Week One is in the Books!!!

I must say I am learning to embrace my inner third grade teacher.  I wasn't sure she was actually in there, but when put to the test, she came up big.  I am loving these kids!!!

It has been 8 years since I taught 3rd grade and I only did it one year and I have tried to blot out the memory for the last 7 years.  I am sure they were not that bad, but I had many things stacked against me that year.  I had just gone back to work after taking a year off having my daughter, I was stuck way out in a portable building with a 5th grade and two self contained special education classrooms.  The portable was literally on the next block from the school, which meant that my little darlings had to walk hike to the main building a couple of times a day, rain or shine.  Sometimes library just wasn't worth it.  There were 4 other single portables out there with us.  We referred to ourselves as "The Village".  It really did seem like an M. Night Shamilan (sp?) movie.  On top of all that my class had the alphabet soup of issues.  Don't get me wrong I loved them.  In fact I followed them for the next three years till they were in 6th grade.  Not that I had all of them every year, but I had most of them at least twice by the time they graduated from 6th grade.  But for crying out catfish, they didn't know what to do with lined loose leaf notebook paper.  I did not realize the vast difference in maturity from 5th to 3rd.

This year I am not only prepared for their maturity level, I embrace the maturity level.   I now understand the true meaning of model frequently.  I mean come on, I could never sing a song about  "Check for Understanding" set to the tune of the hokey pokey with my 5th graders.  This year we have done it 2 times already.  Carpet time is becoming like an old friend, comfortable and inviting.

Below are the books that we have enjoyed together.  I will post tomorrow about the great activities that we did with these books.  If you are familiar with these books you can probably guess the theme that we have dealt with this week.

My name is Nannette.  and I can understand Crysanthmum's angst.  Plus, I could never find anything with my name on it when I was a kid.  I hated Ann and Beth and Susan.  They had cute pencils and stickers and such that were emblazened with their name.  I had to find stickers with Nancy of them and carefully cut off the "cy"  (Nan is my nick name.)  However, I love my name now!

Lily is not a bully, but she is a bucket dipper.  This is a good book to show kids that we can all be a bucket dipper sometimes.  If we are, it is important to say, "I'm sorry."

Great little book to show that we all have something that someone could make fun of.  And shows how we should think about someone's feelings before we make fun of them.  I found this cute video that goes along with the book.



Great book for getting kids to begin to think of ways to make others feel good instead of bad, and why bullies may act the way they do.  Not that there is an excuse, but knowledge gives you power.