What a difference between first and third grade! It is incredible! The students are much more independent! They can read, and read well! We don't have little scraps of paper all over the room from the various cut/paste/craft/learning projects. In fact, my room looks neat and clean every day when I leave, with little to no effort! Team teaching has also been a wonderful experience! I am teaching 1/2 a day, then repeat with the same lessons, so my planning time was cut in half! Teaching this year has been so much more enjoyable, and much less exhausting than previous years! (don't get me wrong, I LOVED teaching first grade, but I didn't realize how hard it was until I moved up and discovered a whole new world!)
That being said, the shoe is going to drop on my near-perfect year pretty soon. This year I have pretty small class sizes (another reason I am having an awesome year!). But because my partner teacher and I have small class sizes, and the 4th grade teachers also have small class sizes, we are hearing the "B" word mentioned around the school. ("Bridge" class aka Combo Class). I taught a first and second combo class last year, and it was beyond a doubt the most challenging and exhausting year of my career. I am not looking forward to being involved in another combo class. However, we still have two more weeks before The Powers That Be will make that decision, so I am hoping that our school gets more 3rd and 4th grade students ASAP!
In the meantime, I am going to enjoy my free evenings and weekends. Last weekend I marveled at not having 8-10 hours of teaching work to do to prep for my combo class. I only had about 2 hours of work to do- it was awesome! I am taking on some additional responsibilities at my church for a few months, so this is a great time for me to enjoy teaching regular 3rd grade while it lasts!
Oh, if you see any 3rd or 4th graders around Fort Worth looking for a school, send them our way! LOL!
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