~Handwriting Without Tears~

It was just brought to our attention (my peer teachers and I) that we will be piloting Handwriting Without Tears for our district.  We currently implement D'Nelian handwriting to transition students to cursive writing.  It was decided by principals that  the 3 Kindergarten teachers at my building, along with 4 Kindergarten teachers at another building in our district will use Handwriting Without Tears for the 2013-14 school year with our classes and decide for our whole district if all 4 elementary buildings will make the switch. I am having mixed feelings.  Part of it is the comfort level of finally being able to teach students the tips and tricks of D'Nelian writing that I have learned over 6 years in my own classroom, so I will have to exit that zone and have an open mind to learn something new for this coming year.  I have had very little experience with Handwriting Without Tears, except I know that a few years ago my coteacher in Special Education used it with the students we shared because from my understanding it was originally designed by an Occupational Therapist to help students with motor skills.  We will have training on using it with our classes, but know nothing other than that.  I am someone who likes things already in place before I start my school year, otherwise I feel very disorganized (which is important to have structure with Kindergarten), and it appears we will not have training until after the school year begins.  I know that there are certain sticks we will use to help with formation of letters, but will only have enough to use with about 4 students at a time and will not have any workbooks that students will use.  I am nervous to pilot something when it seems that we will not have the resources we need to fully implement with 100% of the program.  I guess only time will tell. Until then I found this great website that I think should help me research it a little better this summer: http://www.hwtears.com/hwt.

~Summer Curriculum~

The first 3 days of my summer vacation were spent writing curriculum!!! Our district is transitioning to the Iowa Core Curriculum and I was asked along with a peer teacher to take on the task of revamping and realigning our Reading Curriculum to match.  Unfortunately with our budget, we were only allowed 20 hours and though we accomplised a lot, we did not even put a dent in the Core.  We spent all 20 hours in a room together discussing, modifying, analyzing, and brainstorming what district assessments we could improve.  Our goal was to focus on the Foundational Skills and come up with assessments for all.  A good chunk of these assessments focused on phonemic awareness skills (23 to be exact)! Our major adoption and change to our curriculum in Kindergarten was with our high frequency words.  Currently we had 30 words students needed to master by the end of the school year.  At the end of our 20 hours we agreed with grades 1 and 2 that we now needed to adopt a new word list (Fry's Word List) and now have a total of 75 words for our students to master from August-May.  This will definitely be a significant change for us and our students, but we are up for the challenge.

~June~

It's June, which means that summer vacation has started!!  I thought that this button would be the most appropriate and fitting to start my blog. Unfortunately, I can't recall any recent days that we have worn flipflops here in Clinton now that school is out because the weather has not been cooperating.  We have been drenched in rain, rain, and more rain the last week. With many more days of summer vacation to come, I know that soon my toes will be soaking in the sun and I will enjoy my flipflops.