Along the Road to Home

It was an idea, born of necessity and began with a couple of words that turned into a challenge. From there it took off to a place where I never realized that it might go. I love words, both the reading of them and the writing of them too.  Words and their meaning are interesting to me and playing with them has always been a pastime and hobby of mine.  As an educator I know that knowledge of vocabulary is a critical ingredient in the recipe for becoming a successful reader.  I have found over the course of more than 4 decades now that children sometimes have huge vocabularies of words to call upon while others, through no fault of their own, are sorely lacking.   It is what it is.   I cannot even recall the exact circumstances in which our classroom decided to challenge ourselves to a contest.  We set upon our fifth grade group the lofty goal of coming up with 1,000 new vocabulary words by the first day of December this year.  It...

Someone named Ellen is praying for me. I found her note in my mailbox at the end of school today and considered it a sign from God above to just keep trying, even during the days when being a teacher is sometimes not so easy.  I read her sweet words and they literally took my breath away.  I was glad no one had seen me open it because tears began to well up in my eyes.  After I read it, I swallowed hard and quickly put it into my purse as I started out the door for home 90 minutes after the last bell rang for the kids. Ellen doesn't know me, well at least not really in person.  I'm going to guess though that she has a pretty good idea of what it takes these days to be a teacher.  I'm going to bet that she knows how much time teachers put into the school day and that for many of us it begins in the darkness of the early morning as we unlock the doors to our classrooms and it ends way after school is out.  Her words of encouragement brightened up my count...

It has been 12 years ago tomorrow now that my mom passed away.  Two weeks after turning 87, she simply gave up and went home to Heaven.  She had lived such a full and marvelous life, one that was certainly worth the living.  I'm sure that not a moment of it was wasted.  My heart holds many memories of life as Lois Scott's daughter, child number 6 of 7. Mom helped me to teach the writing lesson this morning at school, and I'm sure she would be surprised.  The lesson was on bravery and what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like.  I've asked the kids in my 5th grade class to come up  with the name of someone they know who exhibits the character trait of bravery and to write about them in a personal narrative essay.  I'm going to lead by example and write one of my own, and the person I have chosen is my mother. Mom was just about my age when my father passed away at the very young age of 59 from lung cancer.  He did not last long af...

A month of school has already passed by, and this year for some reason the time seems to be escaping at a faster rate than ever.  Perhaps it is because I am nearing the end of my career rather than being at just the very beginning of it now 40 years ago.  Maybe it is due to the fact that there is more than a plenty to teach in 5th grade and just so many hours in the day are available to do it.  Each day my step counter makes it well past the "10,000 steps daily" mark that I aim for.  Many evenings when I take it off, it registers more than 12,000 steps.  In all honesty, I must admit that many of those walks down the long hallways at school wouldn't be necessary if I'd just remember what I walked all the way down to the other end of the hall to get.   It comes with the territory I suppose. I have settled into the 5th grade routine, something that I never once imagined myself saying or doing.  It has been a challenge to be sure.  They are o...

One of my regrets as a teacher is the fact that I wish we had just one more hour in every school day.  60 minutes more, 5 extra hours in a week, a bonus 180 hours each year to teach, learn, and grow together would be awesome.  Some folks might question that way of thinking and I have to admit that on a difficult and challenging day even I might question the sanity of anyone who felt the same way I did. But I do wish we had more time. So we do what we can to pack in a whole lot of learning in math, language arts, science, social studies and more each week.  The thing I have learned to do of necessity is to make sure to the best of my ability that the tested state standards are covered and that kids are prepared to take their state assessment each spring.  Every once in a while, I try to squeeze in something new just like I did yesterday morning with "Sherry Sent Me". I believe in teaching traits of character and I put it into practice every single day of the...