School - Always Thinking Ahead

I was surprised to see the title of The Book Whisperer's (author of a book by the same title as her blog) latest blog post on my blog roll, The First Day of School, since this is the time of year associated with winding down rather than schools just getting started. However, as I was reading I could connect so well to the reason behind the title: "Teachers do this, too, reflecting and thinking ahead. One school year ends, and the new school year begins the next day, it seems. We hang up our teaching hats for a few months, but we never turn off our teaching brains. Taking a break to refresh ourselves and recharge, we consider how to move forward in our own teaching and learning. What did our students teach us this year? How can we improve the reading instruction in our classrooms? What can we read and study now that we have time? And most importantly, how can we support each other as learners like my students support each other as readers?" It reminded me back to my first official day of the break and how I did three posts in that day, and even joked at the bottom of the third post how hard it is to just stop and enjoy the break!

She ended her post by inviting teachers to join her in a discussion with the following questions that I thought would be fun to answer:

As you lie by the pool, wait in airports, or work in your garden, what questions and ideas percolate in your teaching brains?
Most of my thinking is focused on literacy and language learning, as I am always trying to think of ways to fine tune or completely implement a component that I have been envisioning.

How do you seek answers?
I love getting new resources, especially from my favorite two publishers Heinemann and Stenhouse. My latest favorite is also reading other blogs. My favorites are listed on my blog roll so that I can frequently remember to check up on them. My school also has a lot of quality professional development that always keeps me thinking.

What would you like to do differently next year?
This year was my first attempt at doing reading and writing workshop. Because of scheduling and/or school structures, and most importantly because I was in a new position and learning all the ins and outs, I did not fully implement them as I had wanted to when I was planning last summer. However, it was a great chance to get my feet wet, and I reflected a lot throughout the year. I mapped out how I would love for my language arts and social studies block to be structured next year and checked in with my director to get her approval. Now, I am ready to plan away, evaluating what worked well, what did not get implemented, and how I can plan on implementing the important pieces. One of my biggest shifts is that I was able to get the okay to switch SSR (which is a current school-wide practice at our school) to a reader's workshop. This seemed to be one of my biggest barriers to really being able to have reader's workshop this year. I also requested to see if I can have a reading intervention push in that supports our in class literacy philosophy rather than a reading pull out, and it sounds like it may happen that way. I will also be using writer's notebooks and writer's workshop on a regular basis whereas this year it was not as consistent.

Word study is another area where I want to improve. This year was my first year using Words Their Way in English. I brought the pre-made resources available in English and had extra help that I had at different times throughout the year help transfer many of the sorts over to sentence strips for small group instruction. This summer I would like to finish up the rest and write on the back of the title card notes to myself to remember about each sort. I also want to create a more systematic way to track my students' progress and to make sure that they are in the "right" group. I will also create Spanish word sorts to use for next year.

With social studies, I feel like I was not able to consistently do what I know is best for language learners, providing sufficient scaffolding. I want to plan my social studies units over the summer so that I get all the important pieces in place. (Of course, next year will be different anyway because as our school is growing to one more grade level I have a partner teaching for the middle school piece that will be taking over the math and science components, making it easier for me to really focus on the concentrations that I am responsible for.)

As I plan over the summer I will be posting and reflecting about different aspects.

Which practices will you keep and which ones need an overhaul?
Some of my thoughts on this question were already mentioned above. I will definitely keep homework as being nightly independent reading. However, I am planning on switching a journal two nights a week to a more open writing potentially as often as every school night for fifteen minutes. I am still thinking this piece through.

After reading Notebook Connections, I would love to integrate a reader's notebook into my curriculum as well.

I want to start a class blog, and am exploring exactly what role the blog will play in the classroom and whether or not to have the students have their own blogs as well.

So much to think about...