Quote

I am totally proud that I taught my class all day today with only 1 part time aide. I am awesome.

Student: you look tired today
Me: you know, that's not nice to say to someone.
Student: why? What's wrong with that? You do look tired.
Me: well I'm not tired so that's not a nice thing to say.
Student: I didn't say you were tired I just said you looked it.
Me: okay. Drop it.

Goals

>> Another blogger I know over at Scooping it up wrote a post about goals. It got me thinking. I have many goals for myself as a teacher. Why not share?

First of all I want to plan more lessons.
My class is based on schedules, and doing the same things weekly. Wednesdays are writing day. Thursday and friday are fluency reading. Monday and Tuesdays are phonics/workbooks. (These schedule needs to be extended into math too, but L.A. is pretty steady now.) I have to clear my credential, so I am required to write up lesson plans, create goals and this year I have focused on writing because it is not my strong area. In fact in the beginning of the year we NEVER did it. Anyways, this past few months I have been focusing A LOT on writing rubrics and my students initiating their own learning through using rubrics. Wednesday I did a lesson where students had to create their own rubrics using past writing examples of their own as well as ones i made. my students LOVED IT. They requested we leave the examples up all year so they could look at them and use them while they are writing. They were excited. They explained their reasoning and why they graded certain things certain ways. I LOVED IT. It did not take me long to plan. But, if I could try and do something exciting like this once a week. A fantastic different kind of learning experience. I would be proud of myself.

2: develop a good way to track students goals.
Currently I have a huge binder in which each student has a divider. Their goals are divided in, and usually a week before goal checks are due, I go through and find work that meets each goal and I check their progress. (we work on goals all the time, but i dont specifically test) I would like to develop a way to test monthly, if not every other week. I would love to be able to send home nicely corrected evidence with every goal, or at least have less estimations, and more analyzing of data.

3. Do not be late on any IEPS.
I will say it is usually not my fault that I am late on IEPs. usually it's scheduling, parents, and my waiting until the last minute. I would like to be EARLY more often then right on time.

4. Have more fun.
A lot of time in my classroom we spend on academics because my students are so far behind academically. I would like to incorporate some more fun learning activities. Art projects. Fun history lessons. Fun science lessons. This goes into my first goal. but I think if I take time to research and work on new exciting lessons, we could have a lot of fun.

--

>>I took my students on a reward field trip to a local fast food restaurant today. We had to walk there in the rain. Which wasnt awful. My students did VERY well. I was actually impressed. The worst part was coming back to school and trying to get them back on track for the rest of the day. We survived but, I was also checked out ,and that is never good for anyone. I was being silly and immature, and it is not always the best when I get like that.


>>Next week is the ski trip. Do we remember that from last year? I hope it goes okay.

Quotes

Phillip :
I want to shoot calves in the desert.

Aide: what do you want to learn the most about?
Phillip: soil
Aide: you want to learn about soil?
Phillip: I hate soil
Me: then why do you want to learn about it?
Phillip: because soil is cute.

Phone app

>>I decided to start using a phone app for blogger mostly so I can post quotes during my prep and breaks because I always forget them. These week was one of those hellish weeks. There were schedule changes which royally messed up everyone. A half day in the middle of the week. Observations. Assemblies for one grade only. Field trip permission slips. Ahh. We survived. It's done.

>>A student from the other special Ed class came up to me and poked me in the face on Thursday. Who knows why. But I poked him back.

so many things

>>There are so many things as a young teacher I feel ill-prepared or incapable of dealing with. Being a mother figure and the only stable adult in a 13 year olds life is one, dealing with neglected students another, but this one takes the cake. My home hospital student (the girl with CP, who has non-stop seizures) is very very very sick. She's been in the hospital for 2 weeks. The first two she was on a bipap machine to help her breath, and now she is on a ventilator. We went to see her today, and wow. I do not know if I am prepared to deal with this. There is a very large chance she will not make it. Please keep her in your thoughts. She needs all the good ones she can get.

I MADE A WORKSHEET!

>>While my ever growing obsession with pintrest.... well continues growing. I have slowly been obsessing over how to create my own teacher worksheets that look professional, and have everything I need. I have a student who works on writing letters, tracing and functional sight words, and I have made the following: Well, it won't let me upload. But someday you will the glory that is SPED teacher's beautiful worksheets. They include the student coloring a picture of the word, tracing the word, then writing the word. It gives them practice in many different ways and I love it. I am very proud of myself and now I have a template to put words from all different areas of my curriculum. YAY learning.

Fire alarm

>>Tuesday while I was enjoying my 40 mins of quiet time during my lunch break, the fire alarm went off. The fire alarm never really goes off without teachers knowing about it before hand. This gives us time to prepare. During lunchtime the fire alarm NEVER goes off. So, I quickly rush to the lunchtime room and grab the two of my students that always spent time there. I was looking for Mary who is usually in there too, but was not. We head out to our spot. The entire school is confused. Students who were at lunch are trying to decide where they line up. The other SDC teacher and I are trying to keep our students organized and non-meltdowny (yes, I invented that word) When I get out to the our spot, I see Mary. She looks shaken up. Worried. I assume it's because the fire alarm was going off. Immediately she said "It was me. I pulled the fire alarm. It was me. It was me. ______ told me to do it, but I asked him how to do it. It was my fault" I told the other SDC teacher because ______ is in his class. I found the vice principal, and explained to him what she said. When the office gave us the all clear, I went back to Mary. She continually repeated "I wanted to get kicked out of this school. I did it. I wanted to never come back. Now I won't have to come back. etc. etc. etc." She then refused to come with me to the office. After shouting (well, the most shouting I really would do) That yes you will be getting in trouble but you need to come with me NOW. She followed me to the office. While sitting in the office... the alarm goes off AGAIN. (NOT MY FAULT) students are moving, and confused. Long story short, the fire department came. Mary was yelled out. Talked to. Little did I know that Mary felt like she hated this school and did not want to go here anymore. NOBODY told me that she had been talking like this all day, and actually asked ______ to give her a way to get kicked out of the school. TEACHERS AND AIDES HAD HEARD HER, but nobody told me.

>>Suspended for 5 days.. we will see how Tuesday goes. Rumors spread, and people learned. OF COURSE it was my student that pulled the alarm. OF COURSE. I tried to explain it to my other students about what happened and how this can be a learning experience. They seemed to understand, but that didnt stop this week from being pretty hellish. It's pretty much that time of the year where the students are checked out, and I am tired of lecturing and yelling. Instead, I am now pawning them off into trouble rooms, handing out citations, and giving lunch time detentions. It's the best thing I can do to keep my sanity.

>> In other news, I cleaned out a few cupboards this week and moved around my classroom which made me super happy.

>>and Finally, my home hospital student is VERY VERY VERY sick. She's been in the hospital since Monday. Lungs not working, hooked up to machines, fever continues spiking. Please please please keep her and her family in your thoughts.