January Currently

Happy New Year!! I hope you all had a fun and safe New Years Eve. I had a great time with my friends here in Jacksonville and am trying to squeeze in as much as possible in the next 5 days before I head back to Memphis. Time is going by too fast!

I saw this on a lot of blogs so I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon for January and try it out. Here's what I'm up to currently!

Most of this is pretty self-explanatory. It's warm and rainy here in Florida but I am NOT complaining because I know I'm going to be cold for 9 weeks straight between winter break and spring break. Wah. 

I need to pack up my room here in Florida because we are selling the house after my mom gets married in March (over my spring break) so I won't have another chance before then to go through everything. We've been here 20 years so I have quite the collection of junk. 

I got Les Mis for Christmas and still haven't watched it yet. What's wrong with me?

I think we all need to re-hydrate after last night. No comment. 

And one of my favorite traditions is our family white elephant gift exchange. My whole extended family wraps ridiculous and horrible gifts and we spend the whole afternoon drinking, eating, and laughing as we unwrap velvet dresses and jars of mustard. 

That's me currently, what are you doing on the first day of 2014??

Playing Catch-Up

Hey everybody, I'm sorry I've been MIA the last 3 weeks! We had spring break and I went to Tampa for Roxanne's wedding (check out her blog here) and then to New Orleans to visit Casey, my bestie from high school. It was such a great spring break and EXACTLY what the doctor ordered.

Beautiful wedding!

Teacher friends =]

Casey and I in New Orleans

Being tourists

We ate our way through the city- naturally.

Then we had Monday, April 1st as an inservice day and I was only at school Tuesday and Wednesday before I got hit with a stomach bug and had to stay home two more days. I really wanted to be careful though, because I did NOT want to give my kids any germs right before FCAT. 

This week we just reviewed everything we needed to, covered up all of our bulletin boards, signs, and books (basically everything but the brick wall) with giant sheets of paper (no cheating here!), and rearranged the room for our big test next week. 

We are so looking forward to getting past this test! I feel confident in my kids and I know they'll do great! We also have a respectable pile of snack food piling up that families have brought in for the afternoons of the FCAT. I think with all this hard work, our kiddos definitely deserve some Cheez-its and Disney movies ;)

In internship news, I had my FINAL observation on Wednesday! That makes 11, in case you were wondering. To give you a comparison, the other interns at my school (from UNF) do 4. Let that sink in. The only thing I have left is an informal observation by my supervisor and a principal observation. I'm going to do both of these during the month of May when I'm teaching full-time. At least I'll be prepared for the 6 observations I need per year in Tennessee! Bring it on.

And Now For Some Good News

You made it through Wednesday! Congratulations, just 2 days left until the weekend. How am I doing, you ask? Y'all are so sweet. I'm doing GREAT actually. Let me show you in pictures how everything's been lining up juuuuuuuust right.

Yay!

Got an email for a phone interview with Gestalt Community Schools (a charter school in Memphis). I actually had that interview today and I think it went well! I was cool, calm and collected. This would be for elementary, so K or 1st. The tiny ones scare me, but they make up for it in precious things they say. On to the next picture:

Yay!

Got an email for a phone interview with KIPP (another charter school in Memphis!) This interview is Friday afternoon. Again, their elementary is just K and 1st, but there's also their middle school, which has 5th and 6th. Maybe? Who knows. Next picture!

Yay!

I passed all of my Florida Certification exams. Now I just have to finish these pesky classes UF wants me to take. Two more classes and three more months of an internship before I can apply for certification (which will promptly be transferred to Tennessee, thank you very much).

And finally, though I don't have a picture to go with it, my mentor teacher said I could take over the classroom for the month of May- basically the last 4 weeks I'm there! It'll be after FCAT so pressure is off and we can experiment with some new lesson ideas. I'm just excited to completely take over! It was one part of the old style of interning I regretted not having.

Sigh. So yes, it's all coming together. Remind me of this when it inevitably all feels like it's falling apart ;)

Growing Up Can Be Fun!

Hi everyone! I have had a great week- is it sad that working (er. interning for no pay?) a 40 hour week versus a 50 hour week can make that big a difference? It's been great going home on time every day! I had a conference call with TFA on Wednesday. These are really neat. You call in to the conference call and put your phone on mute, then you log in online (I use my IPad) and watch the presentation. I feel like I'm on the Jetson's or something.

accidental Apple advertisement

I also got ANOTHER book in the mail, specifically for Memphis corps members. Bring on the reading!

In other job related news, I was contacted to fill out a job application with Gestalt Community Schools. This charter school reminds me a lot of KIPP and is really neat! They just started an elementary school this year so it'd be really cool to get in on the ground floor. Check out what they're doing here: http://www.gestaltcs.org/

Submitted my application today!

This weekend, I got to go down to Tampa to see Lexi- my teaching partner from my pre-internship last year. Nothing bonds you faster than spending all day, everyday with someone for a whole semester! We were lucky to have each other and she asked me to be her bridesmaid during school one day while the kids were taking a test. Haha perfect timing- no squealing allowed. She's getting married in July and had her bridal shower this weekend! I can't believe it's only four months away. She'll be moving to Houston and I'll be off to Memphis and we'll be grown-ups with classrooms of our own- so insane! Well, here are the highlights of the shower:

Isn't my teaching partner pretty!

The bridal party

wedding pictionary

I loved these pretty little teacups

toilet paper gown

ribbon and bow bouquet. who needs flowers??

So that's what I did this weekend! This upcoming week, I start my science course. Science and technology are the two courses standing between me and a masters degree! Let's get this show on the road!

Florida Writes 2013

Oh. Baby. Today was the day we were all anxiously awaiting! Florida Writes 2013!! After warming up to the Cupid Shuffle, our fourth graders kicked butt today and wrote their little hearts out for a full hour. After we wrote, we celebrated with some homemade treats (Paula Deen's gooey butter cake, anyone?) and got to relax with some indoor recess while it continued to rain outside. We were SO happy we avoided a tornado warning during the test. Wouldn't that just be a nightmare?

In honor of being finished with FCAT Writes, I thought I'd share some of my favorite snippets from the kids' journals they've been keeping. Enjoy!

Selena Gomez is my standard of beauty, too.

It's easy to mix up "hands-on" and "hands-down". What a great new saying!
Writing is HANDS-ON my favorite subject!

"Ugh! This is not my style" Princess in the making. I feel the same way, girl.

Alluding to Jackson Pollock. These are 9 and 10 year old children.
Are you as impressed as I am??

My favorite: "...they look so beautiful it makes me feel like I'm a dirty street rat."
Where did this come from??

I just love reading everything these kids write. They have so much personality in their writing! I'm so proud of them and happy that we. are. done.


In TFA news, I received two books in the mail today: Teaching as Leadership and A Chance to Make History. These are for "onboarding" which is prep between now and Institute in June. It basically looks a whole lot like my online classes- read sections and then respond in a group of 6-8 people online. I'm also applying to more schools and preparing for some phone interviews. Very exciting stuff!

Special delivery!

Teacher Binder Revisited

Happy Thursday! We had Monday and Tuesday off this week and, ya know, I think EVERY week should start on a Wednesday- just a thought ;) This week I wanted to focus on organizing so get ready for an overload of pictures:

One of my most popular post is this one on my "ultimate teacher binder". Unfortunately, once I started my internship, I accumulated a LOT more papers and soon, my cute little binder ripped :( Instead of buying a new one, I decided over winter break to break up my one big binder into five small ones! You ready for this??

My first binder has three sections: Important Info, Weekly/Monthly Lesson Plans, and Example Lesson Plans. This is where I keep all our schedules, school maps, phone numbers, etc. I created my own weekly lesson planner, then, I used the monthly lesson calendar I found at KindergartenWorks for a big picture. I also keep all my observed lesson plans in this binder. This way, if I need to plan, I only need to bring home one binder!

You may also notice I changed the cover- different school, different binder cover!

My weekly template

Monthly planner. I go back and highlight everything at the end of the week.
Everything gets color coded!

The next binder I made is Student Info, Course Info, and Meeting Notes. This is where I keep all my records on the kids (testing, scores, growth charts), all my course info for grad school, and the meeting note template found on the Ladybug Teacher Files blog. I bring this one to meetings and conferences instead of having to bring all of my stuff.

Pretty self-explanatory

The next binder I made is my Standards and Assessments binder. Here, I have the Read Naturally assessments for 4th grade, the spelling lists for the year, the 4th Grade FCAT Specifications for language arts and math (it's all here if you want to print it out), and the 4th Grade Common Core checklist (we bought it here). This is also mainly a reference binder, so I can leave it at school if I don't need it. Score!

This is what we bought on TPT

This is an "I Can" checklist for all the standards

Finally, I have a binder of lesson plans that my mentor teacher gives me. Basically, every time we have an extra copy of something, I put it in that binder. Never hurts to have some extra stuff stored up! Especially because my mentor teacher is fabulously innovative so these are not your run-of-the-mill worksheets, but fabulous units and lessons!

Every subject has a tab!

Ok, so that's it! Hopefully all this info helps if you're trying to get organized. The pictures are also kinda fun if you just like looking at other people's organization ;) And where do I put all these binders?? In my new teacher cart I got for Christmas! Thanks daddy :) Remember, if you're curious about how I made the covers of these binders, you can see on my original post for the links.

Everyone come see how professional I look! hehe

Election Day 2012

Happy Monday everyone! Hope you enjoyed your extra hour of sleep this weekend- I know I did! It really threw me off this morning, though, because I kept thinking I was late with the sun being up already. No complaints here, though!

So for all of you who have been living under a rock, tomorrow is Election Day 2012. It's such a great opportunity to teach our students about democracy and how an election works and we have been doing some fun things building up to tomorrow. One really great website we've been using is actually a website made by a school. Check it out! They have a lot of really great resources and we used the quiz as a fill in the blank for the kids to do while we went through the powerpoint of how a president is elected.

Pop quiz: who are these men?

I also liked the link they had to the Scholastic website about the election. They have so many activities and lots of information! This would be a great thing for the kids to explore.

Can you SEE the potential?!

We talked a lot about the electoral college. This website is EXCELLENT to look back at previous elections. You can see all the way back to 1789- ha! It's neat though to see how close each election was. We also gave each student a couple of electoral college maps to color in for what the polls are saying now and one to color in Tuesday night as the votes roll in! I'm going to join in the fun ;)

This website is too much fun to play with!

It's so demanding: COLOR ME IN!!

Finally, a great activity to integrate reading has been doing research on the candidates. We gave each student a one page biography on President Obama and a one page biography on Governor Romney. The kids had to read each and highlight examples of the 7 Habits (being proactive, thinking win-win, putting first things first, etc) that show leadership. Don't you just love integrating subjects?!

We will be wearing red, white, and blue and anxiously awaiting the results tomorrow! I will also be showing off my "I Voted" sticker (hooray for early voting) and hope you'll do the same!! Happy Election Day, friends =]