OhMyWord! I Blogged!

Hello, Stranger Peeps!

It has been foreva! Like, literally, almost forever! I'm going to put this in print so that (hopefully) it comes true: 2014-2015 is going to be the year when Dawn actually blogs. For reals. Hopefully you can help hold me to it. I am sooo bad. So a bit of a recap of what's gone on...

I started teaching back at my favourite school, this time in a Kinder/Gym position. Not necessarily my forte, but I very much enjoyed it. Some A lot of changes happened at school this year, almost half of our professional staff is leaving or moving into new positions. So I'm teaching Grade 3 next year. I'm excited to be in my very own classroom (not filled with someone else's stuff), and not having to share with anyone, as well as working full-time (and full-time classroom). Plus it is the room of a good friend who left for another position at a different school, which means that it's an open spot that could become mine if everything goes well this year.

Also a plus, I know all of my kids (they were in Kinder the first year I taught at the school) and I taught them Phys. Ed. all year. No need to learn any names! :)

I'm super excited for this new chapter, and for a work-free summer! I am helping out at my mom's store for two weeks, but other than that I'm free!

Here's to a summer of fun (and blogging)! Thanks for reading!

Take care,

Announcement and a Design Change

Hey All,


The announcement and the design change sort of go together...so, first, it's official! I got a job at the school I was talking about earlier! :)

The only thing is that it's not the grade 3 job I applied for...I'm teaching kindergarten!

I was pretty nervous at first, I trained as a Middle Years teacher, and over the past few years have taught everything from 3-7. It was a little overwhelming at first, thinking about what a day would look like with my kinders, but over the past couple days it's become more exciting.

Now I'm mostly nervous about the first day. But I'm sure it'll be great.

So that's the reason for the design change. Thanks to Dreamlike Magic for the template!

Pretty soon I will be a "Middle Years Girl in an Early Years World"!



Thanks for reading!

Positive Thoughts...

Hey Everyone,

Just a quick note to ask you to keep your fingers ultra crossed for me this week as I had an interview at one of my favourite schools. Should hear back sometime after the long weekend. I went in pretty confident and with a lot of staff support, but you never know.

Thanks for the support!

Currently, etc.

Hello Friends!

Thanks for sticking around, even though I have been a lazy blogger most of the time that I have been with you. I promise that eventually things will pick up around here! Around the same time that they pick up in my teaching career. Sigh.

Anyway, I shall start with this month's Currently. If you haven't yet, you should check it out (every month) by Farley over at Oh Boy 4th Grade. She always has lots of fun things going on.

So here is what right now looks like for me:

 

I should be working on my PBDE project, but instead I am working on cover letters and blog stalking. Very worthwhile past-times! Since I've started this post-bacc program, I'm techinically able to apply for different resource/special ed. positions. There were a couple postings this week, but I'm kind of afraid that I will be completely over my head if I get something. I just need to work on believing in my abilities and figuring out how to bring that across to others. Also, I am craving a frappucino. But I am still in my PJs at 2 pm. So that tells you how much motivation I have today :)

On an unrelated job note, I really need a teaching job so that I don't have to work so much retail anymore! I am really sick of working Sundays. 

And my "like, love, hate": 

I always think that "D" words are so hard...but I came up with three. My like, dorkiness, is just fun. I've been lucky enough to get a lot of sub days at a school that I worked at for most of the last school year. So my "dorkiness" is one thing that lets me connect with students and have fun. My love, is my dog, Leif. He is such a dork too. 

But how could you not love this face?

That's my puppy giving me a "I missed you, momma!" hug!

And the last, my hate, is drama. I feel like there is always someone trying to start things. So I'm doing my best to avoid those who start and spread it all.

That's it for now! Have a great weekend everyone!

Generalness and Math

Hey Everyone,

Happy New Year, hope everyone had a relaxing holiday (I know, that break seems like forever ago)! I am coming to the end of a extra-long weekend due to a storm day on Friday (woo hoo)! One of the perks of teaching outside of the city is being able to roll over and go back to sleep after that great phone call while all your friends who teach in the city still have to go to school (sorry, friends)! :)

If you are wondering, no, I still haven't found a job, but I am doing a short stint in a classroom in a school I used to work in for the next week and a half. So I get snow days too. Unfortunately, there were a bunch of things at school that I wanted to take home for the weekend from her classroom to get ready for this week, but I wasn't able to since I wasn't at school. Oh well, I'll take sleeping in, going for breakfast with the hubs and getting my grocery shopping done by 10am.

So I've had a couple of questions about my guided math program that I'm going to try to answer, and later this week (hopefully) I'm going to post about my exciting math-related project I'm doing for my post-bacc course.

Guided Math

So Aviva was asking about problem solving and communication in my guided math groups. One thing to stress with the students when building your guided math routine is how to work when you are not with the teacher. Some of these strategies include the mechanics of station work: how to get and pack up materials, how to move from one area to another, etc. But the other important routines to build with your students are how to work together, how to "help" one another, and how to talk about math. (As a disclaimer, I would like to say that all of my schooling and experience has been in grades 3-7. So some of my ideas may need to be tweaked for first and second graders).

The idea of teaching kids the second set of routines is super important. I don't know how many times I go into classrooms and am trying to help students with a problem, when the next kid in line whispers the answer. They think that they are helping, but really, they are just speeding the process along. This becomes important to kibosh when you are doing g.m. because the students are working alone in their groups without you for 3/4 of the time. One of the preteaching things that I always do is talk about how we can help. I try to teach students to talk about processes, not results. Talk your friend through how you started to solve the problem, or important words, or where to look to find the info you need to begin. I find, especially at the middle grades, that this is difficult for kids. They don't want to show their work, or talk about strategies; teaching them how to do this effectively is super important (and for little kidlets too, that way they'd be used to it by grade 5)! :)

For problem solving, I would start off as a whole group, and go through strategies to use. We would probably start with different problems that would use the same strategy. I used a program called "Problem Solver 6". What I might do in the future is to give each group a problem once a week when they meet with me. Then in one of their breakoff groups (paper/pencil, or instead of fact practice) I would get them to take turns talking about the steps that they would use to solve the problem, or maybe give each group a different type of problem, and have them be 'experts' on that type of problem to teach the rest of the class.

As I said, so much of it is about pre-teaching these routines. Like in the Daily 5 program, you have to start small, and definitely teach kids the language, expectations and routines. You might not get into fully operating guided math groups until November. But that's okay. All that preparation means that it will run so much smoother later on.

Hope that helps! Any questions, ask 'em in the comments!

As a final note on this incredibly long post, I need to share this picture, which may finally help me to remember what the difference between mean, median and mode is. I shared it with a group of grade sixers on Thursday and they were repeating it all morning!








Take care!

Made it Monday! Finally!

Yay! I finally made it for a Made it Monday with Tara over at Fourth Grade Frolics! 

This Made it is actually a while in the making, but it is finished...and it is Monday, so I get to link up! I'm so excited! 

If you spend as much time on Pinterest as I do, you'll probably know this sign: 

http://www.etsy.com/listing/81301231/classroom-rules-subway-style-wood-sign?ref=cat3_gallery_22

Which I really loved. Then, scrolling through another set of Monday Made Its, I found this post by Jen @ Teaching and Tech in the Middle School (go check it out if you want how to pictures, and because she's awesome). 

So short story long, I went to Michael's, bought a canvas and a couple tubes of paint, bought some different font cartridges for my Cricut, cut the phrases on cardstock to use as a stencil and ended up with this: 

(Please excuse the blurry phone picture)

It still needs a couple touch ups, but I'm pretty excited about how it turned out. Thinking about doing a matching/opposite colours one for this: 

  

And on another note: Had an interview today! Keeping my fingers & toes crossed until Wednesday. Sent positive thoughts my way! 

Now go amaze me with your craftiness!

Happy Monday Everyone!

School (the other kind)!

Welcome back!

So last time I mentioned something about having some more news.

So over the past few months, I've hemmed and hawed over the idea of heading back to university and doing a few courses. On one hand, I didn't want to do it because as someone who has two degrees adding up to six years of university, going back and doing a full year's worth of courses would 'bump me up' the pay scales in my province. Teachers here only need to have 5 years of schooling, so I'm already more expensive than other people with the same years of experience as I have. I didn't know if this would be an issue at hiring.

On the other hand, one of my eventual goals is to qualify to become a resource teacher, especially as there have been a number of postings over the last while looking for those lovely people. What I really wanted to do was qualify as a Teacher of the Deaf/hoh, but apparently I missed that boat by a few months at my home university when they offered it as a "one time only" course! :(

So, long story short, I've applied to go back to school to work on my PBDE (Post-Baccalaureate Diploma in Education). I figure that professional development and life-long learning can't be looked at as detrimental to an applicant, even if it makes me a little pricier. :)

So I'm pretty excited to go back to school! One of my friends is also taking the course I want, and I know the professors for both halves! The first one is a prof I had during my undergrad and the second is the former vp from my first school! Yay!

Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end!

Anyone else heading back to university this year?


'Til next time!

Update

Hello Peeps!

I hope that you are somewhere where the weather is cooperating and you don't have to hide inside hugging your air conditioner while the weather is being stubborn! It has been a hot couple of weeks here in Winnipeg, and even the thunderstorm we got last night has not helped break the humidity. My poor hair!

Anyways, I feel like I owe you an explanation for my absence (once again), so I decided to do it in pictures!

First there was this:

And then there was this:

And, finally:

If you're still confuzzled, last Saturday, on our twelfth 'anniversary' of dating, hubs and I *finally* tied the knot. You know it's bad when people start asking when you're having babies even before the wedding is over.

So now that that's behind me, hopefully I will have more time to devote to this li'l old blog of mine!

In related news, if you're wondering, still no new prospects on the job front. Everything's pretty much shut down for a few more weeks, hopefully good news then.

I have some more news, but in the interest of keeping this short, I'll save it for next time (and you'll be guaranteed one more post soon)!

Laters!

Currently, Blog Changes, Job Offer

Hello all you happy people!

Hope that you had a wonderful Wednesday! Mine was very active (we still have two weeks of school left, but my kidlets have checked out already), but we are still pushing through. So as the tile says, there are lots of things going on in this post.

(PS: Look! Two posts in two days! Woo Hoo!)

First, let's start with this month's Currently. If you haven't, or are a late one like me, go hook up with Farley over at Oh Boy Fourth Grade for this fun monthly activity!

Here's mine:

 

This year I haven't been on any trips! We have been focused on the wedding and that planning. We would love to go to Europe and visit some friends who moved there recently, but that trip might be pushed until later in the year. We are planning on going somewhere right after the wedding, but it might just be a road trip down to the States for a few days. 

Okay, moving on...

Doesn't my blog look awesome? It's so exciting!

So I had an interview yesterday for a job in one of my local school divisions. I thought the interview went well, and got a call today from the principal. She called to offer me a job, though not the one I interviewed for. This one was a grade level lower and only half-time. I've decided not to accept, but I feel like I am closing the door on something...I just hope that something else will come along! 

All right, that's enough for me! 

Happy Wednesday!