Infertility was never talked about to me growing up. It actually never occurred to me that I might experience it. I think I was just scared into believing that I would get pregnant right away. My husband and I married young. He was in nursing school and wanted to have kids right away, but I …
Continue reading “Everyone is Fighting a Battle You Know Nothing About. Be Kind. Always.”
Over the last 6 years, I’ve been collecting classroom pieces from Craigslist and the Facebook Marketplace in order to transform my classrooms on a budget. I’ve share a little bit about this in a couple other blog posts over the years, including Classroom Transformation and Cafe Style Classroom on a Budget. What made this transformation …
Continue reading “Behind the Scenes of a 7 Day Classroom Transformation”
This last Friday, my first graders walked into a total classroom transformation. Our whole day was filled with Mario! The day was centered around Design Thinking and Math, with a Mario Kart theme. It started off with the students coming into the transformed classroom with Mario theme music playing in the background, and Mario Kart …
For me, it all started about five years ago when I was a Kindergarten teacher. I didn’t have desks or assigned seating in my classroom. We spent most of our days rotating through work stations. During this year, my husband and I talked about how if I ever taught older kids that we should turn …
As I start in a new classroom, I try to think, “If I were to go somewhere to focus and learn, what type of an environment would I choose?” I know for me personally, I’d choose a coffee shop. It has a buzz of conversation and collaboration, but it is not overstimulating. There are different …
As I go from 5th grade to 1st grade, I am taking the wood/metal cafe look of my 5th grade classroom and transitioning it into a woodland look for my 1st graders. A lot of my flexible seating options are the wrong size since I will have much smaller students, so I have spent time …
Grammar can be one of the most boring and frustrating subjects to teach and learn. As I was sitting last year thinking about how I was going to teach the parts of speech, I started thinking about what types of personalities these parts of speech would have. I love using personification and imagination to make …
There is an object lesson that I do on the very first day of the school year. The students come through the door, I greet them, and show them the room. Then, we meet at the carpet, where we will meet every morning for the rest of the year. This carpet is where we do …
When I was a child, I loved math because I felt like a detective solving all these cases. I loved that math was full of puzzles, and soaked up the feeling of accomplishment when I could solve something that seemed so difficult at first. Now, as a teacher, I’m passionate about bring this creative and …
As a child, school came easy for me. My school work was never too hard, and I prided myself in being a good student. I really enjoyed school, but it wasn’t until 8th grade that I felt inspired to be more. My 8th grade teacher believed in me, but he also had very high expectations. …
Teach Like You Mean It