Effort and Ease

At 10:15 each Sunday morning, I walk into a wonderfully peaceful yoga studio with a kind and inspirational instructor, Natasha, for an hour and fifteen minutes of re-centering, inner peace, and quiet thought. Natasha engages in this interesting stream-of-consciousness type thought, an offering for feeding her students' minds and bodies. What she says sticks with me many days, but today particularly, one small phrase stuck...and for the rest of the practice, I let my own thoughts draw parallels between my yoga practice, my teaching practice, and our second grade students' learning. 

In regards to the pose we were doing at the moment, the words Natasha used were:

We're searching for effort and ease.

Effort and ease.

I said them over and over to myself, a mantra. What I then began to think about was this:

Since my first day with our second graders, in the classroom, I have been searching for effort and ease there. I have been hoping for effort and ease on the part of my students, for myself, and for our class to collectively feel. I just wasn't able to so eloquently state it.

As a new teacher, I am searching for this balance of effort and ease in my teaching practice. I am putting forth immense effort--effort in planning each lesson for each day, wrapping my head around the essential questions and enduring understandings for each unit for each content area, studying the curriculum, growing by reading professional publications, providing thoughtful written feedback to students, setting professional goals, contributing on a professional level with my colleagues, collaborating with parents--the list goes on. In the midst of all this, though, I began to recognize that I am feeling at ease in many ways, too--ease in feeling comfortable in my own skin as a teacher, feeling at ease in the fact that though I'm putting forth my best effort every single day, teaching is imperfect (and that's actually, contrary to my inner perfectionist, okay!!). I'm recognizing ease in the fact that I know my students quite well already and I will continue to get to know them better as learners and thinkers and individuals, ease in the fact that our parent and family community in 2B is wonderful in so many ways, ease in the fact that I insist on kindness, on a culture of learning, on a community of trust.

Effort in conferring on writing personal narratives, ease in knowing I'm meeting student needs in this moment

Effort in planning SMART Board lessons, ease in engaging students (sparking as well as witnessing many smiles while learning)

Somewhere in between the spine series and balance series in this Sunday morning class, my focus shifted away from what this phrase meant for me as a teacher to ponder what it might mean for our students. For our second graders, I thought about the ways effort manifests itself in our students' written response to reading and in Writer's Workshop, verbal responses in classroom discussions, justification of thinking in math, creative thinking, interpersonal problem solving, practicing self-control, responsibility, respect in Morning Meeting and throughout our day. I thought about my hopes that these efforts are in fact made possible by the ease our students feel--ease in the fact that they exist in a safe, respectful classroom that accepts them fully as an individual and values them uniquely, ease in feeling comfortable to take risks (whether it be raising a hand or sharing news from their personal life or asking for help when they feel like they need it), ease in the fact that they are learning and growing in a room where we make learning fun yet push each other to try new things and think in new ways and gain new understanding every single day.

Effort in creative writing, ease in quiet independence

Effort in collaborative group work, ease in the freedom to be themselves

At about this time, my brain was quietly humming with these very active thoughts, but Natasha's far away voice told us it was time for shavasana, or final relaxation. This was my cue to quiet my mind and just be still. The thing was, though, that it was one of those days where I couldn't quiet my brain, not at all. Because this new mantra--the search for a striking a balance between effort and ease--as it applies to our life in Room 2B was buzzing in my brain, and I was thrilled that I had a new way to frame my goals for myself and our students. I couldn't wait to write about it.

Meticulous Measurers

2B has been buzzing each day at 1:00. Sometimes, learning is loud...it's loud in a fluttering-with-activity kind of way. It's loud with a sense of urgent movements as students parade around fitted with rulers, metersticks, and yardsticks. It's loud with a "oh!! Let's see how many meters long the SMART Board is!" kind of way. So, while personally I am a proponent of calm and quiet focus, I can still appreciate the messy, somewhat raucous-but meaningful-thinking, talking, and doing that has gone down in 2B over the past two weeks.

On Friday, students were addressed in the Morning Message as "Meticulous Measurers." They read on to learn that the word "meticulous" means "careful." We have measured objects in our room--and a few at home--in inches, feet, yards, meters, and centimeters. Students are learning the business of careful measuring. They are learning to slow themselves down and appreciate the precision required in actually measuring as well as the reasonableness that a good estimate should have. Students are showing evidence of visualizing units of measurement in their head.

I know this because I ask them to estimate before they measure anything and then, they can bet that I'll ask "why does that estimate make sense?" or "how do you know that's a good estimate?" I gently nod and offer a smile as I watch the wheels turning in their head, putting together an explanation of the fact that they visualized "what a ruler looks like" to help them make a thoughtful guess. These kinds of justifications of mathematical thinking are challenging for our second graders to work through and verbalize, but they are making gains in doing so.

Enjoy some pictures of our busy classroom during math!

 Fitted with a meter-long link belt and a ninja meter stick

 Visualizing and solidifying understanding of how long a meter really is using links

Discovery: 1 meter is 30 links long

Post-measuring bonanza

(They had just captured me and added to their list "Ms. Baier: About 2 meters tall")

SMART Board Unveiled

In September, we welcomed our long awaited, much anticipated SMART Board! Leading up to its appearance, the students regularly posted sticky notes on our parking lot that said "when is the SMART Board coming?" and "how do we use a SMART Board?" and "what is a SMART Board?" Our parking lot is a place where students can post questions that are floating in their brain and that can't be answered right at that moment. At some point later on that day or week, I always get around to discussing parking lot questions. Anyway, one afternoon, two burly men appeared in our classroom after school hours and installed our SMART Board. I was so excited they were there; I even took pictures of the installation process to show the students. Yay!!!

So, what is a SMART Board anyway? It is an interactive white board with a touch screen. It has a sturdy steel back and is connected to one of our classroom computers. I have all of the SMART Board software downloaded to my school and personal computers to work with from home and plan lessons. It is a highly engaging learning tool that we can write on (in all different ways...with our fingers, with the special pens, using calligraphic ink, using magic disappearing ink...the list goes on and on). Many interactive lesson plans are already uploaded to an incredible, safe site called SMART Exchange and are aligned with Common Core State Standards. I can create our own SMART Board lessons, which I do from time to time, but the resources we have available to us that are already made and ready to rock are amazing. Two students can interact with the board at a time. I usually pull popsicle sticks for students to come to the board. So far, we have used it for all subject areas and will continue to do so throughout the year.

This technology was new to our second grade youngsters, but I wasn't at all surprised that within 10 minutes of using it, our students were itching to explore with it...no cold feet in our room! Our students and their generation have been coined "digital natives" and rightfully so; our second graders are savvy with this unique tool and though we have just dipped our toes in the huge ocean of SMART technology, our students are acclimated and comfortable with it. 

What have we done on the SMART Board so far? 

-Interactively graphed how many teeth we have lost in 2B and interpreted our data

-Shared-writing journaling about fall: different students come up and add a sentence to a whole-class journal entry using our 5 senses (to be continued this week)

-Watched kid-friendly videos to help the even/odd digits stick in our brains

-Learned about Viking clothing, occupations, homes, and locations

-Written story problems using a gumball machine with digital manipulative gumballs

-Worked with money by filling up digital coin purses and writing corresponding number sentences

-Watched Ms. Baier model the art of journaling about fall topics

...and much more to come this week (and the next, and the next!)

Here is a photo sampling. I took some screen shots of our SMART Notebook files to give you a taste of what our work together has looked like. It doesn't exactly do it justice, as the uber cool interactive piece is missing, but at least you get an idea of what this is all about!

I began our lesson about creating and interpreting bar graphs by setting the purpose with this silly slide!

We dragged our pictures to the appropriate bars on the graph to create and interpret a class graph about teeth lost in 2B!

I wrote this entry in front of the students to model the process of journaling and living a writerly life.

Stay tuned for more SMART updates!