Busy Week

This week will be a busy week.

First of all, Shelby Fest is this coming weekend, and the primary organizer keeps giving me more things to do for it. Second, it will be my second week of tutoring, and I'll really have to lay the foundation for the rest of the school year of tutoring. That means being on top of both behavior and curriculum. And those are both not even in-school activities!

This Saturday was one of our Teach for America professional development days. It hurts to give up a Saturday, because it's my only non-school filled day (Sundays are preparing for the coming week), but I always find them immensely useful. This week, I spent a lot of time talking with T--, another first grade teacher here in the Delta. T-- is incredibly sweet, motivated, and hard working. She runs the first and second grade learning team and she is taking the same course as me.

In our course, which is on unit planning, we worked together to improve the way we plan for, assess, and teach math. Then in the learning team, she told me how she runs her guided reading groups, and I think I am going to totally switch what I am doing now to emulate her system. Basically, instead of running centers in the morning, her students read for half an hour to forty minutes while she meets with reading groups and focuses on comprehension strategies. Then in the afternoon, she runs her centers, which includes her reading center at which she might do phonics or decoding or phonemic awareness for struggling readers. The other centers are cross-curricular, so some are math, some are science or social studies, and some are reading. Fantastic! Now I have to figure out how to implement, and then I jump in!