Reading is Soooo Cute. A guest post.

My guest blogger, and favorite daughter, is back. This time she asked to write about reading. I typed and gave only the slightest prompting and editing.

I Love Reading by Maya Fliegelman

Cover of Maggie and Max (The Puppy Place)

"I like to read. I am reading Maggie and Max, a fun book. It is Puppy Place book. It is my homework book from school. Mrs. ABC didn't tell me to read it over the weekend. I read it over the weekend because I wanted to. Rebecca is my friend. She is reading it also.

Maggie is a dog who has black and white fur. Max is a cat. He has black and white fur also. Maggie and Max stay together. When we first saw them, they were at the shelter. Later they were at Charles and Lizzie's house. Maggie got out of the box that they were in first. A little bit after that, Max got out. Max got stuck in Charles and Lizzie's Christmas tree. Maggie helped him get down. I am probably going to finish Maggie and Max soon.

Some other Puppy Place books that I have read are Max and Flash. Some Kitten Place books that I've read are Sky and Star. Star is soooo cute. Sky is very cute, too.

I love reading to myself if my brother, Manny, doesn't interrupt me."

Some day, I am sure, Mrs. ABC will have Maya branch out to other genres. For now, I should be happy that she is reading and loving it.

Oh, one more thing, I think that Maya is soooo cute.

Related articles

• Mrs. ABC, Really (principalspov.blogspot.com)

Feasting and Dancing in Jerusalem

So I am not a teenage any longer. In fact, I haven't been one for quite a few years. Anyway, I realized a few months back that I still have teenage trait left in me (no, not my sense of humor as that is more like a 12 year old). I still have songs that define my life. In the last eighteen months, there are three songs that tell a lot about me.

This Year by The Mountain Goats

Firework by Katy Perry

Chicago by Sufjan Stevens

This Year is a song aimed squarely at a demographic more than 20-years my junior. I don't connect much with the whole teen angst thing. My teen years were not very angsty, and I am not so angsty now. Except...last year was pretty tough for me. (For most of that story, please read this post). Anyway, my connection to this song was really only with the last line and the chorus: 

Image via Wikipedia

There will be feasting and dancing in Jerusalem next year

I am going to make it through this year if it kills me

I am going to make it through this year if it kills me

A powerful, hopeful mantra as I listened to that song about seven million times.

During the spring of 2011, things started to pick up for me. Sometime during the winter, I, along with 3 zillion other folks, watched a Texas high school lip dub of Firework by Katy Perry on YouTube. While not my usual style of music, I was hooked and added the song to my happy-songs playlist. Over the course of a few weeks in the spring, I drove from Massachusetts to and from and all over Vermont. As my interviewing confidence grew, I kept turning up the volume on Firework. Some of the lines I like best are:

"Cause baby you're a firework

Come on show them what you're worth"

Image via Wikipedia

"If you only knew what the future holds

After a hurricane comes a rainbow"

"Maybe you're the reason why all the doors are closed

So you could open one that leads you to the prefect road"

"It's always been inside of you, you, you

And now it's time to let it through" 

Catchy? Sure. Trite? Absolutely. Beneath an educated, professional? Definitely. Did I listen to this seven million times also? You bet.

Well time went on as it always does, and we moved to another town. Getting the principalship at Wolcott Elementary School, moving to Vermont, and finally selling our old house in Massachusetts has made for a great New Year.

Image via Wikipedia

During these past few months since the move north, I have listened frequently to Chicago by Sufjan Stevens. Once again, a song aimed at a very different audience, spoke to me. The hook was the beauty of the song, but the refrain at the end seems to sum up my learning of late:

we had our mindset
(I made a lot of mistakes)
all things know, all things know
(I made a lot of mistakes)
you had to find it
(I made a lot of mistakes)
all things go, all things go
(I made a lot of mistakes)

So, that is me in song (at least recently). Going forward who knows what I will listen to. Maybe more of the same, maybe a whole different genre (countrified rap here I come).

Over the last eighteen months, I have come a long way. Things are good. We are not in Jerusalem, but we are feasting and dancing this year.

Related articles

• Making the Most of Mistakes (connectedprincipals.com)
• Katy Perry breaks Twitter silence for first time since Russell Brand divorce announcement to warn fans off believing gossip (mirror.co.uk)

Office Closed - K-2 For the Day. #NoOfficeDay

Last week was International No Office Day for principals around the world (well, at least a few of us). Shira Leibowitz started a wiki for those of us involved. Here is my experience.

So I decided to start by asking the K-2 teachers to schedule me for the day on Wednesday, September 14. principalj does a great job telling how we each explained the day to the staff.

My day started with a few minutes in my office to put my things down. Then off I went.

Here is my schedule for the day with some notes thrown in for good measure.


7:45-9:15 Kindergarten

• Some students were at breakfast, some still filtering in. I tried to engage 'Bill' to no avail until the teacher suggested that we use the blocks. Things took off from there. We built towers that hardly stood long enough to admire. When some other boys arrived, I referee'd the use and temporary ownership of the blocks. For a few minutes, I talked with some other students as they were drawing.
• Once everyone arrived, the teacher began the morning meeting. She reviewed the calendar before singing the good morning song.
• From there we moved onto a Fundations lesson introducing three letters. While not surprising, I was awed at the sheer breadth of student readiness and the teacher's ability to work with 15 squirmy five-year-olds.

School was only 75-minutes old, and I was already a bit tired.

9:15-10:45 1st Grade

• The first grade class was wrapping up a math lesson when I arrived. I wandered from kid to kid helping with writing number sentences and their turn-around equations. It was exciting to watch one student that I know in a disciplinary sort of way work on the math and really get it.
• At this point, the teacher asked me to participate in the next lesson as a student, not an educator. She asked me to sit between two kids that struggle with letters. We began the Fundations lesson by reviewing the letters covered the day before. At this point, many kids started getting pretty excited about the activity to come. The teacher had Baby Echo come out to help kids practice the sound of certain letters. Then, we all became skywriters. Cool, I love planes. We worked on tracing the letters in the air to help us learn the shapes.

2 hours, 45 minutes into the day: I was really tired.

11:00-12:00 2nd Grade

• The second grade teacher had asked me a few days earlier to teach a lesson so she could finish some assessments with a couple of students. So, I entered the room armed with the National Geographic Weekly Reader from May about butterflies, my iPad, and three different worksheets from the Reader teacher's guide. Just then, one student and the teacher looked at a book about bugs and declared that it was wrong. There was an error in a book! Goodness! The teacher grabbed the moment and told kids that they would need to write to the publisher to point out the error. Nice.
• So, I scrapped half of my lesson right there on the spot. Once the teacher left, I turned on the document camera, fired up the iPad, and searched for info about monarch caterpillars to double check the error in that book. We found tons of fantastic images and information and still the book looked wrong. We also found some really fugly caterpillars.

40 minutes, many butterfly facts, and tons of informational-text-features later, I was pooped.

12:00-1:00 Lunch, Recess

• I admit that I cheated slightly here. I spent about 15 minutes at my desk before joining the kids for lunch. I have eaten lunch with the students many times already this year so I think it is ok.

1:00-1:20 2nd Grade

• After Lunch/Recess, I hung out with 2nd grade again and listened to the teacher read to the class. I love to be read to.

My original schedule from this point on was:

• 1:20-1:50 PE w/ 1st
• 1:50-2:20 Music w/ 1st
• 2:20-2:50 PE w/ 2nd

Instead, the librarian was out so we needed someone to cover three, thirty minute library read-aloud sessions. OK, I am your man. Turns out that K, 1, 2 students can get a little wiggly towards the end of the day. Who knew?

Between managing the group, I was able to read a few pages of a book to each class. They tested my patience and I passed the test!

I have been an administrator since 2003, I know what means to have a long, busy day. That said, I am in awe of the staff who do this with primary grade students day in and day out. I learned (re-learned?) that I am one of the luckiest principals in the world. I have a small, safe school with an amazing, dedicated, high-endurance faculty.

Cool.

Related articles

• International No Office Day (pairadimes.davidtruss.com)
• International No Office Day (connectedprincipals.com)
• Jon's #NoOfficeDay (mjgds.org)
• No Office Day (principalj.blogspot.com)
• My Version of No Office Day (agreenblatt.blogspot.com)

Monday Morning Meeting on Thursday Afternoon

At the end of the first week of school, we held our first Monday Morning Meeting (M.M.M.).

Huh? A Monday Morning Meeting on a Thursday afternoon? Strange. Well, we didn't have a Monday that week due to the untimely arrival of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene. We decided to hold the first meeting just before the 4-day Labor Day weekend.

So, Thursday afternoon it was. I can deal with M.M.M. on a Thursday afternoon.

Using a seating plan drawn up by one of the teachers, the classes filed in. Now, Wolcott Elementary School is rather small - 119 students in grades K-6. We fit easily onto the floor of the gym entirely within the 3-point line.

I spoke about the exciting opening of school, my observation that the students had been so very polite so far, and a reminder of our PBIS Rs, Responsibility, Respect, Readiness.

At that point, I asked the entire staff to leave the room. While I spoke with the students, the staff snuck around into the storeroom behind where I was standing.

We had previously hung streamers over the doorway, and as I called the teacher's name each came running out into the gym. For each staff member, the students cheered and yelled. The smiles were enormous all around.

The students behaved perfectly during this excitement. They cheered and yelled and made tons of noise. When I raised my hand, they got quiet in less than five seconds.

The first M.M.M. was a resounding success.

We are off to a great start.




image from http://www.ashberrybaby.com/products/Basketball-Half-Court-%252d-Boy-Canvas-Art-by-The-Doodle-Store.html (I have no connection to this company)

First Exposure, First Staff Meeting

With thanks to Todd Whittaker, I have been talking a bunch about First Exposure recently. In August, at the Vermont Principal's Association Leadership Institute, Todd talked about making sure that the first exposure to a new idea is done right or it will take a long time to recover.

Well, as with every single thing that Todd says, I have not been able to stop thinking about this (ok, this might be the only thing that I remember from Todd's four hour session ;).

Anyway, I left the conference and immediately turned into Wemberly and started worrying about my First Exposure. No, I have not taken to wearing nothing but a trench coat. I am talking about the first staff meeting at my new school. Throughout the month of August, I added items to my draft agenda with the idea that I would pare it back to the essentials. I joked with the teachers that I had cut my four page annotated agenda down to 1.5 pages. The thing is that it wasn't really a joke.

Agenda cutting is harder than it sounds but very satisfying. Of course there is so much to cover at the beginning of every school year, but at the beginning of a principalship, the pressure is really on.

With the meeting scheduled for Monday morning, I finished my agenda on Thursday night so that I could show it to my mentor on Friday. (It was my idea to meet then and to ask for feedback on the agenda. I am very luck that my district values mentors for principals).

Turns out that I hadn't really finished on Thursday night. Armed with very insightful suggestions from my mentor, I continued revising through the weekend.

By the time I finished making fruit salad at school on Sunday afternoon, the agenda I used the next day was complete. Here is an edited-for-public-consumption version of my annotated agenda:

1. MEET THE PRINCIPAL (20 min)
1. Quick background
2. My core beliefs/Values
1. Learning
2. ALL Children Can Learn and Be Successful
3. Leadership
4. We do what is best for children.
5. It’s all about the relationships!
6. Process & participation matter in decision making.
7. Community
8. Safety, Respect, Learning
3. Humor
1. I take my work very seriously
2. I use humor to help me keep my balance
4. Some basic expectations I have of all staff
1. We never argue. We never yell. Never use sarcasm. With students or adults.
2. Check email at least once per day. Monday Memo, etc
3. No surprises. For me or parents.
4. Step up.
5. Invite me in.
2. SHIFTING ROLES (5 MINUTES)
3. MEET THE NEW FOLKS (20 minutes)
1. count off into fives and split up into groups
2. New person tell the following to the group
1. Something you do for fun and relaxation.
2. Why did you want to work at WES?
3. Where did you grow up?
4. What gets you most excited when you are working with students?
5. What is your favorite dessert?
3. One group member report out and introduce the new person
4. HISTORY OF WES (30 min) (Bill to facilitate this part)
1. Line up by the Year first hired
2. Pair up with a person next to you.
3. Talk about:
1. Name, position, year started and/or years at WES, memory from the first year and/or issue of the day
4. Share with the group what your partner shared (you may use notes) 
5. Record timeline as we go (Bill)
5. POWERSCHOOL (5 min)
6. NOTE CARD
1. Ticket to leave, answer on a note card: What do you need from me as Principal?

Well, on the big day, the food was a big hit. In addition to the fruit salad, I had all sorts of pastries and lots of coffee.

The meeting itself seemed to go well. I am not a great read of staff groups during meetings, and I ought not play poker with most staff. Anyway, they listened politely and participated actively during the Meet the New Folks section of the meeting.

The highlight of the meeting was definitely the History of Wolcott Elementary School section of the meeting. We moved from the Multi-Purpose Room to the Gym. I asked the Director of Curriculum to facilitate so that I could participate. He did a great job, and the group, again, participated fully. Listening to folks talk about their start at WES and their years at the school, was a fantastic history lesson for me.


image courtesy of flicker user dvortygirl CC

Related articles

• Lessons from a principalship (georgecouros.ca)