing to have things improve, is that my classroom has been completely re-arranged. As I showed in earlier posts, my classroom is a fairly small rectangular room and my SMART board was on one of the narrow walls. This made arranging the seating plan difficult because the students at the back of the room were very far away from me when I was up at the board. While I was teaching something that didn’t require the SMART Board I would circulate as much as possible, but I found the whole room felt crowded, even after taking out two big tables and my reading corner carpet. And I'm not sure why the font changed on this one paragraph when I added in pictures.

My principal looked into having my SMART board moved to one of the long walls and it happened the end of last week. Wednesday afternoon these two guys showed up and asked me where I wanted it moved to. I was not expecting it to happen so soon so I was caught off guard. I think I put it a little too far off to one side which also restricts my seating plan. And now I’m writing on a chalk board instead of a white board but that’s okay.

I find we have so much more room this way. It’s easier to get to the students who need help and I have fewer bruises on my hips from bumping into tables and desks all day.

I’m hoping that with these two big changes along with some other smaller changes, that we can create the supportive learning environment that my students need to help them learn as much as they can this year.

Oh, and on the French front, there was one comment that happened on Thursday that I have to share. We were having a serious discussion about why it’s important to be learning French, especially in New Brunswick. A few of my students were expressing a negative attitude towards French and so I knew it was an important discussion to have. I shared with them that my husband is looking for work right now and that he’s finding it hard because most jobs that he wants require French and he was only in Immersion for a few years so his French level isn’t high enough.

“He could come here and learn with us!” shouts out one of my girls.

They’re so sweet.

My husband thought that was hilarious.

Tables and Desks

Please excuse my absence from my blog. Life has been busy lately. I have another post coming explaining why in part but for now I have another post about today.

We had a meeting today about our new school. Our school and another in the area are going to be closed next year and our new school is currently being built. We will be combining the two school staffs and students and to ease this transition, we have meetings occasionally with both staffs to talk about what we would like to see at our new school and what we would like our culture to be like and to get to know each other.

I’m fortunate enough to have worked at both schools, though the other one I only worked there for about two months and then supply taught a bit after, but I know most of the teachers there.

One of the things we were asked to discuss today was what we would like to have in our classrooms. We came up with a list of things like having a tall stool, a small table near the SMART board for our laptops, having a guided reading table and a reading area with something on the floor. These were all things we easily agreed on in our grade level groups.

Then we started talking about desks versus tables for the students. I had never even thought about this idea before. I just assumed we would be getting standard desks and that would be that because that’s what every classroom has in the upper grades that I’ve seen. But the other Intensive French teacher said that she would like tables. She explained that she didn’t have her students put much in their desks anyway and they always end up being a mess. The students tend to play with things in their desks and they end up being more of a distraction than necessary.

I agreed with all of her points and felt that I too would prefer tables over desks. I’ve always had my students store most of their stuff in places other than their desks and I find that their desks end up just being cluttered and full of things that they don’t need. So why have desks? Wouldn’t it be easier to have the students store things elsewhere? And also, this could help them prepare for middle school where they will not have desks of their own. They will need to carry their stuff from room to room and won’t be able to keep supplies in their desks. For that matter, I question the necessity of having desks with storage space in middle and high school. What’s the point? All it does in encourage them to put things in there like notes for students in other classes and other distractions.

Together we thought of a system where we would have tables with different responsibilities for bringing over the table’s basket of supplies. Especially in Intensive French where we do so much oral and group work together, there isn’t a lot of need of supplies. We barely have any duotangs or scribblers and no text books. So what is the use of having a desk to store things? But the other grade 5 teacher, who teaches French Immersion was not convinced. She wants desks with storage space in them in her classroom. At first we thought this would be fine, that we could customize our spaces. 
But it turns out that they want our wings to be be uniform. And when I thought about it a little more I realized that although I’m setting up this classroom for me and for what I would like to have to teach, I also have to think of the teachers who will have my classroom after me. After all, it’s not likely that I will stay in the same classroom for the rest of my career. And even if I did, the new school is going to outlast my career. So I have to think about what the teachers after me would want to have in their classroom as well. And that’s a difficult thing to do. We’ve been told that we can’t change our minds once our furniture is ordered. We don’t have enough money for that. So if we decide now that we want tables and then we find out that it was a horrible mistake then we just have to live with it. Both of us are new teachers. We’ve never worked with tables before in older grades. We just have this idea that it would work better but we don’t know in practice. 
So I’m asking you, my more experienced PLN, what do you think would work better? If you could have any kind of furniture in your room, in your ideal classroom, what would it be, knowing that you have to get the whole wing to agree and that future teachers will be living with your choices? And other than student work spaces, what would your ideal classroom contain? Would you prefer a round table for conferencing or a ‘c’ shaped table? Would you prefer to have a water fountain in the room or in the hallway? If you could design your classroom to look however you wanted, where would you put the board? Your desk? Would you even have those things in there at all?

French video resource

It's been a while since I last posted. I've been very busy, like all teachers, getting into classroom routines, marking work, getting to know my students better and all those little day to day tasks that pile up. I've been thinking of a few topics I would like to write about but I need to find a costume for our school's Halloween Howls tomorrow night and I need to get to bed so this is a quick post today.

I am very fortunate to work in a school district where YouTube is available for us to use and even encouraged though they prefer us to take the video, save it and show it without worrying about ads or other videos being shown that are inappropriate. My solution to that is that I set my laptop/SMART Board to extend so I can queue up the video on my laptop where the students can't see it, then slide it over to the SMART Board where they can. That or I go to a channel where I trust the content.

My favourite YouTube channel is La chaine de Mme Duckworth, created by a Core French teacher in Toronto. She has about 1500 videos on there, some are silent videos, some are songs, some are tv shows. Not all are appropriate for all ages, but with any video, it's best practice to watch it first before you show it.

Some day I would like to start my own YouTube channel for songs and videos I use in my classroom. Do you have a favourite resource for videos that you use?

Happy Halloween!

NaNoWriMo 2011

Today is October 11 and October is nearly half way done. What does that mean? It means that National Novel Writing Month www.nanowrimo.org is just a few weeks away. That's pretty scary and exciting.

For the past three years I've participated (and finished) NaNoWriMo, a crazy idea started over 10 years ago by a bunch of college students who wanted to see if they could write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Crazy idea. But they did it and the idea grew and grew to the amazing worldwide phenomenon it is today.

My first year I wrote a novel called "Getting Centred". It ended up being several stories about these interconnected characters all woven together. It stated out okay but ended up kind of a mess. The second year was the best. I wrote a children's novel called "And the Tower Came Tumbling Down" with a little help and inspiration from the classes I was supply teaching for. I still enjoy reading this novel and am working on editing it with my writing group, but more about that later. Last year, since it was my first time with a full time teaching job during NaNo, I decided to do something "easier" and write a memoir piece about teaching. I managed to get my 50,000 words written but I didn't enjoy doing it as much. I love the unknown about writing fiction. I found with memoir, though I do like writing it from time to time, that there was no surprize. There was no trying to think of what was going to happen next or my characters telling me what they wanted to do because what I was writing had already happened. So I think I'm mainly going to stick to fiction this year.

Generally, October is my out-lining month. I do not write by the seat of my pants for NaNo. I outline, chapter by chapter what I would like to have happen and then I write it. But this year I've been very busy with school and focused on my new class, I haven't had a lot of time to think about what I would like to write this year.

Part of the problem is that with my new writing group I've ventured into thinking about becoming more serious about my writing. They've been helping me edit my children's novel and while reading it over again and again I've decided I still like it and I think it could be worthy of being published one day. That's kind of a frightening thought for me but also exciting. Up until now, writing has just been a hobby, but then I think, why not? Why couldn't I get published? I started looking into how authors get published. I read up on query letters and websites where they critique query letters. One thing that struck me is that it seems like in order to get a novel looked at, you need to have other works published. I've never been published, not in a literary magazine, not as part of a contest, not even on the internet, other than little bits of writing I used to post back in the Geocities days.

So it looks like if I want my novel to be taken seriously, I should first try to get some other stories published, problem being, I don't write many short stories. Even as a child I had trouble with keeping my ideas small enough to fit into anything smaller than a novella. I have written some short stories though and I know I'm capable of doing it.

This brings me back to my NaNo idea for this year. What I will try to do is write 50,000 words worth of short stories. I will try to out-line some ideas for the stories in October and then, hopefully, I'll have enough short stories when I'm done that some will be worth editing and sending off to different contests and magazines. I'm excited by this idea. I could be biting off way more than I can chew but the whole idea of NaNo is to push myself to do something I love to do.

Here's to another crazy November!

Tickets please

After blogging about it, talking it over with our M&R teacher and doing a lot of thinking I have gone back to using positive participation tickets in my class. We had a big discussion about it on Friday and, after being out sick on Monday, I started using them for the first time today. While the system isn't totally fleshed out yet, basically this is how it works:

A student speaks French, gets settled quickly, helps someone out, goes above and beyond what is asked of them, I give them a ticket. These tickets can be redeemed for privileges, things like; indoor recess with a group of friends, time in the gym, Smart board games, Lego and so forth. The idea with the "rewards" is that they were mostly group rewards, not just for an individual.

What I haven't worked out yet is the "value" of each of these rewards. I suppose I need to come up with some sort of price list or something so that the students know how many tickets they need to save up. Now I know from video game theory that the most effective reward systems start of with small, easy to achieve goals and then over time make the goals harder and more time consuming. But rather than increase the value of the rewards (with some sort of strange inflation?) I think as time goes on I will make tickets harder to get, so for example whereas now, if a student attempts to speak French, even by repeating what I'm saying back to me, I give them a ticket. In time I will only give out tickets for full sentences or spontaneous French.

The other advantage of this system over last year's is that, rather than constantly having to get new tickets, I'll be able to re-use the same tickets over and over again until they fall apart.

Today's introduction to the tickets went pretty well. As I expected, almost all bought into the system instantly. I saw hands go up from students I hadn't heard from without specifically calling on them before. And yes, this is extrinsic instead of intrinsic motivation, but you know what? It was a happier, more peaceful classroom this morning when we were doing our French work. And hopefully I can gradually pull the program back as they become more confident in their abilities and eventually they will buy into the real reason that we're doing all this learning - to better themselves.

Any hints or tips on how to make this program even better?