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)!