Save Your Sanity with Read Alouds

*Note: This post was written in September of 2020. If it seems dramatic, well, teaching during the pandemic was not for the faint of heart.

Keeping it simple is absolutely key.

Remote, concurrent, hybrid, brick-and-mortar: no matter the title, being a teacher is rough right now.

I’m not gonna lie. These past couple of weeks have done me in. 

There have been tears. 

There was gastrointestinal distress. 

There was lots of vodka consumption in many different forms. 

And to make matters worse, the windows in my car decided to stop working while I was pulling through the Taco Bell drive-through. {Have you ever ordered a Cheesy Gordita Crunch and a bean burrito while hanging your entire body out of your car door? I have.}

 Roll more tears and, you guessed it, more tummy troubles.

But about halfway through this week I stopped deciding to be unhappy and to start figuring it out. Instead of resisting the change, I decided to start learning alongside my students. I focused on what brought me joy (reading aloud) and refused to stress about the rest.

 Here are some of my takeaways after two weeks as a “concurrent” teacher:

-Plan for everything to take twice as long. 

-You have to click “end breakout sessions” for a breakout session to close. (I left two students stranded for 1.5 hours. Oops.)

-Don’t try to do anything even slightly complicated. 

-Kate Hudson makes a beautiful and delicious bottle of vodka and you can order in bulk.

-Read alouds will get us through. 

Every morning I’m starting the day with a picture book or two. Sometimes three.  

Every afternoon I’m reading from a beloved chapter book.  

This is my new curriculum. My science, social studies, and mentor writing texts all rolled into one neat package that I can actually implement without clicking a million tabs or staring into a screen. 

We’re asking questions, inferring, predicting, making connections, analyzing illustrations and text features, and best of all in this new, weird, concurrent space–we’re building a unified community of readers through common text. 

Finally something that doesn’t make my stomach hurt. 

Are there any books you’ve been leaning on these past few weeks? I’d love to swap titles ♥

yours in reading,
rawley