A Tip from Us to You - Shoes It Wisely (Hee hee)

Ok, let's get real here ... what's the number one skill that a first grade teacher needs to have? If you teach in lower elementary this is a no-brainer - you need to be a world-class shoelace tier. In fact, we should probably start being a little more hard hitting in our teacher interviews. "Oh, you have a masters in education. That's nice but can you tie teeny tiny shoes all day every day? Can you undo partially tied double-knot shoelaces with the utmost patience and care? Yes? You're in!"

One day while visiting the LAND OF BRILLIANT IDEAS AND LOST HOURS (aka Pinterest), KH was collecting ideas about exercising instead of just getting off her rump and actually exercising when she came across a post about a way to double-knot shoes that is as easy as 1-2-3 to undo. This elicited a quick double-take THEN an excited, "Say what?" THEN a rapid lemme try this out for myself. And, guess what??? It works and it's brilliant. So from us to you, here's how to tie double-knot laces that are easy to undo.

Gratefully borrowed from this website: http://www.organizinghomelife.com/archives/4123

Go forth and tie, our dear teaching friends. May your fingers be ever nimble and sure, and your students' shoes securely tied.

From the limb,

Why We're Over the Word "Challenge"

Almost every year, KH comes down with strep. It's her achilles heel. If she's going to get sick, like full-on sick, it'll be strep ... every time. Last year, KH did not realize that she had strep so she was working in the classroom in that state you get in just before you realize that you're sick ... you know, the way you feel when you look back and think, "That's why I felt so weird." Anyway, in this strep induced cloud, KH had a strep induced genius thought and we're about to drop it on y'all ...

Every child needs a challenge.

You're welcome!

Ok, ok, ok ... let us explain ...

Do you ever find yourself using specific language just to appease a certain group of parents? We'd like think that we're above all of that ... that we tell it like it is ... but the truth is that we all do it. We want parents to trust us; we want them to believe that we have their child's best interests at heart and we're acting out of our extensive knowledge and experience base to meet the unique needs of their child. And many do hand us this trust and this professional respect buuuuuuuuuuut there are always a few who do not and we find ourselves, often subconsciously, changing our language and our presentation in order to convince them of this. One of the ways we do this is by throwing around the word "challenge", particularly to parents who are very concerned that their child is bright and they are not being, well, challenged.

"Your child is ready for a challenge ..."
"We will be challenging your child by ..."
"We are working on the challenging work of ..."

You get the idea.

But the truth is ... every child needs a challenge. Actually, scratch that:

Every child needs deserves a challenge.

That's our job, really ... right? Challenge exists in the area between what I can do and what I am just about to be able to do. It's the wilderness where learning occurs. Challenge might look different for every child based on their individual needs and learning trajectory, but if it's stretching you, if it's pushing you, if you're learning then it's a challenge. So that's why we're going to stop throwing the word challenge around like a prize to be held by certain students. Every child deserves a challenge and that's what we're about.

Okay, thanks for listening. We'll get off our high horse now :)

From the limb,

Lessons from the Limb #10 - Touchy Feely is Sometimes What It Takes

In our classroom we have many rituals; we thrive on organization, structure, and consistency. One of the structures we have is a Morning Meeting - which we totally invented (Just kidding! We wish!!) - and a Closing Circle to open and close our day. Both of these times are an important aspect of our community building. Morning Meeting gives us a chance to check in with each other as a class, exchange important information, and set a purpose for the day. Closing Circle gives us an opportunity to reflect on the day's events and set goals for tomorrow. While we always like to maximize every spare second of classroom time for instruction, these two rituals are so important that we never EVER skip them (like EVER).

We have been running a collaborative classroom together for the better part of 3 years now (woot! woot!) and in many ways we are a well oiled machine. But in the busyness of keeping our classroom running day to day, we forgot an essential thing - to apply the tenants of our classroom philosophy to our own partnership by having our own Morning Meeting before school and Closing Circle right before we go home each day.

Now to be perfectly honest, it's probably KH's fault that we let our meetings go (We used to have them - guilty face!). See if KM had her way, we would walk around school holding hands and wearing matching sweaters ... literally. And if KH had her way, we would be working with speed and efficiency through our endless to-do lists from the minute we set foot on campus until the minute we left for the day. And even though we are so in sync with each other, we still at times have friction and miscommunications (We know this is utterly shocking to hear but it's true). We would never cut Morning Meeting or Closing Circle out of our classroom day so why did we let it go for ourselves? Sooooo .... we've made a recommitment to having our own Morning Meeting and Closing Circle. We're sure you're dying to know what our Morning Meeting and Closing Circle looks like ... well, be in suspense no more:

Morning Meeting:
1. Say good morning (yeah, sometimes KH can forget this important part - guilty face!)
2. Go over the day's lesson plans and any special announcements
3. Go over any important tasks we have to accomplish - this is really important because KH is a planner and KM is not so it helps both of us to get on the same page about what needs to be done
4. Go over any goals we have for the day

Closing Circle:
1. Reflect on the day
2. Go over the to-do list and decide if any work needs to come home
3. Compliments!!! (This is KM's favorite part)

So the FLY AWAY is this: no matter how well you work together and how much you can accomplish, don't forget to take the time to work on your relationship and connect. Get on the same page about your day and the most essential things that need to be accomplished. Tell your teaching partner what you appreciate about them or something that you noticed that they did particularly well that day. And you could always end your day with an air high - 5 because really who doesn't feel good after an air high - 5? Yee-ah!!

From the limb,

Tabula Rasa

From the limb,

It Was a Crate Idea!

Are we the only people who get inspiration from weird, random places? That's the funny thing about inspiration, we suppose ... you never know when it's going to hit you. Well ... we recently got some inspiration from a weird source: freezer meals. Do you know about freezer meals? Some amazing people make enough meals for one month and then they freeze them. Talk about organized!!! See ...

The philosophy behind freezer meals or make-ahead meals is that it's more time efficient to do things once even if it's a lot of things at once. For example, if you're chopping vegetables for dinner, you might as well go ahead and chop vegetables for all your dinners that week. Big effort BUT saving time by doing the repetitive activity only once. You see? Let us tell you how this inspired us.

We have a weird cycle when it comes to preparing for the week. We are pretty much have everything prepared for the week in our core instructional areas by Monday morning, give or take a few things. That's good, right? Things prepared for the week, plenty of time to get started on the next week. WRONG! Somehow every week our time gets eeked away and we end up like this on Friday afternoon:

It's not a good look! It leaves us stressed and frazzled through a final early morning push on Monday and then - phew - we're ready for the week. We have repeated this lovely cycle week in and week out so far this year - hating it but not knowing how to change it. Enter our freezer meal inspired idea. We give you ...

OUR CRATE!!!

We pride ourselves in our differentiated reading program and we strive to provide our students with targeted instruction to meet their specific reading needs during our Reader's Workshop block. One component of our program is our phonics strategy groups. We run our phonics groups in six week cycles and the children move flexibly in and out of the groups based on their needs and their growth. For the phonics cycle we're in currently, we have four different strategy groups running, each with their own 6 weeks worth of lesson plans. B.C. (before crate) we were pulling each lesson and all of its supporting materials every week and putting it into our lesson plan totes.

It was the same thing again and again ... a lot of work every week to pull and prep, pull and prep. Then the crate was born:

The crate holds all of the instructional material for all 6 weeks for each phonics group. Each phonics group has a different color hanging folder to differentiate it from the other groups. Each hanging folder is labeled by week and all of the instructional materials for the week are dumped into the folder.

There are also a few hanging folders with support materials, such as our Dictation sheets and Draw and Label sheets that we use weekly. Finally, each phonics group has a checklist (we LOVE checklists) so that we can keep track of our prepping and reference what hasn't been completed yet.

You can download this document here.

KM worked on the crate all week, which seems like a lot of time, but then it was ALL prepped ... for SIX WEEKS ... ALL prepped ... can we get an "oh yeah!" Now she just pulls everything out of our lesson plan totes and dumps it back into the "Week X" folder it came from, and then puts all of the materials for the next week in the totes. SO ... MUCH ... EASIER ... and less stressful. KM is now officially more obsessed with the crate than our pencil sharpener.

One thing that we've learned about teaching 40 plus kids and striving to provide them with the most differentiated, targeted instruction that we possibly can, is that we have to stay organized. It's the only thing that keeps our train on it's tracks and keeps us sane. It's always a huge victory when we think of something that will help make our jobs go just a little smoother. So we're passing this along to you to see if you think it's a "crate" idea, too.

From the limb,

The Scheduling Squeeze #1: There Is No Such Thing as a Panacea

So CONFESSION TIME ... we wrote the following blog entry last summer. Yep, last summer, as in 5 months ago aaaaaaand we're just now posting it because despite sitting on it all that time, we do think it's pretty awesome. We could have edited it to pretend that we wrote it right now, but let's face it

So, yeah ... enjoy!!

Scheduling the school day sucks (please excuse the salty language but we are fired up). It is the bane of our existence. It is the source of constant headaches. It creates tension between us as we battle to fit everything that is important into each day. All last year we struggled with our schedule.

Back, Time Dragon, back!!!

Where could we find more time? Where could we squeeze this in? How could we accommodate this? KH became a scheduling contortionist, twisting and turning, at times almost magically pulling extra minutes out of thin air, in order to accommodate the diverse needs of our students. And while we were able to accomplish a lot and we are proud of the program we built last year, there were also stresses that came directly from the schedule. We were scheduled so tightly that any little thing could knock us off our timetable. There was this constant sense of stressed time ... next, next, next ... we have to fit in more, more, more!

While we have always experienced this sense of schedule crunch, of not being able to fit in everything we think is important into our day, this feeling seemed particularly prevelant last year. We made a commitment to ourselves this year to try to streamline and integrate, particularly our reading and writing program, in order to maximize our time with our students. And we thought we had a genius plan - a Reader's and Writer's Workshop combined. We were set and we were excited ... it was going to be epic. And then we went to New York.

Specifically we went to Columbia's Teacher College Reading and Writing Project (you can read about that experience here) and had the amazing opportunity to learn all about how we could improve our writing instruction and program. This was both inspiring and frustrating because no matter how we rearranged the schedule, no matter how we spliced up our time - it was never enough. GARRRRR!!!

It is so unbelieveably frustrating to know what you need to do in order to provide an exceptional instructional program, to have the pedagogical know-how, the resources, and the professional confidence in your abilities, and to be halted from realizing it only by the limitations of time. And after KH had made the tenth revision of the schedule over the first two days of the conference, she was banging her head against the wall (Well, actually it was one of those teenie tiny college desks - what's up with that, anyway - college kids don't need room to write???) Why was this so hard, so much harder than scheduling when we were teaching on our own? Then she had an epiphany! Small group! The problem was small group instruction.

Now please, PLEASE, PLEASE do not misunderstand us. We love small group instruction. It's our middle name. It's the heart of our educational philosophy. It's the instructional practice we hang our hats on. It's the air we breathe. It's ... we could go on ... really we could. BUT it's also a gosh-darned scheduling nightmare!

Oh, Ryan. Stop! We're blushing!!

This is why. Small group instruction takes time. More time, we realized, than we initially anticipated when we started this journey together. This may seem really obvious but boy was this a revelation to us. You see, once we were able to get our kids working independently last year and we were able to engage in meaningful, focused, rigorous, differentiated small group instruction, we were hooked. We became gluttonous, voracious, insatiable. We wanted more, more, more! We spliced our time up into 15 minute chunks an we rotated, rotated, rotated. We were addicts and the high was amazing, but with anything there is always a cost. The cost for us is time. There is realistically not enough time in the day for us to teach reading, writing, and math through small group instruction without making sacrifices.

Let us repeat that ...

There is realistically not enough time in the day for us to teach reading, writing, and math through small group instruction without making sacrifices.

Whew! Believe it or not, that was hard to say and an even harder reality to face. Last year we sacrificed whole group instuction, As we added small groups, whole group time was whittled away; we basically stole the time in order to have more time in small groups. In reflecting on the year, we realized we missed whole group time. We missed the moments when students at different places in their learning came together and taught each other. We missed the building of common instructional experiences. We missed the way kids were bolstered and validated when contributing to the knowledge of the class as a whole. We didn't want our classroom to be tiny pockets of kids working on their learning in isolation from each other. We knew there were key ideas and experiences that every student needed to have regardless of their instructional level. So we planned to add it back in, but there's also a cost in that plan: time for small group instruction. Annnnnnnd ... around we go again. Are you starting to see the headache, here?

This is a quandry that we have no solution for; we are in the woods on this. There is nothing we want to do that we feel is not essential; we have already trimmed the fat long ago. There's no fly away here, no wisdom we have to impart. We suppose we mainly wanted to vent our scheduling frustrations. But more importantly, we wanted to share our epiphany about small group. Small group is time consuming if done right - to group, to plan, to carry out. We want this reality to be acknowledged. Dedicating time to small group instruction is essential; we are small group's number one fan. But there has to be a balance. We're still working on finding ours but our epiphany was a helpful first step. Now back to fighting that dragon!

From the limb,

How To: Make a Video Newsletter

Soooooo remember that post a little while back where we said that we tried something new and the verdict was still out? Well, guess what?!? Our newsletters are a huge hit!!!

The parents have been loving them, the kids have been loving them, and we have been loving not writing the newsletter tomes that we ended up with last year (Lawd, could we write a loooooooong newsletter!). We've had some unintended bonuses as well, like parents sharing the videos with grandparents. Cool, right?!? And the best part is that we can provide a little window into the classroom so parents can get a feel for what every day classroom life is like ... the good, the bad, and the ugly :) (We say the ugly because we do not censor our videos ... A kid is crying in the background - oh well! Someone is staring off into space instead of participating - whatcha gonna do! We include whatever we catch on film. And now you're probably thinking ... those are two bad booty chicks ... and you'd be right :)

You can read all about us being bad booty chicks here: Special Columbia Edition of How To: The First Rule of Chart Club Is ...

While we are by no means experts in making videos, we'd like to share with you our process for churning out a video newsletter every other week so you can see how we make ours with minimum muss and fuss because really we ain't got time for that! KH loves her some checklists so we're going to share our checklist for creating a video newsletter, our storyboard (oh yeah, get ready, this post is just going to be sprinkled with terms from the industry - the movie industry - cuz we're in the know like that), and some tips we've gathered along the way.

We apologize that we cannot show you any more of our videos to help convince you to take the plunge, but alas they now star our students and we do not want to post pictures of our students on our blog. You're just going to have to take our word on how awesome they are and see where our knowledge + your creativity can take you.

Our Process

Download here

Our Storyboard

Download here

Here is an example of our storyboard from our last newsletter:

Math Workshop Video Newsletter Storyboard page 1

Math Workshop Video Newsletter Storyboard page 2

And since we're Share-y McShare-ysons, we'd like to share with you some tips we have for making video newsletters.

Tips
1. Make a plan first

     Know exactly what you want to include and be sure to capture that. You may get other footage by happenstance, but the last thing you want is to try to cobble together a coherent video from a bunch of random footage. It'll make your job much harder and more time consuming and frustrating and ... you get the point.

2. Focus on the curriculum and the learning

     We use our video newsletters to highlight what we're learning and what our life in the classroom looks like. We do not use our video newsletters for quick reminders of things like field trips or homework. We include bulleted reminders on the email when we send out the link to our video newsletter.

3. Tell a story

     Think about your video as a story - the story of the learning or the story of the content in the classroom. Let your video walk people through your topic in a way that's organized and coherent, in a way that builds upon the previous section, as if you are giving someone a tour. For example, in our most recent video about Math Workshop, we used choronlogy to tell our story. We walked the parents through each element of Math Workshop in the order that the children experience them. We told the story of Math Workshop.

4. Use the kids

     Our first video starred us - BORING! - but we didn't want to continue that way for many reasons, vanity being one :) Now the kids make up 98% of the video and they LOVE being part of the video and sharing about the classroom.

5. Have someone else shoot your footage
     For example, our last video newsletter was focused on sharing our Math Workshop. We have a different parent volunteer that floats every day during Math Workshop so we can focus on teaching. Each day we just gave the parent volunteer our camera and a post-it with some things we wanted to include in our video. By the end of the week, we had most of the footage we needed for our video and it didn't take any of our instructional time.

Post-it given to parent of footage to shoot

6. Find a predictable format and stick to it
     We have made a format for our videos and that helps us when we make our plan and when we go to put it all together. This is our format:

Title Slide - It always says "Our Class News" and the date
Introduction - We always introduce the video together and we always say: "This is our class news for ... (date)." Then we preface with the focus of the video.
1-2 Topics - We always choose 1-2 topics to focus our newsletter on.
Topic Slides - We use topic slides to separate the topics.
Closure - We always end with the credits

     We always use the same fonts, the same title and topic slides, the same formats to layer text over video, the same transitions, etc. This may seem boring but it makes for so many fewer decisions when it comes time to put the video together and it lends a continunity that makes the videos seem like part of a series instead of stand alone pieces.

7. Layer video, text, and audio

     You can deliver a lot of information in a short amount of time by layering. We often layer text on top of our video footage to give more information about what is being shown. We also use audio clips over photos or video we've muted in order to explain what's going on. Finally, when we have students introduce parts of our video, we will write their lines on whiteboards so that the viewer can hear them and also read what they are saying in case the audio does not come through as loudly as desired.

8. Get yo' self some B-roll

     That's right. We KH knows video terms. Tape some stock footage of your students during different parts of the day. It can serve as a resource to pull from when you're putting together your videos. A parent volunteer is a great person to get some B-roll footage for you.

9. Keep it short and sweet

     Try to capture as much as possible in as little time as possible. Use a critical editing eye when reviewing your video. Does it drag anywhere? Is anything redundant? Do you get the idea of something without needing all of the footage? For example, we often use footage of our students singing, but sometimes the whole song can feel long so we'll cut it down to just 1 verse and the chorus. Be a critical editor; you don't have to use everything you shot.

10. Don't spend too much time on it
     Don't obsess about it being perfect; you'll make yourself crazy. Just get the footage you need and move on. Surprisingly, some of the best feedback we've received is how much the parents enjoy that we leave in the mistakes. We're being authentic about what really happens in our classroom and that resonates with them. So take it from two perfectionists - don't try to make it perfect.

11. So there isn't actually an 11th tip. We just didn't want to have an odd number of tips .... so ... yeah ... we're weird ... anyway ...

12. Celebrate yourself and your class

     You're awesome and the work you do everyday is amazing. Brag about it! 

Finally, a technical note: We use a flip camera mostly to get our footage. We also use stills from a digital camera and sometimes film directly on our MacBook Pro. We upload all of our footage into iMovie and use it to make our videos. We export them direclty from iMovie into Quick Time. We found after trying to share our first video newsletter that the files were too large to email out to parents so we upload them using Google Docs and then change the share settings so anyone with a link can view the document even if they do not have their own Google account. Then we email out the link to all of our parents.

We hope this was helpful and maybe even a little inspiring. We would be happy to do a more technical blog about how we use iMovie to make the movie if there's interest. If anyone tries a video newsletter themselves, we'd love to see it or hear how it went!

From the limb,