Summer

This was the start of my summer...a beautiful weekend down in Lake Geneva with a friend from college. I should be more honest, the days were beautiful, but the nights were rainy. Nevertheless, it was some much-needed R&R. And, hopefully, R&R will be what the rest of the summer brings: some golf, time at parks watching Olivia playing softball and soccer, and a vacation to Disney World!

But this summer will also bring some new experiences, specifically with the learning and preparation that I will need for my new 6th grade position. My focus will be in math and science, and I'm really excited to starting this adventure in these areas. Not that I have anything against the other subject areas--it's just that math and science have always been areas I've enjoyed more.

I'm beginning my learning on middle school with a little online learning, checking out middle school blogs and twitter resources. Next week, however, I'm going to have the opportunity to sit down with the other teacher in my 6th grade "house" for some curriculum planning time. This will be our opportunity to look for opportunities to do some team teaching and structure our classrooms. As she is already in the middle school, I'm going to be picking her brain quite a bit! We only have a couple of days together, but then we will have the rest of the summer to bounce ideas off of each other. Because as every teacher knows, there's no such thing as "summer off."

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What Day is It?

 Did you ever have one of those weeks where every day kind of bleeds into the next, and by the end of the week you have a hard time remembering what you did on certain days prior? That's how I'm feeling right now. I would say that the main reason for this is that I'm sitting in an empty classroom every day. Even though the students are at home, teachers are allowed to work in their classrooms (assuming that they don't have any illnesses or have been contact-traced). We do have the option to work from home, but I felt that I would get more accomplished at school (fewer distractions :-) Now that the assignments are starting to roll in, it has definitely been helpful to have the quiet time at school to manage grading and identifying what is missing. However, I would much rather have a classroom bustling with activity (as most teachers would). So, even though I couldn't fully remember what happened on what day, looking back at my lesson notes has helped, and it was a pr...
Read more

An Epic Fail (and a Recovery)

So, I usually post my blog on Thursday nights (sorry this one was late, but I was REALLY tired last night), so with all things considered (with teaching in the world of COVID), my post for last Thursday made it seem like the first week of school wasn't too bad. Then Friday came. And it was time for my science lesson (not that I'm actually into my science content yet--we are still working on launching procedures with the students). If things could go wrong with my science time on Friday, they did. It was an EPIC fail.  My focus for launching procedures with the 5th graders has been centered around using Canvas, our online learning platform. On Friday, my lesson was about showing the students the different ways that they could submit an assignment in Canvas. My hope was to show a short video over the Google Meet that we had going so that we could use it as a jumping-off point to discuss procedures. Well, the volume levels in the different classrooms didn't really jive well wi...
Read more

Just breathe...

I'll be honest, today was a tiresome day. My students seemed more amped up than usual. So I tried something today that I haven't been able to do with my class in awhile--mindful breathing. I had attempted it several times last year with my class, but I had several boys who seemed to make it their mission to get their classmates to laugh during our mindful breathing sessions. So after some reflecting, I decided it was best to not offer them an audience. But this is a new year, and a new group of students, and I don't really have those attention seeking entertainers, so I thought it was worth a shot. In my daily schedule, we have a TRIBES/Mindfulness time to allow for community building opportunities and moments of reflection. This time period is right after recess, so I figured some mindful breathing might be good for them to cool down a little. When the students came in from recess, I put on some music from the Nature Sounds channel on Pandora. I let that softly play...
Read more