School ended one week ago. In the past week I have done nothing but read for leisure, take day trips to Memphis, and lay by the pool.  I have had 1 week to not speak about teaching, my students and been able to consistently sleep past 5:45 am.  I don’t think that it has quite hit me that this isn’t just some quick little week long break, it is the real deal.  2 months off.

During my check out with my principal, I begged her to tell me what I would be teaching next year, because I want to be sure that whatever work I do this summer is relevant to my experience in this coming year.  She assured me that I would be teaching K, and that the 2 new cms that we have coming to my school would be under my guidance and control, as I will be their mentors — scary stuff!  I am very excited though because I know that one of them will be getting my students and that makes me happy to know that they will have a solid support for reading, because if they are able to work hard enough, many students can and will read on a 3-4 grade level when leaving 1st grade.  I promised the parents after they found out that I would not be going to 1st grade with their student, that I would make sure that they continue on this great trajectory, because I am just as invested in these student, those are my babies too.

I was not as sad when the school year came to an end as I previously thought.  I did shed some tears as a few of my students names were called at graduation, but I felt an enormous sense of calming after graduation was over.  For the week that preceded graduation and the ever so exciting field day, I only had between 8-12 students come to school daily, and that was almost dare I say boring.  I will think back to that when I have the promised 28-30 in my classroom next year (please say a prayer).

I look forward to the next year and making sure that things run much more smoothly than they did this year.  I want to be organized down to the worksheets that I am going to use each week, and just have to make copies, and not have to do too much planning, because I want to take a week or 2 to plan everything this summer.  I went to a conference this month where the speaker was Kim Adsit, you can google her name and she has a fantastic website, and information on there.  I want to run my classroom by the model that she put out and to do so much individual/small group work with the students because I know that is how they learn best.  I need to give up the “listen to me” attitude that I know I can get and let the students speak and develop both their English and Spanish skills.