Growing Mind and Bodies

Being a middle school teacher is way more than teaching students math.  Some people say they would never want to teach middle school but truthfully if you can teach middle school, you can do ANYTHING!

Including but not limited to, my role as a middle school teacher is to:

• Encourage students to join different clubs
• Encouraging some kids to talk, to anyone!
• Help them deal with parental issues
• Organize their lives including but not limited to folders, lockers and schedule. 
• Be there to listen when they don't know what do to about a boy/girl
• Know everything about their 'time of the month'
• Know when students need to go to the bathroom for a BM
• Hold a Pokemon lunch once a week, because they still like to play with their friends
• Modeling correct manners and following through with please and thank you's
• Making sure they 'have' something instead of 'got' something
• Introducing them to things in life, like the prices at the grocery store

And probably my favorite roll as a middle school teacher, measuring their physical growth.  Some boys grew 4 inches from the start of the year!  WOW

What other roles do you play other than teacher? 

Valentines Day 2015

So for now it is a tradition that I help with valentines for my nieces.  If you remember, last year we made crayon lips for all their little friends.  This year, we made Olaf!

Only one of my nieces was able to do it this year.  Well, mostly because we waited till the last minute to do them!  I really missed Mackenzie :(

So back to Olaf.  I had seen on Pinterest really cute Olaf's in a bag so we went for it.  We had to piece together a snowman in a bag and attach a label to the top!   For the label I used pages (on a Mac).  I downloaded some Olaf clip art and used a fun font that I found from dafont.com a few months ago.  I have a secret obsession with font, by the way. I left a blank so that Ashley wrote her name one each one.  That is a total of 30.   I didn't know how well this was going to go because of flashbacks of last year and how painful it was watching a 3 year old write 6 letters. This year, much better.  Holy cow the difference three and four!

 Now time for the snowman.  I purchased everything at the local grocery store.  I used giant, regular and mini marshmallows for the body.   For the arms, of course, pretzel sticks.  For the nose and buttons, Mike and Ike's and mini M&M's respectively.

It was time to let the girl do her thing.  She put a big, medium and 4 small marshmallows in each bag.   She then continued to put in 2 pretzel sticks, 6 mini M&M's and 1 nose.   She counted each mini marshmallow and M&M's out everything.  I will come clean.... Ashley was still napping when I got to my dad's house so we started to make some in advance and left 5 for Ashley to do.  Thank goodness because it was painful watching her count out the M&M's!  While she was finishing making the snowmen, I stapled the label on.  I stapled 25 of them of before Ashley had finished 1 bag, just to give reference. They turned out totally cute!

So we were done and waiting for dinner to finish in the oven so we played!  We had left over marshmallows which we were never going to eat and pretzel sticks that our hands had been all over so we improvised.  I love her spirit and creativity.   We started building a house, then worked out with our dumbbells and then Ashley pulled out the Q-tip!  I was dying laughing!

Hope you enjoyed!  Happy Valentines Day from my family to yours!

Stop Motion

Over the past few years Jason has been watching Frank Howarth on YouTube.  He is a phenomenal woodworker who incorporates stop motion into his videos. So I decided that my goal was to incorporate stop motion video into my newest video resume, tweet at him and have him tweet back.  Here is what I have so far!  I can't wait for the final product to be finished. 

I am really over the moon right now!  Hope you enjoy.  Any suggestions I would love to hear them!