School Daze

I am literally in a daze at this point...a school daze. This will be my second full week of school. I am finally beginning to get my bearings about me. We have wasted no time in my class diving into instruction. The students have already written a small opinion piece about swimming with sharks. We did this to coincide with Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. The kids loved learning about the different sharks and the handful of sharks that some people believe are safe to swim with. We are also in the middle of a research project on immigration as well. We have read texts such as Allen Say's Grandfather's Journey, first hand accounts of children who have immigrated to America through Scholastic's Immigration: Stories of Yesterday and Today, and taken a virtual field trip of Ellis Island also produced by Scholastic. It has been an exciting unit of study. The students are beginning to finish their research papers and we are hoping to share them within the next few days. I have already tried to establish an environment in which my students feel comfortable sharing their writing with one another. Many are already excited about the opportunity to express themselves through the written word daily. Writing has been something that has not been a major part of their educational career for most of my students. Many teachers felt the strain of standardized tests and have overlooked writing with students. This is something we aim to fix this year in our school. We have implemented a writing initiative in our school where writing has become the center of our instruction. If students read about it, they write about it. If students can have a conversation about a topic, they can write about that conversation. Writing has to become as easy to these students as breathing. I know they will get there. I am already amazed at what some of my students can do with words. I look forward to seeing growth in my students' writing as well as growth in their relationships with one another and myself.