Little changes… big possibilities! (#solTuesday)

In a post last week, Kathleen Neagle Sokolowski shared a quote from one of her classroom read alouds: “Sometimes a little CHANGE can open your world to BIG possibilities. … Because life can be GREAT when you try something NEW!”

We’re trying something new in our classroom this year.

Because of our experience of total immersion in wisdom, passion, and research at the August TCRWP Reading Institute this summer, my teaching partner and I decided to split our first and second grade classroom into grade level specific academic classes for all subjects. This is a first for us. In the past, we’ve kept reading and writing as whole-group instructional time and only split math classes, but because of the huge amount of trust and faith that we have in the TCRWP family, we made the switch. As it turns out, this switch is fostering some incredible growth of our first and second grade readers and writers.

From my second grade perspective, I see a heightened sense of urgency for this super important work that needs to be done in second grade. The possibilities truly seem endless! There is a heightened sense of awareness surrounding self-views of being a reader and a writer. There is a heightened sense of ownership and responsibility for “the second grade side of things” on “our” side of the divisive sliding door. And, yes, there continues to be a heightened sense of sweet stewardship as second graders set examples and welcome first graders into our classroom community.

We tried something new, we threw in this little change, and life is pretty great right now.