New Blog

                                          New Blog!

This is the very first post for my very first blog. I have really enjoyed reading a lot of teacher blogs over the past several months and thought I would start my own. It has been an experience just setting it up. 

A little about me: I am 41 and this is my 15th year of teaching. My first 6 years I had a 1st and 2nd grade class at a private Montessori school. I loved it, but the benefits weren't great. Since then, I have taught 1st grade except for one year when I taught 2nd. 

I am happily married to my best friend, Kenny. We have two children, Jake (22) and Becca (20). Jake has been out on his own since last summer and Becca is getting married this July. 

I have been dealing with chronic illness for the past several years, but thankfully I am much better and able to do more now than just teach all day and come home and collapse. I finally got the diagnosis of chronic Lyme Disease last summer and have been undergoing treatment ever since. I feel soooo much better than this time last year. Recently, we discovered that my mother and daughter also have chronic Lyme Disease and we are awaiting Jake's test results on May 11th. We are trying to figure out how we all contracted this and I hope to get a family blog started documenting our journey with Lyme Disease and recovery to try to help others in a similar situation. 

Even though I have to think about Lyme Disease and health issues everyday, I will put that information on the other blog. I want a place to just focus on education. I will put a post on here when we get the Lyme blog up and running in case anyone else is dealing with Lyme Disease. I would love to hear from another teacher dealing with Lyme. 

So, one of the reasons I want to get involved in this world of teacher blogs is to "meet" other teachers, get ideas from them and share my ideas. I think teachers are some of the most creative people in the world. For the past several summers (6, I think) I have been a trainer for the math and science program in the counties near my home. I have really loved getting to know teachers from other cities and the different activities that they do each year. I try to keep things interesting for my students. I think that if I am bored, they are bored. I love hands-on activities and projects. 

For this first post, I will just tell you about the project my students just finished yesterday. 

Each student chose an animal they wanted to research. I was surprised by some of their choices, and several were just plain adorable. One of the toughest boys in my class (can be a real trouble maker) chose to research Hamsters:) That just struck me as cute. One child chose Goldfish because he was so intrigued by our new classroom pet. Three of the girls (I only have 6) chose Wolves.Anyway, it took about 6 weeks for each child to research their animal and create a book. There were 8 pages and each page asked for something different about their animal. Before I let them write in the book, they had to write a rough draft and Conference with me. For Homework, the children had to choose some way to show their animal: poster, diorama, clay sculpture, etc. Yesterday, we invited families to come listen to the children tell about their animal and show their projects. It went really well. I will definitely do this project again. They were so proud of themselves- especially when the assistant principal came in and listened to each child tell her about their research. 

Ok, so that's the end of post 1. I plan to get organized and get going on this. Tomorrow I may try to post a picture. (I did figure out how to put up the one of my husband and me on the side:)