Anyone Else Feeling the Stress?!?!

    We are 5 weeks into school and I am starting to feel the stress of the pull between home and work and finding new things to improve my teaching or going with the easy same old same old!  I love my kids and class and I am enjoying teaching them, but I feel like I have searched for so many new things and found them but now finding the time to implement them and plan them out is making me crazy!  I need a summer again now that I know my kids to sit down and organize all my materials, but it's hard to do when you are not 100% sure of your kids and what they can do.  Then all these new programs come along.  We are doing a book study of  the book Beyond Retelling and I love it and have already started using some of it in my classroom but again, I had different plans, but we are being told to implement this in the weeks between our book study!  UGH!!! So now I am trying to figure out how to incorporate all this and get home to my sons and husband because my husband is feeling stressed too (not necessarily from work, but from the busyness of life)!  So I am hoping to take some time to plan and look at everything I have now that assessments are almost complete. 
    Here's another struggle I am having...I don't like to see things on the computer, I like to touch them and hold them in my hand and highlight them and write on them,  so I have all these great resources on my computer but I am trying to print what I really think I want to look at and now I have stacks everywhere.  My file cabinet is full and yes I need another one and I have binders all over as I try to find some kind of system that works for me!
Enjoy your week and if you are feeling stressed like me, I'm going to try to imagine being "Knee Deep in the Water Somewhere"!

First Week Down!

The first full week of school is over!  I am really enjoying my new 2nd graders!  I have a dilemma though that I have been trying to figure out this week and am wondering what others do!  My problem is that I have found so many great things on blogs and teacher stores that I don't really know what all I have.  I have it all on my passport (huge flash drive) in subjects and categories within that subject, but I still have a hard time going through and deciding what to use.  I have thought about binders, but am afraid I will use too many and really would like to do it without costing a lot of money. 
Thanks,
Melissa

Almost finished

My classroom is almost finished, but still needs some work with the organizational aspect, but the decorations are pretty much done, except for the great stuff I got at Teacher's Pet in Morganton, NC.  I will get those laminated and put up before Open House on Tuesday. Here is a picture of my character traits board which everyone who walks in my room loves.  Classroom teachers in 2nd and 3rd met in the spring and discussed this and then most of us have put one of these boards up to help us when teaching reading to refer to specific character traits to improve our students' vocabulary as well as prepare them for the 3rd Grade Benchmark Test! 

If you are interested, this is how my assistant created these characters.  She punched out the people diecuts in our workroom and placed them under the document camera.  She attached poster board to my white board and enlarged the people to the size she wanted by moving the camera angle.  Then she traced them and cut them out.  After that, we took the list of character traits from 3rd grade and chose words that we could distinguish easily as a negative or positive trait and typed each one up in a different color font.  She then printed them off, backed them in another color, and laminated them.  She made the smile say 'positive' and the frown says 'negative'.  She then took book cut outs that I had and made a border.  I bought ArtSkill letters and laminated them and stapled them up.  Throughout the year, I plan to use people diecuts and write character names from stories we've read and write the character trait they displayed and maybe a blurb about how and then staple them next to the character they match! 

If you would like my word file, just let me know!  Enjoy!

Workshops, Workshops, Workshops!

The rest of this week is Workshop City for me.  On Tuesday and Wednesday,  I will be attending Newton-Conover Schools workshops and can't wait!  They had some really neat topics that I can't wait to find out more about and of course share!  Then on Thursday and Friday, our school system has adopted AIMS web to enter our assessment data.  I have no idea what this is, but am looking  forward to finding out!  So, instead of getting some extra time in my classroom after my week long vacation to Florida :), I will be going to workshops.  However, I hope on Tuesday and Wednesday, that I learn some great stuff to put together when I get to work in my classroom next week!

Frustrated!

This summer, I have become a blog stalker and wanted to join in the free giveaways, so I started my own!  I had a family blog previously, but it got hard to keep up and keep posting.  Hopefully, all the creativity and ideas I see on others will help me keep this up.  

Here is my frustration though.  On someone's blog I saw Oops cards to have students record behavior on, but now I can't find that blog and I can't seem to find them on anyone elses!  I would like to try these out this year.  Does anyone have one already created or ideas to create one!

Melissa