Hey all, today we have Kelly, a Kindergarten Teacher, who has a fabulous blog, enjoys being active and traveling. She's pretty rad.
If you would like to participate in a day in the life series email me at pinkflipflops44 at gmail dot com!
Hi I'm Kelly from
She Wears a Red Sox Cap. It was hard to pick a "typical" day, so I ended up leaving it to the last minute and Tuesday picked itself. It's a busy day, but relatively typical although it's the only day I tutor before work. On other days, I usually get to work by 7 to get work done. Luckily, I don't tutor until 4 on Mondays so that's when I get a lot done that I would normally do on Tuesday mornings. I think that's all you need to know- here goes a day in the life of me.
5:30am- I wake up thinking it's the middle of the night and head to the bathroom- I catch a glimpse of Eric's clock and realize it's 5:30. Noooooo! My alarm will go off at 5:45. Lie back in bed for a few minutes and finally just get up at 5:37. Shut off my alarm and jump in the shower.
6:00- Come downstairs and make myself breakfast.
6:10- Eat breakfast while I read blogs, check e-mail, do some research on restaurants in the theater district since we will be there on Friday night.
6:25- Say hi to Eric who is now downstairs about to eat breakfast, then head out of the house trying not to forget my lunch or anything else I need. Now I drive to tutoring, the whole way there no matter what radio station I switch to, they are discussion how cold it is out. Yes it is, is talking about it really helping?
6:40- I make it to tutoring where I am going to work with a 3rd grader. This is my second year working with him and he's a good kid. I've had to get pretty creative to keep him entertained lately, but it's usually worth it. Today we are going to do an activity with prefixes and suffixes, play a game called Stealing Bundles which I turned into a reading game, read the book "The Magic Finger" by Roald Dahl (well, a few pages of it...), write some spelling words and sentences and finish up with a game of reading Uno.
7:40- Leave tutoring and start to drive to work. I hate driving at the time when normal people drive- it's so much less relaxing than the early morning commute.
8:00- I make it into work. I always feel late on Tuesdays despite the fact that I'm still 45 minutes ahead of the kids. I immediately check my work e-mail. Triple score- no annoying e-mails from parents!
8:05- I post the schedule for the day and start planning my reading groups. I decide to move one of my groups up a level so I run upstairs to grab a new book for that group.
8:20- One of my work friends comes in and we discuss annoying e-mails from parents and how we hate them.
8:30- Write an e-mail to the school psychologist intern. I am helping her with something she has to do for grad school and I need to give her a heads up on what I'm going to "ask for help" with during our meeting tomorrow morning. She has to record herself helping me with a problem. God, I don't miss grad school.
8:43- Do an internet search for ways to improve reading fluency and end up on Pinterest- end up finding lots of good stuff and print it quickly before the kids arrive.
8:45- The bell rings and the kids start to pile in. I hear crying coming from down the hall and I immediately recognize it as one of my students. A few seconds later she shows up at the door of the classroom and I go over to see what is going on. Her sister tells me that she is upset because she was not allowed to wear her sunglasses to school. Despite my absolute lack of patience for crying, I absolutely love this girl. Of course I still tell her this is not something to cry about and make her start her morning jobs, but in my mind I kinda wanna see these sunglasses...
9:05- The kids gather on the rug for Morning Meeting. This is when we read the schedule and the morning message (I write it and then kids fill in some missing letters). After that we will have handwriting, writing workshop, snack and reading workshop.
11:10- It's recess time- my aide takes the kids out in the morning and I take them out in the afternoon. While they are outside, I do some cutting and set up for math and then I check my work e-mail. Ah, I knew I couldn't make it through the day without an irritating e-mail- this time from a mom who wants me to move her child's reading level up. Sigh.
11:30- The kids return and we start math. We are working on number combinations and the kids are writing addition problems to go with numbers 5 and 6.
12:20- It's time for lunch. My students eat in the classroom so I head to the teacher's room for a few minutes of quiet. I talk to the other teachers about annoying parent e-mails and annoying people in general. We do stop talking about school for a few minutes to discuss a sprint triathlon we are going to do together in May.
12:50 Back to the classroom and time for science. We have been studying sea creatures and writing about them during writing time. In science today, the kids do venn diagrams comparing the animals they are "studying." They do an awesome job and one of my kids who is repeating K and *really* struggled with writing last year declares that he wants to do all the writing for his group today- yay!
1:30- Time for recess again! This time I go out- I try to take some pictures of my kids at recess to show you guys but I suffer from paranoia that someone will recognize the playground so I end up not including them in this post- sorry, like I said I'm a little paranoid!
1:45- It's time for "choice time" which basically means time to play, for the kids. For me, it's time to start "assessing" (aka testing). Testing is huge in education right now and sadly kindergarten is not exempt from it, though I think the kids think they are. Today I am looking at math skills, particularly their ability to "change numbers" like if they are have 2 pennies and want to get 5, how many do they have to add? Yes, this is algebra on a kindergarten level. I also take a break from the math to read with my student who's mom e-mailed me earlier, I need to record an exact percentage of words correct vs. incorrect to report her reading level, yipee.
2:15- The kids head to PE and I go back to getting work done. I spend the entire half hour writing an e-mail back to the previously mentioned mom about her child's reading level. She is right that her daughter can technically read about 1 level above where I have her, but she is not able to answer the comprehension questions and she doesn't read fluently at all. Normally I wouldn't really care about this in kindergarten, but she is reading well enough that we need to start talking about how to not read like a robot :) The e-mail gets really long as I explain exactly what questions I need her to be able to answer, what fluency is in reading etc.
2:45- Pick up the kids from PE and get ready for dismissal.
3:00- The kids leave, one of the parents is late picking up so I chat with the student until his dad comes.
3:15- Grab all my stuff and jet out of school to be at my second tutoring kid of the day at 3:30. This student is in 2nd grade and I started working with him last June. He is pretty easy to entertain but if he's not entertained it's nearly impossible to get him to do anything. Sadly I have to do some homework with him and this is usually when it's a battle. Luckily today his homework is to write his spelling words twice. In order to get him to do this we do a race- I have to write the word five times and he has to write it twice- whoever does it first wins. Of course I lose and I don't even have to try- it takes me forever to write these days, I bet I could type faster than him though. Post-homework we play a reading bingo game with 2 syllable words, and read a book. At the end I chat with his mom about the results of his most recent testing at school.
4:30- Drive home and say hi to Eric who is working out in the basement. Then I go right upstairs and eat an early small dinner since I'm going to spinning at 6. I eat a small tuna sandwich made with just tuna and greek yogurt. While I eat I read some of The Hunger Games. I am loving this book but I really need more time to read it!
5:30- My friend comes to pick me up to the gym. We discuss how much we'd rather be drinking beer than going to spin. We also discuss how if our favorite instructor is not teaching we may turn around and go home.
5:50- Our favorite instructor is not teaching and we briefly contemplate going to a bar instead of class...but we don't. Sadly.
6:00- Class starts and I seriously regret my decision to go to spin instead of the bar- the instructor's microphone isn't working and she is YELLING. This is not helping my headache.
6:08- A new song starts playing- apple bottom jeans, boots with the fur... I have a sudden flashback to dancing at bars in college and this cheers me up for a few minutes, which upon later investigation is completely wrong since the song did not come out until 2007... oh well
6:15- I continue to regret my decision, wine would really make time go faster right now
6:30- My instructor stops yelling and I start to kind of like her, plus I feel like since the class is more than half over I can definitely do it
6:50- The class ends and I decide I'm glad I went to the gym
7:00- We drive home and decide we are going to hate work/annoying parent e-mails less in the morning
7:10- I get home and I remember it's one of my friends from work's 30th birthday tomorrow. I drag Eric to the liquor store down the street. We are the only people there on a Tuesday night. Awesome. I buy her a bottle of wine and myself one too, but I'm going to save it for a weekend, I swear.
Yes, I am 5 seconds away from dressing him in ridiculous clothes...
7:30- I sit down on the couch and start to write this post. Man, my days are not that interesting... maybe I should've picked a day where I did more fun stuff...
8:00- I switch between reading Hunger Games, writing this post, reading blogs, checking facebook and generally wasting time until I start to get ready for bed at 9:20. I briefly consider doing a survey for work at 8:50 but I decide that will drive me to opening that bottle of wine I bought earlier!
9:40- Hunger Games and bed
Not the most fascinating day, but a usual Tuesday for me! :)
Thanks Kelly!!! ;) I find it fascinating. ;)
How long are your work days?
I've read this before but felt inspired to read it again.