School and the City

Y'all. I hate pencils. And pencil sharpeners. Some days I daydream about quitting my job and inventing something to replace pencils and becoming a millionaire overnight. Oh wait. Those things already exist. Thanks mechanical pencils and ink pens for shattering my dreams. Unfortunately, I do not prefer mechanical pencils to old-fashioned pencils. Second graders and mechanical pencil lead do not make for a happy ending. I'm that girl that sharpens pencils for her students on my own time after school because I've spent too much time and money buying electric pencil sharpeners that end up in the trash. You can't use this new pencil sharpener, I told them. Only I can touch it , I told them. I am tired of you all breaking pencil sharpeners that I buy with my own money, I told them. You already know how this story ends. Yep, that sharpener broke too, even though the only person who touched it was perfect in every way. Ahem. Then, this pencil sharpener walke...

This year was my fourth time around teaching text features , and I decided that it was an area that I could show improvement. I think text features are a difficult concept for young students to learn because it's typically rote memorization of a lot of funny words that they don't understand the importance of.  This year has been the fastest my students have ever learned the names of text features, and they know how to use them, too.  First of all, I have seen anchor charts on Pinterest where a teacher tears apart a worn-out nonfiction book and uses pieces of it to create a visual reference for text features. I loved the idea of that, but it was a LOT of work and I didn't want to have to do it year after year. I spent an afternoon cutting apart a book and some magazines and gluing pieces on a piece of chart paper. Then I took that baby down the hall to the place where the magic happens: the teacher workroom. Because that's where the laminator i...