Sorry it's been so long.

  So it has been awhile since I have posted and the reasons are many. I was recently reminded about the amount of excitement and anticipation I started the year off with. Since then the year has been what I affectionately call a roller coaster. I have been reading a lot of blogs and talking to a lot of teachers who seem to be having the same experiences. Here is what I know right now: being a teacher is harder now than at any point in my last ten years of teaching. 
  
   My goal for myself is to focus on those moments during the day (when the door is closed, no one is watching or evaluating, no one is coming in to tell you another thing you have to do) when you have that group of students and are doing a lesson, they are engaged, they are learning, smiling, and I am reminded of why I worked hard to go back to school to become a teacher. I love teaching! I love my students! I love myself when I get to have those moments and remember that I am good at what I do. I just have to work harder now to make those moments happen and that is my goal. I don't want the changes, standards, evaluations, assessments, and challenging situations, to win. I want to win for myself and my students!

   So now onto how much I love second grade!!! No seriously it wasn't until I watched a little line of kindergarten students recently, by the way I love kindergarten and taught it for 7 years, that I realized how much I love my second graders. They have a higher independence, more skills, a different sense of humor, and all these things are reasons why I love them. I am still trying to learn the second grade curriculum which is vast. In my school we do Lucy Calkins writing, Handwriting without tears, Words Their Way, Daily 5/Cafe, Math Daily 3 (utilizing lessons from Engage NY, Georgia Units, Illustrative math, Howard County), and then of course Guided reading, science and social studies. That is a lot to learn for both the teacher and the student! I keep reminding myself that it's my first year in this grade level so I can't know everything or do everything perfectly, but I am doing my best. 
   
   I put up a classroom timeline in my room, but so far I haven't taken any pictures to put up on it. This is one of my many "fails" from the first two months of school. Which also means I have no pictures to post here of what we have been doing. Once things settle down I will working on getting some pictures of all the great things we are doing. 

   For now I leave you with this:

~Erica