I’d love to share one of my favorite holiday traditions: Book Advent.
My 2 girls each open one book every night leading up to Christmas. We cuddle and read them before bed, and add them to our ever-growing home library.
I select and save them all year round, gathering from Scholastic book fairs, Books4Schools, Amazon, conferences or workshops, a local bookstore, or wherever life takes me. Last year, our Book Advent was filled with board books, this year with paperback picture books, and next year we will start to see chapter books – I love to reflect on how our family reading life evolves.
If you have a fun family tradition like this, I’d love to hear about it!
Wait… is it really October already? We’ve been back for a month already? It feels like we just started! I was very excited to return to work this fall after being out last spring on maternity leave. And boy, did we hit the ground running!
I am a SPED Literacy Coach, and I support about 15 staff members spread across 4 buildings. Part of my back to school fun involved traveling around, checking in with the teachers I support, and delivering treats 🙂
Sorry-not-sorry for the cheesy pun 😀 So grateful for Pinterest!
Our back to school PD this year had several foci, and I was thrilled to finally be getting ‘into the weeds’ with many of these topics. Trauma Sensitive Education. Word Study. Science Inquiry. College and Career Ready IEPs. EXCITING STUFF! All of it directly impacts student learning, which is incredible.
I hope you all have had a successful and smooth transition back to school, and that you are enjoying building relationships and getting to know your students. That, essentially, is the cornerstone to trauma sensitive education. I’m really enjoying meeting all the new students and reconnecting with the teachers I support to kick off an exciting new academic year!
How has back to school been for you? If you could summarize it in one word, or three, what would you say?
This update has been a long time coming, but I am finally done with my room! As a coach, I don’t get a ‘classroom,’ but I do get to place my office in the building’s book room. This is a room where we house our Calkins Units of Study books. Even if it is a glorified warehouse, it’s still “my” room, and it needed some flare. So, at long last, here is my office space!
And where are all these books, you might ask? Here they are!
See the post below for Before Pictures. That 70s yellow was just too sad for me, and I had to brighten it up with more white. I covered my desk in contact paper, covered the walls in white butcher paper, and added as many pops of color as I could. The wall is also covered in book jackets of my favorite elementary read aloud books. I hope you enjoy this fun makeover!
If you have a blog with before/after pics or brag pics of your classroom, I’d love to see! Please link in the comments below 🙂
Most teachers I’ve met are born planners and organizers. That is exactly how I would describe myself as well. This past summer, I dove head first into the world of Whole30 (an anti-inflammatory way of eating that centers on healthy, lean meats, vegetables, fruit, and some nuts and healthy fats – basically, no dairy or grain). I LOVED how it made me feel: strong and healthy. More than that, I loved how I DIDN’T feel anymore – no more bloating, GI discomfort, headaches, feeling sluggish. Even mosquito bites didn’t bother me as much any more, as if to say my body was healing and better able to fight.
I wanted to be able to continue eating Whole30 (W30) throughout the school year. However, as you know, time is a precious commodity, and W30 does require a lot of cooking. Armed with my favorite kitchen appliance – my Instant Pot – I spent a good amount of time this summer batch cooking and freezing for the fall. When I made dinner for the family, I’d double it and freeze half. By the end of the summer, you can see below what I amassed. These recipes include W30 as well as paleo items, as I am now in W30 maintenance and slowly adding in items that are permitted in paleo (i.e. honey) but not in W30.
In this picture you see:
4 sweet potatoes slightly cooked, peeled, and diced to be added to hash – W30
My first stop to prepare for this endeavor was Costco. There I was able to purchase bulk meat at a discount. Next, I treated myself to a jar of minced garlic to save me a step. I purchased a giant bag of almond meal from Amazon for the paleo recipes.
Not pictured here are the things I will make weekly, including:
Keto overnight oats
W30 Egg breakfast
A dozen hard boiled eggs
Paleo cereal
In addition, I have purchased a lot of snacks to keep in my desk, listed below:
Dried apple rings
Roasted Plantain chips
Rx Bars (Chocolate Sea Salt and Blueberry are my faves!)
It is with mixed emotions and a heavy heart that I close the door to my classroom this week. I have decided to embark on a new adventure with a new school district. In the fall, I will be a Literacy Coach for another suburban, low income, small school district near Milwaukee. I will specialize in supporting teachers in closing the 5th to 6th grade reading gap. It sounds exciting and terrifying all at once! Am I ready for this? I’ve never been a coach before. I’ll soon find out!
To prepare for my new role as literacy coach, I will be reading the following resources this summer.
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My main goal for the first few weeks is going to be watching, listening, and learning, as well as encouraging and supporting teachers. While I am extremely saddened to leave my school district ‘home’ of 10 years, I’m also very excited to meet new teachers and make new friends. I’ll also be shifting my perspective from working with 6-12th grade adolescents to now elementary students. It will definitely be an adventure!
Now that we’re a family of 3, I’m always thinking of fun new traditions to start and enjoy for decades to come. As I was passing through the dollar section of Target (aka a Mom’s Vacation), I came across these adorable felt envelopes. At a dollar a pop, I just had to snatch them up! They are very large and can fit quite a bit of goodies, including books. In the same section, there were also some felt hearts, which inspired me to personalize the envelopes (I created the felt letters myself). The extra one is for our puppies, Rocket and Ruffy, and yes they got some treats, too!
This was Elaine’s first Valentine’s day eating solids, but that didn’t mean I wanted her to have all of the traditional teeth-rotting sugary sweets of sticky candy and chocolate. I settled upon a book and some fun, special treats that we don’t get very often. She went straight for the Lucky Charms, and picked out all of the marshmallows (just like her mommy, sheesh!)
At 1.5 years old, I’m sure she was pretty confused by this new tradition. Nevertheless, she loved opening her envelope and getting presents, so that is a win! My sweet husband filled my envelope with various chocolates that he knows I love and a thoughtful card. I filled his with chocolate and beef jerky.
Can’t wait to bring out these envelopes again next year to continue our tradition!
Pssst…. did you know that TpT is having a site wide sale today and tomorrow (2/7 – 2/8)? Time to shop! I know I’ve had a few things on my wish list waiting for this sale!
I have this awesome whiteboard stop sign that I place outside of my classroom door. I try to greet my students each day / hour with a funny pun. It’s turned into a truly remarkable experience for everyone this year. My students will let me know if the joke isn’t funny, and this often turns into a teachable moment where I can share with them a finer point of the English language, or a colloquialism.
What’s great about middle school students is that many are finally starting to understand sarcasm and double meanings, along with symbolism and metaphor. I get to watch their brains develop right before me! It’s an incredible honor. When they truly get a joke and laugh, it’s a gift for both of us.
This experience has brought many new students to my door – students who aren’t even ‘mine’ – just to say hi, thanks for the joke, or share a joke that they’d like to see on the board. Many colleagues stop by and let me know that they miss the joke-of-the-day when I am too busy to make it happen. I love this new tradition! Here are my faves so far this school year (I’ll try to add more throughout the year):
As any teacher will tell you with a wide, genuine smile and a sparkle in their eye, summers are the best part of our profession (well no, students are the BEST part, but summer is a close second!).
Though I always look forward to summers, I was a little nervous going into this one. I mean, I have a 1-year-old now. This is new, unchartered territory for me. And thinking back to last summer with my newborn – that was scary. I was struggling with postpartum anxiety and depression, I had just moved into a new house, I felt socially isolated, exhausted, and I was plagued with all the new parent fears. I was scared to leave the house with my baby because it always took me 1-2 hours to get out the door, I was pumping, and I was afraid to leave the comfort of our safe, climate-controlled house with a baby. I was a wreck!
This summer was SO different. And it was honestly the best summer of my life! I feel like I am finally getting into a groove as a mom (which means life is about to throw me a curve ball, right?). I am not afraid to leave the house with my daughter. In fact, I insist we leave the house at least once a day, even if it is just to go to the post office. Anything can be an adventure!
To help ease the transition into summer, I made a bucket list. It was important to me to set goals for things we could do together, and things that I needed to do for myself. Of course, as I expected, the list was very ambitious and I wasn’t able to complete everything. The silver lining here is that I now have items to earmark for next summer!
We did have SO much fun. I loved seeing the world through her eyes, taking in all of the new places and textures and people. I learned that my daughter LOVES the water, and would swim daily if she could. However, she HATED the beach! All the sand was a total disaster, and she was miserable. I wish we had gotten to the animal farm, because she is obsessed with animals. When she sees any creature, from dog to goat to raccoon, this strange shriek of pure joy comes out of her – an alien sound I never hear otherwise.
I loved learning about my daughter this summer and making it my mission to help expose her to new experiences. I became her ‘summer school teacher.’ And all those naps and cuddles? BLISS. I felt like I had won the lottery every day.
I also set personal and professional goals for myself. I needed to keep my mind sharp, and I always need to be working toward goals. I didn’t manage to learn as much about AIMSWeb as I had hoped, but I have made it my mission for this first week back to school, our In-service and Professional Development days, to seek out the information I need for the school year.
I hope you had a wonderful, relaxing, purposeful summer, and that you are recharged and ready to hit the ground running this week for back to school! As a teacher, I am grateful for the summer time to re-center myself, thwart burnout, and be the best version of myself that I can for my students each year.
Yesterday morning, we completed The Color Run as a family. It’s something we’ve always wanted to do, and this meant bringing along our 1-year-old baby/toddler (I’m not sure what to call her!). I thought I might share our experience, in case it might help others. I have completed (and LOVED!) The Color Run before, so I knew what to expect going in. It was a new experience with a baby, however, but I felt prepared.
Even though The Color Run peeps say the coloring is safe, I still didn’t want to expose my daughter to it. What can I say, I’m a paranoid First Time Mom. I was worried about it getting into her lungs and her eyes, so I knew I wanted to protect her as best I could. I asked around, and some people suggested goggles, face masks, hats, the whole 9 yards. I couldn’t imagine my daughter tolerating all that, nor did I want to deal with it, so I went the simpler (read: cheaper and lazier) route. I invested in a stroller rain cover similar to this one.
I did bring our Tula baby carrier, but it was much too hot to wear her for 5K (in cooler weather, I totally would have just worn her and saved quite a bit of hassle). We brought the stroller and kept the Tula in a garbage bag in the storage area (I couldn’t bear to see it ruined by color staining! But I wanted it just in case). As it turns out, I was actually able to avoid each of the color stations by going around them. I simply met up with my family on the other side. And as far as getting colored myself? I opted not to, because I wanted to be able to hold and comfort my daughter if she needed it, and I wanted to stay ‘clean.’
I know what you’re thinking. Isn’t this taking all the fun out of it? Why bother doing a Color Run if you’re just going to skate through and come out lily-white on the other side? Well, I did actually have a lot of fun. I enjoyed seeing my family members get messy and silly, and my daughter enjoyed looking at all the fun colors, bubbles, and clouds of color dust. The excitement is palpable, so much fun music, smiling faces, and lots of high fives! It’s a great atmosphere, and truly is the happiest 5k on the planet.
I know many other moms give their babies the true Color Run experience and have no problems, but I know that’s just not my personality, and I’m okay with that. You do you, and feel free to use the info in this blog post to make the best decisions for you and your family.
You should be aware that a very real hazard, much more dangerous than the color dye itself, was the loud volume of the event. In the start up line, there were booming speakers that made my daughter scream. And at the end, the after party was a loud, bumping base full of Zumba fun. I love loud music, and it was really fun, but it is also very dangerous for such young ears. I would say to do your best to avoid areas with large speakers.
A few other tips I have.
I brought extra towels (to cover our car seats), changes of clothes and shoes, and garbage bags to put all the dirty stuff in afterwards.
Bring your cell phone or camera, for sure! If you are really concerned, you can put it in a clear baggie to protect it from dust. But you won’t wanna miss these pictures!
At the finish line, there are people with leaf blowers at a “blow station.” If you got dust on your stroller (and yourself for that matter), this is a great opportunity to remedy that. Also, we’ve found that blowing off the color is MUCH more effective than rinsing it with water, which just serves to spread it around.
Bring water. Make sure you have a cold sippy for your baby. I also brought a frozen lunch bag with cold milk and fruits.
Sunscreen, hat, sunglasses, etc. And if your baby is too young for sunscreen, try a muslin blanket and stroller clips (I like these)
If you have color treated hair, or really blonde hair like me and my daughter, the coloring might temporarily dye your hair. Hats are a great multipurpose solution.
Laundry wasn’t a big deal for our clothes, but light colored shoes and anything made of terry cloth did pose a problem. Blow off, pre-treat, bleach, and sun dry.
Drop a pin in Google Maps when you park your car so you can easily find it again!
 
