Year 3 - Day 206 - July 24

Today I ran my own Professional Development from start to finish for the first time in awhile. I had done pieces of this class on my own in the past because my partner is a parent and sometimes has things come up, but we have changed the class since then. It used to be a couple hours for 2 different nights after school and now it's 6 hours in a full summer day. Extending it those extra couple hours has been hard but at least there's a lunch break. :) Everyone knows that the most important part of PD is bringing candy for the tables. Of course I wasn't thinking about that until this morning, so they got a random selection of stuff we had around. I was happy to see that everyone found the day useful and that the evaluations were positive. It's different doing PD than teaching my college class, that's for sure.

Year 3 - Day 200 - July 18

Today's hands on activity was to make a shelter for Clifford the Big Red Dog using 100 (no more no less) straws and scotch tape. This year's instructor isn't quite as last year's with making the connections for WHY we are doing something. We kind of just do it. That doesn't make as much of an impact, but I am sitting with good people so we're making our own connections the best we can.

Year 3 - Day 199 - June 17

I'm at a state PD session for 3 days this week, and we do a lot of hands-on activities in preparation for changing the way we teach STEM activities. Today we first had to make an animal using playdough. Then we were given the task to make a tall tower using nothing but index cards. We could bend/fold/rip them, but that's it. Also, we had 50 cards but were supposed to go as tall as possible while being as economical as possible with our cards. Then one of our animals had to be able to stand on top without the tower falling down. Luckily, one of our girls had made an alligator out of her dough, so we were able to go higher since the weight was distributed differently.

Year 2 - Day 60 - March 1

Today, I shadowed my media supervisor as part of a leadership class I'm taking.  (Photo of a PBS video collection in central media.)  I had so much fun.  I don't really want to move into an admin position at this point in my life, but it's definitely something I'd be interested in down the road.  I don't have my admin degree yet, so that's one thing.  I'd also be working year round and driving all over the place-  so living so far from the county I work in would be an added difficulty.  But I loved having conversations at the more global level rather than the classroom level.