Monday Already?

I must admit my dear readers when I woke up this morning going to school was the last thing I wanted to do. The covers on my bed were so warm and my pillow was so soft, yet the unwelcome tune of my alarm broke my peace. Even teachers have trouble getting up after a relaxing weekend. Before I knew it I was off on my 45 minute commute once again. I must say, seeing the sun start to rise above Lake Washington does ease the sting of a Monday morning.

In class my students didn't do much differently than they usually do, I will say though that behavior wise things seemed a bit off. Before I go any further let me say that in general I have a very, almost eerily, well behaved class. For some reason though things were different. There is one student who has been dealing with quite a bit of separation anxiety lately. She'll get weepy boughts, be completely fine for a while, then start to get teary again. T1, T2, and I have been trying to figure out the situation since it started last week. I suggested we have her write/draw out her feelings. When the student began to cry again T2 gave her some paper and talked/prayed with her. This worked well until about 5 mins before school was over. As of right now the three of us are a bit stumped for what to do, if anyone reading this has suggestions please let me know!

Next there was a student who was definitely testing my patience. He has a strong personality, which can be good, but there are times when he doesn't know how to control it. In the morning during singing time he wanted to do some work but I told him he needed to wait. He responded with a "no" and turned away from me. Similar occurrences continued, and so did plenty of short talks about respect. The funny thing was that he would do things like that but then do what I wanted him to do. That is, until lunch time rolled around. I was doing a read aloud and he was playing with his lunchbox. Multiple times I told him to put his lunchbox on the ground, he even did the whole try to be funny by putting it on the ground and then pick pick it up and start playing with it. The other students got as annoyed as I did, a couple of them even yelled at him from across the room to "just listen to the teacher"  and "put it on the ground." Ahh sweet victory! There is no greater feeling than having the rest of the class as your ally. The student was soon quiet, put his lunch box down, and willfully listened to me for the rest of the day.

Other than those two issues, today went rather smoothly. I taught a spelling lesson and lead a reading group for Social Studies. Tomorrow I will be teaching both Handwriting and Spelling. They're both pretty simple and don't require a lesson plan but I need to start somewhere right? I will also start volunteering with an after school tutoring program called KidReach once a week. T1 has been involved in it for a while and I asked her if I could join as well. It should be fun, I'll let you all know how it goes.

As of right now there isn't much else to report. I'm slowly working my way through my unit plan, it's more like a giant list of ideas right now than anything.

I do hear a bowl of ice cream calling my name though, it would be awfully rude of me to ignore it.

Good Night!

Lessons Learned Today:
-The "teacher stare" works.
-It's important to be patient with students, no matter what the situation.

Goals for This Week:
-Start putting some lessons for my unit together.