I was thinking about my first week of teaching in Alpine School District. I had no idea what I was doing. I had been an English major and spent one semester student teaching in a Jr. High thinking I wanted to be an English teacher. Eisenhower Jr. High made me rethink that idea, and after sort of waffling about whether…

I was teaching a visiting class a science lesson and a kid raised his hand and asked what happened to my head. I asked what’s wrong with my head and he said there’s a huge bump on it. You never have such rapt attention from a class as when there might be something wrong or embarrassing happening. So every eye…

Here are some practice Maze (Daze) assessments for upper grades. They get progressively harder. You might also want to check Mastery Connect. There are quite a few timed tests for practicing this sort of assessment. Search, ‘CORE Reading Maze Comprehension’. And, someone out there is making Google forms that are MAZE passages. I think I’d prefer Mastery Connect because someone…

https://spark.adobe.com/video/TyWSTm4Pj6hwi

As I’ve worked in elementary education I became convinced that while the 5th grade math that I taught wasn’t hard to perform, explaining the thinking and principles behind them can be challenging. Getting students to think about bigger mathematical ideas instead of just performing an algorithm and coaxing students into developing thinking patterns when reading a text, require critical thinking.…

Mechanically Inclined – This is a book on teaching grammar. You’ve likely been annoyed by a grammarian at some point or other in your life, even if you consider yourself to be one, but Jeff Anderson is not one of the annoying types of grammar people. He’s not here to mock or review grammar rules that long ago lost their…

Last Child in the Woods – is a book that laments the ‘indoorsiness’ of today’s society and promotes folks heading out into the bugs and dirt and rocks and getting back to that Earthy connection. I find it a little ironic that whenever I talk about this book out loud it usually comes out as, “Lost Child in the Woods”…

Once a year we round up the young ones and separate them by gender. The kids have known this day was coming in the way that kids know things via the inter-gradal gossip chain. Word about stuff like this gets around. ‘They talk about what!? At school? And the teachers are all there?!” The note we send home fills things…

One thing I kind of like about my job is that it has a bit of variety. We dance, we sing, we do push-ups, we talk about history, we talk science, we talk about families, we build things, we go places, and we play outside. Once a week I have recess duty. It means I have to go outside with…

“Nature is imperfectly perfect, filled with loose parts and possibilities, with mud and dust, nettles and sky, transcendent hands-on moments and skinned knees. What happens when all the parts of childhood are soldered down, when the young no longer have the time or space to play in their family’s garden, cycle home in the dark with the stars and moon…