A new week at school, and the kids came back with their memories intact. Good things about today:

- I started reading and responding the letters kids wrote to me and learned 2 things - 4th graders need a lot of work on their spelling (some even write lowercase b's and d's!), and these kids have a very good knowledge of sentence structure especially compared to fifth graders

- I have some sensitive kids in my room. I have to remember that I'm dealing with little innocent personalities here. They are not the hardened snotty kids from last year.

- The kids read for 20 minutes before anyone looked away from their books. We're on our way to good stamina!

- During that 20 minutes I was able to look ahead and make some reasonable goals for getting my literacy block where it needs to be this year. I'm pretty proud of that :-)

- 4th graders smile a lot. And when they do, I remember why I wanted to do this in the first place.