Hungry Minds

• v This article shocked me when it stated that 1 in every 6 are hungry. How sad! One day when I was in second grade, my teacher asked me why I looked so sad and couldn’t do my work. I told her because I was “starving.” Honestly, there’s no way I was starving. My mother would never have sent me to school without feeding me. However, I remember the feeling! I had a headache because I was so hungry and all I could do was stare at the clock and wait for it to be lunch time. Mrs. Bosko didn’t allow that. She sent me down to the cafeteria with $.75 and told me to buy a cookie and some milk. Now that I am teaching, I think about Mrs. Bosko very often. I need to try to be that attentive to my students and know that they may be too hungry to sit in class. Perhaps it is just because they were super active the day before, or maybe they are in need like the people who went to the soup kitchen. I know many schools provide breakfast for this purpose, but the school I am placed in currently does not. If I do notice a student who cannot focus or tells me he is hungry, I can always give them a “Chewy” bar! They’re yummy, have nutritional value and are inexpensive!
• v I was interested in the proven topics that they wrote about in the workshops. I would have liked to see more of those.
• v I think that writing can be very therapeutic. I think that by using writing as a way to let my students relieve feelings, I will be better able to know them and meet their needs more efficiently.
• v Finally, I loved how they use a writing workshop to “kindly criticize” one another’s writing. That’s truly how you improve and build your writing. Also, a class anthology of students’ work is a great idea. Students can keep it to remember their own work, read the final works of their peers, and I could use it as modeling in the following years.