Teach to Every Whole Brain!

     Holy Whole Brain Teaching Batman!!  Last year I began to learn about Whole Brain Teaching.  My first look at Whole Brain Teaching came through Pinterest.  I happened to click on a video of Miss Freundlich http://www.teachingandlearningtogether.com/whole-brain.html and I was hooked!  I had been teaching Kindergarten for 12 years, had my Masters and National Board Certification, and yet still had never been as excited to implement something in my classroom.  I watched her videos over and over.  I told my whole Kindergarten team about them.  I searched the internet for more videos  and began watching them.  I even watched them on my iphone on the way to school.  I was so very excited, and I still am!
     Why was I so excited after watching these videos of Whole Brain Teaching in action?  One of the biggest reasons was because the children were so engaged in the lesson.  Not just the first few minutes of the lesson, either.  It was through the entire lesson.  The students all seemed intrisically motivated to learn and pay attention.  They were actively learning.  They were all happy, and so was the teacher!  Another biggie was that the learning goals were clear in each lesson.  The children were able to state what they were learning about and were building upon knowledge that they had already gained.  These features should always be impressive for any teacher, and they surely impressed me.  I was even more impressed, however, because these fabulous features also align so closely with the "Exemplary" ranking of the new evaluation rubric that my county is using to rate teachers.  So...wait just a minute!  Was I seeing this correctly?  Whole Brain Teaching is a method of teaching that seems like the best thing for little learners AND it will help me earn better scores on my evaluation?  Count me in!
     My next step was to go to http://www.wholebrainteaching.com/ and create an account to become an official member of the Whole Brain Teaching world!  I read through all of the "First Steps" so that I could combine the explanations with my knowledge I had gained from watching the videos.  This all happened in a matter of days.   After visiting the Whole Brain Teaching website and reading/watching more about it, I was even more impressed and excited.  It seemed that WBT was going to fill a void in my classroom that I didn't even realize was there.  I began to implement the "First Steps" right away!