Living the Dream

I got the dream job!!! I will be teaching second grade in the fall at the school I did my student teaching at! I cannot believe it, it still has not sunk in yet. It is so surreal.  My cooperating teacher retired as well as another 2nd grade teacher across the hall and I was able to fill one of the positions. Teaching at this school, let alone second grade, is a dream come true. I am so thrilled!!! I have been to my classroom almost every day since I signed my papers and have been to Target at least ten times this week!!

This is my classroom! The janitors have to move the heavy furniture for me

I have lots of cleaning and organizing to do!!

 

I cannot say enough how excited I am to start my career! I can’t wait for my close friends to get their perfect teaching jobs!!

College Graduate

I can’t believe it’s almost been a month since I graduated college! Unbelievable! I can’t believe it’s over and I am very proud of myself for what I’ve accomplished.  Not only did I graduate college, I did it in four years, and I squeezed my major into three years! I graduated summa cum laude, I made lifelong friends and I am enrolled in graduate school. I think I deserve to pat myself on the back, or kiss my brain like I tell my first graders to do.

Yes that’s right….I said my first graders! I am teaching first grade at my old elementary school for the rest of the school year (that’s nine more school days). I am loving every minute of it. It really is just the ideal situation. I have fifteen students and a full-time assistant (!!!!). I cannot get used to this because I know  it will never happen again, but I am enjoying it while it lasts. It is weird having an assistant, someone who is older than my mother and knows so much more than me about children and schooling asking me what they can do for me. I feel like I should be learning from them, not having them do things for me. But we are working together and she is such a help to me.  And the children are such little sweethearts! I have been so lucky to have two wonderful classes this semester, my second graders at ORE and my first graders at JES.

I can’t say enough what a wonderful feeling it is to know I have already started my career. I love going to work everyday. I love using the skills I learned in college and that I’m using my degree already.  I love reading my kids’ stories, I love giving them hugs and them hugging me back, I love hearing their angelic voices saying, “Miss. B can I have another piece of paper to finish my story?” I am so excited to be filling this position but I am just so sad it ends in two weeks.

April Showers Bring May Flowers

So what do May flowers bring? PILGRIMS!! It has been raining here non-stop. A tornado warning Tuesday morning took down my neighbor’s tree. Then Thursday, Friday and Saturday night we had thunder, lightning and torrential rain.  I sort of like it though. Thunder storms and this outstanding rain is one of nature’s rare beauties.

My family went to go see Greensboro Day School’s production of To Kill a Mockingbird last night. I don’t even have the words to describe the performance. These middle and high school students did a phenomenal job of playing their characters as well as capturing the time period and the seriousness of the story.  I can’t even imagine the discussions and feelings putting on this production evoked in the actors. It was so inspiring to see and makes me want to challenge my students’ minds and ideas in the same way. I also want to include way more drama opportunities in my classroom.

Graduation is in less than a month!!!! I can’t believe it! The past three months I have been saying, “I just can’t wait to have my own classroom.” I can say that my mindset has changed 99%. I am not even close to being prepared to say goodbye to my students OR my cooperating teacher. My teacher is an amazing woman who has dedicated thirty years of her life to our community, 26 of them spent in second grade.  Every week I learn more and more from her. And my students….I will cry all day May 4th. Now, I know I will see my kids after May 4th, but it still will be hard. I don’t have any other plans for May right now (besides a beach trip with three of my Block 2 friends!!!) so I will be in my classroom a lot, but it is sad to know I won’t have those children next year, or maybe will never have the opportunity to teach any of them again.

That being said I am very excited about the things we have been doing in my class. My impact project was centered around a Healthful Living unit. We learned all about the six healthy habits:

• Be Safe
• Eat Healthy
• Exercise
• Keep Clean
• Take Care of Your Teeth
• Get Enough Rest

We did all sorts of fun activities which included learning how to take our pulse and seeing how exercising affected it, sorting the different types of food from grocery bags, pretending glitter was germs and seeing how fast germs spread, making our own “got milk” ads, and creating our own healthy restaurant menus.  Our school is a Team Nutrition school so there is a heavy nutritional focus in all parts of the school (from snacks, to rewards, to play time).  We are getting a huge nutrition award on Tuesday and a bunch of county officials are going to be at our school. Well, the fourth grade teacher who heads up our Team Nutrition happened to stop by our room and she saw our display on our wall and door and told me they MUST be displayed by the gym where the assembly is going to be held. I GLADLY moved both displays down to the gym and I am so excited to show off my kid’s terrific and hard work!!! I will try to post pictures of our new display!

I am loving my guided reading groups too! I love finding different ways to teach different skills.  There is nothing better than hearing my student who has a hard time focusing on anything say, “Can you please put more time on the timer? I don’t want reading to end!” I have started incorporating informational texts with our fiction selections and my kids seem to really enjoy that. In one group we are reading a book titled Hurricane about a young boy who’s family is preparing for a hurricane and he’s worried his tree house will blow away.  We used different internet sites to learn about hurricanes and I plan to make hurricanes in a bottle (soda bottle science experiment).  My kids loved reading about how actual hurricanes work!

Last week we spent our writer’s workshop time each day writing a story about the Easter Bunny’s adventures the night before Easter. We made graphic organizers to plan, wrote rough drafts, and I conferenced with each student before they wrote their final draft. I was so pleased with the effort each student put into their stories. One girl wrote five pages!!! I also LOVED modeling for them how to plan and compose a rough draft. We have enlarged laminated writing paper and I wrote my rough draft on that and displayed it one the white board. Of course I made mistakes so the class could see the importance of editing your own work (I went back with a red dry erase to edit). One student said to me, “Wait is that yours? And you edited it?” I told him that everyone makes mistakes, even teachers, and that’s why it is so important to review and edit your work! I can’t tell you how much I love reading my student’s writing, talking to them about it in our conferences, and giving them feedback on their final draft. I think writing is my favorite thing to teach right now. I have truly learned that the more you put into writing instruction the more you get out of it. This week we’re going to write a free-verse poem about spring and I can’t wait to read them free-verse poems, show them the different formats, and model for them how to plan (five senses!!) and write.

Here’s to 15 more STUPENDOUS days of student teaching!!!

 

Our Healthy Menus!

My genious students' KWL about Rainforests

Never in 22 years…

Tomorrow I might get something for my birthday that I’ve never gotten before…

SNOW!!!!

Excuse me while I try to go a) prep for my interview tomorrow and b) try not to stress that GCS will be shut down on the day of my interview.

Crashing waves…

My family decided to go to Topsail Island this weekend to open up our house and I thought, “What a great way to get away from all this impact project mess!!” So here I am, listening to the waves crash across the street (there’s a storm a’brewin) trying to forget about student teaching and all my work for a day or two. Oh yeah…and trying to destress over my INTERVIEW WITH GUILFORD COUNTY ON MONDAY!!! I have a screening interview set up at the county office on Monday, which also happens to be my birthday.  Once I “pass” (they score your responses) I am allowed to interview with principles in the county, so really this interview is just a formality. I am very excited to get this job process rolling, but I am also extremely nervous. I have the worst nerves when it comes to these things. For the job fair I had to wake up three hours in advance just so I could have time to calm myself down before going.  But for right now, I am enjoying the sea air and trying to forget about my life at home just for a little while.  There’s nothing like being at our second row cottage with my two dogs.

I have decided to live a more healthy life. I have been attempting to do this since junior year when I realized…omg my high school body is gone and I can’t eat Chik–fil-a and the pies from the cafeteria every day.  And while I made valiant efforts along the way, my efforts dwindled more and more as I advanced through the Blocks.  At first I was just exercising a lot, then it was less exercise but more healthy foods, and by the end of Block 2 I had just given up. But I now realize I have to change everything. I have to change how I eat, how I exercise, how I use my spare time, and how I snack.  I have been eating much healthier lately. Mostly I just realized food is supposed to go bad, it’s not supposed to sit in your pantry for six months and still be good, so I’ve been trying to get everything I eat out of the fridge. This has made a big difference in my moods and energy. I also have been trying to increase my fiber and protein intake.  But besides eating healthy I have been trying to find an enjoyable way to exercise. I have tried walking the dogs, running, and a mix between the two. I am just not a runner, I don’t have their mindset, and I can’t commit to that lifestyle. So…..I pulled my bike out from the garage and have been going for rides. And I love it! I forgot how fun it is and how great the wind feels against your face when you’re going down hill. I love pushing myself and I love how my thighs burn when I get off the bike. The only issue I’m having is my seat is so uncomfortable!!! Dr. Frye, any suggestions?? I am really enjoying this new healthy lifestyle. I won’t say it’s easy but the benefits are so much more rewarding than the taste of a Twix bar!

One last thought….graduation is a little more than a month away! I am so thrilled! Looking for jobs will be exhausting and exciting and I wish all my teaching friends the best of luck in their job search!

Granny

That’s what I feel like…a granny. Wake up at 6, in bed by 8:30…wow this is the life!! No complaints, I’m just still adjusting.

I have been doing two of our guided reading groups, the below grade level and on-grade level groups, for about four weeks now and I am really in the swing of things. My first group reads a picture book every week and this past week we read Maggie and the Pirate by Ezra Jack Keats. We even made “Wanted” posters about the pirate! That was really fun to see their creativity shine through, and to translate a project from an App classroom to my classroom. My other group has been reading You can’t Eat your Chicken Pox, Amber Brown. We have (most of us, at least) just finished chapter eight and found out Amber just got the chicken pox in London. I’ve had a lot of fun with this selection so far.  I’m really just asking all kinds of questions/having them do all kinds of activities to find out what works best.  They’ve created packing lists of what they would take to London, they’ve written stories about what would happen if they took a flight to London and how they’d feel, they’ve used atlases maps to learn about the stops in Amber’s trip and read a story about England, and they are in the process of creating a postcard from Amber’s point of view to send to her  mom back at home describing her trip so far. I’m really having fun with this book!

On another note, this week my students worked on stories about a leprechaun they created in centers. The hook was “There once was a leprechaun named…”. The best story I got was about a leprechaun rock star. Every time the leprechaun rocked out his pot filled with gold and with St. Patrick’s Day coming up, he needed a full pot. The story was very cute and very very creative! I love reading my students’ writing and seeing how creative they are!

Life is too short

Two Christmases ago one of my close friends died.  It was the first time I had experienced death in my adult life and the first time someone my age died.  It was something that was so hard to deal with mostly because it was a  complete shock and out of the blue.  Today I found out that someone I graduated high school with and played in band with for four years, died yesterday in a motorcycle accident.  Even though we weren’t close friends and we actually fought a lot (he was my best friends boyfriend at the time, and we didn’t like each other) it is still so sad to hear.  I will never understand how it is “fair” for people who are full of life and so young to have their lives cut short.  I can only imagine the grief the two mothers of my friends will deal with the rest of their lives.  Hearing that Jorge died has put me in such a reflective mood today.  Life is so short, we barely get enough time as it is, it seems unfair his life was cut short.  It really makes you think, Am I making the most of my life? Are the people I surround myself with the ones I love? Should I maybe call my grandmother and tell her I love her? It really makes you count your blessings.  Rest in peace, Jorge, there will be no one else like you. To everyone else: please watch out for motorcycles on the road. One glance can save a life, whether it be yours or someone else’s.

Seniors in WGHS Band