A Lesson From My Sick Day SOL Day 20

It happened suddenly and all at once Sunday evening.  The excitement and busy of the week prior caught up with me and hit me like a ton of bricks. By Monday morning, I was down and out. I emailed the teachers and coaches on my scheduled and pulled the covers back up, and that was that.

Staying home meant a day of rest and recuperation for me personally, but professionally, it meant missed meetings, classes, and deadlines!

One deadline was setting up a first grade class of iPads for an upcoming blogging lesson. Typically, before I go into a classroom for a blogging lesson, I go in and log in all the iPads into the blogging website. Doing this enables the kids to sign in one easy step.

Today, I knew the one easy step method was not going to be. Today I knew we would be leading 25 first graders through the seven steps to sign in!

I walked in the door and made it over the teacher smiling my biggest and friendliest smile. She greeted me friendly and asked if I was feeling better. I assured her I was and I was excited to work with her class. This was easy, first grade and writing are my favorites!

I explained the lack of preparedness and my step by step plan to guide her students thoughtfully through the steps needed to get signed into KidBlog. The teacher smiled and said, "It's a good thing you know first grade."
Smiling and anxious, I and gathered the class on the carpet.  I looked into their eager faces and asked them to remember a time they got a new toy, a bike, or maybe a time they baked cookies with a grown up. I asked them to think about the work of getting the new toy, bike, or cookies ready to play with or to eat. Everyone agreed it took some work the first time, but this was only the first time. The next time they wanted to play with the toy, ride the bike, or even eat a cookie, it was "easy peasy!"

With this mindset, we began the seven-step process of setting up and logging into our new KidBlog accounts.

Guess what? They did it! "Easy peasy. lemon squeeze!" In reality, I wasn't completely surprised, I knew the kids could do it.  What did pleasantly surprise me was the teacher! She was so pleased with her class! She saw them listen to, follow, and successfully complete seven steps to sign in and set up their personal KidBlog accounts!

This was when I realized wasn't doing this prework of setting up and logging in students because I doubt the student's abilities, I was doing this because I was protecting the teacher's perception of her student's abilities. When in reality, I wasn't allowing the teacher to see the real potential of their students.

Sick day or not, students will now be completing all seven steps, showing their teacher just what they can do!