November is Rosemary Wells month in my class.  We read Max’s Dragon Shirt for the second time today, and the children were excited to see it again, but were stumped when I asked them this question: “Why did Max want a dragon shirt?” A girl who we will from now on call Ruby (as in Max’s sister Ruby) said, “because ...

The worst is behind me.  I’m pretty sure about that. This week is a short week, to fit in parent conferences.  That always helps. I will finally have an assistant teacher — hooray!  She starts Tuesday, and I can’t wait.  She was so awesome in the interview the Prince kept sending me these looks saying, “let’s hire ...

Anyone reading this who is already a teacher (I know I have some fledgling teachers reading this blog, as well as some non-teachers) knows what teaching is like.  Teachers are well-acquainted with the experiences of being bombarded by stimuli all day, of needing to think of 100 things at a time, and having to make decisions constantly.  So ...

Alas, it was another difficult morning. Most of the hour I had before school started I was at a tech meeting in the computer lab, where we learned how to do a behavior screener on each child.  I got all mine done — which was good — but only with lots of technical glitches, which was not so good.  Everyone on the staff is ...

Hooray for Mo Willems.  I decided that September would be Mo Willems month in my classroom.  Usually I have this “welcome to school” theme and I read all these books about school, but this summer I admitted to myself that I think all those books are boring, so I went straight to a unit on bugs and an author study on Mr. Willems, my ...

Actually, things went okay today, on this, our eighth day of school. On Friday I passed out the Friday folders to the children as I was lining them up to go out in the hall to get their jackets for recess.  They started opening their folders, dropping their papers on the floor, and chatting with each other, and I had a really hard time getting ...

i just saw on Mo Willems’ blog that he’s got a new Elephant and Piggie book coming out in October!  I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

There was an article today about what children read most often, listed by grade level.  I was surprised by how prosaic the list was, and realized that these are the books that teachers (and children) are so familiar with, we hardly notice them. Green Eggs and Ham, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Are You My Mother?….I [...]