The PTA annual Spring Fling is just around the corner. Though the typical student auction artwork is no longer being made in the halls, trust me, it's being done behind the scenes, ie art classrooms. Additionally, with some help from our student council, staff and students celebrated the Fling's 60th anniversary theme, with a very special dress up day today. 
Down in Jennifer Brunello's class students were in the throes of their life cycle unit related to hatched eggs. This year, in addition to the traditional chick eggs, Ms. Brunello has added duck and goose eggs to the mix. I must say the goose eggs looked quite large in comparison to the eggs I'm used to seeing; she tells me when she had one of these larger eggs accidentally included during a previous delivery a few years back, her kids at that time thought they just might be looking at a dinosaur egg. Hmmm...now that would be something to see! Kids are marking the incubation days on their tally chart, so look for those hatchlings sometime next month. 
And we had lots of teacher meetings and trainings this week. Some related to tutoring and use of the CST system to document interventions and progress, one related to STAAR training, and another related to our creative classroom work. Maria Satterwhite, Robin Maca, and I met one day to map out our second annual Fine Arts Open House. Mark your calendars for Thursday, April 25, 6:15-8:00 pm, flyers will follow from our special area folks, and the night will showcase not only our stand alone arts offerings, but also give parents a small taste of what arts integration looks like in the classroom. We'll also round out the event with a showcase of our community arts partners as well.
Even in and around testing, teachers try to keep the learning authentic. Sally Hunter invited me to visit when she hosted a student from UT's Drama for Schools one day this week. Students were working with our UT guest on character analysis around the vocabulary word evolution, specifically how characters evolve given the action at the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Connected to the work they are doing with the novel The Egypt Game, students then worked with a partner to demonstrate a character's emotions at those time markers. Not only engaging, not only motivating, but it gave those students one more tool to make meaning of what they had read.
Leah Read finished her Product and Process Display this week as you can see - one more completed for the year! Mrs. Read always does something cool with her novel studies, giving students "novel jobs", such as Discussion Director, Word Finder, Artful Artist (yep, a bit of painting completed too), and News Reporter. She added the DBI strategy of Hot Seat this year, telling me it went very well as students put the character on the hot seat and asked questions related to motivation, behavior, and more. The activity presented many opportunities for accountable talk, but also many opportunities for perspective taking for these young learners. Keeping the fire burning on all things creative classroom and arts integration is difficult at times. Teachers have much on their plates, we all have much on our plates, but because we see how students benefit, we keep the fire lit. Sometimes a spark, sometimes full on, but thankfully, always lit. Before teachers were able to leave their STAAR training Thursday afternoon, they completed a short exit pass for me related to DBI this semester. Specifically, they answered questions related to their own DBI practice - what strategies they had used most recently, what content area(s) did they use those strategies in, and most importantly, what each person needed in order to move the work forward. Though I haven't disaggregated the results yet, I was pleased with the discussion heard round the tables, as they sat thinking of what they had done related to drama based strategies within the last few weeks. And the power of sharing, when a teacher described a strategy they had used in a class, but just couldn't remember the name of the strategy...and a team member went, "oh, that's called..." We're a long way from being at full implementation mode in every classroom, but we do have fires, tiny though some may be, in each one.
And finally...Alyssa Absher popped into my office wanting to know if I recognized the activity in her room as I made my way down the hallway this morning. When I indicated I was running and gunning with other things on my mind, she went on to share that she "had forgotten the 3 ball toss strategy until someone reminded me about it during our work at yesterday's meeting. So I was inspired to include it in my LA class this morning". I'd say that fire is flaming just a little bit higher today.
