Her Summer 2014 Goals

Hello Summer 2014!!!

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As much as I miss my students (you can read about that here), I am happy to be a "Lady of Leisure" as Sean calls me. Summer is a time to regroup and refresh. I love my job - don't get me wrong - but summer vacation is a great perk!

Like a lot of teachers out there, I have a to-do list a mile long for my summer vacation. I'm typing it out here so I can hopefully keep myself motivated to get it all done.

School:
This is not as long as my list usually is, but I have quite a bit I want to get done for school.

I have quite a few picture books and I forget about them each year. I want to organize them and make a list of what I have, along with lessons I think I can do with them. Hopefully this means I will actually use them in class.

My county requires that I do D.O.L.s with  my students each day. I like them and I think they teach the students about editing other people's work (which is 1/2 of their state writing test), but the way they are presented is not exactly like the test. I started changing up the basic routine and found a way to make it work for my class and match the test. *Bonus!!* Now, I just have to modify all the week's of sentences and paragraphs.

Last year, my principal decided to put the Civics and Science classes on an A/B schedule (students would have one class on an A day and the other on B day). They had each for the entire year. This year it looks like she is going to switch us to semesters (one semester Science, one Civics). This is the schedule I made for this past year that has to be revamped for semesters.

I love these posters I found to help my students with reading strategies. They were just printed on a color printer so they are small. I want to recreate them so they are larger and can be seen throughout the room. Hopefully, this will help remind the students of what they should be doing as they read.

I have spent a lot of time (and let's face it - money) building up my classroom library. Now I need to get it organized. I want to use my Lexile Leveler app to find the Lexile level of each book and put a colored sticker on them so I can remember. Then I am going to organize the books by genre so the students can more easily find things they want to read. My students this past year read a lot more partially because of all these books I had in the room and I hope that trend can continue once they are more organized.

The last week of school my Civics students helped me come up with vocabulary terms for Civics. We ended up with 173 words/phrases/terms. *phew* I'm thinking Word Wall!

These are a hit each year and I love giving the kids something to recognize their birthday. I put the balloon on the front of the birthday pencil and a coupon for something fun on the back. I will blog more about this once I get them done.


See! That's not that bad? Right!?!?


In addition to the school stuff, I have some fun stuff I want to do for me.

Read:
I want to finish reading The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller. I started last summer but didn't finish before we headed across the pond to Australia.
I also want to read Reading in the Wild by Donalyn Miller. It is the follow up to The Book Whisperer and I have heard great things. 
In addition to those two school books, I want to read 10 novels.

Health:
I plan to log my eating each day into MyFitnessPal. (I started again today so if you also use the program I would love for us to be "Friends". My user name is Manders0808.)
I also want to go to the gym at least four days a week.

Knitting:
I want to finish my first pair of socks, finish my first cabled scarf, and start (and maybe finish) a baby project.

House:
I want to clean out and reclaim one of the bedrooms we don't use that has become a catch-all.
I want to find a way to stop the ants that are attempting to take over my kitchen.
We have a bunch of items that we set aside to take to GoodWill and I want to actually take that final step and get them out of the house.

Misc:
I want to bake a loaf of bread from scratch. I have no idea why but I have had a hankering to do this for a while now. I've done it before and I want to do it again. Anyone have a good recipe?


That's my summer to-do list. It is going to be busy, but very fun I think. What made your to-do list this summer?


Happy Vacation,