Today was the first day of school. It was a hectic – new students were coming into my class throughout the day and that made it tough to make sure everyone was on the same level in understanding of rules and procedures. When a new student comes in mid-morning, it’s challenging to get them to do their morning routine and still be teaching the rest of the class. I’m going to go over our routines again tomorrow to help students who came in late today, or are coming in tomorrow, to adjust.
But I’m trying to focus on the positives – this morning, I did an activity where my students explained why we have different rules in our classroom, and what it means to follow those rules. I was worried that they wouldn’t really feel invested in it, but they seemed to be trying. I’m wondering if the questions I was asking were more abstract than what they’re used to, or if I should have modeled what I was looking for more.
My plan for today wasn’t dense enough – I didn’t have enough planned and I was at a loss for what to do for a while. I had planned for recess because that was on the school schedule, but I didn’t realize that we couldn’t go on the playground because of the construction that’s happening on the school roof right now. After I realized that, I was planning to go to the auditorium, where we keep games and things (think indoor recess) but the auditorium still had parents registering their students for school, so we couldn’t do that. I took the students back to our class and we started silent reading while I tried to figure out what to do next. It was kind of a mess – the silent reading books in my classroom weren’t in any particular order, and the students had a hard time selecting a book that was near their level and something they were interested in.
In the past week, I’ve thought back to my own third grade experience a lot. Mrs. Knight was my teacher for third and fourth grade (my school had split classes for 1-2 and 3-4.) I read Harry Potter for the first time in third grade and was enamored with it from that point forward. I remember 9/11 in the fall of third grade, and I remember the video we watched about it the day after, and I remember that we learned about Michigan history and local history, and we had a whole big thing about the White House Christmas tree coming from somewhere in the UP.