My Lucky Seven

I figured I'd join up with this fun linky from Don't Let the Teacher Stay Up Late to help get into the St. Patrick's Day mood. 

So, here are my seven things I feel lucky to have in my life:

1- My beautiful wife of the last 5 years! 

We met while teaching next door to each other! I was a young 2nd grade teacher and she was the new Special Education teacher. After our big move cross-country she has moved on from teaching and is now a counselor at our local university.

2 - My Home

I'm lucky enough to live in a great little small town (but not TOO small) in Central PA. My wife and I had a rough first year here because we hadn't sold our old house in GA, so we lived in a tiny closet of an apartment for a full year. 3 years ago we were lucky enough to buy our new home, which is plenty big enough for a potential family one day.

3 - Our German Shepherds

Even though my two dogs can be quite a lot of work to deal with, I'd still consider myself lucky to have them in my life! My wife trains them in a sport called schutzhund. They're serious on the training field, but big goofballs everywhere else!

4 - School & Kiddos

I'm lucky enough to work in a school where I am trusted to do what's right for my students. The other teachers and administrators value the same things I do, and the students in my school are just a great bunch of kids. My kids this year are even more reason to consider myself lucky. They're smart, funny and super respectful of each other. What more can a teacher ask?

5 - Faith

Though I don't like to preach, and I usually keep it to myself, I have a strong faith in God and am thankful for the blessings I've received in life. I've had my share of challenges as well, but always pulled through!

6 - Health

An array of health problems are in my family history, but I've been really lucky to be able to say that so far I'm relatively healthy! I've had a few scares here and there with health concerns, but for the most part I can't complain!

7 - Living in the 21st Century!

Teaching 5th has really reminded me how lucky I am to live in our day and age. The internet, ipads, video games, medical science, etc. How could I live without them?! Not sure I'd have made it this far in life if I'd have had the poor luck of being born in the 18th century. 

Finally, just to spread some luck (hopefully the good kind!) I made up this small set of freebie clip art really quickly. As a hobby I like to hand carve custom rubber stamps. I made this set of .png files using impressions from one of my rubber stamp sets. Enjoy!

Find them at my TpT store by clicking here!

A visit from the Terrible Trivium

For The Phantom Tollbooth uninitiated, the Terrible Trivium is a kind of demon-dude that Milo and his buddies run into who's main purpose in life is to waste people's time with trivial and meaningless tasks.  (He's the faceless guy up there in the corner in fact!)

Well, we got to meet him again today in the form of a standardized writing assessment. And we get to spend the rest of the week with him too. Blech. 

I know this isn't a particularly fresh or unique take on testing, but man...I hate standardized tests. For one thing, my kids dread them and get nervous about them. I downplay testing in my classroom and refuse to even acknowledge that it has importance in our lives. 

I've taught my kids good pre-writing strategies that I expect them to use. I've taught them how to spice up their writing with strong adjectives and varying sentence length. We've learned about the differences in the various modes of writing. We've discussed phrasing and prosody. We've beat punctuation and capitalization into the ground...but not so they could pass a test, so they can be successful writers in real life situations. 

I tell my kiddos that they should always put their best effort into anything they do, of course. But I never act stressed about it, or emphasize its importance. Despite this attitude I could tell that many of my kids were nerve-wracked this morning when they came in and saw the blue paper I'd hung all over the walls to cover our anchor charts and student work, their desks spread out, a new #2 sitting in their pencil wells and the fact that all of my students with special needs were being ushered out of the room to test in another place. They didn't like any of that. And neither did I. 

But of course it's our job as teachers to grin and bear it! Give up 3 days of real school to the Terrible Trivium each year with a smile on our faces. He'll be back in April for 3 more days of tedium and trivial tasks when it's time to inadequately assess whether the kids can do math and read well.

Aargh! Okay, vent over! On to better things! I have much more positive posts planned for the future!

If you haven't signed up for my "Brand New to Blogging" math game giveaway and you're interested in one of my 5th grade (easily adaptable to 3rd and 4th in some cases) math games, then sign up below!

As an apology for sitting through my whole rant on testing, I hope you'll enjoy this font I made! I call it "Nick's Typewriter" 

http://2ttf.com/QosLTMPH

Brand New to Blogging Giveaway!

So, what is blogging if no one else is reading?

I've seen other people's giveaways before and figured I'd try it out. I'd love to be able to do one of these each time I hit a benchmark number of followers. The prize is small this time because I've got a small number of followers! Let's remedy that!


a Rafflecopter giveaway

Currently in March

So, for a while I've been reading others' blogs and I've always seen the fun "Currently" posts that originate from Oh' Boy 4th Grade and now I get to do my own!

I'm a little to the party this month, but here goes anyway:

Listening - I'm a fan of 1940's music, especially jazz, and Billie Holiday is one of my all time favorites.

Loving - Wonder by R.J. Palacio is one of the best books I've read in a while, and I'm an avid reader. This is going into my rotation of books that I'll read with my kids every year.

Thinking - We have our state standardized writing tests this upcoming week. I feel like I've done my best to prepare my students, but I'm still dreading them. I hate having to sit there and watch the kids do formulaic writing to a prompt for hours on end, for 3 days. 

Wanting - A big mug of coffee and a donut would be great right now. I can remedy the coffee problem, but the donut is not worth driving to the store for. Alas!

Needing - My wife and I have a horrible habit of eating out, getting take-out or eating from a package. We haven't been blessed with any kids to feed, so it's usually just easier to grab something for two than it would be to cook for two. Still, we really need to stop!

Like/Love/Hate - I like new teaching blogs that I can add to my list to read. Nothing bums me out more (okay maybe some things) than seeing my little Google Reader App displaying "0 new items" to read.

I love a good novel. I read more than is probably good for me, and I've usually got 3 to 4 books going at once. It's a real problem. 

I hate this winter weather! It's time to end! I typically ride my Vespa pretty much everywhere I go, but for months it's been too cold. We've been teased with warm weather this weekend, and I can't wait for it to warm up enough to ride again.

So...time to go make that coffee and smash an english muffin into a donut shape! So long for now!

A reminder from Tock

Don't forget to set those clocks forward tonight!

It's always so much fun to "fall back an hour," but not so much to "spring ahead." Losing an hour of my day (even if it is when I'm asleep) just doesn't appeal to me considering all the things that I have on my plate!

This weekend has been really productive though! I got my blog started, posted my 25th item to my Teacherspayteachers store, and finished all my prep work for teaching next week before Sunday! I even got to enjoy the nice change in weather by going with my wife to help her while she trained our dog in tracking, and we went for a nice little Vespa ride around town!

I am so excited to have two followers already! I thought for sure I'd spend months "talking" to myself on here before anyone noticed! And it's always great when people have their own blogs that I can follow and add to my growing list of RSS feeds!

For the curious, my 25th item was also my biggest one yet. I've been working on a Novel Unit for the book Wonder by RJ Palacio. It's 170 pages long! I was really excited to finally finish the unit.

If you haven't read this book yet...finish reading this entry then shut down your computer, drive to the store and buy yourself a copy. Be ready to devote the rest of the night to reading and have a box of tissues handy.

Hands down, this is one of the best books to come out in the last few years. I am so excited to read it with my class for years to come. Not only is the story a masterpiece of realistic fiction, it has great tier two words for vocabulary, shows different perspectives, excellent examples of figurative language, easy to pick out themes and tons of opportunities for kids to infer and predict. What more can a teacher ask for in a book?!

While making the novel unit I read through the book several times and I think I probably teared up about 10 times each time I read it. It was just as good the fourth time as it was the first.

Check out my novel unit here:
Wonder Novel Unit

Here's hoping the nice weather holds out or even improves even more! I'm a dedicated environmentalist and as a part of that I drive my Vespa (74 mpg!) whenever possible...but when the temps dip below freezing, even I have to store the ol' girl til Spring. Today's ride around town really reminded me what I have been missing. I guess if Spring will get here it's worth losing that hour tonight!

More to come from me soon! I've set a goal to blog at least three times a week! I feel an addiction blooming here...

Escaping the Doldrums

So after years and years of avidly reading other teachers' wonderfully well-written, thought-provoking, and often truly helpful blogs...I've decided to take a stab at it myself. 

 I thought I'd start with a quick introduction of myself, my motivations for blogging and why I chose this theme for my site! 

 I'm currently a 5th grade teacher in Central Pennsylvania, but I'm still really new to the world of 5th grade. This is only my second year! I spent my first 10 years teaching Kindergarten, 1st, 2nd and 1st/2nd Multi-age. My beautiful wife and I moved here to Pennsylvania five years ago to escape the smog and traffic of the big city. 

I am lucky enough to work in a great school, with staff and admin that share the same values I hold dear; democracy, environmental conservation and focusing on making great kids, not just great test scores. I'm sure to post more in the future about some of the things I think we're doing right at my school! 

 The move to 5th has definitely been a learning experience, and has made me feel like a brand new teacher more days than not. Pulling late nights, scouring the internet for good ideas, learning the things myself so that I can teach them...it's been a journey. 

One part of that journey meant finding a whole new set of blogs to follow! Reading about the experiences and ideas from other 4th and 5th grade teachers really helped me last year with getting my feet wet in 5th. I've always thought blogging seemed interesting, and Lord knows I like to talk, so I finally decided to give it a try! Maybe one day some of the ideas I share will help another teacher! 

 Finally, when it came time for the important job of choosing a name and working out a theme I had to give it a lot of thought. I finally settled on using one of my favorite books of all time as inspiration, The Phantom Tollbooth. 

To me, this book really embodies what teaching is all about. Milo begins his story bored and uninterested, but by the time he reaches journey's end his world is full of color. His quest to find the Princesses Rhyme and Reason, and his encounters with all the characters in the book, remind me what I should be doing as a teacher. Help kids escape the doldrums. Introduce them to numbers and words and rhyme and reason, and you fill their worlds with color. 

 Happy reading!