Well it's that wonderful time of year again! That's right, back to school!
I've already been in classes for three weeks now and I can't tell you how much I'm loving it. This semester I'm taking classes that are preparing me to teach the core subjects, and it's really exciting. I'm also going to be spending some time in the classroom!!! So hopefully some of the things I share with you will be pertinent and interesting.
The first thing I want to share this school year is memories from my elementary years that could give you ideas for your future classroom.
One of the first memories (and many thereafter) I have is from second grade. My teacher was so awesome because he always did so many different hands-on activities that made everything more interesting. I remember doing a dinosaur unit, and we actually went into the sand box on the playground and dug for fossils (wooden dinosaur bones). Then we had to identify them based on what we knew about dinosaurs.
Another thing I remember from second grade is doing a space unit. Every year, my teacher would have his class make paper mache planets to hang in the hallway. His first year teaching he had the students make a little tiny planet for Mercury, then the next year made Venus, and so on. When it was my second grade year, it was time to make Jupiter. We were so excited because it was the big planet, plus we got to make the rings! We spent hours putting on paper mache, painting, and attaching the rings. We were so proud to finally display it in the hallway with the others.
The last thing I'll share for today is something that I did, you guessed it, in second grade. We were learning about metamorphosis and I remember my teacher telling me that this was everyone's favorite subject to learn about. Why? Because we got to raise our own butterflies! We each got our own caterpillar in a little container, and each day we would have to make observations about it. Soon it made it's little cocoon and my teacher moved it into a box where we could watch it hatch. A few weeks later, we started to see one by one the butterflies emerge. Each time one would come out, we would release it into our net that we had set up in the classroom. Then eventually they all were flying around in the classroom. I remember going into the net area and looking at all the beautiful butterflies and being so amazed that they were all once caterpillars.
These memories were all ones from over 10 years ago. I still remember them because my teacher was so wonderful. He had a passion for every subject he taught, and it showed. I can honestly say that he was one of my favorite teachers of all time. I only hope that I can be that teacher someday, and that someone will look back and say how much they loved being in my classroom.
Enjoy!
While perusing Pinterest this morning, I found this great idea for an alternative to having the name tags on the desks in my future classroom. The teacher on this blog says that she hates the name tags because students pick at them, peel them up, and at the end of the year they're a pain to clean off. This is her solution:
They're Sharpie paint pens, and they come in a ton of colors. She just writes the names of her students on their desks, then at the end of the year, colors over them with an Expo marker, and wipes the names right off! I have to admit, I'm a little skeptical about how well they'll wipe off, however, the other teachers on her blog that commented on this post seemed to be thrilled with the results. If this works, it could be used for sight words, spelling words, and more!
