This week I spent 2 days away from my classroom. 

At the beginning of the school year when I had to miss a day of school for new teacher training (once every month), I was very stressed out— how can I write sub plans?? I hardly know what I am doing, let alone how to write it down so someone else can do it!!  However, when I learned in December that I had two inservice days the first full week of school in January, I felt that writing sub plans was a good exchange for two days break from the classroom!! 

I must be getting better at planning, even though it doesn’t feel like it, because I can often be satisfied enough with what I’ve got by 4:30 pm.  In the fall, I often stayed at school until 6 pm, or walked home at 4 to fix dinner and interact with the kids, but then went back to the school from 6-9pm to work on plans.

The first day of inservice was Leadership Team meeting.  The principal switched up the teacher leadership team, and I am now on it. There is one teacher from each grade level on the team, so this is not because I am perceived as a good leader, but just because it is my turn. The leadership team went to the district for training and to work on our 90-day plan for spring.  I hardly knew we had a 90 day plan in the fall.  I’m looking forward to being on leadership team because I’ll know what is going on now— and I’ll have a voice in it.

Today was my second inservice day. It was a training for LETRS which is a science of reading training that all K-3 teachers in Utah are required to take.  I know you will ask- but aren’t I teaching fourth grade?  Yes, but I already know that I’ll be teaching third grade next year. The current third grade teacher has always taught 4-5th grade until this year, and desperately wants to be back in the “upper hall” (4-6th grade) also, she is unwilling to do the LETRS training.  I want to do the training because I have to take a Foundations of Reading test for my Utah teaching certificate.  This training will help me pass that test.  (P.S. did I mention that Utah is making it much easier to get my professional license than Missouri was going to be? It’s significantly so)

 I have had overviews on the science of reading before. I’ve read at least 2 books on the subject while I was homeschooling, and the language arts curriculum we use at TES is based on it, so my training for that also had an overview. But I’ve never had a fabulous teacher before. My teacher today was so good at showing us the theory and then bringing it down and showing us what that actually means for our students.  

For example, I have seen the simple model for reading many times:

  word decoding x language comprehension = reading comprehension.  

I knew that if a child can decode words but doesn’t know the meaning of the words, they will not comprehend what they read.  Contrarily, if the child has a huge vocabulary but cannot decode words, again there will be no reading comprehension. 0 x 1 = 0.

I knew that diagram, but the true implication of it was not clear to me until my teacher today said, “This means that you cannot teach reading comprehension, because reading comprehension is a function of decoding skills and language comprehension.  If a child cannot understand the main idea of a text, you do not reteach how to find the main idea. You go back and find out if they need word decoding skills or vocabulary/syntax/context and teach them what they are missing.”

I have been banging my head against the wall trying to teach reading comprehension to my students for half a year. What would have actually helped them was if I had been teaching vocabulary words and we had been playing with those words in every way we could. I know how to teach vocabulary, but I haven’t been doing it much because the curriculum only slots 5 minutes a day to vocabulary, but there are 10 new vocabulary words per lesson, and it’s overwhelming (not to mention kind of impossible) to teach that many new words even if I take more than 5 minutes. However, from now on, vocabulary is going to get a big fat juicy slice of time in my lessons. With pictures. And four-square. And discussion. I’ll figure out something else to skinny down. 

(Here is where I will avoid going on a soapbox rant about the magical time thinking that my curriculum engages in, where it pretends that the lessons can be taught in 90 minutes a day, but there are all these asides about how I **may** want to spend more time at some other part of the day working on vocabulary or re-reading the text for fluency, or giving the students additional time to finish up the writing assignment. Or here is an extra 20 minute lesson to help my English Language Learners (that’s the whole class) but don’t think of it as “extra” think of it as “support” and whenever  I ask the curriculum representatives and the instructional coaches how to find these other minutes, let alone just accomplish what the curriculum says we can do in the 90 minutes—we aren’t as fast at reading as it thinks— they tell me I just have to “be intentional” and if one more person on a teacher zoom training answers my real and serious questions with “you just have to be intentional,” I might just intentionally set the school on fire. ahem.)

Other news:

Because of her birthday, Apple Pie is now in Young Women’s with Key Lime Pie and Banana Cream Pie. So that is fun.  Thursday night is now boys home alone watching football while all the girls go to the church for Uno, painting, and soon: pickleball.  We haven’t done much sports for YW because team sports aren’t much fun when you only have 4 people to play. And our cultural hall is also the chapel in our small building, so we would have to move all the folding chairs before and after we played (I don’t think we even have a basket ball hoop in there, but I should look again. I can be pretty unobservant about that stuff.)  Anyway, I had the realization that pickle ball works with four people, and I’m pretty excited about it. I still need to buy equipment and learn how to play…

We had a school wide spelling bee.  Zeke almost won, but spelled the word enjoy with a “g” instead of a “j.”  He insists that he said “j” but the whole school heard “g.”  So he is a little sad today.  I let him have ice cream after dinner. Maybe we will start having family spelling bees for fun.  And playing Balderdash. However, the Pies are highly suspicious of any game that smells like a learning game. They flatly refuse to play. “Why are you ruining our fun with learning?” says Banana Cream Pie.   But they might not realize that they are learning vocabulary with Balderdash. 🤞🤞