Here's the Situation

The upcoming school year is really a turning point for my school district when it comes to kindergarten.  We will be moving from a half day setting to a whole day and I.CAN'T.WAIT!!!  To be perfectly honest, I was scared to death about implementing (or attempting to implement) the common core standards in a half day setting.  Earlier this year, we broke our our schedule down to determine how much instructional time we actually had in a half day kindergarten and by the time we took out "specials", recess, transitions, etc., we were left with 100 minutes of instruction.  100 minutes to provide exceptional instruction for all those new language arts common core standards?!?!?!?  Couldn't happen - we may have been able to "cover" the standards, but there's no way we would have been able to provide the kindergarten experience that we strive for. Luckily, our school board finally agreed with us!  OK, off my common core / half day kindergarten soapbox.  Anyway... we are anticipating having five sections of kindergarten and right now, each section has about 26 students in it.  We will most definately be getting a few more kids when our enrollment re-opens again in August, so we are trying to plan for closer to 30 (with no paraprofessionals).  In fantasy-land, we would add an additional section of kindergarten before school starts but I'm not holding my breath. I would love to hear about what class sizes look like in other districts. Also, if you've seen significant class size gains over the past few years, how has your classroom management style changed to accomodate that?

Getting Started...

Like all good kindergarten teachers, I save my best ideas for summer vacation!  I've been kicking around the idea of starting a blog for awhile now, primarily because I love reading about what other teachers are doing in their classrooms.  The blogging world has truly changed the way I teach my students and I decided that I wanted a more "involved" role in this whole blogging business.  So, I sat down with my brilliant colleague (aka my twelve year old daughter) and starting trying to think up a catchy name.  As you can see - we are not always the most creative folks out there :)  I really thought that would be the most tricky part of this process - unbeknownst to me, creating a blog using the "simple" blogger format is really not so simple. So, please bear with me as I work out the kinks in my current blog design!