Love Notes

This morning I got to school early to put the finishing touches on my presentation for staff development. I'm on the committee that teaches our co-workers ideas and skills that we've determined are needed to improve our instruction. We usually have these presentations on the morning that we've designated as an early arrival day, so that we'll have enough time to really give some attention to a particular issue.

Today, it was my job, for which I'd volunteered, to show how teachers can use one assignment to teach and assess more than one content standard. I'm the writing teacher, but I have a passion for science, too. Many teachers (not just in my building) feel so much pressure with all the math and language arts standards that are mandatory and tested that science is often overlooked or put aside. So, I had prepared my whole "show" to illustrate how we, in our grade level, have worked hard to incorporate the science standards into our language arts curriculum.

We worked at it for thirty minutes, and everyone was very enthused to go back to their classsrooms and utilize some of the techniques and methods we'd shared. Some gave us encouraging feedback with other ways we'd shown them to "scaffold" our instruction to help students better write complete paragraphs with evidence from the text. Etc. Etc.

I left the staff development feeling confident that what I'd been doing in my grade level for the last month or so had been effective and that our students were improving their writing, and learning science, too.

It was Valentine's Day, of course, and so everyone was just hyped up to the max. We'd planned our day to accomodate this, so we were prepared. The last hour of the day was the Party!! Everyone was excitedly reading their cards, and enjoying treats and snacks. So I opened the note that one of my dear students had wrapped around a yummy cake treat for me. Here's the note:

Dear Mrs. [EarthSignMama],
       Even though you don't teach much writing, I've learned a lot about many different things I couldn't learn in math or reading. I've learned a lot! Have a Happy Valentines Day with Mr. [CoolGuy].

Love.....

After I finished laughing, I hurried to share it with my team members. We'd been really congratulating ourselves on our presentation earlier that day, but I guess I'm going to go back to the writing curriculum, undiluted by fun stuff. Or maybe she's been learning writing all along, but just didn't notice. She did spell everything correctly, and she did use correct letter format. Hmmm...maybe it's okay that we have a good time learning a lot of different things---plus writing

Here's a photo of some of the "love" I received from the rest of my students. One girl brought me a little pot of tulips, but I left them at school to enjoy in our classroom. They know what I like: chocolate.