If I had one wish, I would wish I could rewind this school year back to August and start all over. There are so many things I would redo including my long-term and unit plans, my management plans and how I reacted or didn’t react to certain situations. I have learned so much in the less than three months time frame I have been in the classroom. If I had the knowledge I know now and could begin again, things would be hundreds of times better for both my students and me.
Unfortunately, I can’t push a magic “rewind” button and start this adventure again. So I have to continue trudging through messes I have already made trying to tweak and make improvements when I can.
That being said, there are two sort of positive things going for me:
- Generally, people like the way my classroom looks. My Marian University Professor says that I excel at the very important aspect of “creating an environment and culture for Reading.” I just call it being good at decorating. However, if others want to call it “creating an environment and culture that fosters reading” and that is in the textbooks for being good at something teaching related, then I’ll take it!
- I posted a project on DonorsChoose.org which is a nonprofit that allows public school teachers from around the nation post classroom project requests. Then the public can donate to specific projects. Once a project reaches its funding goal, Donors Choose delivers the materials to the teacher’s school. My Program Director, Andrea, thought it was awesome I have at least posted something as many first year corps members haven’t gotten around to doing that yet…
The project I posted is a proposal to get high-interest books for my students. My proposal explains:
“Many of my students do not own books nor have easy access to ones that interest them in order to truly become passionate about reading and want to participate in RIOT (Reading Is Our Thing)- which requires silent reading in and outside of school. Thus, I want to provide my students with “page-turning,” “can’t put down” books that interest them and contain stories, characters and plot lines that they can relate to. This will foster a short- and long-term desire for reading and help them to gain the reading skills needed to become successful readers.”
To read my entire proposal and/or to support it, please click here.
So there are some things going right… Yet a lot of things that are still not going the way I’d like. However, I am trying to focus on the little accomplishments so I don’t get bogged down with all of the failures.
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