Moving Into Our First Home

At the end of December, we closed on a house and I was lucky to have the people in my life that I do. In a little over two weeks, we (my brother would tell me that I wasn't included in the "we" but I tried!) had repainted the walls and doors, installed new flooring, replaced the trim in the house, and redid the bathroom! Best of all, we had someone in the family or close friends to help us with all of this. A BIG thanks for my Mom for helping us with everything too.

Before: Extra Room

Now: Extra Room (AKA where I'll live my first year of teaching)

Before: Bedroom

Now: Rom, FINALLY have a bedroom that I really love.

Kitchen: The selling point of the house, loved it.

Before: Mudroom

Before: Mudroom

The mudroom has been GREAT for all of the snow we have been having. Tracking less of it in the house.

Living Room

Kitchen

Our Wall

 I'm fortunate to have this house and a place to call home for the next few years. I found out that redoing a house isn't quite my expertise but the decorating part I loved. Now our next adventure is redoing the garage and backyard! One step at a time.

Update On My Life

I wish I would have kept blogging during Student Teaching. It was an amazing experience and I learned SO much. I also had the opportunity to be part of an amazing team and formed a strong support system. My cooperating teacher is going to be my go to person during my first year of teaching! A very, very brief overview of Student Teaching through some pictures...

The students Fall Trees created with Q-Tips. The students wrote a compound subject or predicate underneath of something they like to do in the Fall.

Lucky to have snagged this resource of Mystery Pictures for all different holidays. The kids love them.

My very first bulletin board!

Halloween

Wizard of Oz, my amazing team.

Don't know what I do without sticky notes now. Tried this idea off of Pinterest and ended up really liking it. I think I will try it my first year of teaching but I also use a daily schedule that are found in most planning books too.

Loved going on a Field Trip :)

I was able to collaborate with this amazing Student Teacher, she helped me survive!

The students created a Thank You book for me that was binded. One of my students drew and colored this, she is quite the artist! The notes make my day.

My mentor. She was the best cooperating teacher and lucky for me, my best friends Mom. She will be my shoulder to cry on my first year of teaching.

So now I have graduated,

and bought a house,

It was a great ending of 2012 and an exciting beginning of 2013. I'm working at the same school I student taught at as a Para. I work with many individual students throughout the day. Most of my mornings are spent with Kindergarten and afternoons in first, second, or third. It has been a great learning experience and I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to stay at Lee Elementary. There are many amazing teachers there I've been able to work with!

I'm going to have a goal for myself to start blogging more in the next few months. It will be awesome to have this to organize, remember, and share my first year of teaching. (Wherever that may be at!) A lot of Pinterest ideas will be created!

September Student Teaching

I've already been Student Teaching for six weeks now! Time is flying by. I had a reality check yesterday with how close I am to graduating. My Mom called me to ask me about graduation announcements after I had sat down my cooperating teacher and outlined my plans for the next two months. A little stressed and a little overwhelmed. BUT!

I'm still very happy and I have learned so much. It's amazing how many ideas and resources I feel like I have already came across. Pinterest has been my best friend while planning my lessons. I don't know what I'd do without it!

I've been teaching a lot of Grammar Skills with the third graders. I started by teaching them to identify sentences as a statement, a question, a command, or an exclamation. For this activity, the students made an inner circle and outer circle. The inner circle students had different example sentences and the outer circle had their whiteboard and dry erase marker. The students worked with partners to identify the different sentences as fast as they could.

I also taught the students to identify and create a sentence with a simple subject and simple predicate. I found an idea on Pinterest to make a Grammar Flipbook/Foldable. I shared the idea with my cooperating teacher and now all three of the third grade classes are going to try it. One thing that is amazing at the school is the teachers collaborate together on everything! They work really well together. I can only hope to get into a situation like that my first few years! Hopefully the foldables help the kids learn and understand the skill! 

I made all of the teachers an example one.

Sorted the labels and definitions.

The students wrote their own sentence, underlined the subject and circled the predicate. I remember practicing this is third grade!

They also placed an X under the simple subject and simple predicate. We had them write their answer on a whiteboard before copying it to the grammar flipbook. We use our whiteboards for everything! So useful.

I'm in the midst of planning my unit which will cover solving subtraction problems with four digit numbers with and without regrouping. I feel like I'll be learning with the kids, what I have to do a lot of the time! They learn Math a completely different way than I had learned it growing up. It would have been so much more beneficial for students to learn the conceptual way. I'm collaborating with another Student Teacher for my unit which is perfect, we already have some great ideas.

Halloween is right around the corner and we started decorating! I'm teaching two Art lessons this week and today we made witches and spiders to hang up in our room. They added a lot to the room, too cute! The kids loved it too.

Some of our spiders.

Our witches.

Definitely going to do this when I get my own classroom.

We hung them up all through the classroom. It was quite the process but two hours later, they were all up! All three of the third grade classrooms have them up successfully :)

September has been a great month. I can't wait for October with my kiddos.

Student Teaching

First Two Weeks of Student Teaching

These past three weeks have been very busy and exciting! I started Student Teaching in Mrs. Ekart's Third Grade class at Lee Elementary. I am so lucky to have Mrs. Ekart as a cooperative teacher. She is a great role model and very supportive. Everyone has been so friendly and helpful at Lee and I'm really looking forward to this semester.
These first two weeks have been busy. We are getting to know the students and going over rules of the classroom and school. A teacher that Mrs. Ekart collaborates with went to a workshop over Kagan Cooperative Learning and has been introducing us to it. Kagan activities are all about engagement and key into teambuilding. I plan on using these resources in my future classroom! 

The students drew a self portrait and wrote about themselves. It was a great first sample of their writing and it was great to be able to put their work up in our classroom.

This is the front of a folded piece of paper. The students answered questions about themselves and when you lifted it up, there was a picture of them. Fun way to find out the students interests.

The room looks amazing with all of the students' work hanging up.

She is so artistic.

This is the students' "Look Back At Summer." They wrote about something fun they did this summer and illustrated them in inside the sunglasses.

We did a lot with Arthur the second week of school. The students were able to learn how to draw him. They were really good!

This was one of the Kagan teambuilding activities. The students are in groups of four. Two students get a glue stick and two students get a crayon. Every student two pieces of paper of their color. The students make a clown without touching any materials but their own. They also can't use scissors. They work together to come up with a plan then work together to make a clown.

Our "Guess Who" bulletin board outside of the classroom.

Our "Math About Me" activities showing that math is all around them every day.

The finished clowns. The groups got to name their clown. The students were really creative and had a lot of fun!

We got the classroom ready for Parent Teacher conferences by tracing all of the students and letting them color them like themselves. We taped them to their seats with a ruler. This was very time consuming but turned out really cute. It was fun seeing the parents try to find their kids based on how they colored themselves.