Habits and goals

2012 is here. It doesn't sound like a date that could describe the present. I sounds more like a date from a sci-fi novel describing either a world full of robots and flying cars or a dystopian future after some terrible disaster, human kind is faced with extinction. Well 2012 is now the present. We do have some robots, we even have one in our house. It's a vacuum and it's been broken for a few years and I haven't replaced it. I have an idea that cars could fly but they would be too expensive and would cause too many complications. As for the terrible disaster, we've had lots of those and we are still carrying on.

But that's all off topic. Today I wanted to talk about how my goals for myself are going. So far I've been exercising every day. I've been drinking 8-10 glasses of water (I'm not sure if I'll be able to keep that up when I go back to school though because it means having to go to the bathroom way more than I have time for) I've made and kept to my meal plan, I've been writing daily and I'm feeling pretty good.

After my last post about my goals, my father sent me a link to this site http://zenhabits.net/fitguide/ about how no one can stick to their resolutions and that fitness programs that promise quick results are worthless. Instead, it advocates choosing one habit that you want to change and focusing on it for one month. I agree with that idea and I have been mostly focusing on my fitness goal so far but I also want to re-start my other goals as well. The Zen Habits site has 5 big pointers for forming habits and the second is:

Do one habit at a time only. People often skip this one because they think they are different than everyone else, but I’ve found this to be extremely effective. You increase your odds of success with just one habit at a time, for many reasons: habits are hard to form because they require lots of focus and energy, having many habits means you’re spreading yourself too thin, and if you can’t commit to one habit at a time, you’re not fully committed.

Now I agree with this statement. I really do. But, the goals (habits) that I want to focus on are ones that I have done before but have let fall to the way side. I don't want to not write just because I'm focusing on increasing my fitness. And I'm not going to wait three months before I start meal planning either. But perhaps this month I will focus on my fitness while writing and meal planning but not put as much energy into the other habits that I'm trying to form while I work on making sure that I'm exercising every day this month.

Another suggestion on this site was to use Fitocracy to help track your exercise and to make getting fit more social. It's essentially a social networking site that promotes fitness. There are challenges and points awarded and all of those fun little carrots to help keep you motivated. I've joined up and am enjoying it a great deal.

I think that this idea of forming habits, focusing on one at a time and putting a lot of energy into making sure that habit becomes ingrained is very important in the classroom. Daily 5 is a perfect example of this. The way that read to self is introduced for example, is all about forming good reading habits. It's done slowly and deliberately. None of the other components are introduced until the class has good read to self habits and high stamina for independent reading. After that is going then another component, maybe write to self or read to a friend is introduced and again, the class builds stamina, forms good independent habits before moving on to another.

In December, I decided to take a risk and try to introduce independent writing in my classroom. Why is this a risk? Well, they're only 3 months in to learning French and independence is not something that comes easily when learning a new language. But their habits from learning to read to self independently in French were so strong that they surprised me. It took a lot of work and modeling and problem solving as a group, but they were very quickly able to take those skills and write independently.  So now Mrs. W and I are able to go around and conference with students without being interrupted by students who want me to be Mme LaDictionnaire. I'm hoping that when we switch over to English in a month and I officially introduce the Daily 5 to them that they will be able to take the skills and habits that they are learning now and apply them to our English Language Arts classes, but I won't expect that they will all be able to do that on their own so I will help them, through explicit teaching and modelling, to develop those habits slowly and thoroughly so that they will have them forever.

What sorts of habits are most important for your students? For yourself? What do you do in your life to try to build your positive habits?

Looking back at 2011

Today is the last day of 2011. Tomorrow we change over our calendars again and start another new year. This past year has been filled with many challenges and opportunities and I know that 2012 will be as well. In 2011 I finished my first full year of having my own classroom. It was the first time I taught only in French for the whole year as well. Now that we're preparing to switch over to English in a month I can see some of the advantages and disadvantages of both keeping the same class and switching with another teacher. I found February to be a very stressful. While I had taught my new homeroom class in the afternoons for a short amount of time during the first half of the year, I didn't know them as well and it was very much like starting over again with them. It was basically like having September all over again, except it was in February when my energy level wasn't as high because I hadn't had the summer break before it. But at the same time, I didn't have to do much to my classroom and I got to re-teach a lot of the lessons I had already taught to the other class.

This year I keep my class the whole year so I won't have that feeling of September in February, but I do have a lot of work that I'll have to do in my classroom to get it changed over. I have to replace my word wall, change my sound wall into my CAFE wall and, biggest challenge of all, I'll need to bring in my English classroom library and sort it and store it in the classroom and figure out what to do with my French library. But I'm looking forward to seeing how my students are when we do the English curriculum.

Also this year I worked with two different principals, both wonderful and supportive to work with. I've been very blessed to be able to work with such wonderful colleagues, and now to have Mrs. W work with me in my classroom has been an amazing help. This was also the first year where I stayed in the same school, the same classroom even. I'm very luck to be able to do that this early in my career, especially give then current job shortages. I am very grateful to have a job and grateful that I am able to speak French which enabled me to get a job when there are so few out there.

In my personal life this year has also had some ups and downs. My husband and I went to far too many funerals this year for friends and family members who passed away this year, three of whom were taken from us far too early. We also have had friends give birth and become pregnant. I'm looking forward to having another niece or nephew who is due to arrive in March and I recently found out that another friend is expecting her second child.

I joined a new writing group this year and got in to a musical. I wrote a lot and read a lot. I enjoyed supporting my husband's band while they played in lots of great places like the ECMA's, Harvest Jazz and Blues and Music New Brunswick. I had a great time filming their shows and sharing them on YouTube. I'm so excited about their upcoming shows and their new CD that's in the works.

Yes, this year has had a lot of ups and downs. I look forward to all the joys and challenges that 2012 will bring.

Goals for 2012

In a few days it will be the start of 2012. It's amazing how much faster time goes as you get older. I have a few goals that I would like to make for this coming year based on what I think would make me feel better about myself. After all, that is the point of making goals, isn't it? The main reason for my goals is to reduce my stress. I've been sick more often this year than last, I ended up taking four days off in December alone, and I think that's because I haven't been taking as good care of myself and I've been more stressed than usual. I can't diminish the amount of stressors in my life but I can change how I deal with them.

1. Exercise - So many studies are showing how crucial exercise is to your general well being. It reduces stress, helps you sleep, increases endorphins, lots of good reasons to start exercising more. My goal is to use my Wii Active at least three times per week and as well as walking, skiing, biking, doing some sort of other exercise through the week.

2. Meal Planning - I used to make up a meal plan for myself for the week and I got out of the habit of it. I want to get back into the habit of doing it every week. This will help me save time when I come home and try to decide what to make. I also want to try out one new recipe every week to get myself back into cooking new foods and trying new things.

3. Writing - I have been using www.750words.com to write, but I haven't been using it consistently everyday this month. I want to write every day using that website as well as doing "real" writing. I would like to write a new story every month, send of at least one story per season to try to get published as well as editing my novel. My goal for my novel is to have edited the whole thing by the end of the year and workshopped most of  it by the end of the year.

4. School - I have so many goals for school that it's hard to write them all down. For measurable goals I want to make a conscious effort to leave school by 4:30, 5:00 at the latest each night. I want to make an effort to work more efficiently. I want to have my students do the school announcements every week. I want to spend 10 minutes every day organizing my files and throwing things I don't need away.  I want to participate in a twitter PLN chat (#elemchat, #edchat, #claved, #5thChat or #D5chat) once every week or two.

5. Home - I want to spend a few hours a week organizing and decluttering my office and getting my files moved from my old computer to my new one. I want to finish some of those unfinished sewing projects I have lying around.

Those are some of my goals for this year. What are your goals or resolutions for 2012?

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?