Early bird special

Had I been a bird, I would definitely have caught a few worms this morning.

Often when I have a lot going on at school, I have trouble getting back to sleep if I wake up in the middle of the night. Today was no exception.

I woke up around 4:30 - one hour before my normal time - and couldn't stop planning and replanning my day. Finally, I just went ahead and got up.

After getting my work done, I went through my usual morning and realized I still had a few spare minutes.

So I hung my masterpieces from this weekend.

I swear, I'm using nothing but foam core art in my house from now on. No picture hangers! Just stick em up with Command strips!

DIY Madness!

I returned to school today after one of the best weekends I've had in a while. Why, you ask? Well...

It was 3 days long. Duh. The Hubs was working the entire weekend, which would normally be a downside, but I really managed to get a lot of things done. One of those things was to take care of some DIY sprucing up of my casa.

First project completion: CORK BOARD!

I have been collecting wine corks for years - both from our own imbibing and from friends and restaurants. I began working on this cork board in July before I started work. It has sporadically been added to until I finally finished it this weekend!

I used hot glue to arrange the corks onto plywood. We will at some point figure out how to get it onto the wall behind our bar. And fun fact! Not all corks are the same size, or even close - it makes fitting them together super fun. Trust me.

Project completion #2: DIY ART!

Hubs and I are renting a fantastic old house that we love.  There are high ceilings, wood floors, and lots of character. However, it's taken us a while to get everything looking like real adults live there. Our upstairs hall has this long wall that was just begging for something on it. The problem is that anything that fits a 14-foot-long wall is expensive. I hatched the idea recently (thank you, Pinterest!) to make a series of pieces myself. Downside: I lack any real talent for painting or drawing.

So I decided to create some abstract art reminiscent of Piet Mondrian, whose work I have always found really interesting (and useful in teaching math -- more on that later!). I decided to create a series of five pieces using horizontal and vertical lines and blocks of color. I measured and taped the lines to make sure they were perfectly straight.

I went with blue and yellow because it's one of my favorite color combinations.

I created lines of different widths - 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 inches, depending on what I felt like. It was really fun planning out where the lines would go! Plus I find painting therapeutic, particularly if it's just filling in a rectangle with a solid color.

By the end of the evening, I had a five-piece series of Mondrian-inspired art. Since I used foam board instead of canvas, everything all together cost about $35. Not bad!!

Looking forward to putting them up on our hall wall tonight and making my house a little homier. I highly recommend doing something a little different when you have some extra time - it's the best pick-me-up I've had in a while.

Resolutions

Happy New Year!

The first semester ended as it has for me in the past: classroom holiday celebration including treats, presents for me, and parent volunteers asking me, "How do you do this all day every day?" (Side note: one mom even told me she'd "probably have to be drunk all the time" to handle my class five days a week. Vindication?)

Anyway, Hubs and I had a not-so-relaxing but oh-so-fun trip home to New Orleans. We went to some fun parties, celebrated and spent time with family, and watched our beloved Saints whip up on our rivals the Falcons before heading back up here. Then I headed up to visit my best friend in Virginia, returned and spent New Year's with our friends here, and even got to watch the last regular-season Saints game today with my fabulous aide from last year (hi, friend!). It's been a much-needed break.

You'll note, however, that "preparing for the upcoming semester in any way, shape, or form" and "cleaning my hot mess of a classroom" were nowhere in my holiday description. That's because I haven't done a damn thing for school, and you know what? I'm ok with it.

New me!

We have a teacher workday tomorrow, and I plan to be super-focused all day to make up for my holiday enjoyment.

In the spirit of ringing in a new year with resolutions, here are a few I'm planning to focus on that relate to school:

1. Take care of myself. This doesn't directly relate to school, but a happier person is a happier teacher. Hubs and I have been working on getting our house in order, so it looks more like we've lived there for 6 months and less like we are squatters and/or hoarders. I'm also back to watching what I eat carefully and exercising. We'll see how that goes.
2. Get school preparation done farther in advance. This has been a goal since I started teaching - hell, since I student taught. I'm never going to be the teacher who's planned 3 weeks ahead of time, but my goal is not to be making things I need the morning I need them.... at least, not very often....
3. Adjust my expectations. This is both for me and for my students. I need to realize that I have the children I have, and I am the teacher I am. I am not going to beat myself up inside if a lesson isn't perfect, and if my class' stupid test scores aren't what another class' are. On the other end of the spectrum, as far as behavior goes, my expectations will be a-changin'. I'm getting serious with that, y'all.

4. Keep my classroom organized. Haha, yeah right. That was just a little comic relief. But seriously, I do have specific goals like "see the bottom of my desk at least bi-weekly" and "put something in a file folder at least once." Small steps.

Anyway, I hope that you are making resolutions too. I think it's a healthy and helpful process to examine areas of our lives that could use tweaking or improving. Don't change too much, though - where would that leave you for 2013?