Setting Goals & Getting Ready

2014-2015 is going to be an epic year.  I can see it now.  I'm excited.  And I want to share it with others, and write about it for myself.

This is my third year at my school.  The first year I was there I weeded my library and got to know my kiddos (aka, students).  The second year I was there I kicked butt with grants, fundraisers, and creating an environment that the kiddos (and I) love and are inspired with. 

This year... I want to bring the grown-ups into the fold.  I want parents in my library all day.  I want teachers to WANT to come with their students.  This is going to mean I have to be crazy organized because building relationships with these grown-ups is going to take up my normal flex-time before & after school and during the day.

In order to be more organized I have started reading The Together Teacher thanks to a friends' recommendation. I started it today, and am ready to begin implementation so that it can be in full swing in three weeks when teachers go back (officially... I've already 'gone back' in my brain). 

I love how it brings out this idea: You have 168 hours each week.  How will you spend them?  I'm excited to set personal AND professional goals for those 168 hours... here are some of them:

• Exercise
• Pre-planning (lessons, meals, cleaning, finances)
• Read (personal & professional) weekly
• Friends & Family
• Honor Shabbat

What are your goals for the start of the year (or end if you aren't a teacher)?

Summer Reading Challenge Update

Alrighty there...

mid-May I wrote a post about a Summer Reading Challenge.  75 books in Summer 2013.

I'm a little less than a month away from my deadline of August 19th, but I'm 28 books in.  AND, most of them have been adult books, so it isn't even including the stack of children's books I have waiting at my apartment for when I get back from vacation!  (And definitely doesn't include all the Pinterest book recommendations I've been holding onto to start collecting.) While I'm not as far as I had hoped to be, I'm making a decent dent and I'm back to enjoying an afternoon reading rather than an afternoon watching tv, which was my personal goal.

I'm hoping next time I post I'll even have some reviews of the children's books up for people to enjoy.  My goal this school year is for my students to post book reviews, so I want to test out some different Web 2.0 tools for them to use to do so.  I got a lot of great ideas with my district's Digital Educator's Summer Academy, as well as my attendance of Technology in Education's (now InnEdCo) Conference in June.  I got a lot of great ideas for myself, my teachers, and my students.

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer vacations and summer reading!

Me on the Map Project (1st & 2nd Grade)

this is the Pinterest project from, well, crazy teacher brain...

Remember this post? (http://www.msbooklady5280.blogspot.com/2013/04/my-name-is-ms-book-lady-and-i-have.html)

(aka, how I spent two nights in a row cutting out 900 construction paper circles)

The first step is admitting your problem right?  A couple weeks ago I found this:

http://kidworldcitizen.org/2011/11/26/my-place-in-the-world-project/ 

It looked like such an awesome project, and it meets standards for first and second graders about understanding their place in the world so I couldn't pass it up.

The steps to produce this project included: A) I (plus my para and a parent) spent almost a week tracing and/or cutting out circles for this project.  B) Now that classes are finishing up, each has to be hole punched and string tied (oy vey).  Thankfully next year only 1st grade will do the project, because doing this times 200 is getting ridiculous. C) I had to grade these all of them, checking all of the options.  Here is a snapshot of each of the projects (awesome examples from all 8 first and second grade classrooms):

Most students did a great job...I also used a checklist:

...while it obviously didn't help all students, it made a big difference for some--especially with punctuation, and making sure they capitalized/spelled correctly the proper nouns.

This was an amazing project.  I truly recommend it, especially if you are in the classroom (aka, not creating 200+ of these, and only 30).  It meets 1st and 2nd grade standards beautifully.  (See below.  These are Colorado State Standards, since CCSS hasn't expanded to Social Studies.)

Content Area: Social Studies
Grade Level Expectations: Second Grade
Standard: 2. Geography
1. Geographic terms and tools are used to describe space and place.

Content Area: Social Studies

Grade Level Expectations: First Grade

Standard: 2. Geography
1. Geographic tools such as maps and globes represent places.