CHAMPions!

So, I've decided that this blog must only be for the beginning of the school year and the end of the year since that seems to be the only time I'm every available to write anything!  Oh well...

This year has been crazy!  There's just no other way to describe it.  Here are a few highlights...


1. Co-teaching took on a new meaning this year!  I was assigned to two regular education teachers at the same time, so I spent a lot of my time going back and forth between the two classrooms.  After trying a few different strategies, we finally found one that worked for us!

2. We started with a new ELA curriculum that was good, but VERY different from what we had been using in the past.  It took everyone a while to get into the groove and get used to the setup.

3. ACE It!  This was a new way of getting students to go deeper in their answers.  Here's how it works:

4. We started a Social Committee at our building this year and had tons of fun coming up with new ideas for activities to bring our staff together!  The funds for our committee came from these super-cool t-shirts that the art teacher designed...

5. Of course we've had our regular tennis meets as well.  I'm so proud of my kiddos and their hard work during both girls' and boys' season!

6. M is finally getting big enough that I can bring her along and she will mostly entertain herself without getting into too much trouble!  Here are some of my favorites of having her along this year...

                       Fall '14                                      Spring '15 (Look how much she's grown!)

7. This group of kids has really been one of my favorites!  I have loved getting to know them and their different personalities and building relationship with them.  Consequently, there have been several times this year that I have found that they have left their mark in their own ways... (thank you Apple for making it so easy to take pictures!!!)

8.  And last but not least, our district is adopting a new behavior support curriculum next year called, CHAMPS.  We have spent a lot of time this year reading and learning about this new program and even implementing some new procedures in anticipation for this change.  Of course, with great change comes the great need to CREATE!  I've been looking at ideas on Pinterest for how other teachers are using CHAMPS in their classrooms and got some great ideas for new posters!  Here's a sneak peek at the design:

If you like what you see, head over to my TPT store and pick up a set!

This year has definitely been one of my favorites and I am going to miss this group of kids a lot!  Can't wait to see what next year brings!!!

I'm Freezin'!!!!

Ever since I was little, I've loved being in the kitchen cooking and baking to my heart's content.  As much as I love to cook and bake, my schedule now is not nearly what it was even five years ago.  Now I'm a wife, mother, and have a full-time job, and have decided that I enjoy being involved in my church and community as well!  So I will freely admit that the thought of coming home after a long day and standing in the kitchen for an hour or two just doesn't seem to appeal as much to me anymore.

Enter the "lazy" cook's response: FREEZER MEALS!

Seriously though, as much joy as I find in slicing and dicing and coming up with new "creations," I just don't have the kind of time that I would like to devote to that type of cooking anymore.

Over the last several months, I've seen a ton of posts about freezer cooking and have found many blogs and sites that have a plethora of recipes to choose from and (yay for me!) some even include the grocery list! :)

A while back I decided to try doing a round of freezer cooking on my own.  About 3 hours and $150 later, and I had enough meals to last my family a month!  As rewarding as it was to do on my own, I decided "the more the merrier!"  So I asked a couple of friends if they wanted to try it with me and last weekend we got together and made 12 new meals EACH!  We had a blast!

The table was barely big enough to hold all of our pillage!

 36 meals total!

Here we are in all of our freezer-cooking, eyes-glazed-over, STARVING glory!

We definitely learned a few things that we'll need to change for the next round, but overall I would say that the experience was a success!

Heather

Joining the Crowd...

Well, I did it...I opened a Teachers Pay Teachers account.  If you know me, you know I'm not usually one to go along with the crowd.  In fact, I'm pretty independent and tend to be kind of rebellious at times!  Anyway, I've been a member of TPT for a while, but really only used it for ideas and to look at freebies.  The more I looked around on it, though, the more I began to think, "I could totally do this!"

Now, if any of you knew me in my previous life as a Premier Designs Jeweler, you'd know that I'm not that outgoing when it comes to selling things.  I love to buy products from companies that I like, but when it comes to trying to talk anyone else into buying the product, I just clam up!  So...that means that this post is most definitely NOT about pushing my latest entrepreneurial venture.  I'm just really excited because for me, this process was not just about signing up for my own TPT store.

Toward the end of last year, I began looking for ideas to improve my classroom organization and kept coming across lots of cute ideas and designs for Teacher Notebooks, Sub Folders, etc.  While I was looking through what seemed like a million of them, I began to think about how to make my own?  Of course, I saw lots of ideas on TPT, but I'm cheap, so I wasn't really interested in buying them when I felt I could probably come up with something myself.  Eventually I ended up just googling until I found a great website with free digital papers that I could just download and use as backgrounds in a simple Word document.  These were great and I came up with some decent dividers-even created tabs to cut out and glue on the edges!

 

 

All of this was great, but then I decided I wanted to figure out how digital pages like this were created.  I mean, they just looked like one shape repeated over and over again, right?  I've had some mild experience using Adobe products, so how hard could it be? (Graphic designers, feel free to insert laugh here...)

Since you guys don't really care about all the juicy details...long story short...I found a free graphic design program online, downloaded it to my school computer, started making some designs and voila!  I will admit that I spent quite a while on my first creations as I was learning the program and finding out what worked and what didn't, but now I've got a pretty good system down so I'm excited to see what I come up with in the future!

Here's one page from the new document I just posted to my TPT store.  I literally created every inch of this, except for the font, from scratch.  I don't normally brag about anything, but I'm kinda proud of this because I figured it all out on my own...(remember that comment about being independent?)!

If you like this and want to see what's in the rest of the file, head on over to my TPT store and download the freebie!

Have a blessed day! :)

Classroom Tour

I know, I know...you've all been anxiously awaiting my next post and were just about to give up on me. Well have no fear...the chaos that is my life has finally slowed down enough for me to think about writing another blog.  And...by that I mean...I finally remembered that I even had a blog!  

A lot has happened in my little traveling world! School is now a solid two and a half months underway. We're all settling into the routine of another school year and...it's almost CHRISTMAS!!!!  If you couldn't tell, Christmas is my favorite holiday! There are several reasons:

          1. It's the day we celebrate the birth of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ! 🎄

          2. My birthday is only four days before Jesus' birthday...soooo....double the presents!!! 🎉

          3. Two SOLID weeks of vacation from school! 🎄🎊

          4. And last, but certainly not least....my daughter's FIRST birthday will be less than a month

          away! I. Can't. Believe. It! 🎂

Oh boy...remember my last post where I talked about having a touch of ADD? Well if not, there's a slight rabbit trail for your reading entertainment!  Now, back to the topic at hand-my classroom!

I'm super excited about my classroom this year because I have a new theme-black and pink polka dots. This is the first year since I've been at this school that I've had a theme. Now, middle schoolers don't get quite as excited as elementary kiddos about having a cute-ly (yes, I just made up that word) decorated room, but I don't care. I'm the one who has to sit in it all day long, so why not make it enjoyable?  I got several ideas for the theme from one of my favorite websites. That's right, you guessed it...Pinterest! I probably spent the better part of the last month of school last Spring planning the decorations for this year (shhh....don't tell the principal!). In addition to finding decorating ideas, I also found several great ideas for classroom management to make my classroom run just the tiniest bit smoother. I feel like I do a pretty good job with rules and procedures already, but there's always room for improvement, right?  I know I won't be able to credit all the places that I found these ideas, but in case you're wondering...just search my "Classroom Ideas" board. 

Now without further ado...the moment you've all been so patiently waiting for...may I present...my classroom!

(I apologize for the blurriness in some of the pictures. I took them with my iPad and with the lighting in my room, it can make for some interesting photos.)

This is MY space!  When I moved into this room, there was a HUGE piece of peg board on the wall. What can you do with a huge piece of peg board in a classroom, you ask? Why, cover it up, of course!  My darling husband spent quite a little bit of time hammering thumbtacks into the peg board because that was the only way we could think of to get the black fabric to stay on. He was such a trooper, but I can say that the fabric will NOT be coming down until I move classrooms...and maybe not even then!  Merry Christmas to the person who gets the room after me...  Anyway, I just love my new border.  I got it from Mardel.com. That was the only place I could find a border that matched my design exactly. I also redid the schedules and grading scale posters to fit the theme. Aren't they cute?

This is the one and only bulletin board I have in my little room. I came up with the idea for the border myself. At our school, we use Robert Marzano's "Art and Science of Teaching" philosophy. We are expected to have a learning goal posted each day so the students know exactly what they are going to be able to do by the end of the day or week. I haven't been good about posting my goals for the last two years, so I thought I needed a giant reminder when I walked into the room. I'm getting better...

This is the top of my filing cabinet. Mostly it's a dumping ground for the cute little decorations that I couldn't find another place for. The canister in the back is full of ping pong balls and each are labeled with a different "brain break" on them. The idea is that the kids get to pick one out and then we take five minutes if we need to do the activity. I think I've used it once...

I got really tired of students not coming to class with pencils and wasting time looking for one to borrow, so I decided to provide them with one, but at a small cost to them. If they don't have a phone to leave, they have to leave something else of value instead. It seems to work out so far. 

This isn't really anything fancy. I got two of these pink baskets for 50% off at Bath & Body Works, so of course, I had to find a place for them in my classroom!

 Paint Chip Calendar anyone? These are all over Pinterest! I first saw one that an acquaintance from college had posted on her blog and always wanted to make one myself. My husband was a little mortified when I swiped the paint chips from the display at Lowe's, but...it was all for at good cause, right? Besides, how did the guys at the paint counter know that I wasn't going to be painting all of the walls in my house a different shade of pink?

Another Pinterest idea...scrapbook covered desk organizer. The original idea I found was to cover cereal boxes with scrapbook paper, but I quickly realized they wouldn't be large enough for what I wanted to put in them. So....once again my husband came to my rescue. He "built" me a custom-designed cardboard box that I covered with the paper. It's very sturdy and I can fit waaaay more in it than I every could've in those cereal boxes! Oh, and I also had to design some file folder labels that would match the theme as well. 😊

My mom has started making several different crafty things, one of them being these cute wooden circles covered in any fabric print you could imagine. She made this for me to out in my room. I love it! Oh, and here's a free plug for her...if you like what you see, stop by her Facebook page, Trinity Creations, for more gift ideas. 

This has now become the home-y section of my room. The shelf is home to my personal effects and I brought in several plants to give it that nice, comfortable feel. Don't you love the zebra flower pot?

Some ADORABLE paper lanterns I found in the party section at Hobby Lobby!

Just a couple more classroom management ideas. I'm really bad about remembering to hand back work that's been graded, so this year I made a separate tray to put the graded work in and it's up to the students to get their work out of it. The file folders have a folder for each hour that I put copies of work in for students who were absent or who are missing work. The one folder close to the middle has "Yellow Sheets" in it. This is another Pinterest idea-if the students don't have an assignment I turn in on the due date, they have to fill out a yellow sheet telling why they didn't have their assignment. They turn that in in place of the assignment and when they finish/find/get around to turning it in, they can receive up to half credit for the work. It helps me document so that when parents call wondering about their child's grade I can show them the Yellow Sheets that I've collected. 

Well, this brings me to the end of my little tour. I hope you enjoyed your glimpse into the life of Room 305. Have a great day!

Heather :)

Ephesians 3:12-21

Why am I even here?!?!

Ok, so I've never really been one to jump on the bandwagon when it comes to trends and fads, especially when that fad includes blogs.  We can all admit that in this day and age "all the cool people" have blogs.  While I do enjoy reading blogs and have found some of my best ideas from what others blog about, I haven't really been all that interested in starting my own.  I mean, what in the world would I write about?  Everything that I can think of seems to be exactly what everyone else writes about and I've never been one to do something just because "everyone else is doing it!" 

The other side of the coin is that I'm not really all that crazy about writing.  When I was a little girl, I started countless journals and diaries, but each one ended up in the same way-just a few entries and then abandoned until I got another wild hair to start a new one up again.  I don't really know why I dislike writing.  I mean, I teach the subject for crying out loud!  Don't get me wrong...I really do enjoy teaching students what good writing looks like but...

(I know those few writing teachers out there that are reading this are thinking, "What are you talking about?  You don't seem to have any trouble with writing at all!")

...anyway, I never said that I can't write, I just don't really enjoy it.  That's kind of funny to me, though, because now that I've started this blog, I can't seem to stop!  However, my point in starting this blog wasn't really for me to tell you the woes of my writing life, so let's get back to the topic at hand...why in the world did I decide to join the crowd and start a blog? 

Well, it wasn't because I woke up one day and suddenly had a change of heart, that's for sure!  A coworker of mine actually gave me the idea to write about my teaching experience (I know...remember what I said about everyone else already writing about the topics I had thought of?).  However, my teaching experience isn't just any teaching experience.  You see, I'm a co-teacher.  Those of us in the teaching world might know exactly what I'm talking about, but others may not have a clue what it means to be a co-teacher.  Allow me to enlighten you...

For me, being a co-teacher means:

1. I have two desks.  One is in my classroom and one is in the classroom of the other teacher that I co-teach with.

2. The bell is just a suggestion for me to think about getting to my co-teaching class.  I'm constantly being stopped on my way to the other classroom or having to deal with students in my room before I can leave for the other room.

3. My arms get a good workout at least twice a day.  Having to move between classrooms means that I have to carry my computer, iPad, keys, cup, notebook, and any other sundry of items that I might need for the one class, up to the room and back down again when class is over.

4. I have a common plan time with my co-teacher.  This is a good thing because otherwise we would distract our class with girl talk, gossip, and friendly banter.


I'm sure there are many more reasons that I could think of if I wanted to turn this post into a college essay...oh wait, it's kind of turning into that already!  Oh well!  My intention for this post was to give you a tour of my classroom because that would've been fun, easy, and fast, but clearly I got off track VERY quickly!

Guess that will have to be my next blog...(and I thought I wouldn't have anything to write about)!