It is rare that I will write in the middle of the week, but I have had a very good day and thought I should share:

It all started this morning when the kids came in and got right to work without ANY prompting from me. This is rare, and they did it so quietly and efficiently. Got right to the morning routine and were sitting in their desks working on the morning message. I loved it :-)

After that nice quiet start, I did a shared reading lesson that I had come up with while lying in my bed last night. At the moment I'm reading The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid a memoir by Bill Bryson. The book is all about Bryson's life growing up in the 1950s, and it is hysterical. The part I was reading last night, however, tied in to a conversation we had begun the day before in shared reading about natural disasters. Bryson was describing the conditions of a particular tornado his grandparents experienced in rural Iowa, and it provided me with a lightbulb moment. After my training on shared reading on Monday (provided by the district as a part of our new teacher professional development) I knew that I could choose any text, regardless of level, and use it to teach a variety of lessons.

So this morning I prepared photocopies for my kids and decided I would talk about accessing background knowledge to help us understand what we're reading. IT WAS AWESOME!! The kids were with me, they loved Bryson's writing style, and they got excited about the fact that they could read and comprehend an "adult" book.

I went on later that morning to call all 3 of my guided reading groups- no small feat when you don't have a curriculum and you've never practiced teaching guided reading before.

This afternoon was similarly productive. I had a great math class in which the kids worked independently for the majority of the hour and we reviewed together at the end. I was able to finish calling small groups to pre-assess, and able to gather information about how they're getting this unit via a warm-up worksheet.

The kids are also getting really excited about the next science unit. I'm really shocked at how much I'm enjoying science all of a sudden. It's so refreshing to be able to take the content at a slower pace, pick and choose what I feel is important, and to get invigorated about the processes all around us that are so phenomenally complicated and intricate. Our next unit is on weather, and we watched a video that got us all in the mood to be scientists. Being a weather man is like being James Bond with all those gadgets - and the kids think that's way cool!

And then after sitting in traffic for an hour, I sat down at the table for dinner and planned an entire week without cracking a book. What that means is that I'm figuring it out. The planning is becoming more natural. I don't need lesson plans anymore because I'm teaching with the end in mind. I know what the goals are and so do my students, so I direct all of my instruction toward accomplishing those specific goals. When it's all laid out for me, it makes it so much easier to decide what to do and how to do it.

Isn't it great when you feel like you just might finally know what you're doing? I'm happy to say that I'll be able to go away this weekend without worrying about not being prepared for next week. Yay for progress!!!