Parent Orientation

Parent Orientation for second grade is tomorrow night. 6 PM! See you there!

2 days in...

Wow! We have had a busy and exhausting first few days of school! We have spent a lot of time practicing routines and becoming familiar with our school family. Here are some reminders so far.

• Students may bring a healthy snack. We eat snack during our recess time, so please send something that doesn't require a utensil. 
• Please send in a picture of your family for our friends and family board. I promise you will get it back at the end of the year! 
• A huge packet of papers came home this afternoon. Please return these by Friday. 
• Me Sacks are due on Friday! 

Mrs. Byrd and I are very excited about this school year and working with your children. Please email us if you have any questions or concerns.

Welcome!!

Welcome to our classroom blog! I will use this information to keep you up to date on classroom events. I am very excited about this year and look forward to working with you. :) If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me!

Facebook made my day!

Well, not really facebook. :) A lot of my former students are at the age where they are getting Facebook accounts. One of my past students and I are now Facebook friends and the first thing he post on my wall was, "omg i miss you". I should cringe at the grammar, but it made my heart melt. Those moments remind me why I am a teacher. :)

Ch Ch Ch Changes!

As you may have noticed, the name of my blog has changed. I am no longer a fourth grade teacher, so my tales would not be of such. I am entering back into the world of primary grades! No... not kindergarten. While I enjoyed kindergarten, I'm not sure if I would want to teach kindergarten again. The kids were great but I also enjoy independent kids!

Starting in August I will join the Fabulous Five team in Second Grade!! I am so pumped! I will miss my fourth grade team mates but I am looking forward to a new experience. I am also looking forward to teaching a primary grade again. I have always wanted to teach second grade. With all of the things I will miss, there is one thing I will not miss... standardized testing! When you teach 3rd grade or higher, it's a part of your life. I learned the strategies to teach kids, became a better writing teacher (I still had a lot to learn!), pulled my hair out, cried over results, celebrated results, and stressed WAY too much!

During the past three years in 3rd and 4th grade I have had some challenges. Every year I would get some kiddos that already hated school, which broke my heart. :( I took on those kids every year and did what I could to help them enjoy school again. They still had a long road ahead of them and I hope they enjoy every year after! Life is too short to hate something you are doing for most of your day. So, I hope I inspired some of my kids to love learning, read more, appreciate the adults in their lives that care for them, and desire to become MORE... to build a great future with the knowledge that they can do anything they set their mind to. My saying stays the same, thanks to the great artists in Journey.... Don't stop believing! Ever! And I hope, that my students past, present, and future know that I will ALWAYS believe in them and expect the best for them.

Onward... to second grade... a new adventure in the life of Mrs. Edugator!

In kindergarten...

We all learned how to share. Well, let me tell ya! My fourth graders know how to share. Too bad they are sharing their germs. This teacher has been sick for almost 2 weeks straight with a stomach bug, sore throat that turned into a mild case of pneumonia. Looks like my classroom is going to get a nice scrub down tomorrow. Hello cold season!

On a plus side, the kids have handled the subs pretty well and I keep getting "We wish you well" notes. They are so sweet. We just finished reading, "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" by Judy Blume. I love that book! I am so glad I didn't have a little brother like Fudge. We are starting a unit on nonfiction and our next genre for In2Books will be Social Studies Trade books on the westward expansion. I will attempt to keep you posted!

9 weeks later...

Can you tell that I have been busy? This school year is going very well and I am very lucky to have two great classes and great people to work with!

We have already read "Fourth Grade Rats" and "The Cricket in Times Square". Currently, we are reading "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing", another one of my favorite fourth grade books.

We just finished our first writing and reading benchmarks and the scores are great! I have some kids that love to act and put on quite a show with the commercials they produced.

We are using a new writing program this year and I am really enjoying it. It has been a challenge since I didn't go to the actual training but I am seeing a great response through the student's writing. I have some kiddos that love to write stories this year so I am very excited to see their writing develop.