Sometimes they are a field of tiny yellow suns brightening an empty lot.
They seem to sprout up in the most unlikely places. In small cracks in the sidewalk. Next to an abandoned building or in the cinder block wall. They thrive where they land, without the coddling or TLC that are usually lavished on typical landscaping.
As delicate white puffballs they are metaphors for possibility. Perfect rounds of magical stars beckon, urging breath. As we wish, tiny seeds take flight, swirling in the wind, dancing in the sunlight, spread by hope often in the spirit of play.
And yes, I know they are frequently described as weeds, despised by many. I watch my husband mow them down, dig them out, and cast swear words in their direction. But still they thrive…much to my delight.
They catch light and my imagination…and on today’s walk they also caused me to pause, to notice, and to photograph. And to come home and write.
Schedules at school have been challenging this year. COVID protocols meant staggered lunches and as the newest member of the grade level team, I started this school year with a lunch time so early it felt like brunch! The problem with an early lunch is that the afternoon (with 6 years olds) felt interminable. I was able to negotiate a slightly later lunch after the first couple of weeks–and 20 minutes really did help, but afternoons continued to be a struggle.
A few weeks ago as the Omicron surge began to level off, the rumbles of change started vibrating through our staff. Could we have students line up on the playground instead of waiting outside the classroom as they arrived on campus in the morning? What about letting students play before school for the 10 minutes before the bell rang?
And then a more seismic shift started, could grade levels share a common lunch time? A common afternoon recess? I was definitely in favor of this change–and a complete overhaul of my daily schedule. All of my recess times would change and I would gain precious instructional minutes in the morning and shorten that afternoon when student engagement was so troubling.
It was decided that our new schedule would begin when we came back from our February Family Week break…yesterday!
My Monday was magical! No, not perfect, but the difference was so significant that I felt like singing from the rafters! My students are engaged in meaningful learning right up to our 10am recess. They come back and continue with focus up until our 11:30 lunch. After lunch we settle in for 50 minutes until our afternoon recess and manage to maintain focus right up to our 2:35 dismissal–at least that was true for the last two days.
Honestly, these have been the best 2 days of the entire school year. Do schedules really make that much of a difference? Were these last 2 days just a fluke of timing? Can a shift of 25 minutes at the start of lunch change everything about how learning happens?
I don’t yet know for sure…but it feels like the best thing that has happened in a while. Maybe “normal” is in the little things, like lunch at lunch time, play before school, and breaks with my colleagues. This schedule change feels like a win.
Like so many others on social media (at least my feeds), I have been participating in the Wordle craze. I like that I can only play once a day, that it is limited to 6 guesses, that the words are all 5 letters long and that the whole world is playing this one word each day. There is something about limitations that funnels my focus, and while my first guesses often seem fruitless, somehow I usually pull it out by guess 4 or 5.
The first graders in my classroom have been playing a math game called digit place. In this game, I think of a 2-digit number and students make guesses to determine what it is. With each guess I indicate whether there are correct digits and whether they are in the correct place. For example, if my number is 12 and students guess the number 27 I would put a 1 in the digit column to represent a correct digit (the 2) and a 0 in the place column to show that it is not in the correct place. Subsequent guesses narrow down the possibilities leading students to a correct response. At first there were lots of random guesses, but the class is becoming strategic and quite successful. (I’ve had third graders who played this game with much less strategy and success!).
We’ve been focusing on 4-letter words ending with a silent e in the last week, building word ladders and noticing how this e causes the other vowel to be a long vowel. Students are building their skills and getting better at changing just a single letter to make another word that fits the rules of this ladder. Today, I found myself thinking about Wordle, digit place, and word ladders…and decided to try my own version of Wordle–first grade style.
So…I introduced this new game to my students. I drew 4 lines to represent the 4 letters in the word I was thinking of. I grabbed a black, blue, and green white-board marker announcing that letters in black were not in the word, blue meant the letter was correct but in the wrong place, and green meant the letter was correct and in the right place. I wasn’t sure how this game would work out–or if it would even make sense to my students. But…it was great! Students loved this process–and caught right on. I could hear them telling each other whether a guess was a good one (“…we already know there is not an “s” or “h” in the word…) and the game definitely caught their attention. We played several rounds today…and I remembered to take a photo of the last one.
My social media involvement was put to good use in the classroom today. I love having a new engaging, educational, and no prep game in my back pocket for those few minutes that need filling from time to time. Wordle for first graders–and we don’t even need the internet!
Thinking Through My Lens 