Planning In Paradise: Teacher support

Monday, June 22, 2015

Teaching: Making a Difference

This is Robin from Class of Kinders. It is summer break for me and I was just at the beach the other day. We can do that here in Paradise, because the warm sunny beach is just a short drive away. It is a great escape from the fast paced life to reflect. Most of my trips to the beach are during the summer…when school is out for summer break. I do a bit of reflecting about the school year…thinking about the things I loved about the year and things I might do differently.

I take a book, listen to music, soak in the water and work on my tan!

(Why is it that tanner skin always seems to help the figure?…lol.)

Sometimes, I go just for the sunset. Equally as beautiful!

One evening when I was there, I happened upon lots of starfish washing up onto the shore.

There were literally what seemed like hundreds of them! It honestly made my heart beat faster and faster, to see them there, knowing if they did not get back into the water….

But there were just so many to rescue.

The Starfish Story immediately popped into my head. The one where the little boy was throwing things back into the water as a man approached him asking what he was doing. He told the man he was throwing the starfish back into the ocean that had washed up onto shore. The man laughed at the boy and basically told him he was wasting his time. He said the boy was just one person and there were so many starfish. The boy listened, but continued his work throwing them into the water. He turned to the man as he threw one starfish into the ocean saying… see, it made a difference for that one.

This is how I feel about teaching. I am the boy. And the man, well, "he" is ALL of

"those things" that get in the way of me teaching my students. Regardless, we should continue our work as teachers, just as the boy did, throwing the starfish back into the ocean

…making a difference in the lives of our students!

I created a copy of this Starfish Story originally written by Loren Eiseley.

You can get this copy free from my TpT store as a tribute to summer, teaching, and the students we work tirelessly for. Give it to a friend to encourage them…hang it in your classroom so you don't forget.

Enjoy your summer.

Recharge your batteries.

And...

Continue making a difference!

Friday, February 27, 2015

Welcome To Paradise!

Every teacher needs a circle of teacher friends. You need a friend who can laugh/cry with you when a child pukes on your brand new, really cute shoes. You need a friend who understands teaching is as much about summers off (yeah right) as it is about marathon bladder control. (Holding it from morning meeting all the way to lunch. Every. Single. Day.)

You need a friend who understands that your house will look like a tornado blew through it the week before school starts (cleaning; aint’ nobody got time for that). A friend who knows the joy of finding the exact right chevron fabric to cover your bulletin boards with or who understands the insanity of heading to Walmart at midnight in a blind panic to purchase a laminator because the school laminator is out of film (again).

Most of all you need friends who will throw open their filing cabinet or open their hard drive and SHARE! Friends who can really talk about best practices, what really works in classrooms, and how to make the wonderful, amazing sounding theories presented at workshops really work in a classroom (instead of turning into a hot mess of classroom management nightmares that leave you staring blankly at the wall eating M&Ms at the end of the day). I don’t mean share a cute Thanksgiving worksheet from the internet that prints a little lopsided and is blurry. I mean a friend who will share the ancient Chinese secrets of teaching, the holy grail of teaching treasures, the BEST stuff, the stuff that really worked, the stuff that made the principal’s pen furiously write about your GENIUS teaching during a walk through, the stuff that made your teaching toes curl, the stuff that will work in your classroom also because they “get” teaching the same way you do.

At Planning in Paradise we have found each other. We are all blessed to work at a wonderful school filled with amazingly talented teachers and top notch administrators. Over the years we have come together, through a shared love of creating resources and talking about how to make classrooms really work. We share ideas, we share frustrations, we laugh a lot, sometimes we cry, but most of all we lean on one another to navigate the twists and turns of teaching as we cling on for dear life to the ever shifting pendulum swings in education.

We started Planning in Paradise because we are excited about the things going on in our K-5 classrooms and the ideas we have for making it all work. We are excited to create and share on our blog, because after all every teacher needs a circle of teacher friends!