"Today was a difficult day. Tomorrow will be better."

This is a quote from one of our favorite books that we have read this year, Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes.  In this story, Lilly, a kindergarten-age mouse can't wait to show off her new purple plastic purse and all of the goodies she has inside. Throughout the day, Lilly tries to share what she brought, but has a hard time following directions and completing tasks because of her excitement.  Her teacher, Mr. Slinger, gently reminds her several times to think about her choices.  After many redirections, Mr. Slinger has to take the purse away from Lilly to help her concentrate and not distract her classmates.

In our classroom, we also had a difficult day today.  Though many students continued to follow our Harlan Habits of Respect, Responsibility and Kindness, several others needed those gentle reminders and redirections.  Unfortunately, these choices continued throughout the day, with few attempts at making different choices. This included not following directions, not telling the truth, taking things that didn't belong to us, not sharing, using unkind words and actions and not completing the assigned activities.

I spoke with my friends in Room 100 several times today about what we shoud do if someone near you is not making a good choice and here is what the kindergarteners came up with:

"Show them what they should be doing by following directions ourselves."
"Ask them to turn their voices down."
"Use our silent hand gestures to remind friends of their choices."
"Help those in our group who are off task by reminding them of what we should be doing."

After returning to our classroom from the media center, we decided, as a class, that we needed to end on a better note.  We all agreed that we should start the day over, even for the last 45 minutes.  We even put our hands in a circle and cheered "Room 100" all together!  I am happy to say that the end of our day was much better.

Please take a few minutes this weekend to discuss good choices in school.  I truly believe that today was an "off day", and not the usual behavior for our classroom.  As I told my friends when they left, we will start fresh on Monday.  Everyone can have a hard day, but we need to think about what made it hard and how we can make different choice to make the next day better.

Thank you and have a wonderful weekend!

 

Mr. Slinger and Lilly