Someone asked me, "How do you do all of this and have a young family?" I am used to hearing people say, "Do you ever sleep?" Yes, I sleep. In fact, I need at least 8 hours of sleep each night. Rest is important for me to function at full speed as well as for my recovering brain. It's a fair question. When I was a beginning teacher, I would arrive at school early in the morning and stay there until past dinner. Then, most nights I was doing work at home before bed. It would've been really difficult for me to be an excellent teacher if I were just now starting with littles at home (not to say that others who are just starting and have littles at home can't be excellent teachers, just that it would've been hard for ME). But due to that hard (and likely unhealthy) work back then, I have a lot of strategies in my teacher tool kit and many resources to pull from. I also spend an hour each day in the summer working on resources that will help me durin
Today is a day of firsts; first day back after the long Christmas break (we had a snow day yesterday), first day of my new blog, and first day with my new student teacher. I remember my days as a student teacher and how terrifying the first day was. In fact how terrifying every day was. Starting something new is scary and it takes courage to stand up in front of a group of 9 year olds and try to teach them day in and day out when you've never done it before. I tried tirelessly to create lessons that were engaging, fun, and exciting for my group of students. I wanted to be confident I wanted to teach them and see them grow. I was a disaster . In fact, I was so much of a disaster that my cooperating teacher encourage me to pursue another career field. She simply told me this is not for you (looking back, I understand why she thought that- I had ZERO classroom management and my 'out of the box', energetic lessons sometimes got out of control). Because she was a veteran teacher