Courage Doesn't Always Roar: A Teacher's Quest to Be Better Each Day

Saturday morning: The laundry baskets of clean laundry have piled up and so no more excuses- time to put the laundry away.  My almost 5 year old son Alex and my 2 year old Megan are playing Hide and Go Seek as I start putting away Alex's clothes.  Until he stops me and asks if HE can put away the laundry. "Mommy really wants to just get it done," I say as he grabs the neatly folded shirts, immediately unfolding them and making my blood pressure rise a notch or two. "I want to help.  Where does this one go?" he asks.  I sigh.  There are so many tasks I need to get done and it would be nice to just complete this one so I could tackle the next thing on the list.  I take a deep breath and tell him shirts go in the second drawer. He opens up the drawer and stuffs it in, not very neatly but with a lot of pride.   "What's next?" he asks and I show him where the shorts go.  We continue like this, putting away underwear, bathing suits, pajamas. ...

Missing: Back to School Anxiety Dreams Appearance: These dreams, really nightmares, usually look like boxes all over the place while students wander into the classroom, ignoring everything I say.  I am unprepared and unable to manage the class.   Frequency : Every year, since I started teaching in 2001.  Normally they appear in August but they have been known to also come in July.   If found : Feel free to send them away! They are not really missed at all.  It dawned on me the other day that I haven't had any back to school anxiety dreams yet.  This is WAY late in the season for them to have not made their ugly arrival.  Most of the time, the dreams center around the classroom being a mess and then the students coming while I am not ready.  I can never find the papers I need and I search through boxes while they run around the room.  The only good thing about waking up from these dreams is realizing that didn't really happen and I...

One of my favorite things about being a teacher is the chance you get each year to start again.  We are blessed with two New Years celebrations! With school starting in a few weeks, this fresh start brings all the hopes and resolutions we usually reserve for January when we usher in a new calendar year.   I loved reading about other teachers' One Little Words (OLW) that would help them focus on their priorities and dreams for themselves and their students. I decided to make a OLW for the new school year and it was a hard decision because there were so many words that were important.  Some words I considered were Connections, Believe, Bridges, Community, and Expectations. All important, excellent words.  But in the end, I chose Relationships as my OLW for 2015-2016. Last year was a year of many changes for me.  After 10 years of being a kindergarten teacher, I switched to third grade.  There was so much to learn and I think at times, I...

"It's been so long since I've seen the ocean....guess I should." -"A Long December" (The Counting Crows) Last week, feeling a little tired from my self-selected professional development activities, I dreamed of the beach.  The lyrics from "A Long December" by the Counting Crows kept playing in my mind: "It's been so long since I've seen the ocean...guess I should."  It's truly a sin that I haven't seen the ocean since last August. Until today.  I live on LONG ISLAND. In the same town as Jones Beach. The ocean is a 10 minute drive from my house.  And I haven't been there.   Today, as I carried two heavy bags full of back-up bathing suits, suntan lotion, change of clothes, Goldfish, juice boxes, towels, pails and shovels, and my tantruming two year old, for a minute I dreamed of sitting in my professional development workshop, in the cool air conditioning, pen in hand, taking notes in my lovely noteb...

As I contemplated setting my alarm for 4 am to be able to write my Slice (I didn't- writing this at 5:20 am instead), I am thinking about what I've been doing so far on my "summer vacation": I co-facilitated the Long Island Writing Project Summer Institute for 8 days (9am-4pm) Reading Jen Serravallo's Reading Strategies as part of a Voxer book club. Read A Handful of Stars as part of a writing about reading book club and participated in the Twitter chat. Rereading Fish in a Tree as a small group thinking about writing about reading for an upcoming Twitter chat. Read Digital Reading: What's Essential in Grades 3-8 as part of #cyberPD and Twitter chat tonight. Trying to read a #bookaday to keep up with the blog I created for reading,  http://sokolowskibookbonanza.blogspot.com/ Writing my first post for our Two Writing Teachers blog series and thinking of ideas for the rest of the August posts I will need to write. Participating in a 4 day worksho...

Every summer, I dream about my new class. I wonder what the students will be like and how I can design the classroom to create quality learning experiences. I read professional books to learn more about my craft, children's books so I can recommend them to my students, and I buy new bins to house all these books. I dream of ways to help each child become a reader for life- a person who chooses to read many different things for many different purposes. I've heard of Donors Choose and this summer, as I dream of all the possibilities for my third grade students, I decided to give it a try.  My project is to add classroom magazines to our library so students can read from different genres and across content areas in real-world, engaging ways.  I've been a magazine reader since I was a young child and still love when one of my favorites gets delivered to my house! Due to financial issues, not every student is able to get magazines delivered to his home.  At school, we c...

It has been so enlightening to read the book Digital Reading: What Really Matters Grades 3-8 as part of the #cyberPD community. Reading a book on your own but then using digital tools to connect your thinking to a broader community really epitomizes what the book is suggesting for educators! The ideas shared in this community have really inspired me and showed me new tools that I plan to use next year. For example: Reading Cathy Mere's post about having a hub for the important sites your class visits made me inspired to create a new class site through Weebly. I currently have a teacher page on my school's webpage but I would love to update to a Weebly with more possibilities! I need to do a better job of organizing all our online places and make it easy for parents to access all the tools we are offering. Megan Skogstad's reflection on Chapters 6 and 7 introduced me to the digital newsletter site, Smore. This looks like an incredible way to keep parents and others in the ...

Last week, I described the experience of listening to Dr. Linda Opyr read her poems and talk about the life of a teacher turned writer. This was part of a workshop through the Long Island Writing Project Summer Institute, which I was co-facilitating. We were also joined by the Long Island Writing Project Creative Writing Retreat for Teens. One of Dr. Opyr's poems was entitled, "You Must Tell Them This" which provided inspiration for my poem. I shared this piece with the teachers of the LIWP Summer Institute on our last day together it was my submission it into the publication we created. You Must Tell Them This (Inspired by Linda Opyr ) By Kathleen Sokolowski You must tell them this: Teaching chose me. It's broken, expanded, and filled my heart, and I've learned more than I taught. You must tell them why I became a teacher- to be the lantern lighting the way to literacy and learning to show students that your choices matter- yo...

I am participating in an online book discussion of Digital Reading: What's Essential in Grades 3-8 by Franki Sibberson and William Bass. Join us at # CyberPD! Reflections on Chapters 3-5 Authentic. Intentional. Connected.  To me, these chapters are about using technology in real ways, for specific reasons, and to form deeper communities around literacy. What struck me is how students who are in these authentic, intentional, and connected classrooms easily move between the digital and print worlds.  Here are some ways I envision my third graders using digital tools in authentic, intentional, and connected ways: *Participating in the Global Read Aloud Project.  Reading Fish in a Tree and taking notes in a notebook, composing a blog post about a reaction to the book, skyping or Google Hangout with another third grade, collaborating on a Google Doc about the book with each other or other classes, tweeting our questions or comments to Lynda Mullaly Hunt, collab...

Last Thursday, I had the chance to hear a poet and teacher, Dr. Linda Opyr, speak.  Teens who were participating in the Creative Writing Retreat, facilitated by Long Island Writing Project teachers, and the teachers I've been working with in the LIWP Summer Institute had the opportunity to listen to Dr. Opyr read her poems and talk to us about being a writer.  Her collection of poetry is called If We Are What We Remember and it is beautiful.  Hearing her read her poems was mesmerizing- she read with such heart and expression and voice.  Dr. Opyr spoke with such passion: my pen could not go fast enough to keep up with her wise gems. "When you write, you have the opportunity to change people's lives," she said.  Your writing can send someone more deeply into their own life.  She said through writing, "what was lost was found again."   She described writer's block through the metaphor of a field.  Whether something is blooming under the surfac...