Five for Fraturday

I have a deepened respect for all you full-time teachers who blog. I just finished my first full week of teaching and most my energy was spent keeping my own head on straight. I am extremely lucky and grateful that my school has a new teacher mentoring program or I don't know what I would do! 

Okay, okay, I don't mean to sound melodramatic. Over all , I am loving my new position and adore my students. Most of my kiddos are adjusting really well and have been comfortable with me being their new teacher. I am still working on getting to know them beyond what their files have told me. I definitely have a lot of learning to do but if the rest of the year is like their week, then I will be just fine. 

My students are absolutely loving our current author study on David Shannon. The previous teacher started with the Oh David books and I continued this week with some other favorites including A Bad Case of Stripes, Too Many Toys, and Jangles. 

This coming week we are going to be making David emotion masks. I created a template of his head, ears and nose for students to cut out and then glue down. We will be working on identifying and naming emotions so I will ask each student to name the emotion they draw on David and then a para will write it on the back. 

I've also created a David's emotions mini poster for some of our lower kiddos. 

I am so excited to debut my new blog title and new blog design. I was really impressed with the awesome names that people submitted. I had a number of favorites that made it a little difficult to choose a single winner. Check back in a few days to see if your name was picked!

Tuesday our school had our first annual Dance-A-Thon. Each class took 15 minute rotations dancing in our auditorium. I've been talking with my paras  about incorporating a music time into our weekly schedule and after the awesome display of dance moves at the Dance-A-Thon, I know I have to! I could not believe some of my kiddos who were bustin' a move to Kidz Bop hits as well as some classics (helllooo Chicken Dance!). Our class managed to raise nearly $200 for our school which I thought was pretty impressive for preschoolers!

This might sound a little trivial but I wanted to share that I wrote my first IEP on Friday. And by my first, I mean my first official IEP for an actual student and not a case study done during school. A student of mine, whom I never actually met, withdrew this week and I was quickly assigned a new student. I completed their IEP yesterday and I will get to lead my first IEP meeting as a teacher this coming week. 

If any of your Twitter account a recently spammed by my Twitter, I apologize. I received one of those hacker tweets disguised as a tweet from a friend and my account was "compromised" according to Twitter. I have since changed my password but wanted to give a heads up to the rest of you. In retrospect I should have realized it was a hack when it asked me to log in even though I rarely ever log out.

Enjoy your weekend! Hopefully it is dry where you're at!