After An Educator's Journey
Out of the classroom & into the universe
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Once upon a time, I taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders. Now I’m retired and working on new ventures.
Tag: classroom
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I have a love-hate relationship with the first week of school. I love it because it is a time for a fresh start, a do-over; everything about the start of the year is new and exciting. And to be honest, after 10 weeks away from teaching, I miss it…. even the most annoying of personalities…
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Hours put in since the last post: 6+ Yesterday I met with our Team’s new Special Education Teacher, Melissa. I don’t know about Melissa, but I am definitely feeling the overwhelming panic that encompasses the start of a new year. The weird dreams have already begun. It will be good to get back to school…
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Time 4.5 hours After cleaning and arranging the large items in my classroom, it is time to start prepping for the students’ arrival. I purchased an additional 10 cardboard magazine files to be used as book boxes. That makes a total of 24. I am prepping for 24 because that, in theory, is the maximum…
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Time Spent: 4 hours This morning I loaded up the Jetta with our new shop vac — more power! — and began cleaning up the dust from the floor replacement. Here’s what was all over every surface, nook, and cranny of my classroom (even behind closed cupboards – this stuff goes everywhere). Cleanup meant first…
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I find that the longer I am a teacher, the more I am blown away by the intelligence and thoughtfulness of colleagues across the US. Here is a blog I recently came upon Two Writing Teachers. Even though the two bloggers teach grade levels higher than my current teaching assignment, the process and their craft…
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This morning, I finished my duties for 2008-2009 by taking a qualifying exam for MELA-O administrators. I have to wonder why I bothered….. the MELA-O qualifying test requires that I determine where a LEP student’s language acquisition lands when compared to Native English speakers of the same grade level. Here’s the catch: I am certified…
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Yesterday, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Scholastic Warehouse Sale. Armed with a listing of my newly reorganized Leveled Library inventory, I forced myself away from the picture books and materials more suitable to second grade independent readers in order to focus on increasing nonfiction texts. 20 year old buying habits are not easy…
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The calendar may be telling me that we “only” have 36 school days left, but this week we celebrated a new year — at least a new year as far as our classroom library is concerned. The book baskets have been labeled and, when needed there are level reminders on the baskets. On Monday, we…
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This week I spent most of a “day off” in school sorting through the books that had been labeled and logged and organizing them into color coded baskets – red for fiction, green for nonfiction, blue for poetry and yellow for special collections. Using both the small nesting baskets from Really Good Stuff and the…
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Two disasters – or near disasters – this week: First, I’ve been updating the Excel database file that I copied onto my school computer (a MAC). That seems like a reasonable thing to do when adding books that got missed on the first pass through a book box. I also have been bolding the titles…
After An Educator's Journey 