Dreaming of Wishing Wells

Here are some pictures from the Kindergarten Graduation ceremony this week. The good pictures were taken by James on his nice camera. The not as good ones are from my camera, which I think I had on a weird setting. All in all, it was tons of fun, even with two kids crying most of the way through, which if you think about it was a quarter of my class. The last morning was pretty fun too. I'm still working on packing up my classroom. It's a big job. I'm throwing away a lot because I don't have room to store it, but if I end up with my own classroom again, I'm probably going to wish I still had some of this stuff. I'm not looking forward to handing in my classroom key, because my classroom has been like my second home here in Wilmington, and I'm going to miss it! I liked being able to go there on the weekends and eat my lunch and listen to music while I did my lesson plans. So I think I'll keep my key until someone realizes I need to turn it in!

Well, today was the last day of school. Dismissal was at 11:30 today, and my last student left just about 45 minutes ago. It definitely hasn't sunk in yet, but I'm sure it will at some point. I'm not sure if it'll happen gradually or all of a sudden. Graduation last night was a big success and I think helped me and the students to get some closure. It turned into a pretty big, over the top thing, and for a while I was really wondering if trying to do this was a stupid move on my part. Thankfully, Justin's church, Wilmington City Vineyard Church , volunteered to provide refreshments and help with setup and cleanup. They were a huge help, and it made everything way nicer than if I had just done it myself. I was just planning on throwing a pack of cookies and some juice on a table, but they had tablecloths and healthy snacks and got me folding chairs and all sorts of helpful stuff. I'd say there were about 60 people there, plus my 8 students and the volunteers from...

I watched the finale of Oprah yesterday. It's hard to believe the Oprah show is over. Somewhat interesting fact: the show premiered three months after I was born. No, the end of Oprah is not the ending I was referring to in the title of my blog post, but I'll get to school stuff in a minute. I made it to the gym right at 4:00 and got an elliptical right in front of the TV that shows Oprah and actually did 60 minutes of cardio so I could watch the whole show. I think that might be a workout strategy for the summer...find some good viewing and schedule my gym time around it. Anyway, I can see why there's a book called The Gospel According to Oprah . This last show definitely indoctrinated viewers in Oprah's personal gospel, which I found very interesting. She started off with a whole segment about finding your calling, which I pretty much completely agreed with, but then got into some stuff about the energy we give off and karma type stuff that I wasn't agreeing with ...

Oh man. This month is so busy. Here are a few pictures of what I've been up to, including taking my class to see two plays at the Dupont Theater, going to Border Cafe for a lovely grad school celebration dinner organized by Kristin, fingerpainting (why do I do that to myself?), acting out the Good Samaritan, visiting Brittany and baby Khloe, generally having fun and goofing around with my students, taking two girls to Chick Fil A for Veggie Tales night (they got free meals if they wore costumes!), and going to the Enchanted Woods and Winterthur Gardens. Wow! And it's only half done. I also wrote a blog post for the Urban Promise website which you can read here . Big things yet to come in May include road tripping out to Grove City and Pittsburgh for Jenn and Albert's wedding and to hang out with Cassandra, the Philadelphia Zoo field trip which I'm in charge of planning, field day, spirit week, and probably lots more.

I have once again neglected my blog for a while. Not sure why I didn't write at all over spring break. I guess I was too busy reading Hunger Games (I'm on the third one now and can't put it down. I even brought it to school and snuck in a few pages while my class did independent reading) and consignment shopping. What I really should have been doing was my summer curriculum, which is still not completely written. So I have to finish this weekend. Boo. I guess the biggest news is that I've officially chose a grad school. I'll be going to University of Delaware and getting a master's in Human Development and Family Studies with a concentration in Early Childhood Education. Yay! And I got a full assistantship. Yay yay! But then I got offered a second assistantship opportunity and now I have to choose between them. So that's not so great. I didn't really know that was an option, and I had been waiting so long to hear from the department about funding that I...

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 ...