What I Have Been Up To

It has been a busy week. 

I spent last Saturday in the big city.

I got see my girls...

...present the Family Fantasy Football trophy to Wo...

...and celebrate my birthday.

At school, the kidlets went grammar caroling. 

They did an awesome job singing/rapping the new pronoun song (a "Thrift Shop" parody) !

I am fairly confident that grammar caroling would have been the most exciting school activity this week, had not Mr. W's military history staged their marshmallow "gentleman's war" on Thursday. 

No amount of singing about parts of speech can compete with a marshmallow battle.

Such is the lot of an English teacher.

The non school hours this week were spent doing some ward conference visiting, training a new Relief Society presidency, and getting things ready for our Stake Relief Society Dinner and Conference.

It is going to be a pretty awesome evening.

If you are going to be in the neighborhood Tuesday, you should stop by.

If you aren't going to be in the neighborhood, I'm sure there will be lots of photos to post later in the week. Anything Sister Woodhouse helps with is always very photo-worthy.

But our school's family reading night is also next week, so it might take a few days to get a post up. Until then, feel free to enjoy the awesome grammatical musical stylings of some of my favorite kidlets.  

(National) Conference Report

Before I get into reporting on my time at the National Title I Conference I attended this week I would just like to point out that, on Wednesday evening, I was here...

...and by Thursday morning, I was here. 

Sigh. 

I know the valley-wide fast for snow helped a little, but I am fairly sure that it was the fact that I had travel plans this week/weekend that was the main cause for our very effectual snow storm.

Anyway...

Last Saturday morning, Rick, Cousin Cindy, and I left Cowtown dark and early to attend the National Title I Conference in  San Diego. 

Now, lest you think that student funds were used to send us on this little trip, I should tell you a little bit about how school funding works. Every dollar we get comes stapled to a list of approved things we can spend it on. For example, technology dollars can only be spent on approved technology, safety money can only be spent on approved safety features, etc. And every so often, some federal auditors show up (picture a cross between an IRS agent and a mob enforcer) to make sure that the money is all being spent on the right stuff.

Well, every year the feds give us a bunch of teacher training funds. That means we can't use the money for productive things, like textbooks, or copies, or paying me a living wage. We can only use it for teacher training. The upside to this situation is that the government likes to hold their training's in places like San Diego in February rather than in Fargo, North Dakota in February. 

The other upside is all the free teacher swag that the vendors in the exhibition hall heap upon us as we sprint from class to class. Teachers LOVE free stuff.

So for four days, Rick and Cousin Cindy, and I spent about eight hours a day in training sessions, then spent our evenings doing a little sight-seeing.  And although I am sure that you would have loved to see lots of photos of me sitting in meetings, I decided to illustrate the things we learned during the day using photos of the things we did in the evenings.

We listened to experts share with us their visions of the future of education.

We rubbed elbows with some of the best full-time teachers in the world.

We learned new classroom management strategies. 

And even had a workshop on finding new avenues for school funding.

And we found out what will happen if our kidlets don't pass the new standardized test. 

We also ate in the BBQ joint where they filmed scenes from Top Gun. 

I realize the above comment had nothing to do with our conference sessions, but I just had to tell someone who might care. The kidlets, bless their hearts, were not at all impressed by this particular adventure, seeings as how they are too young to know/care about Top Gun or Tom Cruise. They were far more impressed by the dolphin I saw during a lunch break on Wednesday.

They were also pretty pleased with the bag of new low-odor whiteboard makers one of the vendors gifted me with. Because it turns out, Kidlets like free stuff too.

Miss H Has Left The Classroom/Building/State/Time Zone

This week, I am here.

And even though I am sleeping here...

... I am spending most of my waking hours here, attending classes with titles like...

Common Core: Consistency vs. Conformity: How to Keep Teacher Individualism and Creativity Alive

and

Closing the Achievement Gap in Common Core Era: Self-Regulation and Struggling Adolescent Readers

and

M Is for Metacognition: Strategies for Maximizing Teachers’ Brains and Instructional Flexibility

I started wearing sunglasses last week, before I even got to California. But I wasn't wearing them because of the sun.

I was wearing them to hide the tell-tale signs of staying up till all hours trying to get four days of PRODUCTIVE sub plans for three and a half subjects finished...

...while also finishing up odds and ends for our first yearbook deadline which, of course, was the same week.

But now the sub plans are done, almost half of the yearbook has been submitted, and I am in San Diego (for the first time in my life), staying in an awfully nice hotel right next to a terribly beautiful ocean.

So I might just have to take advantage of the fact the afternoon session of ...

Turning High-Poverty Schools Into High-Performing Schools: 12 High Leverage Strategies That Work

...has been cancelled, and let my sunglasses do the job for which they were created. 

Literary Love Connections

I stayed after school on the last day of the semester to work on my first new bulletin board of the new semester. I wanted something that would be as beneficial to my year-long English kidlets as well as to my new crop of creative writers.(I also wanted something I could put together quickly since it was 5 o'clock on a Friday.) It was a rush job, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.

The quote Jenny sent me sent me the next morning comparing books to the T.A.R.D.I.S. was a very nice addition. Older sisters can really come in handy sometimes...

Moms also frequently come in handy.

For example, my mom recently passed along the idea for an "extreme booking" activity  her school librarian put together that very closely resembled speed dating. Having junior high kids "speed date" books? How could I resist?

So I took the idea to my school librarian, Dave.

You remember Dave, don't you?

He is the one who made it possible for Sherlock to wish me a happy birthday last year...

 ...and more recently turned me into an adjective.

So I told Dave that I wanted to give the kidlets a chance to step our if their literary comfort zones (Fantasy and dystopian novels are their current favorites). I spent a good five minutes making what I thought was a pretty compelling case, but it turns out all of the edu-speak was unnecessary: I had him at "I want the 7th graders to go speed dating with books."

He spent weeks looking for awesome books that weren't seeing the action they deserved, organized them into genres, assigned two genres to each library table, and assigned two books to each library seat.

After a conversation about not judging a book by its cover, the kids got to spend 90 seconds getting to know books that they might otherwise have ignored completely.

The afternoon resulted in some fun new literary love connections and some expanded "to read" lists, just as I had hoped.

But there was an unanticipated result too... while the kidlets were busy flirting with new genres, Dave and I compiled book-related pickup lines. Not all of them were fit to print in a family-friendly blog, but I thought it would be fun to end the post with a few that could be rated PG or lower. Enjoy!

We could make such a beautiful library together.

Do you know how I can contact Sherlock Holmes? Because I need to solve the mystery of how to win your heart.

You’re so hunky, you must be hiding a rapidly aging portrait somewhere in your attic.

Forget the dictionary, you're the one who gives my life meaning.

If you were a dementor, I would become a criminal just to get your kiss.

You must be the master of the EXPELLIARMUS spell, because your smile is disarming!

Yowza! You are hotter than Fahrenheit 451!

If you were a library book you would be overdue, because baby you are FINE!

Adventure was my favorite genre, but ever since I met you, I can't get romance off my mind.

Do you know what meeting you and my library book have in common? They're both seriously overdue.

You must be a library book, because I just can't stop checking you out.

Another Love Poem

In the grand tradition started by my rhyming tribute to my carport (which you can revisit by clicking HERE), I have penned a similar ode to the new semester and the return of my A-day preparation time.

What joy! What rapture! What freakin’ bliss!

I’d forgotten life could be like this!

After 18 weeks in  disarray,

I finally get a prep each day!

Time to plan, to grade, to breathe!

Time to tinkle? Yes indeed!

Sure, I prepped before, but not each day.

How’d I survive? It’s hard to say.

I came in early, and stayed till late,

Skipped countless meals, and canceled dates.

 I bordered on insanity

While choking back profanities.

But that time for which I yearned,

My precious prep, has been returned!

I can’t describe the bliss, so sweet!

I’m back to prep five times a week!

For those of you without a teaching background, prep time looks like THIS...

... but feels like THIS.

Winter White... and Another Thing My Sister did this week

I know the rest of the world celebrated the new year a few weeks ago, but it didn't feel very "new" to me. In my school district, the kidlets don't take finals until after Christmas break, so coming back after the holiday feels more like a rapid race to the last dying gasps of something rather than the start of something new.

But as of Friday at 3:15, finals were over, and Monday morning a shiny new semester will begin.
I love the start of the new semester: I get five classes of new kidlets, and my three groups of continuing kidlets get to start over with a blank page in the grade book.

Before I left school on Friday evening, I took down all of my final test decorations and put some fresh new paper and a bright new boarder on my bulletin board.

I had already planed the content for my board earlier in the week. Then Saturday morning, my elder sister texted me a photo of an awesome poster in her boy's school library that fit perfectly into my decorating scheme. I will post photos of the result later in the week...

Right now, I want to talk about another idea that my dear sister recently shared with me. 

My mother's family gifted Jenny and I with the gene for early white hair. I found my first white hairs my first semester of college. I decided then that I didn't want to mess with the expense and, well, mess of coloring my hair, so I resolved to grow white gracefully. 

That lasted until I graduated from college and was nearing the end of my first semester as a teacher. I was sitting at my desk when one of my little guys came to ask me a question. He said, "Wow, Miss H. You must work really hard!" I told him that, yes, I do work really hard, then asked how he knew. His answer? "Because you have A LOT of white hair."

And I have been dying my hair ever since.

So has Jenny, but she recently started thinking about quitting the color game. Finding this gal's blog gave her the courage to try kicking the hair dyeing habit now instead of waiting. 

I thought about trying it too. It would be a wise financial decision, and I thought it could be kind of liberating. Going white together could also be a great bonding experience for us. It might be nice to have a color in common after going so many rounds over red/blue issues.

But then last night I chickened out and bought a box of color. New semester = new hair color.

But I haven't completely given up on the silver sister thing. As always, I will just let Jenny go first and see what happens. Then, when I am a little bit older, I will follow her example.

Probably.

The other brave thing my big sister did this week was take Ruby and Milo to audition for the Kid History guys. Apparently the audition went really well, thanks to their cute little speech impediments and devious minds. 

For those of you who don't hang out with tweens from Utah, Kid History is an online thingy that a family started doing for fun, but has kind of exploded in popularity thanks to YouTube. I linked my favorite Kid Snippet and one of my favorite Kid History videos below. If you haven't seen them before, take a moment to check them out. 

They are awesome.

If Ruby and Milo end up narrating the new video, It will be my new favorite thing to watch.

Until then, however, I will have to been content with watching the (two-years-in-the-making) new season of Sherlock that starts tonight on PBS. My Cumber-Pillow and I are all ready!

DIY

I think I should begin my very first post of 2014 by saying that Heavenly Father loves me very, very much.

I know that He loves me very, very much because He did not allow the Arctic Vortex to settle anywhere near my cute little cow town this week, a week that I was assigned outside lunch duty.

Sure, we got a some snow, but it was soooooo much easier to warn the kids that throwing, kicking, or in any way propelling snow would result in four hours of Saturday school without chattering teeth and icicles forming in my nostrils.

And, even though I know the weather is not a contest, I would still like to point out the differences in temperature between my home and the towns where my niblets reside. And then I would like to point out that, if the weather WAS a contest, I totally would have kicked trash this week.

This first week back to school after the wondrous and beautiful two-week break, was kind-of-sort-of busy. Besides the start of ward conference season, it was also the week before semester tests (a.k.a The End of Course Assessments, or EOCAs).

The kidlets had two full weeks to forget everything they have ever learned about English, communications, and creative writing. Over the break, months worth of information leaked out their ears and into their pillows. So this week was my last chance to try to sneak some of that info back in before testing begins on Tuesday.

I have to admit that I was kind of looking forward to getting back in my classroom after so many days off. I was really hopping that, while I was gone, the tech people would have received and installed the new projector my awesome principal bought for me (I think he might have sold one of his kidneys to finance it...) 

When I walked into my classroom Monday morning, I thought that maybe my new projector would be waiting on the ceiling with a big red bow on it. But alas, when I turned on the light, the corpse of my late-projector was still decaying above me.

I have been able to use the library projector since mine bit the dust back in October, but the whole situation has made my life more difficult that it needed to be.

Having this expensive equipment perched precariously on an unstable cart from the late 80's, taking up a whole aisle in my classroom, and various cords stretched across the main thoroughfare was very dangerous. I mean, have you seen junior high kids try to move around a room? Watching them try to navigate their spazzy little bodies kind of makes you think uncoordinated aliens have taken them over and are trying to steer using their toes on an old computer joystick. It is a miracle we don't have more injuries every day even without the the cart of death in the middle of the room.

Things started to look up on Tuesday, however, when my principal hand delivered my new projector to my classroom. There was great joy and rejoicing in 1A English that day.

But now I am waiting for the tech folks to take the projector from down here...

... and put it up here. And let me tell you, waiting patiently has NEVER been one of my strong suits.

For Christmas, my awesome parents got me an adorable standy-uppy cupboard thingy from IKEA. I couldn't WAIT to put it together, so I broke into the boxes to sneak a peak at the instructions.

Upon opening the instructions, I was happy to learn that I can speak Swedish fluently (probably a pleasant side effect of eating so many Swedish fish over the years). and was quickly able to discern that I should not attempt to put the standy-uppy cupboard thingy together by myself.

I have very tool-centric home teachers who I knew would be more than willing to help me when I got the thing home, not to mention a best pal who is married to a retired tech center principal/current building supply store guru, so I wasn't worried about getting it put together. I just didn't want to WAIT. So my mother, a 20 year veteran of cub scout wood working projects, agreed to help me before I even left.

WARNING: THIS SECTION OF THE POST CONTAINS VERY SPECIFIC AND TECHNICAL FURNITURE-BUILDING TERMS. PEOPLE WITHOUT EXTENSIVE FURNITURE-BUILDING BACKGROUNDS MIGHT NEED TO ARRANGE TO READ THIS SECTION WITH A PROFESSIONAL NEARBY TO ANSWER QUESTIONS. 

We put together the big rectangularish part. Then we put together the base part with the cute little feet. That way, once I got it home, I would only have to attach the base feety part to the big retangularish part, slide in the shelves, slap on the doors, and I would be good to go.

I wanted to finish up the little project as soon as I got home, but between time consuming school stuff and spirit lifting Relief Society stuff, I didn't get time to work on it until this afternoon. Thanks to all the work we had done at my parents house, it didn't take very much time or effort to finish it up. 

I think it looks great in my guest room (Thanks Mom and Dad!). 

Putting it together went so smoothly that I started thinking that maybe I could take on another Do-It-Yourself project this week while the kids are silently (Ha ha!) taking their finals. I mean, how much more difficult could it be to take a projector from down here...

... and put it up here? I think I could do it.

As long as the instructions are in Swedish.