This Week OFF From School

Spring break is coming to an end (sadly) so here is what I managed to get done on my week off from school.

1) Library.  I visited the library to pick up a book that I had requested a while ago.  I had actually been reading it at one of the schools I frequent so I finally just took it out of the library to finish (although as it stands currently I still have not finished it).

2)  Cleaning.  We had people over Wednesday evening for a Bible study and a friend spent the night in our spare bedroom too... so I just tidied things up and did some laundry for all our visitors.

3)  Painting.  My lovely husband installed some doors on the main floor a while ago and I finally painted over all the nail holes (and spots where the paint chipped a bit during installation).

4)  Appointments.  What better time to schedule all your appointments than on your time off?  I actually only had one which was nice as I talked to someone else that had scheduled about 3.

5)  Baking.  I didn't need to do much as we still have baking coming out of our ears from when we helped to put on a dessert fundraiser a couple of weeks ago.  But I did restock my banana muffin supply because sometimes if I'm rushed, or switching schools on my lunch, or just not sure of the staff room dynamics at a certain school I'll grab a couple of muffins (I freeze them) for my lunch.

6)  Writing.  My goal was to get 10 new blog posts written over the week (I usually am writing a month in advance... this is #9 so I've got one  more to write either today or tomorrow to reach my goal).

7)  Gym.  This was my last week of having a gym membership.  After this week I switched to going for long walks or runs as the weather slowly improves so I had to take advantage of my last week with my membership.

8)  Movie.  I watched My Sisters Keeper (and other tv shows) but watching this movie reminded me that I should re read the novel because I couldn't remember how the novel ended.

9)  Banking.  I had to go to the bank to take our some American funds because...

10)  USA.  A friend and I went on a quick one night stay to the nearest US city to us (which is about 3 hours away).  Just to get away for a night and do some shopping.  Unfortunately the Canadian dollar is terrible at the moment so we didn't actually do all that much shopping.  What did I buy?  A large bag of tootsie rolls (stayed tuned for Monday's post as to what those are all about), some peanut butter oatmeal, a couple of items of clothing, and a bunch of pillows.  The most impressive store?  Hobby Lobby... despite not buying anything there (only because they didn't have 3 of a particular shelf that I wanted) I didn't realize how big it was or how much they sold there... it is definitely WAY bigger than our Michaels stores here in Canada!

And there you have it... my week off. 

On Monday it's back to work for this substitute teacher.  I get to be in the same classroom for the first 3 days back!

Day's Off

I don't actually have all that many days off (especially during the winter months when illness' are prevalent).  But when I do have a day off I definitely take full advantage of it!

Walk.  If the weather is decent I'll go for a walk.  Sometimes that walk will bring me somewhere to shop (or browse) and sometimes it's just a walk in the community.

Bake.  I don't bake cookies all that often because when I do I tend to make a double batch that will last awhile.  A day off is the perfect time to get some baking done though (some of our favourite cookies are coconut chocolate chip, and chocolate peanut butter)

Work Out.  For 6 months of the year (the cooler months) I get a gym pass.  If I have a day off I'll take the opportunity to go to the gym during the day instead of the evening.

Work.  Sometimes on my day off I work... on my blog.  I like to be at least a couple of weeks ahead in my posts to help me stay on track of posting regularly.  This doesn't always happen... sometimes nothing exciting happens to me for a whole month at work and I'm really lacking for content and other times I'm flooded with post ideas and can be a month ahead of myself.  On a day off I'll typically write at least a couple of posts.

Read.  I was on some extensive book request lists from the library for a while but lately I've been reading a lot more.  A day off is the perfect time to make myself a coffee and pick up that book during the day.

Chores.  I suppose if there was any a day to get ahead (or ahem, catch up) on any chores a day off would be the day.

Friends.  It doesn't happen often when a friend has the same day off as myself (especially with it being during the week) but every so often our work schedules will line up just right and we can enjoy some time together!

Watch TV.  I mean this list would be a lie if I didn't include this one because it definitely happens and I think it's definitely allowed on a day off.

Relax.  Above all, I don't have to go to work... so I'll sleep in a bit and make sure my day isn't stressful or fast paced... I can take things slow today!

This week is spring break where I am so of course I'm busy working my way through this list.

This Week At School

It was a busy last week of school before spring break or me!  Full days turned into half days which turned back into full days and I ended up working every single day this week in the end!

Monday was the day after St Patrick's Day so I read my students "How to Catch a Leprechaun" and then they did a writing activity on how they would go about catching a leprechaun.  I couldn't actually find the exact activity they did online but if you google "How to catch a leprechaun writing activity" a bunch will come up!

The next 3 days I spent at the school with only 9 kids.  We now say it's like I'm their 3rd teacher (after he 1.5 that already teach there, the EA, and the secretary).  They were busy making houses to test out different kinds of insulation.  The plan was that on Friday (when I was not there) that they were going to put a cup of hot water in each of their houses and place them outside.  Every 20 minutes or so they would go out and see what the temperature of their water was.  What were they using for insulation?  Largely shredded paper but also towels and Styrofoam.  One group even spray painted their house black which I thought was smart.  

After spring break they are going to be putting together a little indoor greenhouse to grow some fruits and veggies so we started to do some research as to what seeds do well growing in pots and have shorter growing times.  When I had left on Thursday they had decided on cucumbers, strawberries, tomatoes, and lettuce

Being that it was the week before spring break 2 of the schools I went to had spirit week this week... so one of the days was twin day (which I knew about ahead of time but obviously wouldn't have been able to coordinate with someone to twin with them), then there was jersey day so my husband lent me his and I wore a Washington Capitals jersey to school, then we had read and feed which didn't require dressing up and instead I had them read from about 10:30-12:00 (which surprisingly went over really well with a lot of them).  The feed part was they got to snack on fruits and veggies while reading.  I also brought them some cookies because I had a bunch leftover from a dessert fundraiser I helped with the previous weekend (I had told them that they had to be good in order to get one at the end of the day otherwise as punishment they would have to watch me eat them all - needless to say they each got 2 cookies at the end of the day).  And finally we had school colours day so I wore blue to work.

Friday I only worked the afternoon which was likely actually the easier time to work (and not only because it's the shorter half of the day).  They had stations that each class went around the school to earn points for their grade group.  At the end they totalled up all points for each grade and that grade won some sort of prize.  I was in charge of the cup stacking room which just had 3 groups working together to make a stack of cups as tall as they could using cups and wooden sticks within 15 minutes.  The tallest we got was 37 inches which was actually quite impressive.

Since next week is spring break I'll only be posting twice instead of my usual 3 times as I'll be too busy enjoying my spring break (hopefully).

How we Remember

Spring break is this coming week where I live which means it could potentially be the perfect time to switch some things up in your classroom.

A while ago I saw this posted in a teacher's classroom

And I'm just wondering how are we as teacher's are using these in the way we teach?

I'll be the first to admit, my students have very few opportunities to teach others what they are learning and it's got me thinking... how could I change that?

If students are learning a new and tricky concept their homework could be to go home and teach it to their parents (because lets be honest, things have changed since we all went to school!)

I never got around to doing it but one of the goals when I used the math journals was to have one student share their learning the following day with the class.

But what are some other ideas we have?

Let's discuss and start thinking of some changes we can implement tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year!

All About Me

I was reading through some all about me posters one teacher had up in his classroom and I found some interesting responses in the spot the kids were supposed to write down their favourite restaurant. Most had said McDonalds (or Mickdonalds, mckbond - some b/d confusion) but one student said The Keg - which if you aren't from here you may not know but they are a slightly more upscale restaurant. Hopefully they only go there infrequently. 

One student also said their mom's (aww)

This Week At School

We may not be having indoor recess' so often anymore but that doesn't mean we can't have a snow day still!.... the odd thing about this snow day (which even I as a substitute teacher got to partake in this time) was that I'm not sure more than a handful of snow fell in the city I live in (I do sub in a division outside of the city... which is the one that cancelled classes for that day).

Anyways, this week I was a nursery/kindergarten teacher and a middle years teacher... neither are jobs that I would ideally want to have my one day classroom be in and surprisingly out of the 2 grades I taught this week I much preferred the nursery and kindergarten class!

So, in nursery and kindergarten we practiced some printing, read a bunch of books, and played... a lot!  It was also one of the students birthdays and she brought in cupcakes for the class (which may or may not have contributed to it being my favourite class for this week).

In middle years I read a lot of Underground to Canada.  It's interesting reading it years later (I think I read it in grade 7) the thins I now noticed about it... like when the girls stumbled upon the Mennonite Colony.  I actually had 2 days in middle years this week and one of those days was WAY better than the other... you know what really grinds my gears?  When kids think they can just sit around and do nothing for the majority of the day.  It's like come on... school is your job and since you've managed to wake up and make it here it's time to get at least a little something accomplished today.

St. Patrick's day is this weekend and I did not do a single thing related to it (I imagine I might have had I spent more time in elementary school... maybe?).  But one of the classrooms was decorated for it!

St Patrick's Day in the classroom

St Patrick's Day decorations

If you're looking for an art activity for St Patrick's day (you could do it a day late) here's one I did when I taught grade 4 (well, actually I had a substitute teacher do it so it was fairly simple)

One more week until Spring Break!

String Art

At one of the schools I was at recently the students had done string art (most had actually already taken it home already so I only took the one picture). There was one thing that this teacher did for the string art that likely made it A LOT easier for her students... she used foam boards instead of wood. This way students just had to push in the nails (which still stayed in place) instead of trying to hammer them all in. Plus, in my own personal experience with making string art... the nails are hard to hammer and they often pop out if you haven't hammered them in far enough. So I have a hunch that many students would likely not have been very successful with it and it would have been the teacher doing a lot of the hammering for them. She had told me that she had also tried to find pins to use instead of nails but she could only find pins with colourful tips (which she didn't think would look as nice as them all being one colour)

Anywho, here is one of the string art projects that her students did... I'll see if you can figure out what it is

String Art

And here is the one I did a while ago...

Deer String Art

Indoor Recess Idea

Hopefully we are beyond our indoor recess' by now (at least when it comes to cold weather indoor recess) but for when they occasionally crop up because of rain here's an idea one of the schools I went to last month did. Let the kids leave their classrooms. At this school the gym was open and students were playing wii in one part of it and doing gym activities in another part and all of the classrooms offered something a little different for kids to do. My room was the reading/drawing/colouring room but I know at least one of the other rooms offered yoga (this teacher also made passes for the kids so that only 2 students/class could come to her room - likely due to them needing a bit more space for yoga). Other ideas I could see working well would be putting on some Just Dance videos (you can find them on Youtube), putting on an indoor recess video from GoNoodle and a board/card game room. At the school I was at the kids could also walk the halls but very few students did this.

This Week At School

Another busy week at school!

For some reason one of the schools I was at this week still had an indoor recess (I'm quite sure that the other schools nearby likely did not have an indoor recess though so no one was quite sure why we had decided that). I also had a day of outdoor recess duty but luckily for me it has started to warm up (it's not in the positives yet but it's warmer than -20 which is lovely). I hadn't had outdoor duty in a long time so I guess my time had finally come up.

Last week I was helping some students come up with a design for their spaghetti bridges and this week I was helping them to start constructing them. I'll find out next week if they had much success with their designs.

I was in a new to me classroom this week... it ended up being French immersion which despite having taught basic French for part of a year I usually try to avoid French immersion. It was a chatty group of grade 2 students though so you know they loved to help me with reading some of those French words and you know they also loved it when I said we would be speaking in mostly English that day.

One of my classes had an assignment to do on Roman Numerals... adding them, subtracting them, writing out long lengthy numbers (like 1974) in Roman Numerals. It was during this assignment that I learned right along with them what it meant if there was a line over one of the letters (it means to multiply that number by 1000) and how they would have multiplied their Roman Numerals (which is actually kind of interesting and I was surprised it actually worked out when we tried it with some basic multiplication facts. Why they had such a long (and in my opinion difficult) assignment on Roman Numerals I'll never know... I guess there is always the chance that it might come back bigger than what it currently is.

Finally, on Friday I took my class on a short community walk. They call it their km walk in the community so my guess is the route we take supposed to be about a kilometer long.

Fun fact: On the way to work on Friday I heard about what the top 3 jobs are that kids think they want when they get older... I can't remember what #1 was but #2 was to be a blogger... which I was pretty surprised by because it involved writing...  If the class I was in on Friday was any indication on what the future bloggers will be like... well let's just say they don't like to write so I'm not sure how blogging will work out.  #3 on the list was to be a Youtube or Instagram star (which is no surprise except that I am surprised that it wasn't higher on the list).

Just 2 more weeks until Spring Break!

Interactive Spinner

I've seen this in a few classrooms now but this is the first time I've actually seen this spinner used for something.

Apparently it was used during parent teacher conferences... my guess is students were taking their parents around the room showing them some of the things they had been doing and were able to do.

Spring Break!

It's almost here and because it comes at different times depending on where we all live I'm posting this early because I think this freebie (yes, I said freebie) is fantastic.  

Go check out Mel D-Seusstastic's Teacher's Pay Teacher's store and download this free writing activity for when your kiddos come back to class!

When you use the freebie come back and let me know how it went!

This Week At School

Another busy work week at school!

This week at school I...

Was in some new to me classrooms so I left my information at a couple of new classrooms.  It may currently be busy subbing but that won't last and I'm hoping these other teachers being away occasionally might help fill in at least a few of those gaps.

Helped some students come up with plans for a spaghetti bridge competition.  Do we have some winning designs?  I might find out in a few weeks!

Had one of my half days turn into a full day... which isn't the first time this has happened in February.  The pm class was not nearly as good as the AM class... which is also what happened last time.  The pm class was also a nursery/kindergarten class with 28 kids in it!... so that might have contributed to the not so great afternoon.

Went back to the school that I had a teaching job at a couple of years ago when I was teaching French.  It was a wonderful day (I think I ended up in the 2 best classrooms).

I saw this lovely cat step stool by the sink in a grade 1 classroom I was in and thought it was pretty cute.

Cat step stool

I planned some Pink Shirt Day activities (for those that don't know Pink Shirt Day is a day to stop bullying and this year it happened to fall on Wednesday, February 27th but if you missed it fear not... there's an International Day of Pink happening on Wednesday, April 10th).  Anyways, I just a few things I had done when I taught grade 5/6 you can read about it here and here.  It includes a link to a free resource that I use so it's worth the peek... I promise!

I attended an in class baby shower for the grade 1 class I was subbing in.  Luckily the teacher was just in meetings in the building so she stayed in the room and opened some presents in front of the kids (the boys that it was positively disgusting when she opened the box of diapers).  She has one week left and then she's on maternity leave so it was well timed (but also not because I was there).

At one of the schools I was at this week the kids were having their spring pictures taken.  Nothing says spring pictures like indoor recess because it's just too cold to be outside!... for the record we only had indoor recess a couple of days this week... it IS warming up!

Here's something I haven't seen in a looong time...

Class pets - fish

Class pets!

3 more weeks until Spring Break!

... but who's counting?