This weekend flew by! I can't believe tomorrow is Monday, already. Oh well, at least this week is a short one.

I am thinking about trying Reader's Theater in my classroom as a center during Guided Reading. Or even as an extension of Guided Reading. I'm not sure yet. I have been looking for age appropriate scripts online and found two good books on amazon (one is for phonics, yay!!) I think it will get the kids motivated to read and keep them focused while reading to each other. I find that if I just send them off to read to a partner, at least half of the class gets off track. I am starting the CAFE (Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, Extending Knowledge) method next week and I really think it would match the fluency part well. I am also adding High Speed Fluency Drills into my Guided Reading Centers. They will time each other to see how fast they can read a list of 4 words that repeat in different orders. I chose different sets of words for each group, as they are all reading on different levels. It will be interesting to see how they react to this new center. I only have 4 groups now, which is great, I will be able to spend much more time per group. My book club group will be starting in full swing this coming week, so I am also very excited for this!!

I am also thinking of trying out sign language in my classroom (maybe five signs per week, one per day?) Jessie, if you read this, I need your help, haha. I am not sure of the best way to introduce this. I just want to do simple words. I want to broaden their perspectives a bit with this. Thoughts?

I have been doing a lot of work on kindness and friendship in my classroom. I have found that many of my student's have a hard time getting along and dealing with conflicts. I basically expected this because people are not born knowing how to solve conflicts or how to be kind. It has to be taught. And six years old is a perfect time to learn. I have a chain of kindness hanging up in my classroom. We started it by drawing names out of a box and writing something kind about the person whose name we drew on strips of paper. I read them aloud and stapled them together to make a chain. Now whenever someone does something kind for a student, that person writes it on a strip of paper and I add it to our kindness chain. Last week it started to really take off. This week I am going to try some of the activities suggested on actsofkindness.org (a website I found while reading a story from a book on Ethics that the second grade teacher gave me). Hopefully this will add to the unit.

Something else we are doing is pretty amazing. Amazing for the sheer fact that it was an idea from a six year old. I received an email from one of my student's parents last week talking about how her child was watching the news and saw a story about the soldiers in Iraq. The child suggested that they make cookies for the soldiers and send them overseas for Christmas. She also wanted to write letters, and from that, thought of her whole class writing letters. Her mom wrote me the email to see if I thought this would be OK. I thought it was a wonderful idea and we are going to write the letters the week after Thanksgiving. It is an incredible thing that a six year old thought of this. Many six year olds are still egocentric and have a hard time relating to others and seeing in the perspective of others. This six year old has a very big heart and is always thinking of ways to help others. I am so happy she had that idea and I am very excited to try it out with the whole class.

As for me, I am stressing about my student loan payments. As of right now they are over $300 per month. The first ones are due on the 5th of December. On the website it says I can lower my payments but it is extremely confusing and I am unsure of what to do. I feel very clueless. If it stays at $300 per month I am barely going to be saving any money. If anyone has any advice on this, I would gladly take it.

Well, that's about it for now. I have been working basically all day on school stuff and I think it's about time I settled down, worked out, and watched some of my shows on the DVR. How exciting. haha