Substitute Teacher Blog Spotlight

Welcome to the month of June folks!  

I don't know if you're still in school or not but up here the month of June means we are in the final month of school!

Huzzah!

We've [almost] made it!

I found Miss E Subs Too! a while ago

and to be honest I was REALLY hoping she was going to keep the blog going.

So far she has a grand total of 2 posts but lets not count this girl out quite yet.

It could be summer where she is and her stories just fizzled out.

She could have gotten her very first teaching assignment and quickly got overwhelmed and had to put a pause on something.

I don't really know because I don't know Miss E but I do hope she comes back to her blog!

Why?

This post reminded me of something I had written.  In it she mentions a few tips to help out that beginner substitute that maybe hasn't gotten it quite figured out yet.

If you are looking for some of my posts about different tips such as why you should bring a ball, book, or wear something sparkly you can click on the "tip" link on the right hand side.

In case you missed it I post one of these spotlights every month.  Last month I did it a little different and posted a link  to maintain your sanity as a substitute teacher.

And Miss E. if you are reading this... you should really start posting again soon!

Want a shout out to your lovely blog on here?  Contact me!  I only do one a month but would love to acknowledge your blog one month soon!

Take One and Trade One

I was in gym class with my grade 7's the other day and the gym teacher had them play an interesting game to get them to run laps, do sit ups, push ups, burpies, etc... I can't recall exactly what it was called but it was something along the lines of "take one leave one".  Basically, the gym teacher divided the class into 4 groups and each group would send a representative from their group to the center of the gym for the different rounds.  The gym teacher stood in the center of the gym with a deck of playing cards.  Each student took a card and looked at it... the number revealed how many of that exercise their group would have to do.  However, sometimes he would tell them to switch cards and so everyone had to switch cards with someone else in the middle of the gym not knowing if they would get a "better" (or lower) number or not.

Anyways, the game worked well and had everyone running laps and exercising.  He ended up doing it the entire class but I could see it even being used as a warm up.

This Week At School

Ok... it will really be the last couple of weeks at school because I didn't post one of these last week... what can I say other than it was a long weekend and we were getting out of the big bad city for a bit.

Anyways...

Last week Friday I went with the grade 7's on a field trip.  It was at a University listening to some speakers.

The question on all my lovely readers minds... no we still have not finished Underground to Canada.  We were actually supposed to finish it yesterday but the assembly went quite a bit longer than I had anticipated.  We probably have about 5 pages left to read.  The good news is that because we had about a 10 minute class today I cancelled the end of the book assignment we were going to do because I want them to focus their writing energies on some persuasive essays they are writing.

So, persuasive essays... we're writing them.  My original plan was to do some debates first and then write the essays but instead we did a couple of smaller whole class debates and we will finish off the year doing some group debates.  The reasoning behind this is that I need their essays to be finished by the time I write their report cards.

Anyways, we have some really good topics that some students are choosing
-  Should college athletes be paid to play
-  Should there be no paparazzi
-  Should marijuana be legalized

We just started picking topics and researching but hopefully these essays will start taking shape soon!

TUSC is still going well and we've had some pretty good presentations.  A few that stick out are when "internet pick of the week" showed us Ariana Grande's website, when our demonstrator showed us how to throw a frisbee, the lasagna that the cook brought in, and the slime our science experimenter made for us.

Other than that... you already know about the big end of the day power outage that happened.

Today our school is competing in an ultimate tournament that I'm helping out in.  Should be really hot so it's a good thing I forgot my one and only water bottle at school.

Next week the grade 7's are going to camp for a couple of nights and yours truly is going with them!  It should be fun except that we are leaving Monday after school so I've got a full day of work and then we come back Wednesday after school and work the rest of the week.

The Day the Power Went Out

Story time!

T'was the end of the day and I had just finished filling in my grade 7 class's homeroom teacher what we did that day and ventured upstairs to the staff room (because I'm on staff room clean up this month) when all of a sudden I hear just a bunch of screams from the hall.  I also heard teachers so I assumed it was somewhat under control... which is when I ventured outside of the staff room only to realize that the power in the entire school had gone out.  The staff room is on the 2nd floor and the lights were already out in there because the windows let in enough light so I hadn't even noticed. 

Eventually I ventured down to the main floor which is where my classroom is and notice the hallway my room is down is very dark.  Students are using their cell phone flashlights to help them find their stuff in the lockers and not bump into each other (it's a fairly narrow hallway).  Despite all of this it was likely one of the more orderly locker breaks for that hallway... I didn't hear anyone screaming (and yes, I usually do).  I even had one student ask if it was alright that they had their cell phone out to use as a flashlight (because they aren't allowed cell phones).

Anyways, without power there wasn't much I could do at school (my marking was already done) so I took the opportunity to leave pretty well right after school.  I don't live far from school but I do live about 5 or 6 traffic lights from school... and unfortunately half of the traffic lights were out which meant my commute home likely tripled the time it took.

It turns out we were lucky it happened at the very end of the day... I know a couple of people that live in the area and their power wasn't restored for about 6 hours.

Funny enough this isn't the first time this has happened to me.  A number of years ago I was subbing at another school in the area and at the end of the day the power had gone out in the entire school.  The same thing happened there too... everyone was screaming in the halls.  Because apparently when you use power it is definitely something to scream about.