New Blog

I've moved to a new blog, http://igetupiwalkifalldown.blogspot.com/. The discussion will continue there.

Back at the Ranch

Now that I'm married, I'm ready to start thinking, really thinking about what I want for the kids and myself this year. Almost as if he read my mind, dy/dan posted his newest question:

The ultimate end of your classroom structures should be invisibility. eg. The best classroom management is unnoticeable. The best classroom lesson plan camouflages the planning while pushing the learning to the foreground. The extreme opposite of this is the teacher who creates a new seating chart every day.

• How have you set up your classroom routine so that the wires and pulleys disappear?

This is somewhere I'm really still working. I know I'm doing well when the kids say, "Hey, this reminds me of...." I'm still working on invisible-izing the SMARTBoard, and I'm hoping that actually getting to do the same curriculum two years in a row will help. Next year is the year I finally get to roll out "Words Have Power" and I'm going to start the days with quickwrites to set the tone (Is that what the kids are talking about when they say "bellringer"?).