Planning

My journal became a place to write down things I wanted to remember or try in my classroom. In various degrees of detail I planned many activities for the school year. In the August 20, 1982, entry I listed some things I wanted to do that year.

One was to contact the county conservation officer about my class adopting an area in the wild to visit and take care of. I did contact the guy and explained that my class was looking for a place they could take care of, clean up and utilize as an outdoor classroom. I thought there were a lot of lessons to be learned and if the kids did something like this they might be better stewards of the land as they grew up.

The guy was actually offended that I asked and said he had people who made their living doing these things and we would be taking work away from them. He said he really didn’t know of any spots where we could clean up trash or build small check dams. I was mystified.

Another idea was to have my mother come and work with my class several times on writing poetry and ultimately submit student writing to the Iowa Poetry contest. She did and we did. I don’t think I had any students who ended up being published in Lyrical Iowa but don’t remember for sure.

Another one was to try to develop a way of assessing student writing to use as a measure of growth. That was not an easy task and I don’t think I ever came up with anything concrete. I know the sheer volume of writing increased and I suspect the quality did too but didn’t come up with a good way to measure it.

I listed getting the Young People’s Column that I wrote about previously going and that did indeed happen as I explained in that piece.

I listed wanting to keep a daily journal to record happenings, ideas and experiences. Nearly an impossible task but I also planned to have a required journal writing time for the students and thought I could do my journaling during that time, too.

I also listed starting class promptly, reading stories regularly to my students, introducing and encouraging letter writing, utilizing oral reading and writing in the content areas, eliminating the use of the SRA kits, building on the student schemata (what they already knew).

I listed inviting people to come to my classroom and tell us stories, allowing five second think time after asking a question and after the student gave their answer, requiring each student to have a folder for new words, meanings, using it in context. Some other things I listed were utilize Readers Digest “Building Word power” for additional vocabulary building, use a word bank, have a word of the day, plug decoding skills into vocabulary, and there were many more.

Looking back at them now is fascinating. Many of them were successful activities that I used and refined for many years after first writing about them. Others just disappeared or were replaced with something else. Another time I will go into more detail on some of these.