How do you find the time?

It's the fourth week of school, and as much as much as I hate to say it, I'm stressed!  Big time stressed! We're four weeks in, and I feel like I'm six weeks behind.  I feel like that isn't a good sign.

I knew starting my new job and taking on extra curriculars right away would be difficult.  I am an assistant volleyball coach for the high school team here, and I'm at practice until at least 6:00 p.m. every night we don't have a game.  Game nights are even later.  We had an away game last night, and I didn't get home until 11:00 p.m.  I can assure you, no grading was completed yesterday, nor was the laundry that needed to be put away, nor did I spend any time with my husband, nor did I properly plan for classes today.  I know I'm certainly not the only coach in this world, but I just keep asking myself: where do they find the time?

I'm not just talking about school even.  I don't have time to grade or plan for school.  I don't have time to give all of the attention necessary to volleyball.  I don't have time for a social life.  I don't have time to finish the entertainment center project I started in the summer.  I don't have time to make the things I need to make for my brother's wedding in October.  I don't have time to cook.  I don't have time to read books anymore.  I don't even really have time to blog, which is why I started this post 5 days ago and am just now getting around to writing it. The problem is, if I can't find the time to do any of these things, I have no idea what I'm filling my time with!

What's wrong with me?

I'm not necessarily just writing this post to rant and complain (I'm only doing that a little).  What I'm really wanting to do is make a pledge: a pledge for myself, and for those around me who are getting the brunt of my frustrations.  I will  do better.  I have to, or I'm going to go insane.  Here are some strategies I plan on using to help.  Hopefully I'll be able to report back in a few weeks whether they worked or not.

1. Know how I'm spending my time - Like I already said, since I can't seem to find time to do basically anything I would need to do in day to day life, I don't really know what I'm filling my time with.  For the next two weeks, I'm going to keep a time log.  I'll be honest, it sounds like a silly idea to me, but if I'm honest about it, I bet I'll figure out when I'm wasting my time.  If I really take the time to figure out what I'm doing during the day, I've got to be able to find what to cut out.

2. Prioritize - Obviously, my major problem is my priorities.  I love that I am involved in so many things, but I don't love that I let myself get focused on one and leave behind the rest.  Ultimately, even if I'm productive in one area, I am more mad at myself for letting the rest go.  To-do lists used to be a daily activity for me, especially when I was in college.  In the last two years, I've let it slide.  I'm determined to start making lists again, and ordering them in order of importance.

3. Using a Planner - I've always loved planners.  That sounds lame, but it's true.  Every year for school, I loved getting a new cute planner.  I religiously wrote all of my homework in it, and I would check it off every night before I went to bed to make sure I had done everything.  Unfortunately, this is another thing I've dropped off on since I finished school.  Last year, I bought a planner, and lost it.  This year, my mother gave me a really nice planner, and I've barely touched it.  I don't know what happened, but if I planned my time out in there, I bet I would get more accomplished.

Check out my super cool planner that is also super blank!

4. Schedule my time well - When I made lists in college, I would also assign an amount of time to each item.  If I was going to work on my essay, I was going to work on it for an hour, and I made myself stick to that schedule.  This made me use my time most effectively for that hour, so I got more accomplished, AND it made me take breaks when I needed to.  I'm the type of person who can't work on the same thing for hours on end.  I've got to change it up, or I'll never get it finished.

5. Stop Procrastinating! - Ah, the condition I've been plagued with my whole life, chronic procrastination.  This is will the toughest one to break. I don't know how many times I've said I need to start a task, and then done five other useless things before I ever start.  I'm hoping that if I do every other item on this list, I'll be able to cut out the procrastination.

I'm hoping this will be a good start.  If I stay committed, maybe I'll actually make a change. Who knows?  Like I said, I'll try to report my progress in a few weeks.  

**The information I used in my list came from this link.  http://www.wiu.edu/advising/docs/Time_Management_Strategies.pdf

Using Class Dojo in the Classroom

Want some help with your classroom management?  Class Dojo is the answer! Class Dojo is a wonderful free resource that any teacher of any grade level can use.  It organizes your students into classes, and allows you to track their behavior using a points system.  As you can see below, each student is given their own little monster that they can customize, and throughout class, they can earn or lose points based on their behavior.

The great thing about Class Dojo is that it isn't just about punishment.  In fact, I give out more positive reinforcement than anything with it.  It allows to you to easily reward positive behaviors and scold negative behaviors by issuing points to each student.  It is very easy to customize the behaviors you're looking for.  Really, customization is probably Class Dojo's strongest attribute.

Positive points can look something like these...

While negative points can look like this... 

You can add as many as you want and name them whatever you choose.  

As you can see in the second picture up there, you can see the whole class and where they are at in points any time.  If you want to only keep tabs daily (like I do), then you can reset the bubble every morning.  This doesn't make their week's points disappear however.  I also have some friends who like to use it as a weekly tally of behavior, so they don't reset the bubbles until the weekend.  At any time throughout the week, you can look at reports.  

There are entire class reports,

and there are individual student reports.

This is where my favorite part comes in.  I want Class Dojo to motivate students to do well, so I offer a reward at the end of each week.  Every student who has achieved at least 90% positive for the week are entered into a drawing.  The winner of the drawing wins a prize (usually a candy bar).  I don't let the same person win more than once per semester, so everyone has a better chance, but the winners are displayed for the class.  

Excuse the awful picture, but this is my winners display.  I wish it were more colorful like the rest of my room, but color ink is in short supply at my school.  This way, students are recognized for their achievement, and I can remember who has won in the past.  I didn't do this last year, and I had a hard time remembering my previous winners.  As you can see at the bottom, I also put the best class of the week.  At the end of each 9 weeks, I will reward the class with the most wins a free period on the computers.  This allows the students to work toward a goal as a unit as well as individuals.  It's easier to have bad behavior when it only affects you.  When it starts bringing down the rest of the class, guilt will set it more quickly.  

There are some other great things about Class Dojo as well.  You can take attendance, which makes it easy to not give points to absent students.  There is a great random feature, so you can call on students easily.  I use that a lot for when I need something done that everyone will volunteer for, or when I am having class discussions.  There is also a timer, which is great when you want to give only a certain amount of time for an activity, but you don't want to have to watch the clock.  It sounds an alarm when the time is up.  

These are the many ways I use Class Dojo, but I'm sure there are many more.  Like I said, everything is able to be customized, so make it work for you however you can. 

Writing Memoirs

It's time for our first unit of the year... MEMOIRS! It's only my second year teaching, but as long as I teach middle school language arts, I will start the year off with memoirs.  It just seems like it's the best way to go.  It's something to get my students writing before we've even had a chance to discuss writing skills.  That might seem like a silly reason to want to start with this, but I think it's important to gauge where my students are in their writing skills before I try to teach them.  How will I know where to start if I don't?

Besides, memoirs should be one of the easiest subjects for the students all year.  They don't have to research or learn about a new subject.  They're writing about themselves!  It only asks the students to be reflective and describe a powerful memory in their life in great detail.  However, that part is very important.  It needs to be a very specific and important memory.  I always tell my students to ask themselves "So what?" when they think of a topic.  If they can answer why the memory is very important to them, then it's probably a good memory to write about.

That doesn't mean I turn them loose writing without any instruction.  We spend a full week on activities before they even start writing.  The first activity simply asks them to recall some of their most important memories.  They answer several questions that will hopefully spark some of the most important memories (feel free to use them, just please make a copy).  I teach twelve-year-olds, so despite what they keep telling me, they don't have that many years to remember.  After they have a list of possible writing topics, we start talking about the mechanics I want them to focus on for this project.  The first is vivid language.  7th graders still revert to the most boring vocabulary.  I think this is the most valuable subject I teach during this unit.  Last year, I really saw the kids continuing to use it throughout the year.  Then we review a typical paragraph and essay structure, and lastly we learn how to properly punctuate dialogue.  Have you ever paid attention to how many rules dialogue has?  It's ridiculous, but I really want the kids to explain their memories in as much detail as possible, so dialogue usually helps.  Here is a slideshow I made to explain the rules for dialogue.

Finally, we will start writing.  Last year, I was pleasantly surprised by some, and disappointed by others.  It's a great project to show them again at the end of the year because their writing skills will have grown leaps and bounds.  All of our work is done on Google Drive, so it's easily kept in a folder online, and the students can't lose it.  If you have access to computers, I highly recommend using Google's many wonderful applications.  I'll talk more about those in future posts.  If you would like more of my memoir resources, please feel free to ask in the comments.

It Begins...

One day down, 179 to go.  That's right, on Friday, we had our first student day at school.  I must say, before the day started, I felt very prepared, but as the day went on, I realized that this year was going to be very different from last year.  I said in my last post that I loved my last job, and the only reason I left was because my new job was at the school I went to, and the drive is way better!  However, I didn't realize until Friday how spoiled I had gotten at my old school.

Last year, there were two 7th grade English teachers.  We each had half the kids, and we had them for two periods a day.  That means I only had three groups of students all day, and my largest class was 22.  It was amazing.  Now, at my new school, I am the only 7th grade English teacher, and I have all of the kids.  I have six groups of students, and my largest group is 26.  Now, please don't think that I'm complaining.  I'm very excited to do things on my own this year, and I'm even excited to have a few more classes, but the difference was very surprising on Friday.  By the end of the day, I was so sick of introducing myself.  I'm also having a TERRIBLE time with names.  I know it's only been one day, but I feel so bad because as I'm sitting here a mere two days later, I can only recall a handful of names.

That being said, I'm sure I'll remember their names soon, and I'm also sure I'll adjust to the change in my schedule.  I'm determined to make this a good year.  Two years ago, our school received a very bad grade from the state.  Last year, everyone worked very hard, and our scores improved tremendously; however, 7th grade English was still the biggest problem.  This puts a lot of pressure on me, but I'm determined to meet the challenge.

Although many people complained about us starting on Friday, I actually like the idea.  As I was discussing with a colleague yesterday: overall, not much really gets accomplished on the first day.  I agree with letting the kids get acclimated to their classes, letting them meet all of the teachers, and find their way around before we really get into classwork.  On Monday, I plan to dive right in.  I'm going to introduce our routines, and by Wednesday, I hope to start our first writing project.  I'll write more about that next week.  For now, I'm just excited to see my super cute new lesson plan book full of lessons again!

New Year, New School, New Blog

Woohoo! First blog post.  As you can read on the side, I am a 7th grade language arts teacher.  This is my second year teaching, but I am at a new school this year.  I loved my school last year, and I learned so much in my first year of teaching, but last year I drove 45 minutes to work every day.  That got old pretty fast.  In the Spring, a position opened up at the school I graduated from, and it's only about 8 minutes away.  I applied, had an interview, and was offered the job the following day.  I was ecstatic about going home, and about the large amount I'll be saving on gas this year.  However, this meant that to reset myself in a way.  Sometimes, I feel like I'm a first year teacher all over again.  Again, I had to completely redecorate a classroom.  Again, I had to read new books I would be teaching this year.  Again, I had to meet (or meet in a new way for the teachers I had in school) and create relationships with my new colleagues.  It was a lot of hard work, and I'm not sure I feel like I had much of a summer vacation, but classes start in less than a week, and I'm proud to say I feel prepared.

Although there have been many times this summer I have stressed about what was to come this year, one thing I actually had a lot of fun with is decorating my classroom.  See, last summer, when I got the key to my first ever classroom, I was fresh from college, and completely broke! I had no money to buy all of the fun classroom decorating supplies I had always seen adorn my teachers' walls.  I was sad to see my room be so drab.  Slowly, throughout the year, I added little by little, but it was never truly what I wanted it to be.  This summer, however, my husband and I are living much more comfortably, and I was pumped to finally put all of my Pinterest finds to use. When my wonderful husband's help, we transformed my classroom in an inviting learning environment.  Check out some of my favorite parts.

This is a pretty blurry picture, but this bulletin board encourages students to read the books many of their favorite movies are based on.  Above the bulletin, the paint can posters provided exciting synonyms to some of our most overused and boring words (good, bad, hungry, scared, etc.).

I love the way this one turned out.  I've seen this quote on several school posters, but I love the idea of applying it to social media.  Computers are heavily used in my classroom, and I'm very passionate about teaching proper digital citizenship.  Sometimes it scares me how much kids will be willing to say to someone when they're hiding behind a computer.  I truly hope my students take this message to heart. 

This one looks pretty blank right now, huh?  Well, that's because I'm going to let my students fill it up.  I chose four of my favorite quotes, and turned them into Tweets.  I even gave them hashtags.  I'm going to let my students choose their favorite quotes, and we will fill up this board with some inspiration to get us through the year. 

The picture really doesn't do this board justice.  Underneath the top phrase, "This book is so...", I handwrote several adjectives one might use to describe books (action-packed, dramatic, inspirational, etc.). Then, I split the bottom into sections for fiction and non-fiction.  Throughout the year, I'm going to let student write their own book recommendations down on sticky notes and place them on this board for their classmates to see. 

This is another one of my favorites.  I've seen about a hundred of these on Pinterest, so it's obviously not original, but I just think it's so fun.  

I hope to use this blog to discuss my unique lesson plans and teaching philosophies, while also discussing technology in the classroom, something I'm becoming wildly passionate about.  School starts on Friday; stay tuned for updates!