The First Six Weeks of School, Electives, & Advisory

Week 1 of the new school year is in the books, and what a year it is shaping up to be!  I know we are still in the honeymoon phase, but if the next 39 weeks are half as stress-free and fun as this, then I will be a very happy teacher come June.

Our kids found out their advisory classes today and this afternoon we had our individual first advisory periods, and I am proud to say that after three days of school, I knew all my advisee's names, which checks off the first goal from my "The First Six Weeks of School" list.  I am happy about that, and next week when we formally start to have classes, I hope to fully accomplish the other six goals.  September is so broken up this year, we only had three days this week, and the next two weeks.  Believe me, I am not complaining, but it does make planning and pacing a little challenging.

I am also happy to report that I have decided on my Visual Art elective!  At my colleagues suggestion, I have decided to go with Pop Art as my unit, partly because it's something I want to learn more about and I think it'll be fun.  (FYI my other Friday elective is Math Club, which I am super excited about).

As for Advisory today, I had my kids start working on their coat of arms (an activity that I brought over from my old school) and it was really great to see it coming together.  Earlier in the day, before we split up into advisories, my co-teacher and I had them create their own individual coat-of-arms and I was just so impressed with what they were coming up with.  It's going to be a great year!

The most important of all the "firsts"...

This post will be short because after all tomorrow is the most important of the all the "firsts" - the first day of school.  The halls and rooms and desks will all be full and I will meet my new kids.  It's been a long day, and I am definitely physically tired, but I can't help but be mindful of how relaxed I am.  It's a far cry from the day before my first day of school at my old school, where I almost had a mental breakdown at Staples) and definitely a far cry from my first day of school ever, nine years ago.  I was stressing out a bit last week, but decided to do a short meditation instead, and it really helped - I'm so glad that I will be doing Mindful Schools and Yoga Ed with my kids this year.

I had a thought as I was leaving my classroom this afternoon.  I was reminded of this scene from The Office, as I turned around and took in my empty classroom that will be filled with my new kids tomorrow and who knows what sort of adventures over the next ten months, I thought "This is *my* classroom.  And we're gonna be great." <3

 To all my fellow educators, may you have a wonderfully inspiring new school year with your new students!

First Day Back

I had started writing another post here yesterday about my first day back, but I thought that that would be more appropriate on my personal livejournal, so I put it there.  It's basically about my first two days at my new school.  Not only did I change schools, but my school moved buildings, so the last two days have been spent unpacking boxes mostly.  Unpacking has been OK because our rooms and hallways are supposed be be painted before school officially starts next week, but as of this afternoon it still hasn't happened yet, so I can't really hang things up or set up my classroom, so it's mostly been organizing than decorating the past two days.  I'll probably go in at least one other day this week to get some more stuff done.

One of the things we talked about during yesterday's PD were our school's values, inclusion, inquiry, and responsibility, and specifically focused on inquiry-based teaching.  That talk seemed to solidify my decision to go with CMP3 as my main curriculum this school year.  I had been debating it a lot this summer (and last school year), but the truth is, I really to believe that it is the best way to learn mathematics.  I had a lot of fun when I taught it two years ago, and my scholars really became mathematicians.  It's still going to be a learning process for me, and of course no curriculum is perfect, but I am happy with my decision, because in my teacher gut (at least for right now) I know that it is the right one.  I think I'm gonna pilot using JumpRope for standards-based grading, mostly because it's free and I have some exposure using it already.

I also decided to steal a page from my 6th grade colleague last year and make my baseline assessment (IA #0) and end-of-year assessment the same.  In other words, I will test my 6th graders on 6th grade standards, and my 7th graders on 7th grade standards.  My reason for this will be to give me the pre-assessment data that I need for each unit right away, so that I can see which standards I need to focus on (based off student mastery) and what standards, if any, I can hold back on.  I'm also going to use Khan Academy again for skill practice, which will hopefully complement the inquiry-based classwork.

Well that's it for now.  I'm sure I'll have more to update as the week goes on.  Hopefully I can keep this up as the school year goes on.

PS It's been two days, and I still cannot believe that I can actually walk to work now (no more hour plus long commute each way for me)... that alone is already making this year pretty darn sweet ;)