Little Moments and a Positive Attitude

     This week was LONG; there's just no two ways around that.  The beginning of the year always is, and no matter how many hours I work in a day, there is more to do, and the more to do is ALL imperative, necessary, need to do ASAP why is that not done already? kind of stuff.  Which, frankly, combined with the fact that I'm still putting classroom routines into place, can leave you a little tiny bit cranky, exhausted, and overwhelmed.  But my biggest, most important goal for this year is to have a positive attitude because last year I DID NOT.  And last year stunk.  And I truly believe that if I stay upbeat and focus on the positive, I can make this the best and most successful year of teaching I've ever had.  So here are my little moments of bliss in a very long week:

• "I don't want to go to P.E., Ms. Haines.  I have to finish writing."
• I used my Italian voice teaching math this week and the kids absolutely loved it.
• The principal came in and got down on the floor and chit-chatted with my kids about what they were doing, which they loved.  (We were working in partners on completing a graphic organizer.)
• One little boy took his writing notebook all around school and then wrote a "seed story stretched out" about everything he did.
• These kids LOVE to be read aloud to.  They are begging me to read Sideways Stories from Wayside School in the afternoon, and they are so into anything I'm reading. (Last year's kids so did not appreciate my read aloud skills.)
• We built up to 12 minutes of Read to Self time.

Small Successes

      So, I've been envisioning starting this blog for a few months now, and I have to say, when I've been planning out how it will go, I figured I'd start off talking about some cool thing I implemented or showing some pictures of my little pinterest projects that I've tried.  But we've been in school for a week and a half now, and do you know what I'm most excited about?  This quiz over addition properties (commutative, associative, and identity) that my kids took yesterday.
     Now, you have to understand that this little group of third-graders this year did not come in with a wealth of mathematical understanding.  All of third-grade gave a little pretest of math skills--very basic stuff like adding numbers to twenty and place value to the hundreds place and comparing numbers--and my very highest grade was a 73.  And when we've been doing math and I've been asking them how they added a number, looking to discuss some mental addition strategies, I haven't found a single kid who can go beyond "I counted in my head."
     So, as I was saying, we've got a lot of work ahead of us in math.  But here's the thing.  I gave this quiz, and all but one student made at least a C!  I had three 100s and a whole bunch of As.  I taught...and they LEARNED!
     Which I guess is the whole point of this blog.  I mean, I didn't do anything exceptional to teach this.  We used counters to practice commutative and associative properties, and I let them use Twizzlers to make the parentheses for associative.  Then we did a couple of word problems and talked together about what property the word problem showed.  I put them in partners and let them do a few more of those on their own while I pulled about 6 kids who still didn't get it and worked with them in a small group.  Then I gave them the quiz.  And they ROCKED it!  And I LOVED it!   It just felt so great to be successful at what I was teaching, to have what I work so hard at add up into something good.  It might not have been anything spectacular, but it worked.
     I put their graded quizzes into their homework folders to take home today.  One little girl came up to me and said, "Ms. Haines, I did so good on that quiz!  It was so EASY!"  What makes that so great is that she's one of my most struggling math kids.  And what a few days ago she had no idea about, is now way easy.