Dreaming of Wishing Wells

I just finished my lesson plans through the end of the year!! Also, I just worked on making a class book for over an hour and then accidentally saved over it. But let's focus on the positive. Happy Memorial Day, everyone. No cookouts for me this year...just lesson planning, quilting, and working out. And I'm about to go for a walk in the park. I think if every weekend were a three-day weekend, I would be a really relaxed and happy person. So just 6.5 more days of school. I'll get zero breaks from my students (art, music, and gym are done; so is Friday lunch where the interns eat with our classes), so I'll just have to take a deep breath and dive in to this last week and a half. Ready...go. See you when it's summer.

I haven't been too faithful about writing in my blog lately. Some of my excuses include crazy kindergartners sucking away my energy, an exhausting field trip to the Philadelphia Zoo, visitors at our apartment this weekend, the stressful search for a car, Kaitlin's bachelorette party, the fun but emotionally exhausting end of the year party for Urban Promise staff at Rob's, and the finale of Lost. Yes, it is the busy time of year. This week I have my last 3 days of Reading Assist training. Tomorrow is field day at school, and I'll miss it. At first I was kind of excited, because last year the kids were cranky and bad sports, but now I'm kind of sad. It's our last field trip of the year, and I'll miss seeing them play games and taking pictures. But it's supposed to be 93 degrees, so I'm happy to be missing 4 hours in the sun. But I would probably get a nice start to a summer tan...as you can see, I am conflicted. Our field trip to the zoo went pretty w...

This week I missed two days of school for the beginning of the 5 day training I'm attending about the Reading Assist (RAPS) program. It's for teachers in the Brandywine school district, but they also invited one person from every private school that's in their district's boundaries. It was at a nearby high school, and IT WAS SO FUN!!!!!!!!!! Yes, that's right. It was very fun. I was like a kid in a candy shop....talking about phonological and orthographic processes and debating how many phonemes are in the words pneumonia and folk . Any guesses? Huh? (I think it was 7 and 3.) Plus we started half an hour late, got a 20 minute morning break, an hour and a half lunch break, lots of candy, AND we got to leave 45 minutes early. Man. I got to experience what it was like not to feel exhausted at the end of a weekday. I was (of course) feeling kind of anxious going into it...I didn't really know how to get there, I was scared I was going to be late, I had trouble wor...

This week I missed my first of six days I'll be out of school in Monday for professional development stuff. Thursday, the Pre-K teacher and I went to the annual Inclusion Conference for Delaware in Dover. It was very good. I think it was mostly special education teachers, but there were over 600 people there. We don't formally do inclusion, but I'd say we have lots of students who would likely have a label of some sort in the public schools, and we educate them all in the regular classroom. So in some ways we do inclusion but without any of the supports or training. I was hoping to pick up on some tips for helping these students succeed behaviorally and academically in the regular classroom that we could actually use...so not things that involve a speech therapist or an occupational therapist or anything like that that we don't have. There was a two hour keynote speaker in the morning (preceded by breakfast foods...score!). She was an advocate for inclusion and a great ...

This week was full of support letter assembling and mailing and quilt making. And finishing Season 3 of the Wire! I was pretty worn out by the time Friday rolled around. I was in such a hurry and so tired doing my support letters, I sent out a few without stamps. Oops...that's a little embarrassing. The highlight of my week (which was overall fairly good) was definitely Thursday morning. Music class had been canceled, so I had told my class I'd bring my guitar. The night before I looked up chords to lots of songs we sing in class. We had a lot of fun singing the songs, and they sounded like a choir of little angels. Seriously. They sounded so good. We sang again in the afternoon, and at that point, the novelty had kind of worn off, so their singing was less enthusiastic. I wish I had recorded them singing in the morning. It gave me chills. Plus when I wasn't messing up on the guitar, I didn't sound too bad! I also loved the chance to teach them a bunch of different thin...

I'm finally giving my sewing machine some use. One of the things I was looking forward to about having an apartment was being able to bring my sewing machine (which I couldn't do in the staff house) and have space to sew. And after making two pillows when I first moved in, the poor thing has lived in its case under my desk for months and months. But no longer. I am hard at work at a quilt top that is looking good so far. I will do a real post soon, but I just wanted to share a funny/cute quote from one of my students. Good old Jake (prone to angry meltdowns and brutal honesty) was praying this morning during our circle time. He said, "God, I pray for Chile and Haiti and the earthquakes. And God, I don't know why you made earthquakes. I'm not trying to be mean to you. But I just don't know why you did that." Tiring week at school so far...art class was canceled today and music is canceled Thursday. Luckily it was my week to have a lunch break today (I get o...

...so I will write in my blog. I am about to go to lunch with my good friend and future apartment-mate Bethany. I am excited that she is going to move in here! But that means first Kaitlin is going to move out, which is sad. Things will definitely be different around here next year! I apologize for the depressing-ness of my last entry. The rest of my week was not a disaster. But Thursday morning one of my students (I'll call him Jake) had a total meltdown. I walked my class to music and some of them were having problems in line. So we turned around and walked back a little bit and did it again. I said something along the lines of if they still had problems in line they would need to practice with me at the beginning of recess. Jake was purposely stepping on the feet of the girl in front of him. I didn't single him out since multiple children were having issues. He got very upset when I made the class walk back and do it again. Then he stepped on the girl's feet again. I sti...