best birthday present

today during writing workshop I asked a little one if she needed paper. "nope I've got some" she mumbled behind her writing folder. she continued writing, occasionally asking for help with word or some sounds. finally she announced she was finished. from inside her writing folder she pulled a snoopy birthday card with "happy birthday" preprinted in cursive. inside was the letter she had just finished writing to me. then she took out a gift bow and stuck it right on top of the preprinted writing.
"I brought it from home" she announced proudly. "but I'm sorry the writing is scribble scrabble" she said as she pointed to the cursive birthday message. "it was all we had so I covered it with this bow"

I love my job.

I love my snoopy card with it's big red bow and the inside message I helped her write.

christmas

we spent saturday at my parents' house. my mother's school district is now out for the holidays (we have two more days) and so we helped her unload her car of her teacher presents. she and i teach at schools with very different socio-economic populations, which is reflected every year in our teacher presents. she had so many gifts we had to make multiple trips to the car to get all of the bags. at my school, that's not usually what you expect. classic gifts i've received have included a (used) curling iron. a few years ago i started turning the smaller, more endearing gifts into christmas ornaments. now my tree is decorated with small tokens of love from former students (and decorating the tree involves my poor husband listening to me reminisce about each student.)

this icon was from possibly the sweetest little boy i've ever taught. he gave it to me so i could match him. i believe it is the virgin mary. he wore it every day around his neck. his baby teeth were black from his years in bolivia but his smile could warm your heart. he left our school a few years ago and i don't know what happened to him. but i still hang his necklace with love.

this necklace was an end-of-year present from a little girl. it is handmade on plastic twine. she had her dad use his cigarette lighter to burn the string since they did not have scissors.

these shoes are from a little one who left our school for the gifted and talented center. she proudly gave me these tiny tokens on teacher appreciation day. she drove me crazy because she was always telling me her parents had lied on her forms when she came into america and she was actually older than seven, the year i had on record. any time age came up she'd argue with me about it. looking back at her height, maturity, and work habits, she probably was two years older than we were told.

this fan is from one of my former students who is now one of my jumpers. she brought it to me after her family travelled to vietnam one summer. i had no idea what to do with it (it's actually scented to help you fall asleep on hot nights) but i feel it adds an international flare to the christmas tree.

this little one has gone back to her country, argentina, but she presented this to me with pride one christmas. i was to hang it on my rear view mirror in my car so i could be exactly like her daddy.

this was a necklace, and while it is beautiful, it isn't quite my style. but doesn't it capture the light of the tree nicely? it's a gift from the little one who threw up on my feet one year. memories.

these handmade ornaments came from a little one from sri lanka. she was in my room the year of the tsunami. she desperately wanted to organize some way to help the victims back in her country, although she didn't know where to begin since she was only six. she made posters on her own and asked me if she could put them up in our classroom. she was one of four beautiful girls, all with long, dark hair,which was frequently infected with lice. however, she loved to toss her flowing hair constantly while she talked and we'd always be dodging her head as we sat in guided reading. she gave me many of these homemade ornaments and hung them all over our classroom, even though she was hindu. she returned to sri lanka a few years later, but promised that she'd come back when she was a teenager so she could learn to drive like an american.

cleaning

part of today meant going through a huge cart of my old posters and poems and deciding what to throw away, what to give to other teachers, and what to hide under the bed in our brand new but very small house where mr. lipstick wont see.

i found some things that put a huge smile on my face and made me miss the classroom. (at the moment i can't figure out how to make these pictures turn, but when mr lipstick gets home i'm sure he'll help)

this is an interactive writing poster i did with my first graders. we made a list of things that plants need, and then a list of things first graders need. i love it because i find it so true.

it reads: *books, books, books homework *teachers *writing *good role models *good friends *running *reading *someone to care for them. this is the interactive reading strategy chart one of my classes made. i loved making my own posters for my classroom. plus the kids loved illustrating the strategies we were working on.

another thing i use to do (which totally lables me a pack rat) was save great art work from past kiddos. a lot of my kids would tell me that if they took their art home their moms would just throw them away so instead i'd put it up in the classroom. these are from my first year of teaching. i thought they were so beautiful i used them to decorate my classroom every year before i had new artwork to put up. i have no idea what to do with them now. they are beautiful, but obviously there is not much point in keeping art work that is not my own child's.

the art teacher was also a first year teacher and she joked that her talent was knowing when to take the art away from the children. they would never be "done" but she'd decide that any more would ruin their work. she did have a great eye for when to stop them!

every year i would have a huge writing celebration at the end of august so we could tell the world that we are authors. i know that the experts say not to make your first writing celebration your biggest, but i loved starting the year with the huge celebration of our first month's work. it made the kids excited to keep writing as the year went on. plus, i used it to squeeze in as many lessons as i could. we would make cupcakes, which of course meant planning the ingredients, writing a shopping list for mrs lipstick, reading the instructions on the recipe, baking the cupcakes using math skills and team work, decorating them, and finally eating them. i did this because so many of our kids have trouble sequencing information and they especially have trouble with planning ahead and self-talk. below are the sentence strips i made one year for the children to use at a center in order to practice putting something in sequential order. everyone loves remembering good food, right?

and then there was the year i went to china to teach for 2 weeks during intersession and decided to try interactive writing there. turns out in china they learn words as whole parts. the teachers i was working with were really confused by the idea of phonics, as were the kids. it was one of the oddest interactive writing experiences of my life. 50 kids, 1 teacher, 1 pen. it says, "we live in Xian China. We like jump rope and football. Love," and then they signed their english and chinese names.

yes, i kept a lot of stuff over the years. and it is probably good to get rid of it now. i just would have liked more of a warning.

best wedding present ever

last year on my last day of school before i left to get married one of my jumpers brought this to me along with a card that said, "good luck with the love".

this is a little girl who will stay with me forever. her family situation is grim and she runs the family, keeping everyone in line. she is one of the most caring children i've ever met and will go out of her way to help others. when two girls couldn't make it to our try outs last fall she taught them the routine in the evenings and then asked us to let them try out.

she misses school frequently, mainly because she has to be a translator for her family. despite her grades i know this is a girl who is going to survive. she put together a memorial service for her brother who was killed in another country over a drug dispute. as a 5th grader she got it together, created the invites, talked to the people who needed to be talked to, and pulled off the funeral. this is a child whose strengths will take her far.

i love my wedding present because it was such a sweet, unexpected gesture. which of course, represents who she is.

writing our own endings...

look carefully. yes, that is a pigeon holding a handgun to a duck's head and blowing his brains out. the words on the page said, "pigeon is handgun. boom."

this is another one that was on my fridge that had to be tossed in the move.

it was the beginning of last year and we had read the Mo Willems Pigeon books. (if you are not familiar with them you are missing out. although not necessarily 'good literature' kids LOVE them and reading them with a child is always an entertaining experience.)

one of my little friends, who has autism, drew this picture during writing workshop.

you see, in one of the books the pesky duck is following the pigeon around asking for his hotdog. so my friend with autism wrote an alternative ending to the story. one where instead of sharing the hot dog, (because really, who wants to do that?), the pigeon blows the duck's head off. perfectly reasonable really.

because he does have autism this isn't as violent or upsetting as one might think. we did show mom and the principal, but really we just needed to sit down with the student and nicely explain that we don't draw guns in school, and that using a gun to solve your problems isn't a good idea.

still, it may be one of my favorite pieces of art from first grade ever.

look at me

"look at me becus I'm prety"

Note found on my classroom floor last year.

this one had to be thrown away in the move, but it's too great not to take a picture of.

no no no

my husband and i bought a house and we're in the overwhelming process of trying to pack up and move. in going through old papers, deciding what can be thrown away and isn't worth moving yet again only to stay in a box. i keep coming across bits of papers and notes from kids that make me think, "how can I possibly throw that away?" but after 4 or 5 years, its time. i realized however that a picture will make it last forever on my computer, so that i no longer need to hold onto the original document. so be patient, i'll slowly be telling stories with my memorabilia pictures as i clean.

a few years ago i had a little boy with autism in my first grade class. he was only there a month before he moved, but in that month he made quite an impression. daily he and i would struggle over writing workshop. he wanted to just sit there, and i, well, wanted him to at least attempt to put words on a page. or a picture on a page. anything. it was the beginning of first grade, so a lot of the kiddos didn't know their letters or letter sounds. really, any attempt would make me happy.

one day we hit a break through. after our first writing conference of the day i walked away, leaving him with a timer and the "I'll be back in five minutes to see how you're doing!" speech.

when i returned this is what i found:

number 1: he got his message across in writing. that was a first!

number 2: his pictures match his words. universal no sign + no no no. pretty good.

number 3: his spelling is correct, no is a known word. he has spaces (kind of). his letters are going in the right direction.

i said nothing about his obvious message to me. as the other children looked in utter confusion i praised him for his fabulous job at writing words on a page that told a message. after that he wrote, a few simple words every day, but he wrote.

and i kept my portrait. because sometimes its ok when if they're mad at you.