My class this year is extra wiggly, loud and silly. All three of those things have contributed to making this year my hardest year of teaching yet. It has made me question myself as an educator, and I have often wondered if I am doing the best for these 25 humans. What I have come to learn is that I need to be more creative in how I give them appropriate outlets to do all three of those things so that it does not happen when I am in the middle of teaching.

Yesterday was by far the best day of the school year and its only taken us 124 school days to get there (insert tired teacher here). As I left work I spent my car ride thinking about what made yesterday so successful because of course I would love to leave work feeling that way every day.

What I noticed, was that both lessons for our core ELA and core math blocks included movement and time to work and talk with peers. For writing, my students were put into four groups and were introduced to four writing stations. The students worked as a team to complete a station in 10 minutes before rotating to the next station. That means that every ten minutes they got to physically get up and move somewhere else and they also were able to start a completely new task.

For math, I grouped students again and they rotated around to eight different posters that all had a different math problem on it. Considering that most tasks we have attempted to do all year have been a challenge to keep students on task as well as have the correct voice level, I was amazed that they were able to handle something that had so many moving parts but they thrived. What I learned was that something that I used to view as a privilege for classes who can follow directions and be “good” (whatever that means) is actually what my class that struggles needed all along to be “good”.