It's here! Welcome the new school year, 2011-2012.

After a summer of hanging out, the urgency is upon me, so I'm here at school today attempting to put the finishing touches on my classes for the year. Even after all my time in education, I still become quite nervous at the start. But, I have several great things to be happy about. The first is that our middle school team has a new team member, and life is already less stressful. We had a super middle school meeting, and are off to a great start with a theme that sounds fun: Club Zero - From Frivolous to Fabulous! What is Club Zero? It's a way to raise the academic achievement of our middle school kids by emphasizing three things, No Referrals, No Tardies, No F Grades. Our academic goals for our shared kids are to raise the percentages on reading goals, math facts, and to achieve a 3.0 GPA by the end of the first quarter. We will introduce our theme at our first assembly, September 6, but in the meantime, we will post Club Zero posters up on our section of the campus, and let them wonder! We teachers are excited and well, stoked, to get our year off to a wonderful start! Frankly, after the last couple of years, we can only go up, up, up! The second terribly cool thing happened this morning. One of my team members sent me an email telling me about an offer from the website Spelling City. Here's what Spelling City sent me: I've been given a premium membership to VocabularySpellingCity.com for a candid, personal, online review. VocabularySpellingCity.com helps students study word lists using 25 different learning activities such as MatchIt Sentences, HangMouse, and Word-O-Rama. Parents can create their own spelling lists, find published lists already available on the site, or use any of dozens of free teaching resources on topics such as analogies and compound words. Be sure to come back in three weeks to read about my experience. There might be more free memberships available for bloggers. If you're interested, find out how you can review VocabularySpellingCity.com. I am planning on using this with my 6Math class, to really work on their math vocabulary, and with my Title I/Language Arts Support kids as we work on Greek and Latin roots. I can't believe this great offer! So, look for a future blog post with my VocabularySpellingCity experience. It would be an understatement to say that I am looking forward to a great year, my 34th year in education. You can teach an old dog new tricks!

Summer - almost a thing of the past

Summer is slipping away. July, my self-proclaimed favorite month is gone. The three weeks of Summer School, aka Critter Camp, are over. I always feel when I get to this part of the summer that I haven't accomplished a whole lot, except I've read a lot of books. Let me reflect back on what I did actually do this summer. I did spent quite a bit of time of the computer. My daily routine started, in fact, with checking various social networking sites I belong to, looking at links that I thought might help me in the upcoming school year, checking email, and so on. My favorite teacher site is Plurk which is fabulous! I have gotten so many tips and sites from others on Plurk, and I appreciate all of the expertise I've found there. I save sites of interest on my Diigo page for later reference. I do have a Google+ page, too, but I'm not finding it as useful. I've read a couple of books for my professional health, Brain Rules, and What Great Teachers Do Differently: 14 Things that Matter Most. Brain Rules is fascinating, and I highly recommend it; What Great Teachers Do... was good, but seemed to be more practical, and perhaps geared toward teachers with less experience. I also attended a training session for three days with my colleague Sue. We spent three days at the Empowering Rural Educators training session, put on by the Educational Service District 113 in Tumwater, Washington, just a stone's-throw away from the state capital, and the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The training was good - don't get me wrong - but the amount of information jammed into the three days was overwhelming, and the tech-not-so-savvy had that deer in headlights look. Lots of sites were shown, but there wasn't always time to play with them. We did get two "gifts", however - a headset & mic, and a smartpen - the Echo, from Livescribe.com. That alone was worth it! We also visited Tumwater Falls Park, in the shadow of the former Olympia Brewing Company.

Not a bad way to spend three days, for certain. Again this year, I somehow got talked into teaching summer school. Under the supervision of my late administrator, it was called Jump Start, and ran for three weeks in August. The goal was to provide students, especially those who qualify for Title I services, a time before school starts to practice some basic literacy skills. When I first started doing summer school about twelve years ago, it seemed it was mostly crafts, and I hated that. Kids could go to summer camp for that! Our current administrator does support the literacy angle, and so this year, with the assistance of a co-teacher, we had Critter Camp. Working with a younger crowd, the emphasis was on research, and after an introduction to habitats, and brainstorming the animals that lived in those places, the kids selected an animal, and did some very basic research. In the middle of the second week, we took a field trip to the Olympic Game Farm, located in Sequim, Washington, where we saw lions and tigers and bears - oh, my! Also peacocks, llamas, yaks, a white rhino, prairie dogs, a couple of varieties of deer, and buffalo that circled our school bus as the kids threw bread out the window at them! It was a very successful field trip, and the kids loved it! The culmination of the research was the creation of paper cubes, each side with a fact family on it, and oral presentations by all. I also introduced the kids to math timings, and they put their best efforts into that, too! I think we had a very successful three weeks. Finally, the three iPads I purchased arrived. I'm a bit frustrated with them, mostly because I don't want to spend my own money on apps, and the free apps look too young for what I have in mind. I'm not devoting much space to them on this blog today, but I will later. I will be curious to see how I use them in my classes, but I know that I will. We start school on September 1, with two days of in-service before that. I am taking off for vacation, but the trusty laptop is going with me, because I have Moodle pages to create, and lessons to plan. Summer is over.