Teacher Week 2013! Meet The Teacher

1.  This is my 11th year teaching and my tenth in my current school district.  I have taught both elementary and middle school special ed. I have had students in Kindergarten-8th grade.

2.  I taught at the same school I went to kindergarten at for my first job.  It is a huge school district and when I was given a choice of three schools to teach at I knew it would be an experience to go back. It is strange how different everything is when you are an adult :-).  There was only one teacher that I remember being there and she was the teacher of the other kindergarten section.

3. I went to Catholic schools for 16 years, but I am not Catholic.  It was an awesome experience looking back at the community feeling and service opportunities I had. I had 2 ex nuns while in school one at the public school I went to for kindergarten and another in 4th grade. Some of my favorite teachers and the ones who had a big impact on me were nuns.

4.  A few years ago I feel in love with running.  I have been on activity restriction all summer and I miss it so much!  I was hoping to be back to it after my appointment this morning, but the doctor wants me to stick to walking.  I am anxious and hopeful I will be able to get back out there again.  I have ran 30+ 5ks, completed 7 or so Triatholns, and ran 19 half marathons.

5.  I met my wonderful husband of 7 years while in high school.  We went to high schools in different states though :-).  We will have been dating 15 years this August.  We met online.

6. I have a slight obsession with office supplies.  I have more pens, markers, post it notes then anyone could ever possibly need.  I was working to organize them this afternoon and realized I really should not be doing anymore back to school shopping :-).

7. I coach color guard for a local high school.  I have been working with the color guard at my school district's rival school for 7 years.  It is a lot of fun because my husband oversees marching and maneuvering so we are able to spend many hours together.

8. I am a book worm.  I have read tons of books this summer for fun, for professional development, and for my classroom.  I love my Kindle. I did not know if I would like it or not, but having so many books to choose from and never being without a book is wonderful.

9.  I love to scrapbook and be crafty. I have a great group of friends that I am able to get away with a few times a year to scrapbook with.  I am a little sad that I have been on bed rest so much this summer that I do not have much to scrap.  I guess I will have to keep catching up on my old trips and fun activities.

10.  I am a geek.  I love technology and everything about it!  It is not uncommon for me to have my iphone, mac book, and Kindle out.  I also sometimes have my iPad, Chromebook, and laptop from my classroom as well.  I am involved in assistive technology for my students.  Last year I took a risk and became a Digital Learning Coach for my building and I love it!  Once a month or so I help other teachers to integrate technology in their classrooms.  I am hoping to present for the first time outside of my school district this winter!

Best From the Midwest Blog Hop!

Last week a group of educators got together to talk blogging!  These educators were from Minnesota and our neighbor to the east, Wisconsin.  I was unable to attend, but I am excited to be a part of the blog hop!

A great part of this blog hop is all of the freebies!  Each stop will give you the chance to pick up a new item!

My give away is ideas for using the site : Wonderopolis!  It includes lesson plans and 2 forms for accompanying lesson ideas.  If you have any feedback I would love to hear it!  Click the graphic to access:

For my freebie I am giving away a document I created to help plan along with your special education teachers for the students you share.  I am going to use this template when meeting with my teams this year to better plan for and support my students.

To access visit this link: Peek at the Week

Your next stop on the hop is to:  Carolyn@ Wise Owl Factory .  She is giving away a Bossy R Word Sort Activity!

Each of the blogs are also offering up a product from their TPT store to one winner,  it is not just one product, but one of their best sellers!  To enter use the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Here are what others are offering:

Optimum Organization

Sponsored by Kristin and Elizabeth

This week I have spent a lot of time thinking about how to organize my books.  I love books and I am constantly looking for more to add to my classroom collection. I want my books to be organized and easy to access.  Right now they are organized by Lexile.  My students don't always look for books by Lexile, but it lets me easily recommend books.  The books are color coded to Lexile bands, so I can say hey you should pick out a white dot book.  This helps the kids not pick things to hard or to easy.  This year I am moving classrooms, so it has given me an excuse to see if there are better ways to organize it.

Here are is a before picutre:

I have two bookshelves this sizes filled with books, another bookshelf with nonfiction reads, and a bookshelf where I keep brand new books and books that I have purchased specially.  I am thinking this year of breaking things down into genres and series.  How do you keep yours?

This site has awesome ideas: 

MargD  Reading Posters

Tunes Tuesday 7/16

Today I worked on taking a song that I thought many of my students would enjoy from the movie Tangled. It is the song "When Will My Life Begin".




I took the lyrics and created a worksheet to go along with the song that would be good for review of nouns and verbs, along with tense.   I also included rhyming , vocabulary, and editing.

My worksheet can be found at this link: When Will My Life Begin


If this sort of activity interests you, hop on over to Nick's Blog...  Sweet Rhyme and Pure Reason

T-Shirt Tuesday

I am always on the look out for fun t-shirts to wear on Casual Fridays.  I love ones that are academic, teacher-y, or related to books.  I thought it would be fun today to share some ideas, if anyone else was looking for things.


Here are some fun designs from Lesson Plan Diva

I love these from Threadless

These come from Booklover Tshirts

 

The following are from Etsy Shops.  The picture links to their page...

If you have any favorite shirts or sites please share!

Goal 4. Revisit an Idea

I am slowly catching up on my #30goals for this school year.  Goal number 4 involves revisiting an idea.


“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.” - Henry Ford

I think the idea I need to revisit most in my classroom is student goal folders.  I did invididual goal folders with a few of my students and saw their engagement, but thought it was too much at the time for all students.  I kept data on goals, especially in relation to their IEPs, but did not involve them directly enough.

This year I my goal is to make goal folders for each student in relation to their IEP goals and allow them to monitor progress as we graph together achievment towards goals. I will also be having paraprofessionals in the classroom and teachers give feedback on goals via Google Forms so it can be timely and meaningful.

I think having my students familiar with their IEP goals and comfortable with graphing their progress well help to engage students and to motivate them to have high expectations for themselves.

I am hoping with the time I have this summer to really get the goal folders and Google forms ready to go from the beginning of the year.

Optimum Organization and Made it Monday 7/15

This past week I have been working hard to clean up my files on my computer.  I seem to have things all over the place.  I have been downloading like crazy, but not careful with saving things to the right place.  On my Mac things automatically go to the download folder, so my download folder was bursting with all of the great content and resources I have downloaded from fellow teachers while I have been on modified bed rest.  I spent time to organize things into elementary and middle school items.  I teach 5-6th grade and my students range in ability.  I also organized subjects by color.

This is how I have things set up for now:

I also work on organizing my Dropbox account.  I love Dropbox because it allows me to access things on all my devices.  I often leave my school lap top at school, but it is not a problem since I save things I will want to use to my Dropbox account.  If you do not have a Dropbox account I suggest you sign up for one.  Dropbox also allows me to share files or folders with others.  I find lots of free resources so I share a folder with my team that has these resources in it. You can also see I use it to help with my coaching.  The marching band staff shares Dropbox folders and we can all add resources to it.

The third thing I did while organizing was to organize my Google Drive.  I love how easy it is now to save things here.  We are a Google Apps school district, so I can easily access and share folders and documents with my coworkers in a secure and safe fashion.  I love that I will be able to increase my storage in Google Drive once I register my Chromebooks!

Since I am still stuck at home for the most part it has been hard to get to creative with Monday Made It. I did though work hard on my classroom blog. I am hoping to use this space with students and to communicate with parents.  I learned this weekend how to make and import my own header.  I made a header for back to school:

You can see all I have up on my blog so far at: Room 103