Miss Sims’ Ramblings

I finally have the book blog for my classroom up and a couple posts written.  I plan on kicking it off this week in my classroom with my fifth graders.  I hope they are excited about it, but if they aren’t right away, hopefully they will get excited over the course of the school year.  If you are interested in reading any of the contributions my students make, check back between now and October, when the first post is due.  And, you are welcome to post comments and interact with our class!

I made an outline for my spelling program using bubbl.us which is a cool program I found on another Edublog user’s site. Here is the plan for my spelling program which doubles as an example of a bubbl.us web. Pretty cool!

I just got back from vacation in the Cayman Islands.  It was a wonderful, relaxing time.  However, now that I am back from vacation it is time to really buckle down and get ready for the school year.

Here is my list of things to do in the next 4 weeks:

1. Create an individualized spelling program.
2. Plan major assessments, including a scoring rubric, for the first semester of science.
3. Choose what novels our class is going to read.  Read them.  Create a skeleton outline for a unit on these novels.
4. Work on setting up a classroom blog to interact with other people around the world.

It seems like a short list, but I know it will certainly fill up the rest of my time before school begins again.  If anyone who reads this has any suggestions or ideas, please leave me a comment.  This first year teacher will happily take any help you have to offer!

I sent this e-mail to Bill O’Reilly in response to some comments I heard on his radio talk show. Enjoy!

Dear Bill,
I tuned into your radio show yesterday and caught the discussion on public education. You made the comment that public schools are failing and that parents should send their children to private schools. I took offense to this because I am a product of public schools, and a recent product. I graduated from a public high school in 2003 and graduated from a state university last year. I do not believe that I am less educated or less capable than those educated in a private school. The public schools that are “failing”, according to No Child Left Behind anyways, are generally in urban settings where parents could not afford to send their children to a private school, even if they wanted to. I also heard a call in from a lady saying that those people who enter into the education field are, generally, liberal minded and that the students in the public schools are receiving a one-sided education. I am a moderate conservative and I am a proud public school teacher. I do not present a one-sided curriculum. In my classroom, we examine issues from every side and the students form their own opinions based on the facts. If a parent has a strong opinion about an issue, it is their responsibility to teach their children from that perspective, not mine. You also mentioned that students in the public schools are allowed to run wild and that good behavior is not expected of them. It is true that public schools are more limited in the forms of discipline we use, however, my students do NOT run wild. They are expected to be respectful and responsible and in control of themselves at all times. Before you make generalizations about public schools and make recommendations that parents not enroll their children, perhaps you should visit some successful public schools because, believe it or not, they do exist and a good public education exists as well.
Thank you for your time.