The Magic Happening

I missed my slice last week, and it’s already 9:28pm, but Ana sent me a text saying she wants to show up even if it’s just for four lines, so I figured I could do that too!

The last couple weeks have felt nonstop, more so than in years past, and in spite of us having a fairly easy class behaviorally. When my nervous system gets disregulated due to outside factors, I often feel like I won’t be able to get it all done and just want to crawl into a hole and stay there for a while.

Our head of schools gave me the advice of being present and focusing on the magic happening right in my classroom, so that’s what I’m going to try to do for this slice—think of four magic things that are happening.

Here goes:

1. A morning meeting activity: sentence types. A BrainPop image of the two presidential candidates. Students turning and talking and sharing smart and serious and funny sentences.
2. All four committees of our Flying Solo play adaptation, fully engaged and working in tandem towards our November show. Their wonderful ideas. Quieter students speaking up.
3. The way a few of our students take such care of our space—keeping stock of supplies, making labels for everything, organizing the pillows, color-coding the library shelves, folding the table rags, knowing who has what job when, following *most* of our routines.
4. A reading conference with a student, starting her book together and helping her monitor and clarify, then watching as she made an un-prompted inference, and with guidance, found text evidence to support it. 🥹