It's always good to end the week on a positive note. Sometimes we concentrate on the negatives. We have a choice. Choose positive. Choose to celebrate. I will be joining Ruth Ayres and her weekly link-up, Celebrate This Week. Check out all the other celebrations HERE
1. I have a couple of school celebrations for the week. We are trying some new things and talking about what direction we want to move things towards. Exciting, but whenever you want to try something new, it brings uncertainty and nerves. I'm thankful for my colleagues who are willing to keep an open mind and listen. We might not always agree, but everyone respects each other and there is a willingness to work together.
2. We had a 1/2 day Institute Day today. Sometimes I worry about them, I never know how they are going to turn out. Sometimes we learn something, other times, I wish we were with the kids in class. Today we talked about questioning - having students generate questions. It was informative. I'm still confused on how it will work, but I left the inservice with something to think about. I know the first standard is asking and answering questions. It's easy for teachers to always ask the questions. I know when I sit with one of my small intervention groups, the students all stare at me waiting for me to ask them a question about what we read. It's hard to get them to come up with the questions. We all have "those" kids in our class/groups who do ask questions and do a great job. But with some good teaching, with common vocabulary and steps, I think we can make some headway with this standard!
3. I had an almost-wallet-mishap this week. After almost losing it, I had a colleague point out she thought it was very interesting the items I had in my wallet - it said something about myself. More in a future post!
4. I'm going to celebrate this weekend. It's a 3-day weekend. Yea, more reading time. It's also a swim meet-free weekend! I love watching my daughter swim, but it takes A LOT of time. So celebrating that, I also have to celebrate how she did last weekend. I had blogged that she was doing her first 200 free event and she was nervous but excited. I'm happy to report she did very well. She actually figured out that she does better in the longer distance events then the shorter ones. She gained enough confidence that she actually signed up for 2 more longer distance events in a future meet.
Here's to a positive week!
I love being able to focus on the positive through these Saturday celebrations, too. And now I am looking forward to hearing the story about the wallet!
ReplyDeleteLove the positive energy of your post the Celebration Saturday! Your comments about kids' sports and the "happiness" of those free weekends certainly rings a bell with me....but the wallet story is a "positive" energy cliff-hanger if I ever saw one!
ReplyDeleteMIchele,
ReplyDeleteHow to get students to question...hmm... how to make that happen... but what a great goal! Looking forward to the wallet post! And yeah for three days. I know that love hate relationship with swim meets (have three kids who swam club) loved watching, but the time...ugh.
Great celebrations this week. Collaboration and questioning - two good topics. Good luck with both.
ReplyDeleteI envy your extra reading time! Enjoy it. I find January so challenging after all of the reading I manage to do during the holidays! Have anything really exciting planned to read?
ReplyDeleteNot really exciting. I am excited to start Snicker of Magic based on what everyone has said! I feel behind everyone else's reading so just trying to catch up :)
DeleteEncouraging kids to ask questions is such a valuable thing - they're definitely used to looking to us to ask them and then they think there is only one right answer. That's not their fault - we've taught them that! Now I'm curious what you have in your wallet. ;-) And I totally understand the ambivalent feelings towards sports. They're exciting to watch, and you want to support your kids, but it does take a lot of time! Enjoy your weekend off!
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