New School, New Life!

This teaching journey that I am on never ceases to surprise and amaze me! I was so sad to leave my absolutely wonderful Aveson family. Last year building the ISP program was the most challenging and rewarding year of my life, in SO many different ways! The amount I learned about myself, who I wanted to be as a person, and as an educator was so strongly shaped by what I learned while teaching at Aveson, and I will be forever grateful for that! Grateful for the connections I made, and grateful that they showed me what type of educator I need to be in order to make the biggest impact in the lives of my students.

Moving to North Carolina was so scary in so many different ways, but one of the biggest was that I was leaving a classroom, a school, and possibly a career that I loved so much. I had NO CLUE what the field of education was going to look like in North Carolina, and I worried about not being able to find a job. Even more importantly, I was not 100% sure my teaching credential would transfer. This was a huge risk, but one I was willing to take. I tried to keep my head up and not dwell on these negative possibilities, because this is the profession I belong in, and I believed in my heart of hearts that I would not find myself doing something that I was not meant to do.

With that being said, I feel very lucky to have just finished my first two weeks at Wilburn Elementary School, in Raleigh! However, once I got over my worry about obtaining a job, I starting worrying about the transition from a very progressive and non-traditional charter school, to a traditional public school. I thought that I might not be able to use the skills and strategies that I came to love while teaching at Aveson School of Leaders. Not to mention the freedom that I had to create whatever was necessary, and exciting in my classroom. But, it is a job, so I decided to make the best of it!

This school is about 2 minutes away from my townhouse, so my commute has drastically improved since last year! I am teaching in a 4th grade classroom of 19 kiddos, and I am in absolute heaven! I could not have asked to be put in a better situation! The school is extremely large, and is year round. I have never been involved in a year round situation, but having some longer periods of time off in between long stretches of school seems like a brilliant idea. I will let you all know what I think after the completion of this year :) Another thing that really drew me to this school was the progressive beliefs of the administration team that I met with during my interview. I was so pleasantly surprised to find educators who felt the same way about the education movement that I do, and who are fighting for a change. I was also happy about the different types of professional development opportunities, and levels of support that are available to me.

Overall, I miss my family and friends immensely, and although we came out here for Billy's job I truly feel like this is the right place for me to be right now. Billy and I are very much enjoying building the beginning of our lives together out here. We are learning so much about ourselves. Being in a place that is unfamiliar, where we are learning new things and making decisions together, and where we are depending on each other so much more than we have ever had to is truly a treat, and a testament to how strong our bond is. I am enjoying every second of my life here in North Carolina, and I am SO excited to get this blog back up and running in order to share my experiences with anyone who is interested!

Current Projects

I have many things that I am currently thinking about and working on in order to make my classroom, and this blog a success! I often find myself browsing the oh so many spectacular teacher blogs that their are out there, and I notice how many followers they have, and how active they are in the blogging community. At this point I feel two things: 1.) I can't wait until I reach that point! 2.) How in the WORLD do these people manage both their classrooms and such a successful blog that they post to regularly. It takes everything I have in me not to pull my hair out EVERY day because I feel such an overwhelming sense of defeat at the end of each school day. This job is more than a full time job, because I spend EVERY waking minute planning and preparing for the next day. 

However, I am currently working to feel less overwhelmed, and I feel I am getting there... slowly but surely! Although... I will let you know how I feel in a couple weeks... 

Currently I am working on a few projects and I would like to share one of them with you all :) I hope you like it! 

Weekly Digital Newsletter: 

Since my classroom is an independent studies classroom, my students to a great deal of work independently, which makes it challenging to keep track of all this work. Furthermore, parents want to know what their kiddos have been working on all week, and are hungry for some feedback. I do send home Daily Learning Logs that keep track of what the student completed/worked on for that day, but I was still in the market for something a little more comprehensive to help me keep track, and to keep the parents well informed. 

I began to think about the possibility of using a newsletter. This was something I had used in the past that got great feedback from parents. It featured information about out week, upcoming important dates, and some feedback about their child for that week. The downside: I used a TON of paper to pull this off on a weekly basis. Not to mention at the time, these newsletters were attached to a weekly homework packet. 

This is not ideal, so I considered creating a newsletter "website" and having individual student information for the parents to click on. I played around with google sites for about 5 minutes until I realized that my plan was way too time consuming, and not very practical in the way I was thinking of using it. 

Then it hit me... create a document on Microsoft Word, and use a Mail Merge to input all the student information, that way I can email parents and attach the document! No printing, or web site figuring out required!!! 

The creation of the document and the spreadsheet that I will be using for this project did take me about an hour to complete, and then another hour to refresh my memory with the mail merge. The reason this took so long, was because I had to open and save EACH mail merged document individually. I also had to go back and re-save my documents as PDF's because I realized it would be unprofessional to send them as word documents. 

However, I have finished now with this project (I am in the process of emailing them all individually) so I figured I would show you all what I created :) I must admit, I LOVE the end product, however... it is taking a minute to email each bulletin individually... I am on the hunt for an easier way to do this! 

Page 1 of the newsletter features a note from me, our week at a glance, and upcoming important dates for parents to remember, I also included a picture from the week of the students participating in a brain-based activity. 

Page 2 features all the independent work from the week. It informs parents of whether or not work was completed, and if their child has some work to do over the weekend. Scores for certain assignments are also reported. 

The last page is simple, just a quick thank you for reading and some extra information about this very first newsletter. I think future newsletters might just be 2 pages.