If you're out there in the blogosphere and have managed to stumble across the 1DDiaries, you already know I teach 1st Grade... and I'm still here!

I'm leap-frogging over the past eight months of school -- and five months before that -- perhaps we'll catch up later -- it's almost May and the first graders are humming along. They're reading, they're writing, they're whipping through math, they're just...amazing!

This is the time of year that I love. In the course of the year we worked first on setting up daily, then weekly routines which allowed for the One-ders to discover and make sense of our English language: finding and recognizing letter patterns, unscrambling letters to make two, then three, then four-letter words, re-organizing words until they made sense in a sentence, hours of reading and talking about one text in groups of five or six, finding rhymes in weekly poems, conversations and reinforcement of the previous days, now these come together.

On a "Big Picture" Language theme - The One-ders can approach a bookshelf, open a book, read the cover and make a decision as to whether they want to read that particular book -- or not. They return to their desk or chair or place on the rug -- and read independently. Sigh....

Of course we didn't get to this place without some pain.