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!