Finding My Pirate Flow, Year 2

I do. I really do drink a lot of coffee. It takes a lot of caffeinated power to teach these tiny pirates and find the flow a thousand times a day. Do you hear me? 

Although this is my second year in first grade and I'm finally getting to do some of my favorites from last year, it doesn't mean pulling out my plans and ho-hum recreations. It means I am 100% in. 100% pirate. 100% in character, dancing, singing, connecting curriculum (I need that coffee), and building community. My class this year is nothing like my group last year, in demographics or academics. I have to meet their specific needs and I am thankful each day that I have almost 2 decades behind me so each decision doesn't use my whole attention. Finding the flow uses my whole attention. Heaven forbid I have a stuffed up head cold to mess with our chi.

 

 I did laminate last year. Quite a bit. But those pirate ships, pirate letters, eye patches, pirate sets, and pirate vocabulary? New. Just like this class' reaction to the pirate takeover a few weeks ago. They were tickled. They were suspicious it was me. They've been finding their inner pirate both during and after readers' theater. It's awesome. But not the same as last year. And it shouldn't be. My excitement and anticipation of 'Pirate Week' needed to be new for this group. We didn't do all the things I did last year. And we did some new things. I checked out some new books from the library about pirates and navigation and learned what a mizzenmast is and added it to my pirate vocabulary. I also continued the pirate theme for 3 weeks, all the way to spring break, forgoing activities I did last year and making more connections to pirates (and you can connect literally any study to pirates -- we turned the patterns in the sky to pirate navigation vs. astronaut navigation skills and it was awesome.) We even turned the next two weeks of R-controlled vowels into different ways pirates talk.

ar resource from The Brown Bag Teacher

I love when it all comes together. That's the flow, when each decision blends so perfectly with the other tasks we are doing, even though none of our curricula align. I love that feeling where we are doing skills for the greater picture, in this case, pirates.Will they remember that we used a topic sentence, detail-detail-detail, conclusion to "wrap it all up"? Or will they remember that we learned to draw a pirate ship, most importantly the "poop deck"? 

We used our newfound drawing skills to make the backdrop for readers' theater and spent two weeks on our fluency skills before performing for the class. (FYI there is a ton of free pirate stuff on Teacher Pay Teacher).

    

Each day connected to the next and when I started to do what worked so well last year but didn't seem to flow with my new group, I made a new decision about the direction we would be going. ARGH! it was awesome.
I won't be kicking the caffeine any year soon, and hopefully our flow will continue as well!