RealeBooks.com

Okay, let’s get this show on the road! Yikes! The list of things to do seems unending: Names of kids up and in records books, The floor looks great, but everything else…Lordy!, Down with the old, up with…what?, Meetings and meetings and meetings, Forms to be completed, Stuffed mailbox, A gazillion phone messages… and that’s day one. …and there will be so much work to do when “they” arrive. Just teaching the kids the routines, new expectations, and changed procedures will take weeks. Make it clear, make it consistent, make it welcoming. But this year, let’s make it special from the get-go.

Inertia is your biggest enemy at the beginning of a school year. How do you get things rolling while riding out the inevitable - kids here day one could be gone the next day, new kids will be showing up every day for awhile, there are new faculty to adjust “with.” And that’s before tackling the latest mandates from on high and new instructional materials. Whew!

With all of that going on, it is easy to lose why we are here and focus on procedures and drudgery, losing what schooling is really all about. The pitfall is that by the time all of these things settle down in a month, 10% of the year has vanished with little to show for it. I humbly suggest that if you want to make a difference this year from day one, start off with a bang, and get kids energy behind your agenda of joyful learning that results from hard work. There are a few absolute essentials that must be in place from day one and never change until day 180. Here are my recommendations:

1. Read aloud to the kids. from literature with wonderful language and illustrations, with exciting content and concepts. Read with emotion, think aloud about connections and questions, let books suggest tangents for in-depth conversations to build your classroom community.

Why? It will drench your classroom in rich language and wonderful words. Hearing you navigate complex sentences will help them to navigate complex sentences. Hearing new words in the context of a wonderful story, between the silences of a poem, or enriching a riveting exposition will help them handle new words using what they know about language and the subject. Catching the magic of your smile, the questions that bubble out of you as you read, your personal connections and commentary as you weave it around the reading will help them understand the integrity of life and the empowering content it presents to learners.

2. Initiate reading of self-selected books. Move quickly to 30 minutes or more a day at a minimum.  First, “fluff up” the classroom library as best you can. Engage them in organizing all the books in ways that make sense to them. Meanwhile, teach them how to select classroom books (or bring in their own or from a library) that light up their eyes and teach them that book reading of their own choice can be better even than recess or lunch.

Why? It will position them to try the strategies you have demonstrated in your read aloud / think alouds. Sitting alone, they can read and reread and reread with impunity, as they self monitor their rough understandings and refine their abilities to handle and then embrace language from authors from long ago or far away. Use this as an fertile time to explore with them new authors, genres, and subjects and to help them find the books that sweep them up and carry them away.  By the time they help you organize the library, they will know something about virtually every book in the room. PLUS, come test time, they will have to read alone, silently in a room with others reading nearby, alone over long periods of time. How better to prepare them for both the process and the content of those tests.

3. Then write for a real audience and publish in the first week of school. Just break out the digital camera and capture their smiling and excited faces on day one. Then make a RealeBook for them or with them. Be sure to get images of them laughing and enjoying the magic of a new year. Present the dazzling possibility of THEM being IN a book…and being authors OF books. Print copies if you can.

Why? Even if you just use that book on a large screen or displayed with a computer projector to share and chat about your room and the potentials of the year, this will provide an opportunity to SHOW them what is possible given new technology. This will introduce what they will be doing the rest of the year as they learn in science, math, history and geography. SHOW them the difference writing for a personally important audience makes. SHOW them how their own agendas can be furthered by the use of the kind of language and vocabulary they have heard in the read alouds and in their free-choice reading. SHOW them your revision strategies as you add interesting language and insert delightful silliness or powerful content. SHOW them how literacy will enable them to share, to extend, to impress, to get what they want. SHOW them how YOU feel making a book for someone you care about and invite them to consider who THEY would want to write for.

NOT that this is a Space Race, but it is not out of the question that by the end of the first week, you will have accomplished more than most of your colleagues will by the end of the first month. Plus this launch into new space will set in motion a year of stellar collaboration around making reading and writing work for them as they discover their universe.