Someone asked me, "How do you do all of this and have a young family?" I am used to hearing people say, "Do you ever sleep?" Yes, I sleep. In fact, I need at least 8 hours of sleep each night. Rest is important for me to function at full speed as well as for my recovering brain. It's a fair question. When I was a beginning teacher, I would arrive at school early in the morning and stay there until past dinner. Then, most nights I was doing work at home before bed. It would've been really difficult for me to be an excellent teacher if I were just now starting with littles at home (not to say that others who are just starting and have littles at home can't be excellent teachers, just that it would've been hard for ME). But due to that hard (and likely unhealthy) work back then, I have a lot of strategies in my teacher tool kit and many resources to pull from. I also spend an hour each day in the summer working on resources that will help me durin
Whoa. What. A. Ride. Right? This has been crazy. Teachers everywhere are scrambling to figure out how to best reach our students. How will we teach the remaining content for this year? How will we grade student work? How will next year look? How will we stay connected to our students? How will we help them handle this unprecedented time calmly? How can we help them to feel safe and remind them that they are loved? All over the country as schools are closing, teachers are working. They are creating, trying new things, and figuring it out. Why? Because that's what teachers do to help kids. Teachers are rock stars. Using Facebook to Connect with Students For over a year now, I've been running a Facebook group called Franklin (my school) Bedtime Stories. Once a week, a staff member goes live and reads a bedtime story to our students. In the summer, I have student readers in addition to our staff readers. Since the school closure on March 13, I've had 25 b