Remember to Notice the Good...and Climb the Stairs

Today I happened to have an hour unexpectedly become free in my schedule. For a moment I considered going back to my office to check email or work on lesson plans, but I decided to head to the third floor to the land of fifth and sixth grade. Thank goodness I made that choice.

I saw Writing Workshop in fifth grade in its purest, most beautiful form--the students all hard at work on their fiction pieces while the teachers moved around the room having individual conferences.

I also saw sixth grade readers using Glogster to create "posters" to defend their choices for Impact Awards. They were thinking critically about their books and writing precisely about them.

And across the hall I found a different group of sixth graders creating roller coasters, all of them engaged and all of them able to explain what they were building and what they were learning.

Thank you, Third Floor teachers, for these gifts. They were well with the climb.