One look in my room and you’d see kids up, moving, dancing, and acting, mainly because children are supposed to get 1 hour of unstructured and 1 hour of structured play a day, and some days, without movement in my own room, they would get only 20 minutes total, and we wonder why we have to remind kids to focus a gazillion times a day! One step in my room and you’d hear loud discussions and students learning from mistakes. Learning isn’t all supposed to be boring and mundane. It’s supposed to be fun, especially in second grade! If we want to create life-long learners, then we need to teach them to enjoy learning, not dislike it. This week we are doing a lot of fun things in my classroom. We will be doing pirate treasure hunts, adding movements to stories, and creating posters to save the apes. Soon in science, we will be doing oobleck! (If you don’t know what oobleck is, go and google it RIGHT NOW!) It’s messy, fun, and a solid and a liquid! As a teacher in a decade where we have entire classes of students who all want to be YouTubers (Spoiler Alert: you ALL can’t be YouTubers), I fight daily with getting students attention in new ways or creating engaging lessons for students to make learning fun. My best advice if you struggle with creativity: Practice! The more you create fun lessons, the easier it gets. It takes time. When I create a fun science, math, insert subject here lesson, the thinking part usually starts in the shower, on my way to work, or while I’m straightening my hair getting ready in the morning, which is pretty much the same for every teacher. Take that little glimpse of an idea and work on it. Work on it for a day or two until you have it planned out and then write it down, so you don’t lose it. Then once it’s written down, bounce the idea off another teacher. I have plenty around me that I bounce off daily. It improves my own teaching, and finally, don’t give up! It won’t be perfect the first time. It won’t even be perfect the second time. It may never be perfect, and that’s okay because sometimes it’s better to be a messy, creative human being,  instead of being a perfect one. I struggle with making it fun when students are still refusing to do work, still refusing to enter my classroom, and still not getting along together, after teaching an entire two months worth of lessons from a curriculum called “Getting Along Together”. Some days are rough when multiple of my students try to tell me “No” a million times a day, although I usually just need to give them that “What did you just say to me?” look and they turn it around. Some days that look doesn’t work though. Some days nothing seems to work-specific praise for behaviors the student does right, praising others who are doing the right thing, rewards, clip flips, behavior plans, talking strictly, talking nicely, talking in private, breaks, loss of privileges, phone calls home…you name it, I’ve tried it on those days. My goal is to remember that even if students are challenging me, I can still make it fun for them, because what is it going to hurt? Making it strict and boring and not fun isn’t going to fix anything. It’s going to make it worse. My hope is the more fun I make it, the more upset they’ll be when students are talking about class at lunch or recess, and they weren’t there to enjoy it with us. My hope is then they choose that they want to be in my room and need to learn to be safe and respectful in order to be there. We will see! What are your goals and hopes in your own teaching?

Lastly, my orders are trickling in! My teepee, lights, lamps, 2 tables, and green balls to sit on have come in! I also have plants, stools getting cushions sewn by my talented mom, another table on the way, and pictures developed ready to go! Once my furniture is in (hopefully tomorrow it will mostly be done), my room will be ready for new paint!! Look for my pictures at #tourmystarbucksroom or #flexible seating.