Why visit (in)courage?

Most days I get so excited about the successes at school. I love sharing with anyone who will listen about how I was able to do something awesome that day with my class. Other days, it's not so easy. Teaching is challenging, you have students, parents, administrators (who rock at my school!), coworkers, curriculum, standards, and everyone else jumping in to say what needs to happen.

A few years ago I was looking for some working mom encouragement. Balancing everything is hard and sometimes you feel like no matter what you do, someone is being neglected. My sister started telling me about (in)courage.  A group of women who support each other via social media. She was a part of it for a long time before I jumped in. I was hesitant, I'll admit. How was I going to have time to discuss with a group online if I was already stressed in 'real' life? Once I joined the working mom's group I realized that this was just the boost I needed. I could check in on the Facebook group as frequently or infrequently as I wanted. I could read stories from women like me seeking advice, sharing humorous stories, or offering something that worked for them. I felt more grounded. I knew this was a good place to be.

God opened a huge door last year by allowing me to team up with the amazing Amy to co-lead our new group. We started a group for teachers (http://www.incourage.me/incouraging-teachers) because we have a heart to encourage those like us! Our conversations on the page aren't always the deepest but we support each other. I know some wonderful teachers all around the country now and am inspired by what they do in their classrooms/lives every day.

This session Amy and I are looking forward to a pretty cool structure. That way, if you can only pop in every now and then like I did in my first group, you should still be able to come away with some encouragement. The game plan right now is: Monday praise/prayer requests, Wednesday sharing (maybe a Pinterest board will be shared, who knows!), Friday fun (blog posts, articles, silly stuff, etc). Our Facebook group is closed so anything that is shared remains private, that way our teachers have a safe place to ask for advice, connect, and renew.

Interested in joining? Check out http://www.incourage.me/ to learn more about the group of awesome women (my sister Crystal Stine is a major part of the group now!). Then move over to the Community Groups page http://www.incourage.me/community to see what groups might jump out at you. I won't be offended if you choose another group, I'm just happy you found someplace to call home. Registration opens to the public on Monday January 27th. Groups fill up quickly so jump in if you want to give it a shot. I pray that you'll find a group that encourages you in the way you need it most right now in this season of your life. Happy Sunday!

Youth Group - a different kind of teaching, and Read Aloud Day!

This morning marks the kick off to my church's new Youth Group program. I'm fortunate enough to be able to use my teaching talents to participate as the coordinator and assist a great group of teachers. We are using Lifeway's The Gospel Project curriculum and I think it will be really good. 

Isn't it funny though, that when you go to teach something that isn't in your classroom, or is in front of a different group of people, how nervous we get? I can't believe how much I've worried, planned, changed, and prepared for this lesson today. Takes me back to being a first year teacher! I'll be honest, I don't miss that feeling. 

In addition to writing the lesson plans for the teachers each week, I also decided to do a bit of decorating in the room that we will be using. Take a look! The theme comes from a kit I picked up at Office Depot. I think it is just enough color for the small space!

Those ugly brown bars got some cute border paper the other day too!

While I was planning for that this morning I stumbled across World Read Aloud Day! Did you know that it's coming up on Wednesday March 5th? So, what does a proactive teacher do when she knows how busy her favorite readers are? Yep, sends out early morning emails to her favorite principal, librarian, superintendent, and coach (Kris if you are reading this, look for that email soon hehe). 

Here is a link if you want more information about it. I want to surprise the students with a full out read aloud day. We'll have some special surprise readers lined up, as well as a homework assignment to bring in their favorite picture book for that day. We'll get into groups and read to each other our favorite stories! I can't wait. They offer this great classroom kit and I'm going to send home the statistic page. What motivation to read to your children! Sign up, it's a good time.

http://litworld.org/storage/litworldwrad2014classroomkit.pdf

It's snowing here today, wherever you are, enjoy your Sunday! And if you can, try to do something for you today. Recharge, because tomorrow we start again! Happy teaching :)

RA, Planning, and Weekend Work

*Yawn* 

If you are reading this as a first year teacher, or a pre-service teacher, I hate to break it to you but weekends just won't be the same...ever. Most weekends I do actually get to sleep in (granted my daughter will be 4 at the end of the month so that is all relative) but not today. Today is a morning of coaching responsibility which will require getting approx. 18 sleepy students, 1 awesome co-coach, and a school bus to a Math League meet that is about an hour away. 

We do have a lot of fun on these trips, I just really, really want to be in bed (it's currently 6:30am as I type this). I'll update once we get our results. We have a young team and they are doing a great job learning the program. We've managed to hold our own and I'm really quite proud of them. If you are interested in seeing more about Math League, we using the IMLEM model and are quite pleased with it. Check it out here: http://www.imlem.org/

In addition to that, as most teachers are doing at this point in the year, I'm starting to plan out what my curriculum is going to be looking like in the spring. I'm not the teacher who does the same thing every year. Honestly I can't think of one year that was exactly the same as any other. And I love that! 

So far I've already made an addition to my writing curriculum with our daily journals. The students love them. They were able to bring in their own journals and we've been doing some free writing. A few ideas I'm going to modify from Pinterest:

 

I was given the opportunity on Monday to present Reading Apprenticeship to our interns along with some fantastic colleagues of mine. Good stuff happening there. I think my intern will be using Reading Apprenticeship as his Inquiry Project for the spring and I am looking forward to sharing some ideas that he will be using. 

I am looking forward to planning some reading stations to go along with that! My team is also planning to celebrate MLK day (we have school that day), Chinese New Year (January 31st), and Valentine's Day (we do Affirmations to build positive community). I can't wait to share some pictures of those days soon.

Finally, for those of you who might be like me, completely eager to do something for yourself but lacking the time. I wanted to share a pin that I found really interesting. I love going to the gym but getting up early is challenging, especially if you've been up late grading or sending emails. This seems doable and I want to give it a shot. I'll be honest, I haven't tried it, I'm not endorsing it, I just thought it looked like something that most of us could do. Happy Saturday everyone, and if you are reading this much later in the day...good for you!

Happy New Year!

My goal during our winter break was to blog. Right. Well, now that I have failed miserably at getting on my computer I can honestly say that I don't mind. Yes, I enjoy blogging and writing about my class. I also enjoy writing a little more now than I used to. But seriously, walking away from my computer and putting up my 'out of town' auto response in my email was fantastic!

Looking ahead to the next half of the school year I have a few new things I'm going to try. I have a site set up, and approved through my district, on kidblog.com. I'm looking forward to being able to teach students the joys of writing publicly (I'm hoping that it will improve some of the grammar issues if they know others will be reading and responding to their work).

It's a really easy site to set up and the teacher controls are easy to use. I'm also looking at ways to incorporate journaling into writing class. Like, crazy doodling, lists, high/lows, all over, type journaling. I want my students to be able to express themselves in less structured ways so that we can use that format to make some of our more tedious tasks (like comparing and analyzing poetry) more enjoyable. I got some ideas on Pinterest already. Feel free to check out my Classroom Ideas board: http://www.pinterest.com/leekm2006/classroom-ideas/.

This one is probably my favorite version so far:

http://hopewallace.com/gallery/ringed

I'll post pictures of mine soon. I'm wanted to share with my students how fun, messy, and creative this could be. I'd love ideas on how to make this work for curriculum areas!

And finally, as I prepare to go off for an end of the year hair cut and pop by my classroom to build some book shelves, I want to wish you all a Happy New Year. Please be safe, read a good book, and make for yourself a goal that will sustain you through the next few months of teaching. 

Math Journals and Parent Conferences

Over the years I have gotten slightly more comfortable with parent conferences. And by slightly I mean, well, seriously a small amount. I am so much more comfortable conversing with my sixth graders. I have nightmares about parents coming in and yelling at me, even though they have been mostly calm since the first day of school. I'm sure everything will go well, at the middle level they are so concerned about their children making friends that we can use the conference time to reassure and comfort. My intern and my advisory partner will be there to help, which will be wonderful to have another set of eyes and ears in case I miss something.

In order to prepare for conferences our students create goals. While they do not attend the conference, we do like to share their goals with their families. Most of the time everyone agrees on what has to be worked on. I also like to sit and type up some strengths, concerns, and/or goals for the children based on our observations in the classroom. With 15 minutes to meet each parent it certainly goes fast. I'll keep you posted on how they go. If you have conferences coming up soon, either as the teacher or the parent, please be kind :)

My projects today, I think, are a distraction from the above. I am loving, and I mean LOVING doing the math journals and stations with my students. Being a type-A planner I have math journals and standards matched up until the end of October. Here are the next two that we are going to be working on (again, Runde's Room was my resource for all of these ideas).

Equivalent Fractions

The week of Halloween - they will use them to explain fraction operations.

Happy weekend everyone! I hope you have time to do what you want, even if that means sitting and coloring math journals :) Let me know if you have questions about anything you see.

Feeling Like Fall!

Sometimes I absolutely love warm weather. Mostly at the end of the year, when Spring is right around the corner. Right now, I prefer my weather to feel like Fall. It's October people  (just sayin'). My motivation for this post is two fold. One, I think it'll make you laugh. Seriously, how can a day go like mine did. And two, if teachers can't laugh at themselves we'd all go crazy.

No idea where this is...but I want to be there!

Let's start with the fact that it's Monday. There, I said it. Monday. 2:30 in the morning and my dear sweet daughter was freaking out about the wind. It was really windy. However, I did not necessarily see the need for the wind to wake up said child. Regardless, I got her back to sleep and left the door cracked open more than I normally would because I promised to 'be right back.' Oh, don't give me that..you know you would do it to (it was 3am remember!).

Cut to a few short hours later and we have another wake up. This time..a cat. Yep, because I was 'that mom' I left the door open just far enough that our one cat saw the opportunity and snuck in. Mind you, this is OVER a baby gate that we keep in the doorway. She then proceeded to jump up in bed with my dear daughter (and when I say up I mean UP, it's a mini loft) thus waking her up in a terrified state.

Sooo cute! Not my cat. Just sayin'

Around this time I should have been heading in to the gym but, well, I was tired! So I got ready for work while the kiddo snuggled in bed with the hubs and watched Dora on my Amazon Prime app (if you don't have it, get it!). Got the hubs lunch packed, my coffee made, kiddo dressed and was out the door. But, I just happened to glance at my planbook and saw that I had forgotten to get the candy bars that I needed for my lesson in social studies today.

No problem, I had plenty of time! I drive to the store and pull in, as the gas light comes on in the car. I run in, grab my candy and wait for the lovely older woman at the checkout to stop her 50th sneeze so she can ring me up. I run to the car, head to the closest gas station (which I despise going to) and realize that half the pumps are out of order. After doing about a million k-turns I make in and fill up. At this point I had to text my intern to tell him how late I was running, did I mention we were supposed to meet to check in for the week?

After following 3 of the slowest trucks in the world, I made it to school with 8 minutes to spare. Ack! Got settled and realized that my room was hot. I mean hot. Writing was normal (thank goodness) because I told my students of my morning and I think they felt sorry for me. Seriously. And at this point the temperature in my room was so muggy my hair started to frizz. So I probably looked crazy too. Did I mention that it got so dark outside that we thought the world was ending? And then the rain came. Sixth graders inside, on a Monday, because of rain. Sigh.

And to top it off, I had a 'pop in' visit by my awesome principal and curriculum administrator during my first day of math stations. Which just happened to be a 10 minute catch up involving my students being told to do 'yoga' if they needed to read the upside down words on the screen because I just couldn't keep turning it.

Fortunately my day got more steady after that point. And my AC started working eventually which helped too. But man, I hope my Tuesday goes so much better than my Monday. Luckily, I realize it could have been so much worse, and I'm grateful for my amazing intern, patient students, and awesome administration who overlooked the frazzled teacher and focused on the lesson at hand. May all of your Tuesdays be exactly what you need. Happy teaching!

Took this one myself during our recent trip to Greenwood Furnace!

Where did September go?

Oh man. You know those 'blink and you miss it' moments? September was one of those for me. I can't believe that I didn't sit down and blog at all. I know how you all feel, back to school month is generally one of the most stressful. Parents and students alike are finding their way, communication is at an all time high (for the good and bad) and the demands of administration are often adding to what we already have on our plates. But..we survived! A few highlights of my September:
Kicking off our (in)courage group for teachers. Our community is small but supportive and I am blessed to be a part of it.

• First field trip - hello Greenwood Furnace! 
• Starting my mentor course via PSU - they offer a once a week class to new mentors to assist in training our interns, it has been amazing
• Getting to know my students as learners

It wasn't all good, never can be, but overall I finally feel that we are settling in to our routine. I'm excited to share two lessons/activities with you that we are working through right now. The first is a lesson that supports the CCSS argument writing. We did a lesson on cats vs. dogs to introduce the language of claim, evidence, reasoning. It was so much fun! Here are some images from that lesson:

Claim, Evidence, and Reasoning Vocabulary based on Common Core definitions

I started by telling the class how much I LOVED my cats, and that we should all write about how awesome they are. I gave them 'evidence' to support my claim. And wouldn't you know...none of them agreed with me! 

Then they had time to work as tables to 'fix' my claim. These are some examples. We decided as a class to choose the opinion statement to work on the next day. 

Our final product, we worked together to create supporting evidence for our new claim. Finally we wrapped it all up in the reasoning statement. We will continue to use this language in all of our subjects. 

The second is that my intern and I are starting interactive math journals with our students. I picked up the amazing pack from teacherspayteachers.com from RundesRoom. If you haven't visited her website please go now. She's outstanding.

If you need ideas for math journals, go buy this now! Don't wait!

We started by modeling with the students our stations. There will be 3, and we are only doing them on Monday and Friday to start. Monday stations will be: guided teaching with me, IXL for independent work (great site if you need a math site for students!), and journaling with a small group and a student instructor from my homeroom. Friday stations will be: guided teaching with me, additional practice with my intern, and the journaling station to complete entries for an independent station. We set up our notebooks last Friday, modeled moving around the room, modeled what it sounds like...and now I just have to squish A LOT in the first day (doesn't that always happen!).

If you are in need of any teaching ideas, feel free to hop over to Pinterest and follow my Classroom Ideas page. Most of my pins are for 6th graders (or can be adapted). I pinned RundesRoom's interactive journal packet on there if you want to check it out. It is completely worth the investment.

And finally, with October starting, I hope that you have settled in and feel slightly more in control than you did in September. If you have parent conferences coming up, like I do, I wish you the very best. May all of your parents come in with open minds and a willingness to work together in the best interest of the student. I'll be back soon (I promise to post more than once a month!). Happy teaching!