Ready to Learn

Cross posted from One Good Thing.

Since we had so many snow days, we lost two days of April break, today being one of them. When class started this morning my co-teacher and I had two students. It’s a contained class of seven, but still, two kids! Despite the lack of classmates, the pair dutifully estimated and shared their reasoning. My co-teacher volunteered to be the grapher in our model “describe the graph to someone who can’t see it” game so both students could play describer. Then we discussed some vocab and the two students played the game together. In other words, class proceeded exactly like normal. In fact, the two focused even better than normal, despite the fact that half the school was absent, more than half the class was absent and most other teachers were just playing a movie. When kids show up to school ready to learn, it is so important that we honor that and provide worthwhile activities. They just might rise to your expectations.