Dreaming of Wishing Wells

April 15th, my decision deadline for choosing a grad school, has come and gone, still with no decision. I got an extension until May 1st from Vanderbilt and am still waiting to hear from Delaware about funding. I really, really hope I hear something this week. My week at school was pretty good. Tuesday morning I had a sub so I could start doing DIBELS testing for the school. I am so tired of DIBELS. I feel likes it's all I've been doing lately! Well, I was excited to have a sub and to play reading specialist for the day. I did the testing in the "art room," which is really the old 2nd grade classroom that has basically become another storage place for junk. When they thought they were going to use it for art, they painted the walls an obnoxiously bright yellow. I don't know what exactly started it, but I got a migraine within an hour of being in that room. I blame the walls. It also could have been that I was staring at tiny numbers all morning and listening to ki...

I had the privilege of taking two boys from my class to Red Robin this week. They both worked hard to earn Student of the Month, plus Urban Promise was doing a fundraiser night at the restaurant. So it worked out all around. The boys were so excited in the car that they could hardly contain themselves. Yes, I know the boy on the bottom doesn't look especially excited. But I promise he was. At the restaurant we colored kid's menus and talked to the waitress and they told me all sorts of things their parents probably don't want me to know. Plus one of the boys is scared of the Statue of Liberty (because of Ghostbusters), and there was a Statue of Liberty replica in the restaurant kept freaking him out. This kid is also terrified of mannequins. And anytime I change my appearance. We had a great time, and it was fun to hear them talking about it the next morning. (Hey, remember that time Miss Seefeldt took us to Red Robin?) And neither of them ate much, so I got to take their ...

There's been lots going on lately, and my blog has gotten kind of neglected in the busyness. But I am back with some highlights from the past few busy weeks. So here we go... 1. I got into all the grad schools I applied to and now am waiting to hear about financial aid. I'm really hoping I get some information this week, because April 15th (when I have to let schools know my decision) is getting closer and closer. It seems like the more information I get from schools, the more complicated things get. I'm getting partial scholarships and ideas about campus jobs I could apply for, and trying to figure out what each school would actually cost is not proving to be easy. 2. Kaitlin came to visit! It was so great to see her and fun to have her at school for a couple days. We went to some of our favorite places, including the park, Five Guys, Target (twice), and Border Cafe. I know her former students and everyone at Urban Promise loved seeing her too. I'm hoping I'll be a...

It was a busy week, plus there were five whole days of school in a row, so it wore me out! We celebrated our 100th day of school and Dr. Seuss' birthday and had a week's worth of mystery readers. Here are some pictures from the festivities. And we made Oobleck too, which I can't believe I didn't get any pictures of. Well, I guess it's hard to take pictures when your hands and arms are covered in green slime. You'll just have to picture it yourself. When I look at all these pictures, I don't feel so bad about being tired this weekend!

Here are some pictures of the latest happenings in kindergarten: Decorating cookies on Valentine's Day A group of volunteers came and did a fun reading event for my class last week. They donated over 100 paperback books to the school, and each kid got to take a few home. I took two girls who'd gotten Student of the Month out on Saturday morning. We went to Target, where they were having a story time for Dr. Seuss' birthday. The girls got balloons and goody bags, and they enjoyed it. But I think they enjoyed perusing the toy section more. We had fun pressing buttons on all the interactive displays. And they were so good...they didn't even ask for anything. Then we had some time to kill until it was late enough for lunch, so I took them to Dollar Tree and let them pick something out. One of the girls suggested we get a baby card for Justin and Barbara. Justin works at Urban Promise, and they had a baby on Friday. I thought that was very thoughtful! Eventually we went to M...

Just coming off a four day weekend...well, Friday was an inservice day, so I guess it was a three day weekend. I spent it with my parents in Camp Hill which was fun and relaxing, and then yesterday afternoon I begrudgingly drove back to Delaware. But as an act of rebellion (even though no one else cares except me, so rebellion's probably not the right word) I didn't go in to school to finish my lesson plans. Take that, lesson plans. Instead I watched a very good French movie called The Chorus about a boarding school for troubled boys and an inspirational teacher who starts a choir. As my roommate noted, I'm a sucker for redemption stories about troubled kids, which you could probably figure out by looking at my career choice. Anyway, my night got even better when I saw there was an official winter storm warning for overnight. After a pretty sleepless night that involved checking my phone repeatedly to see if we had a delay, at 6:00 I got the text that school was canceled! ...

I sat down to work on my portion of the summer camp curriculum but decided I'd rather write in my blog instead. I also didn't go in to school to do stuff for next week, so I'll have to do that tomorrow. I like this time of year at school. It's always fun celebrating Valentine's Day, the 100th day, and Dr. Seuss' birthday. It definitely takes more work in the planning department though. I had a tiring week at school getting back into the swing of things after recruiting. My new student continued to terrorize me Monday and Tuesday. I felt like banging my head against the wall because I wasn't really able to teach anything well to the rest of the class while he was carrying on. Wednesday started out similarly, but then he got really out of control. When the class went to art, I took him to our principal and told her what was going on. She called his parents, and in the meantime he threw a complete tantrum and started tearing apart her office and had to be restr...