The Joy of Teaching

To say that my first back-to-school night as a teacher was a bit nerve racking would be an understatement! However, through the years, I learned some invaluable lessons that helped me build confidence and set the stage for an outstanding year.

Back-to-school night tips:

• Create a sign-in sheet and a parent volunteer sign-up sheet for specific responsibilities that haven’t been filled. (See sample sign-in form.)
• Create an agenda, print copies, and make them available for parents at the sign-in table. Your professionalism and organizational skills will impress parents. (Provide pens and paper for note taking, too!)
• Compose your introduction to parents and try to memorize it. This will get you through the initial jitters and help you exude confidence, warmth, and conviction.
• Shake the hands of parents as they are entering the room and finding a place to sit.
• Place informational flyers at the sign-in table (or on the desks) so that parents can have something to read while waiting for the program to begin.
• Help parents locate their child’s desk. Here is a cute idea using students’ self-portraits.
• Create a PowerPoint presentation of the vital information and/or a parent packet. Topics to cover include: Common Core Standards information; tips for reading with your child; homework expectations and sample of exemplary homework packet or assignment; report card sample with explanations of how scores are determined; clear and concise parent expectations and responsibilities; list of educational websites, etc.

Other ideas:

• Have students make invitations for Back-to-School Night.
• Have students write a letter to their parents and place it on their desks. (See sample letter form.)
• Take photos of the students working in every curriculum area and throughout the day. Then, create a slideshow or PowerPoint presentation of ”A Day in the Life of a ______ Grader.” This will give parents (especially English language learner parents) a clear idea of what a day looks like for their child.
• Ask parents to complete the “Tell Me About Your Child” form and to write a letter back to their child. (See parent letter form.)
• Videotape students introducing themselves, talking about their goals for the year, what career path they want to follow, etc. Keep each video well under one minute! Then, create a simple movie of the clips. PARENTS LOVE THIS!

Do you have other ideas for a smooth back-to-school night? If so, please share!

Contributing Writer

Alice Evans is a forty-year veteran National Board Certified elementary classroom teacher and a published author. She recently retired from the San Diego Unified School District and has published a children’s chapter book entitled Torrey Pines Summer.

Is handwriting here to stay? With our increased use of technology and day-to-day texting, typing, and tweeting, it’s no surprise that handwriting is suffering and may seem like a “lost art.” However, the scientific and psychological research supporting handwriting provides evidence that handwriting should be an integral part of the curriculum from preschool through high school.

Of the many reasons to keep handwriting instruction in our schools, here are two that I find most interesting:

1. Learning to write by hand is connected to reading acquisition–while typing and even tracing are not.

Research shows that teaching young children to write letters activates part of the brain that becomes crucial to reading. The act of shaping and forming letters develops successful phonological processing in early emergent readers and writers:

 “The emerging consensus is that the motor experience of manually creating letterforms helps children discriminate the essential properties of each letter, which leads to more accurate representations, bolstering both skilled letter recognition and later reading fluency.” For more information see this article: “Neuroimaging correlates of handwriting quality as children learn to read and write.”

Another study, “The influence of writing practice on letter recognition in preschool children,” compared the differences between handwriting and typing for children 3 to 5 years old. The results showed that handwriting training contributed to the visual recognition of letters more effectively than typing training, among the older children in the test group.

2. Handwriting helps the brain process information.

Taking notes by hand has proven to help students better absorb and retain information in comparison to typing on a keyboard. In a white paper from the educational summit, Handwriting in the 21st Century?, Dr. Virginia Berninger of the University of Washington reported that “after studying students in Grades 2, 4, and 6, those who used handwriting wrote more words, wrote words faster, and expressed more ideas than those who used keyboarding.”

In recent studies by two psychologists, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of UCLA, college students who took notes by hand performed better than those who took notes on a laptop:

“In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning.”

How to Keep Handwriting Alive

In her commentary entitled “Educating Students in the Computer Age to Be Multilingual By Hand,” Dr. Virginia Berninger offers this strategy to incorporate handwriting in the busy school day: “One effective, research-supported strategy is to teach handwriting at the beginning of lessons as “warm-up,” just as athletes do warm-up exercises before a game and musicians do warm-up exercises before a concert. The warm-up is then followed by spelling and composing instructional activities. Handwriting instruction does not have to take up valuable time for meeting other Common Core standards.”

If you’re looking to improve your child’s handwriting at home or add handwriting instruction to your lesson plan, Evan-Moor’s Daily Handwriting Practice is a solution. Daily exercises in small doses help to practice and improve handwriting skills.

Handwriting, printing, and keyboarding all have their place in school and in preparing students for college and careers in the 21^st Century. After all, Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs was a talented calligrapher!

Contributing Writer

Theresa Wooler has more than 10 years’ experience in K–6 classrooms as a parent volunteer, has taught high school English, and is currently involved in education through Evan-Moor’s marketing communications team.

Having a place for students’ completed work and notes to go home may be the single most helpful organizational idea for your classroom. Here are some ideas to manage the paper flow:

1. Hanging folder system: Cardboard pockets decorated with a nametag and/or photo can be hung on the wall or a bulletin board. Hanging folders can also be used in a file system for personalized homework activities or to gather student work for portfolios.
2. Labeled shelf cubbies: Cover cereal boxes with contact paper and then stack them to create inexpensive cubbies. Covered cereal boxes (or plastic bins) can also be used to organize classroom library books by topic or to individualize reading materials for a student or center group.
3. Take-home folders:
   • Card-stock pocket folders can be purchased inexpensively at seasonal school supply sales. When students return their folders, place a tiny sticker on the front of the folder. As the year progresses, students collect more stickers!
   • Give each student a large manila file folder to decorate. Open the folder to laminate it, then fold it and staple two sides. Cover the staples with fabric tape. Students can easily insert work and notes to take home throughout the school year.
   • See this blog post for suggestions of what to include in student folders for the first day of school.
4. Pocket folders at students’ desks: Having a pocket folder at each student’s desk helps students stay organized and file work that needs to be finished.
5. Prong-type binders: These binders can be kept in students’ desks to organize topical needs such as words to practice or songs and poems that are collected throughout the school year.

For more organizational tips, bulletin board ideas, and classroom management ideas, see the Evan-Moor book How to Plan Your School Year.

Contributing Writer

Theresa Wooler has more than 10 years’ experience in K–6 classrooms as a parent volunteer, has taught high school English, and is currently involved in education through Evan-Moor’s marketing communications team.

No matter if this is your first year of teaching or your fortieth, the first day/week of school can be overwhelming. Here are some tips that just might help you survive those first challenging days.

Before the first day:

1. Plan the first and most important day minute by minute… and then have more activities or fun Read Alouds in your “back pocket” for any unexpected down time. (I write an abbreviated version of the minute-by-minute schedule on a large index card for quick reference throughout the day.) This should counteract the spinning head/panic that might otherwise occur!
2. Create a temporary rug placement chart or desk chart using any information you have about your new students.
3. Use lined chart paper and write large headlines on each paper, such as When I Arrive At School; Before Recess; Lining Up For Recess; Walking in a Line, etc.  You can co-create the behavior rules/expectations charts throughout the first day of school. The charts can then be posted on the walls for the first weeks.
4. Put up simple bulletin board headliners for each subject area that can stay up all year.  I like to create phrases:  Super Scientists, Future Authors of America, Math Detectives, Got A Problem?
5. Organize and label all the folders
6. Label all the school supplies, book boxes, etc., with student names
7. Put names on the discipline card pockets (or your our own system) for use on the first day
8. Copy all student paperwork for the first week (at least) and stack it up in order of use.
9. Have name tags, books, temporary folded desk/name tags, first day fun packets, etc., organized on top of student desks.  (I use packing tape to mount laminated student desk identifiers on desk top book boxes instead of right on the desks. They will last all year and not peel off!  I use the smaller ones that have room for a small photo of the student along with the student’s name.  I save the large, fold-up name tags for substitutes.)

First Day/Week Tips:

1. Keep your schedule handy on an index card.
2. Focus on the students! Give each student a hug and wear a huge smile. All children deserve to feel welcomed, loved, and appreciated for who they are!
3. If you feel nervous or uptight, take a deep breath, slow down, and act like everything is under control. The power of positive thinking works.
4. I have the students get started right away on a fun packet of activities. Here are some ideas:
   • Evan-Moor’s Draw…Then Write
   • First Day of School activity books
5. While students are quietly working, I go around the room and take photos of each child (to be used for bulletin boards and name tags.) I greet and reassure the parents, take attendance, guide late students to their spots in the room, take a breath, etc.
6. A lot of the first day is sensing when it is time to move on to the next item on the schedule. Be flexible!
7. Before you have the students transition to the next item on the schedule, give explicit instructions and model when you can.
8. Try to do as much as you can of the yearlong daily routines, such as: Calendar, Number of the Day, Problem of the Day, etc.
9. Work together on the behavior rules/expectations charts.
10. Use a soft, calm voice to set the tone of the classroom atmosphere.
11. Use your discipline system from the get-go. Your goal is to make things as real and routine as possible from the beginning.
12. Do a fun art or P.E. activity on the first day. I like to use a big bubble maker as a P.E. activity outside for my second graders. I call off numbers and children try to pop as many bubbles as they can!
13. At the end of the busy day, read aloud a funny book and lavish praise on your new family of students! I hand out inexpensive medals or certificates to every student.  All students deserve to end their first day on a positive, happy note!

My final advice after teaching for more than thirty-five years:

Make it as real and routine as quickly as possible!

For example, it is easy to put off the challenging training involved in the rotations and routines. So, I start the all-important flexible Guided Reading groups on the Monday of the first full week of school. So much anecdotal information can be obtained about each student’s reading needs during the group time. I usually have three or four groups:  one group remains at their seats doing Daily Work such as Evan-Moor daily practice lessons;  one group is at the computers; one group is selecting and reading Independent Reading books; and one is meeting with me for Guided Reading.

Remember: get the routines flowing and the hard work will pay off down the road!

Contributing Writer

Alice Evans is a forty-year veteran National Board Certified elementary classroom teacher and is a published author. She recently retired from the San Diego Unified School District.