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
What. A. Task! 14 years of teaching and I'm still seeking ways to better organize my classroom library. When I moved into my current teaching position (4th grade) 4 years ago, I lost a lot of bookshelf space and ended up packing away half of my library. Don't worry, I used my "back up library" to swap books out mid-year so that students had "new" books to take them through the second semester. This summer, a local business donated 6 bookcases to my classroom and I am over the moon! Now I can FINALLY have my full library back! But, how do I organize my books? Way back when I was teaching in Northern Virginia, I remember taking a SPOT training and learning about classroom library organization. Besides having regular buckets with different themes, it was suggested to have a few buckets labeled "Boy Books" and "Girl Books". That never set too well with the little tomboy deep inside of me because I know that personally, I've never