Parent Teacher Conferences

We've passed the mid-nine weeks point of our first quarter. My district holds two evenings of parent teacher conferences. Often the evenings seem to go slowly. Most of my classes in the past have been high school junior/senior level and my parents haven't really needed to conference.

This year, I had lots of interested parents attend. I think it is because my HS classes shifted to freshmen and my junior high parents really wanted to get a grasp on our new schedule. I was very excited by the turn out and I really had some good conversations with both parents and students.

Several of my students commented on our new Reading Like a Historian lessons. They enjoyed the conversations and class discussions. I'm really excited about using the common core integrated lessons even more after our conferences.

A few days later, I treated my World History classes to a Roman breakfast. I found some great Tuscan loaves and boule. I added olives and dates to the menu and had planned on cheese. But as I gathered things that morning, the cheese was left behind in the fridge. :(  I asked each student to simply try a small taste of the dates and olives. They didn't have to eat the entire item. Only a few students weren't up to the challenge. I knew that many of them had never tried dates before, I knew because I hadn't either! If I'd eaten dates, it had to be in the Christmas fruitcake.

The breakfast was a success. The more adventurous students loved exploring the new foods and they were full of suggestions as to what ethnic food they wanted next. I had to remind them I was feeding 40 on my grocery budget. They had some great ideas and we will definitely try new foods again!

Planning for the New School Year

The school year is just a few short weeks away. I began planning before the year was finished last year. I keep reading blogs about organization, INB planning, and general teacher interactions. I have a long list on TPT that I want to purchase and my new pencil sharpener arrived this week!

I plan on going to my room tomorrow to start getting some things ready. I am teaching world history this year and the curriculum is new for me. I have a huge textbook to look through and the standards are changing next year. This isn't a tested class and I'm finding the current standards vague and loose. Which is ok, I will have a lot of leniency to pull in art and music appreciation as I teach different time periods.

I'm happy to be teaching the "new" for me class because in 2014-2015 Tennessee social studies standards change, this course will move to seventh grade. I will then be teaching it on that grade level. So I feel like I'm getting a head start on the new standards. The draft standards are out and I will be able to use those as a guide for this class.

My INB planning is going well. I'm hoping to get the first four weeks set in my 7th and 8th grade class. I won't be using them in world history. But I will be incorporating foldables and a lot of the same type materials. My goal is to have things planned four weeks out and I have been pulling scope and sequences from several other school systems. I don't think we've used a standard S&S for social studies on our system. I know we use pacing guides/ S&S in math and language arts.

I really work more at home during the summer and I had planned to spend more time in my classroom this year. But I classroom computer quit working the first week after school ended. IT hasn't fixed it yet and it's just been easier to do things on my personal laptop. I've gotten into the habit of saving everything in Dropbox so that I can access all of my new material. I find that I have too many flash drives and never have the one I need on hand. Dropbox is a life saver!

I welcome suggestions or tips on organization. Please feel free to follow me on Pinterest.