Blessed to Teach and Read

It's not abnormal for me to only post twice a year, but this school year, I purposefully took a hiatus from this blog.  I took a step back from trying to maintain this piece of my library program along with my monthly, library newsletter, because I wasn't going to keep putting work before my family.  I took self-care seriously as we rolled into the 2021-2022 school year, and set some boundaries that I hope to maintain, should we ever get out of this pandemic.   First semester, I do have to share that I had the students make the most beautiful Dot Day display that we have ever made!  I bought and gave each student a small, round, paper plate.  The only instructions I gave were to choose a color family and be creative.  Thanks to the help of a couple of substitutes and several 5th grade helpers (Castle Apprentices), I was able to get the whole thing taped to the walls.  Several teachers begged me to leave the display up for after fall break, so I di...

Oh my goodness!  I found a draft of a blog post from back when I got my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine.  I was so excited and relieved to receive it!  I was proudly, fully vaccinated as of mid-March.  In the original draft, started a summary run-down of all the lessons I had been doing with students, but only managed to get through kindergarten and first grade.  To the draft, I added on what I did with students for the rest of spring 2021.   I do have to say, I am so proud of all of teachers everywhere for our efforts, our love, our devotion, and our perseverance in the face of truly difficult times this school year.  We made it to the end of a year to be proud of, building relationships, teaching students, and growing as professionals! Without further ado, here are my lessons: Kindergarten:   We made puppets of Kevin Henkes' characters from Egg,  after reading the book together and learning about how he uses his typewriter, his S...

As the school year started back, in-person, at the end of July, this was me a lot of the evenings when I got home: The stress was seemingly unreal and mostly from me expecting too much of myself with too little time to do it.  Since school had closed mid-March, I was not able to finish genre labeling the remaining books in the fiction section (F SNI - F ZZZ), which meant trying to do it all during preplanning.  It also meant moving 4,000 books into their new sections by myself.  I insanely, and very briefly, considered doing a full inventory of our books, since I was supposed to have done it at the end of the previous school year, but thankfully gave myself permission not to do it. 😄 Deep breaths. To accommodate some changes to the way our library would function this year, I made and shared a Bitmoji Virtual Help room with lots of different links for both virtual and face-to-face learners.  I also made a Google sign-up calendar so teachers could bring their entire c...