My last post was June 29th? Seriously? :blush:

I have no excuse other than school started back thus I have been obsessing over lesson plans and such. School is better this year now that I don’t have to do my internship. I have a great group of kids this year (overall). I also have a smaller class – 18 this year – which is totally awesome. I sometimes miss all the time I used to spend on Twitter, my website, and the internet in general but I really do enjoy teaching and spend a lot of time planning lessons and such.

Right now we’re in the middle of the Gingerbread Girl craze. She ran away on Friday. The kids were even more excited about it this year than last year’s group was. It’s really fun. We’ll be making gingerbread ornaments, and cookies, and cakes this week. Fun times! My mom made another gingerbread house around my classroom door and it is even cuter than the one last year! Way more color this time around. I’ll have to take a picture of it this week.

Christmas is right around the corner. I have a lot of shopping left to do. I also have many crafty things I am working on. I am working on adding items to my Etsy shop which has been ignored for a couple of years now. I am going to be adding some major cuteness to it, and I can’t wait!

For now I leave you with this yummy treat I baked up at Thanksgiving. More on my Flickr.

And the layout… it was coming along well, but then I got busy. And now I think I may have a new idea.

At times it seemed I wouldn’t, but I DID manage to survive my first year as a first grade teacher. Teaching first grade is a lot different than teaching second, third, or computer lab (which is what I have previously taught). I have to say that overall I really love first grade. Now, I definitely had a TOUGH class this year. One student was diagnosed as EBD. That student and another were both diagnosed with anxiety disorder and ADHD. (Another student was also diagnosed with ADHD.) I had kids throw chairs, scream at me, yell and cry every day, crawl around the room, etc. I am happy to say that I was the only teacher who had all of her students in first grade at benchmark (on grade level) in math at the end of the year. I learned a lot this year and became a better teacher in many ways.

My last day with the students was on Friday. Since we missed so much school due to the ice storm, the teachers have to work until June 9th. We have three days of district curriculum mapping to get through and hopefully the rest of the time I can spend organizing my room and making preparations for next year. I am already excited about next year. I will be at a disadvantage next year in one way. This year I pretty much know most of the kids in my class from having them in computer lab. Next year I will know a couple of students by name, but I don’t really know what to expect from them. The kindergartners were a rough group this year. A LARGE group too. So large in fact that a second grade teacher is moving down to first so we’ll have four and a half first grade classes.

Since my summer is pretty close to actually beginning, I am hoping to have more time to work on my websites and to blog more often. I had to attend a school webmaster training the other day and they gave us a new digital camera and flip video recorder that I am dying to put to use.

Oh, in other news, Colin and I have found a house! Now, nothing is totally official yet (we’re still waiting on the final news from the bank and for the loan to go through), but if all goes as planned we could move into our house on July 19th! I really hope everything goes okay with the loan. I guess it’s freaked the bank lady out that she found out Colin is Canadian. Whatever.

Hopefully I’ll be able to catch up on the blogs I like to visit and get back in the swing of internet things. It’s going to be a busy summer!