The Little Things

Hello friends, I missed my window of sleep so I guess I'll disrupt the flow of my usual once-a-week updates and post an update tonight as well. The new rug arrived yesterday and it is beyond fabulous! The colors are so vibrant and my room is finally starting to feel and look like a real kindergarten classroom instead of an "Oh crapola, we need to make room for an overflow kinder" after thought.

Me solving the world's hardest puzzle.

With the addition of the new rug and my new student this week, I've decided to redo my seating chart (for the umpteenth time). I'm hoping it's one of those things that will get easier with experience, but right now for me, seating charts are harder to piece together than a 5000 piece mono-colored jigsaw puzzle! So much goes into it! First thing's first, I group my students by their ability (low, medium low, medium, and high). Then, since each row makes up my center groups I have to make sure there is a good heterogeneous mix of levels. Next, I look at the specific students. Is student A going to gel well with student B to the right and student C to the left? Or am I asking for trouble? Then, I take into account which students should be up in the front whether for reasons of vision or discipline. Lastly, I have to consider what the rotations will look like once I start guided reading. Oh me oh my... I grouped my students by color and used little post-it notes to easily play around with different combinations.

We got our October interactive story up earlier this week about the San Diego Humane Society's visit. I love how sharp some of my students' phonemic awareness and phonics skills are getting! They are getting pretty good at stretching words they don't know and giving me the letters that correspond to the sounds they hear. Yes for small victories! As a FYT, I latch on to these and never let go. That's right Jack, I'll never let go.

Letter of the Week: Nn post will be up over the weekend! Have a great Friday everyone! I joined my school's softball team and our first game is tomorrow against all the head honchos up at the district office. I hope we can pull off the win! :)