Patience, Flexibility, Forgiveness, and Empathy

I wrote this blog post during the spring of 2020 as we first began our adventure with distance learning. I wanted to share it again because these four words are still so true during my virtual learning experience.

It is easy to want to jump back into the normal routine of school. Curriculum, assignments, attendance, grades, tests... the list can go on and on, but one thing we have to remember is that this is not normal. What we are dealing with while trying to virtually from home or the school building, or teaching in a hybrid format with some kids at home and others in the building is something that we have never been through before.

Yes, it is important that we continue to teach the curriculum and assess the students throughout the year to see what they are learning, we also have to do it with patience, flexibility, forgiveness, and empathy. We don't know what all these kids are having to deal with at home while they are also trying to complete school on the computer. I have had students tell me, I will be back I need to help my sister get logged into class or I will be back I need to get a bottle for my baby sister, or hold on I need to help my mom with something. These kids (especially my 5th graders) are now not able to just focus on school like they would in the building, oftentimes they are still taking care of things in their household WHILE going to school.

On the flipside of this, I am home trying to teach my classes, while my daughter attends kindergarten virtually on the computer. Honestly, she has done amazing, but then I also hear other parents sitting next to their kindergarteners helping them navigate this unknown world of virtual school and i feel guilty that I can't be there next to her. Luckily her teacher has these four words down, because there will be weeks where we will do all of her assignments on the weekend because at the end of the day when I can finally help her, she is exhausted and doesn't want to do anything school related. And you know what, what is ok with me.

While I have been preaching to have patience, flexibility, forgiveness, and empathy with our students, it is also SO important to have these four things for YOURSELF as well. 

Have patience with yourself, whether you are working and trying to help your kids with school or you are teacher trying to teach in a virtual or hybrid setting, please know that you have not done this before. It won't be perfect, but if you have patience it just may work out.

Have flexibility with yourself. Those dishes sitting in the sink after a long day will still be there the next day. The laundry that is piling up, it will get done eventually. Again, we are not living in normal times right now. The day-to-day things we were used to doing are going to look different right now.

Forgive yourself. Especially look at your moms. Mom guilt can feel so strongly right now. I already mentioned that I feel guilty I can't help my daughter more with her school, but you know what, her teacher knows our situation and completely understands. Some nights my kids don't have the best dinners or get a bath, but it's ok. They are happy and healthy and that is all that matters.

Lastly, have empathy for yourself. We are living in times that we would never have predicted a year ago. Celebrate the little things. Made it through the day? Cheers! Cooked dinner for the family? Success! Took a shower and got dressed in regular clothes? Pour another glass of wine! :-)

Patience. Flexibility. Forgiveness. Empathy.

We will make it!

Cafe Board and Interesting Word Collector

The second part of The Daily Five is the Cafe. This is a set of strategies that are broken into the four components of reading. (To learn more about them, check out www.thedailycafe.com/cafe)

For my Cafe board I decided to make strips that have the strategies listed on them and then once we have gone over one of the strategies we add it to the Cafe board.  Also, I use the mini-Post-It note pads and have one for each student and put their sticky note under the exact strategy they are working on rather than at the top of each column.

Here is the Cafe board in my classroom:

Here are my resources:

• PDF of Cafe Strategies
• CAFE menu headings

The Interesting Word Collector is as a word wall. Throughout the school year we will add words to this wall that we come across in reading or writing.

Here is the Interesting Word Collector in my classroom:

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Embrace the Mess

We live in a world where everyone is trying to live their best life, which means that we tend to share all of the good parts with our friends and family, especially on social media. We post the pictures of our kids when they are smiling and getting along. We post pictures about vacations and cookouts with friends. We talk about the latest and greatest thing we have tried or the food we've cooked. All the positive stuff, which is great. But what does this do to us mentally? It can be draining. We begin to compare our lives to others. We try to live up to other peoples' standards. We get frustrated when things don't go right. We begin to wonder why.

But guess what... it's time to embrace the mess and keep living your life.

This is something that I am learning to do. Before kids, I was the person that always had my house together. The kitchen was always clean, the living room was always picked up. After kids (especially once the second one came around), I often felt a lot of anxiety when the house was a mess. I would get frustrated, sometimes at the kids. I didn't like that I was blaming the kids for feeling this way. Then I realized that the mess means they are playing and having fun. The dishes piled up in the sink and the laundry on the floor means that I am spending more time playing with them. I had to come to the realization that having a "messy" house was going to be the norm for years to come as the kids grow and instead of constantly living with the anxiety about the mess, I am learning to embrace it.

It's ok to come home and there be toys all over the floor, to have dishes piled in the sink, to have clothes that need to be washed or put away (let me be honest, I absolutely HATE putting clothes away so more often than not we just look through the piles of clean clothes to find something to wear every day). :-)

There is so much pressure on us to live this perfect life, but it doesn't have to be that way. When your friends post a perfect picture of their kids, just know it took them at least 10 tries to get that perfect shot. When you see those picture perfect clean kitchens on Pinterest or in magazines, just know that they probably don't even get used. Stop comparing yourself to others and be grateful for the life you live.

I am learning to love my messy, sometimes unorganized, crazy life and you should learn to love yours too.

A few tricks and tips:

• Create a cleaning schedule; I've used two options. 
• Option 1 - assign a small task each night of the week. For example, Mondays - vacuum, Tuesdays - dust, Wednesday - bathrooms. I also did one load of laundry per night, as needed.
• Option 2 - pick one day of the week and set aside an hour to get through all of your cleaning. Stick to the one day so in your mind you know, Wednesday evenings is my cleaning night. With this option, I tend to do laundry all throughout the day on Saturday (one of my days off)
• Sometimes it is ok to not be organized
• My kids have a playroom where they have all of their toys. Each toy has a specific bin it goes in when we clean up, but some days (especially if the kids want to help) we just throw things in whatever bin we see and ta-da we can see the floor again!
• I also have that one room that if I know we are having guests come over I will throw all the odds and ends that I don't feel like putting away into the room just to get it out of sight.
• Ask for help!
• I tend to do most of the cleaning and laundry around the house because I am home so much right now with virtual learning, whereas my husband gets home later in the evening and his days off vary. However, I have learned that when things are getting backed up or if we are having people come over, all I have to do is ask him to do something he will always do it. (now if I could just get the kids to help out more) :-)

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The Daily Five Check-Ins

Originally when I was having the students make a decision as to which Daily 5 choice they were going to do, I would call their name and have them tell me which one they were going to do and then once all 28 kids were done I would release them to begin. Now I use this nifty creation to have the kids put their picture next to the choice they want to do and then get started right away on the activity. This process went from being 10 minutes to now taking about 3-5 minutes.

Here is a picture of the choice board: 

I used those student stickers that they give us every year and glued them on a magnet. Don't get them? You can print out their name or take a picture and print it out and then glue it on a magnet.

I allow the students to keep track of what they have chosen throughout the week because I want them to have some choice, but I also encourage them to get to all of them each week.

This presentation has some student check-in sheets, as well as, an electronic check-in that can be displayed on an interactive whiteboard:

The Daily Five Student Check-Ins

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It's OK to Need a Break

I made this original post in December 2019 before the world changed.

Dear moms (and dads)... we all need a break sometimes and it’s absolutely ok.

Last weekend we found out that our daycare provider had an emergency in the family and was going to need to take off Monday through Wednesday, which left us having to figure out what to do with the kids. Unfortunately we don’t have any family in the area and have never really found a backup babysitter for situations like this. Sometimes we can get one of our parents to come stay with us, but this time I asked if my mom wanted the kids to come to her house for a few days. She did (thanks mom!), so I packed the kids in the car and met her halfway.

She kept the kids for the entire week and it was a week that I didn’t realize I needed.  I went to work as usual each day. However, I didn’t allow myself to stay late as I would have done in the past. No kids means catching up at work, right?? Not this time.

So I left on time each day and came home. I also could have done a million and one things at home while the kids were gone, but I didn’t. I did a few small things like picked up the playroom and cleaned the kitchen. But that’s it.

I used this week to recharge mentally. I watched TV shows that weren’t on Nick, Jr. or Disney. I read an adult book. I enjoyed the quiet. I needed this time.

My husband and I also enjoyed this time together. We went to happy hour, we went out to dinner, we made dinner together. Just the two of us. We also needed this time.

To all the parents out there, it’s ok to need a break from your children. I’m not saying send them away for a week because this was definitely not planned. But take a night for yourself. Whether it’s a couple of hours for a date night out, an evening away, or even just a few hours out shopping, take the break.

This rule also applies to work. That will be another post, another day. But taking a mental break from things in life is a necessity at times. Take care of yourself.

The Daily Five

I was first introduced to The Daily Five book by Gail Boushey and Joan Moser when I taught in Fairfax. I was a second year teacher in grade 3 at the time and was excited to try something new.

This blog post discusses what exactly The Daily Five is, how I set it up in my classroom, and the signs I used. I prefer to make the signs with my students each year, so you will notice they are nothing fancy.

So I decided to hit the ground running and jump right into the daily five the first week of school.  I explained to the students briefly all five parts of the daily five and then explained that we would be slowly learning about each one of the next 5 weeks.  I started off with teaching them about Read to Self. I followed the ideas in the book and had them read for only 3-5 minutes before stopping them to join me back on the carpet.  The first time I just released them to choose a spot wherever they wanted, but I discovered this didn't quite work out so well.  I had students under tables, behind doors, etc. So we then had to go over appropriate places to read in the room.  By the end of the week we made this chart:

Next we started Read to Someone.  The kids really enjoyed reading with each other.  The hard part about having them all do read to someone at the same time is that it was quite noisy in the room which bothered some kids, but I assured them that once we actually started the daily five there would only be a few pairs of students read aloud while the other students were working on other parts.  By the end of the second week we had made this chart:

Next we introduced Listen to Reading.  I only have 4 computers in my room that we can use as listening centers so I kept a list of the students and made sure that by the end of the week all 28 of them had gone on the computers to listen to books.  Our school has a subscription to MyON which is where we go to listen to books.  Before I introduced listen to reading I showed them the website and how to log on and choose books.  As the four students were listening to reading I allowed the other students to choose whether they wanted to practice read to self or read to someone.  I made sure that I was taking notes on the students behaviors, while monitoring the students on the computers to make sure they were not having any problems navigating the website.  I found this part of the daily five was the hardest to manage because it always seems that one of the computers has a hiccup and has to be rebooted.  Here is the chart we created by the end of the week:

Around the second or third week of school I introduced the students to a Writer's Notebook and Writer's Workshop (which I will talk about in a later post). I made sure to do this before introducing Work on Writing because I feel that it is important to teach the students how the writer's notebook works before giving them the choice to work in their notebook during work on writing.  During the fourth week of school I introduced work on writing by explaining to students that this was their time to work on a piece of writing that they have already started, begin a new piece of writing, edit a piece of writing, or publish a piece of writing.  We made this chart by the end of the week:

Lastly, we introduced Word Work.  I divide my word work into three choices. The students can work with the mystery word using the magnetic letters, they can do the word sort, or they can write the room.  I did a spelling inventory during this week so that I can help steer the students in the right direction when it comes to their word work choice.  I will explain my word work ideas in a later post.  Here is our chart:

All five of these charts are located on the wall in the back of the room so the students can see a visual to remind them of the five different parts of the daily five and what they should be doing during each part.

I truly miss teaching reading, but wanted to share my resources with you all!

Here are a few resources:

• Daily 5 Posters
• Daily 5 Posters with Descriptions

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Instagram: @mrspotterstyle

Twitter: @apotter730

Repost - Reflecting on the Past Decade

Since I started a new blog, I wanted to bring this post over to this one because I always enjoy looking back at where I've started and where I'm heading.

This is something we need to keep in mind with our kids and students. Everyone is on their own path and everyone has a different starting point. So what looks like growth for one person or child may look completely different for another person or child. Celebrate the small journeys along the path and keep it moving forward.

Little did I know that 2020 was going to be one heck of a year, but it is still fun to go back and read what all has happened.