School!

All three of us started school this week. Josephine is still adjusting, but her reports have gotten consistently better and she got all smiley faces Friday!

We're still in transition about starting school and the numbers of students that we have are changing daily (as they do the first days of school). On Wednesday (before students arrived) I taught 7 classes of Viva Drama. When I got to school on Thursday (1st day back for students) I was teaching a class of Viva Art, 5 classes of Viva Drama, and one class of Peak (intellectually gifted). Quite different. I think that the Peak class is going to be the most challenging class to plan for, but the most rewarding class to have. I really am enjoying all my kids. They're such neat kids and I'm trying to adjust to being the teacher where the kids don't want to leave. Teaching history - they're not to enthused about the subject matter, but in Viva they LOVE having the freedom they're given.

Chip is having a pretty good year too. He says he likes his kids more this year, but it's taking its toll on him because the first two days of school he missed his planning period (meetings). Teaching/being on your feet all day straight is exhausting.

We're still trying to get on our own schedule here at home. Seeing what works best for us to get ourselves ready and Josephine ready to go to daycare. I have to drop off Jo at 7:30 and get to school at 7:30 also. Impossible. I'm just a few minutes late to my classroom, but class doesn't start until 7:45. Luckily, my next door neighbor in my building teaches Viva Art (my 1st period class) so we teach it together (well, I facilitate). All my students report to her room. It helps a whole lot with my schedule and dropping the baby off.

My first project for my Peak class is for them to get to know themselves. We're doing a lot of assessments of self (brain dominance, multiple intelligences, sensory perception, etc.) and they're going to create a presentation of themselves. Our first unit is going to be a psychology unit and discuss their development. I think they'll really find this interesting. Still thinking about what our next three units will be, but they all want to do something where we build something. I'll have to research that. In Viva Drama, we're going to do a presentation on the history of Theatre (they can take any direction they want) and we're going to begin this nine weeks with monologues/character development. The one thing I've heard a lot of from these kids is that they want to do a lot more acting. We played Charades on Friday. Where in a regular classroom can you play Charades as part of your curriculum?? I LOVE my new job. Challenging, but incredibly rewarding!! :)