In the middle school writing rotation, fiction writing came up on my unit map this year. While I have a curriculum that I regularly use to teach writing, I had a crazy idea- what if my students participated in the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)? NaNoWriMo is traditionally an adult-led tradition where people worldwide commit…
Our class has been doing an author study on Andrew Clements, and we’re entering the final phase. We started with a read-aloud book: the first day of school, I opened up Clements’ book Extra Credit and started reading it aloud to the class. It’s a slightly higher reading level than many in the class would be…
A couple of weeks ago, two students in my room—a boy and a girl, friends who often play as part of the same group—were on the outs. Small conflicts kept erupting. On the advice of one of our parent volunteers, who had just finished a difficult recess with them, I pulled those two students aside…
One thing I heard over and over when we began remote learning—first for a few days here and there in the fall, and then in December—was parents expressing amazement at how much more responsible and independent their children were during remote learning this year. It’s strange that we have this point of comparison. Whoever would…
Something that is relatively unique to this school is that we have multi-age classes. While I was growing up, and while completing my teaching degree, there was always a negative tone when speaking about a “split” class, like it was a bad thing. But that causes someone to think- Why would multi-age classes be a…
Twice a year, our school does a day-long, intergenerational service day. The first is in October as an alternative to Columbus Day, and the second is in the Spring, on Arbor Day. For the last couple of years, these two service days have roughly mirrored their holiday. In fall, as an alternative to a holiday…