Crazy Hair Day

I went all out for Crazy Hair Day this year. I put my hair into dozens of mini buns all over my head, and my husband helped me poke tiny cardboard airplanes on wire into each bun.

I looked like a busy airport. My students were mesmerized. They just kept staring at my head and talking about the airplanes. Thankfully crazy hair day is during the last week of school!

Too Much Help

Now that testing is over, a lot of the students and some of the staff have a definite feeling that this part of the year doesn't count any more. Some of my students have totally checked out, and spelling test scores have gone way down. Behavior has generally gotten worse, too.

At the same time, the administration suddenly has a lot more time on their hands, so I've got lots more people in my room trying to help me and coach me. It's pretty overwhelming, and hard not to take personally. It's across the board with all the new teachers, though, not just me, so I don't really think I suddenly stand out as needing lots of help with math, literacy, and ELD. I think they just suddenly have extra time.

So I have decided to go talk to the principal about it. I want to improve, I just can't work on so many things at once!

Update: I talked to the principal. She was totally understanding. I cried when I explained how I was feeling (arrgh). But she's already talked to the coaches and lightened my load. Another part of the problem was that the coaches were observing and leaving a note on my desk, but never meeting with me to discuss issues. So that's improving, too. I'm lucky to have such a responsive principal. Even if she did have to let me out the back door of her office so I didn't have to walk past the office full of people.

Standardized Testing Advice

As a first year teacher, I wasn't quite sure what to expect during state standardized testing. In my state, third graders take the test over four days. The first day is the writing prompt, and then the following days are each an hour and a half of reading, then an hour and a half of math.

The pressure during the test was huge, on the teachers and on the students. I had one girl start crying when I passed out the tests, just from pure anxiety. I knew she was going to, because she'd been getting easily upset and crying whenever something wasn't super easy. She has a high pressure family- her mom asked me for her class rank during a conference. Thankfully she and I had been discussing relaxation techniques and stuff like that, so after I had her to go to the bathroom and get a drink (I told her to walk slowly, and breathe deliberately, and listen for bird sounds), she came back and started doing the test.

I spent $20 on fruit and snacks for the week, and each morning I gave my students a small snack, like 5 apple slices and a few grapes, or some sliced up oranges. My students also love Mangoes and I found some of those on sale too. The school provided me with snacks, but it was all packaged stuff like granola bars and fruit snacks. I gave them those snacks in between morning testing sessions, so the schedule went like this: at school at 8am, eat fruit, start testing at 8:30, break at 10:15 for packaged snack, test until 12, when it's lunch time. In the afternoon we worked on coloring the pictures for the books we've been writing for a few weeks. Nothing academic, but nothing too crazy either. I was also very liberal with prizes during the week. I passed out mint mentos and chewing gum, because everybody on staff is convinced that the kids do better with mint. I told my students (privately, in whispers during the test), that the mint flavor would wake up their brain. I only gave stuff to kids who were still working or checking answers, never to the early finishers. Sometimes I could get them to go reread questions and check answers by bribing them with a single mint mento. I also put tiny stickers on an index card on the corner of the desk when I saw a student working really hard. That meant if a student just skimmed over the questions, they wouldn't get very many stickers. The people who took the longest always got the most stickers. Then in the afternoon I allowed the students to buy prizes with the stickers, like an eraser for 10 stickers or a bottle of bubbles for 20 stickers.

Our testing took 4 days. On Friday I had good intentions, but I was sick and feeling crappy. I showed two movies, did a bunch of read alouds, and gave my kids popcorn, and while they watched the movies I flipped through the test booklets and checked for bubble neatness. At our school we had to check out the box of tests from the principal each morning and return them during lunch, but thankfully they let us check them out again on Friday to go over the neatness of the forms. The only problem with that is that I found a few students who had skipped problems or in one case two pages, and there was nothing I could do about it because testing was over. Next year I'm going to flip through their books as they finish to make sure they did every problem.

What is This Bird?

We have an orange tree in our yard. The oranges were ripe over the winter, and now the remains of the season are falling off the tree.
I have been noticing that quite a few of the fallen oranges have holes like this one: The hole is perfectly round and quite deep. The pulp inside the hole is gone. I have seen a few Orioles struggling with my hummingbird feeder, so I assumed it must be Orioles eating the oranges. I even put up a specially designed Oriole feeder, but I haven’t seen any Orioles visit it yet.

Then, the other day, I noticed a bird high in the tree, busily eating an orange that is still on the tree. I took some pictures and realized that it’s certainly not an Oriole. The problem is I can’t figure out what it is, even with the help of some books about regional birds from the library. The identity of the visitor will stay a mystery.

Dragonquest

This is the second Pern book on the list provided by the library. I read this book while traveling in Thailand. The story was addictive, and I ended up staying awake very late the night before we left to finish the book.

The story takes place 7 years after Dragonflight. The oldtimers, the riders and dragons who came into the present to help protect Pern after the thread began to fall again, are causing problems. They are demanding and greedy, and the people who live in the areas protected by oldtimers are growing resentful.

I was interested in how the groups changed from the first book to the second book. The oldtimers are brought to save Pern in the first book, and now they are causing problems for Pern by their old ways of thinking and acting. One of the things I like about the Pern series is how characters change over time. They grow more mature, or serious, or problematic, or generous. The stories are plot driven, but at the same time character driven. This makes the fantasy and sci-fi aspects softer and more human.

I also loved this book because of the introduction of the fire lizards. They are miniature dragons, basically, only more playful and not as smart. One of the dragonriders happens to impress a fire lizard on the beach, which spurs a newfound interest in the small creatures, as pets and message carriers. I especially enjoyed the scenes where non-dragonriders impress the fire lizards as pets and gain a new understanding of the emotional bond between dragon and rider.

Make Up Day

During the week of standardized tests at my school, the morning announcements mentioned that Friday was “make up day.” Because we have four days of testing, students who miss a test session can make up that section on Friday.

On Thursday, my girly girl student told me how excited she was that tomorrow was Make Up Day! I was confused, because she didn’t need to make up any tests, and then I realized that she thought it was a special day to wear make up to school. Lipstick, eye shadow, blush… quite a theme day for an elementary school!

Dragonflight

This is the first Pern book on the list provided by the library.

The main character of Dragonflight is Lessa, a clever girl who is able to speak to all dragons. When the story begins, Lessa is working undercover as a kitchen drudge in her family’s hold. The hold was seized by an ambitious overlord, and she is biding her time before she can take back the hold. This part was a bit difficult for me to be interested in, because it spends a lot of time talking from her bitter and dissatisfied point of view. It is necessary back story, though.

The dragonriders are in disfavor because thread, the destructive silver rain that dragons burn up as it falls, hasn’t fallen in hundreds of years. The citizens of Pern don’t believe it will ever fall again, and they are questioning their support of dragonriders.

The last remaining (and lazy) queen lays a golden queen egg, and the search for a suitable female dragonrider uncovers Lessa. When Lessa is brought to the Weyr and impresses her queen dragon, the story is finally in full swing. The emotional attachment between dragon and rider is a touching component of these scenes.

Of course, the thread begins to fall again, and the small number of dragons are woefully unprepared to fight it effectively. It is at this time that Lessa discovers that dragons can fly through time as well as space, and she mounts a very risky and experimental mission to bring oldtimer dragons and dragonriders to the present time to help fight thread.

By the time I was a quarter of the way into this book, I had a hard time putting it down. There is wonderful tension and excitement in this book.