Poetree

Bulletin board for poetry unit:
Each leaf includes a poem written by or found by students.

10 Things I Should've Learned By Now

As I said earlier, one of the assignments for poetry was to create lists that are fairly self-exposing. One of the lists was "10 Things I Should've Learned By Now". I wrote down the best lines of all of the poems I graded:

10 things I should’ve learned by now

-         Girls are mean

-         boys equal stress

-         just because an animal looks nice doesn’t mean it is

-         don’t compare myself to people, be who I am

-         learn to let go

-         I should’ve learned by now that some athletes are overrated and don’t have to do much for their credit

-         I also should’ve learned that some athletes can break record after record and still not get much credit

-         That school is more important than you think

-         Your viewpoint isn’t the only way to see things

-         Don’t lend Ally anything- you don’t get it back

-         How to find out who my true friends are

-         Not always say what I’m thinking

-         I’m not getting a dog

-         I need to appreciate what I have

-         Not to paint a room with no air flow

-         Math will never get easier

-         The hamster will bite if you try to pet him

-         To watch my eye-rolling problem

-         Don’t act like everything’s ok

-         Making everyone happy is impossible

-         Don’t set your alarm for 5:30 because you go back to sleep anyway]

Finally Caught Up!

And now for the happenings of March: (and then, I really will try to be more consistent with blogging!)

The first weekend of March brought the play. THANKFULLY. FINALLY. OVER. I started working with Drama Club last year. I was a co-sponsor with my friend Amber. She had the theatrical experience, and I had organization. The best part? Neither of us had to be fully responsible. But, go-getter that she is, she finished her masters this summer and was hired as a professor at DACC. So that put me in a conundrum. I have no theatrical talent (however dramatic I may be at times), and I have never been on a stage in my life save the day I graduated and the day I got married. But then cute little teenager faces came to me, pleading, expecting, wanting... and I caved. So I did drama club by myself. And it. was. horrible. No, not really. It was ok- just really stressful because I didn't have experience and was kind of making it up as I went along. Plus it took a lot of time. However, our play went AWESOMELY. About 4 minutes before it was supposed to start, Daniel came to me and told me we were out of seating, and we needed more chairs. My principal was out of town taking classes for his superintendant certification, and I was at a loss- until I grabbed some freshman boys, and we did some creative breaking and entering into two other classrooms and took about 45 more chairs! Who knew I'd need their skills? I didn't ask where they learned them- sometimes it's better not to know. I just appreciate their willingness to carry tons of chairs and watch our play!

Then, after three straight weeks with students (including my weekends), we got a random snow day in March. Our FIRST one of the year! The night before, Daniel and I were on the couch watching TV. We got a knock at the door, and the only person outside was... the biggest snowman either of us have ever seen. Pictures don't do it justice. He was as tall as our house. 5 of my boys (including 2 neighbor boys next door) made this huge snowman, had to use a ladder, and had to be completely quiet. It was awesome. Then, the next day, Daniel used his snow-blower on our driveways and the neighbors' driveways while Sawyer and I played outside. The neighbors thanked us with cookies and muffins (I just LOVE our neighborhood!). Then after naptime, we got another knock on our door. Six of my girls had arrived (with the biggest snowball ever in tow on a sled) to ask permission to build another snowman in an effort to out-do the boys. Lucky for them we said yes, otherwise they'd be hauling their huge snowball back across town on the sled. Sawyer came out and helped the girls, and it was SO FUN! Even though we've had a 57 degree day, we are the only people with snow left in our yard. HA!

Cute girls with their final product!

Last little picture comment, and then I'm going to change a dirty diaper and go shopping for our new REFRIGERATOR (thanks, drama club!). Sawyer likes to play with his tractors (but not so much cars- must be the city-boy country-boy persona we've got going on for Sawyer and Linky). Lately, he's been wanting his John Deere hat on when he plays with them. How cute is he???

February 2013

Now for the February update:
February passed by super-quickly. I really don't remember much about it. Maybe that's because it's so short? Or maybe because I was drama practicing almost every afternoon and consumed with worrying about little play details. I loved the fact that every day after school, I would go pick up Sawyer and take him back to school with me. He got up on stage and "practiced" with all of my teenagers. He was pretty sure he had a part in the play, and these kids came every day to watch him. Here are the pictures of our month!

Snuggles

Fingerpainting Valentines

 I finally took down the Christmas decorations (Kate would have been disgusted with us), and I replaced them with this little wreath I made. I found the wreath at Dollar Tree, spray painted it red, added this Love sign ($1 from Walmart) and ribbon I already had. It needed something else, so I made the 3 second trip to Dollar General and found these black and white flowers. Love my little $3.00 wreath!

Fingerpainting himself *out of order*

Daniel came out to this after he took a shower one day- popcorn salt. everywhere. couch. ipad. *shaking my head*

He decided he wanted to go in the stroller... sort of.

Our table is bar-height, and it is the perfect place to make a tent!

Sawyer and Maggie are finally friends!

Coloring with Daddy! 

Happy February, friends!

January 2013

In 2013, the Chappell family's life has been CRAZY. I was in the midst of the insanity of teaching, guiding a student teacher through her first weeks, planning prom, and finishing up the final practices and plans for the play. Daniel was in the middle of his fundraising push, as his spring banquet, the biggest fundraiser (and basically where next year's salary is going to come from), happens in early March. Now, two days past all of this, things are finally starting to settle down. We didn't take a ton of pictures over the past two months, but I'll share what we have taken.

January

As far as teaching goes, I was finishing up my last few weeks of teaching before the student teacher took over. Now, I absolutely love having her, and now that she's taken over, my load is getting lighter. However, at the beginning it was a little overwhelming to have to explain every step I was taking in grading, lesson planning, classroom management, etc. My brain is fried easily in a day of school, and to explain the frying process was exhausting. 

For poetry (my LEAST) favorite aspect of English to teach, we did a few different poetic exercises. The first one was to watch this video: TED Talks: If I Should Have a Daughter. Now, this is obviously a twenty minute talk on poetry, so I don't expect you to watch all of it- you're not my student. BUT, the first 3 or 4 minutes is a poet performing spoken word poetry (poetry with much feeling and emphasis- very artistic) one of my absolute favorite poems called "If I Should Have a Daughter". I highly recommend watching it. If you watch the entire video, she talks about how she gets teenagers to write poetry, and one way is by creating lists. My classes created two lists: "10 Things I Know to be True" and "10 Things I Should've Learned by Now". Their answers were amazing. I saved the best ones on my school computer, so I'll add a blog post on Monday with their best answers.

Another thing we did was to create book spine poems. Much to the librarians chagrin (even though I made most of the groups put their books back), the kids had to create a poem from the titles of books stacked on top of each other. These were some of my favorites:

This one makes the most sense to me! So proud!

 On our one three-day weekend of January, Daniel and I wanted to spend some time with Sawyer away from home and the projects calling our names. We took him to the Indianapolis Children's Museum, which is currently the largest children's museum in the world. Now, the Saturday of a three-day weekend was probably not the best time to go, but it was the only time we had, so we made it work despite the masses of people. Sawyer had a GREAT time. He is our little social bug, and he has no qualms about being around...aka doing EVERYTHING... older kids do. It was a little tough for him to realize that he couldn't do every little thing the elementary kids were doing, and it was a little rough for him to realize that when we left one display, we weren't leaving for good- just finding something else to play. He loved being able to make messes and have some hands-on learning. He especially loved this sand table; we were brushing sand out of our stuff for weeks after.

 This room made me think of Lincoln- it was a hot wheels display. HUNDREDS of cars of all sizes- so fun for a little boy!

 He really enjoyed the dinosaur exhibits- especially playing with dinosaur eggs (or in his words, BALL!).

That is honestly all I remember from January! I highly recommend the children's museum- it wasn't too expensive (although only Indiana teachers get discounts, which I found ridiculous). It had plenty to do time and time again, and it had a lot for every age group. I think it's definitely something we'll go back to as he gets older (but probably on a random Tuesday afternoon)!