Teaching with Intention Book Study Chapter One

I am so excited to be joining Greg at Kindergarten Smorgasboard in his book study this summer! This is the first book study I have participated in as far as writing a blogpost for each chapter. I followed along with bloggers last summer on a Daily 5 Book Study where I learned a lot from reading different teacher's blogs. I am excited to participate in this book study and learn along with other educators.

I loved the flow of chapter 1 in this book. It was an easy, quick read and immediately had me imagining what my dream classroom environment looks like. In 2 days, I will be finished with this school year. I always find myself reflecting at the end of the school year how my year went and what I could have done differently. This chapter fits into my reflections because it allowed me to dig deeper by asking me to visualize what ideal classroom looks, sounds, and feels like. Just today, while I was putting away my leveled readers, I realized that I would like to make a book hospital where students can place books that are broken and need to be fixed. I started visualizing this "book hospital" in my head as I finished placing all the books in the proper bin. Debbie Miller talked about how "Two children carefully tape the torn page of a well loved book, another matter of factly fills the stapler." in the third grade classroom that she was observing in. I would LOVE for my students to be able to fix a book with no help from me. I don't know if this is ideal for the beginning of the school year expectations in a Kindergarten classroom, so for now I will stick with my "book hospital" and model for students how to fix a book.

In order not to make this post extremely long. I will stick to the questions that Mrs. Plemon's provided to guide the discussion.

As I stated above, I think the end of a school year always makes teachers reflect and think of ideas to make their classroom better. When I first began this chapter and was asked to envision what my ideal classroom looks, sounds, and feels I immediately thought of a classroom where the students were engaged in learning in small groups, individually and in pairs. Student work hung throughout the room on clothes lines. In my visualization students were engaged in Daily 5 centers. I love teaching reading so I think I always imagine my students engaged in reading activities. My ideal classroom would have a HUGE library filled with lots of fiction and nonfiction books. As well as a decent sized couch, chair and pillows for students to sit or lay on while reading.

In my ideal classroom the students would of course know the routine and be able to function with minimal help from me. I would love for students to lead discussions and learning with each other. It thrills me when I overhear students sharing knowledge with each other like they are experts. I would be working with a small group of students or individually with a student teaching them key concepts. Whole group instruction would of course take place but it would take up minimal time and would be straight to the point teaching towards a specific goal or standard.

My principal encouraged us to implement Reading using Daily 5 centers. Last summer I followed a Daily 5 Book Study where I read along with the chapters each week. Following this book study allowed me to gain a deeper understanding of key components of Daily 5 and brainstorm ideas of how I wanted it to look in my classroom. I feel like I did a good job implementing Word Work Centers, Writing and Listening to Reading Centers. I created engaging and interactive centers for Word Work where students worked individually or in pairs in order to master standards. My students were great writers this year. I feel that this was because we practiced writing daily and students were given lots of example of what good writing looks like through morning messages, modeling of journal entries and sharing their own writing with each other. We used the document camera for students to display their writing and had whole group discussions about what was good in their writing and how it could be improved. Students loved sharing their writing and seeing it displayed on the SmartBoard. Due to the fact that my classroom was a Kindergarten classroom some adaptations had to be made during the Listen to Reading time of Daily 5. Our district subscribed to TumbleBooks, so my students were able to listen to a fluent reader read stories to them where the words were be highlighted. I feel that this helped my students become better readers because they were able to follow along on the computer screen making a one to one connection with the words being read.

I always feel like there is such a long list of things that I could work on in order to better my classroom. Following along with the ideas I listed above. I need to work on obtaining more fiction and nonfiction books in order to build my library. I have found that my boys are always drawn to nonfiction books rather than fiction books. I also need to create a more welcoming library sitting area. I currently have rocking chairs which the students love to read in but in order to make it more comfy feeling I need more pillows form them to sit and lay on.

Thank you for following along and reading my first ever blog post. I hope you gained some insight reading this post and that you will check back in next week for my chapter 2 reflections.