Today was a flex day, so teachers could opt to work or not work. Me being me, I headed into work super early. Ended up eating my breakfast in the parking lot while I was waiting for the school day to begin.
I enjoyed my time today as it was peace and quiet. I started the day by heading to kindergarten, but I saw that their doors were locked and managed to borrow a key to get in there. I had told the kindergarten teachers yesterday that I would be coming by to sign their students into codeSpark. That took roughly two hours to get all five kindergarten classes taken care of.
After I finished that, I went to work on getting all of my group sheets completed. I didn’t get around to printing them, but I have the ones that need to be printed ready to go. I have worked my way through all of fourth and fifth, but I still have a good bit of third grade left to do.
If you haven’t been reading up, I have been doing stations with my students. Group 1 started at station 1, then moved to station 2, etc. With three classes doing stations every day and ten groups in each class, I have taken to printing new sheets every time. Station 1 now has kid 1, kid 2, and kid 3 and so forth. If I didn’t do something like this my head would explode trying to keep up with who is where. Most of the kids are going through the stations for the fourth time, so not everyone is in the same spot. To further confusion, with the Friday rotation some students end up doing stations twice in one week. I haven’t been doing stations every week, as they will take ten weeks and I have other things that I need to mix in with this.
I have been using Apple’s Pages app for this. Previously I would have done something like this in Microsoft Word… let me tell you… this is a world of difference. The speed in which Pages opens in comparison to Word also blows my mind. I am able to easily duplicate, rename, and then edit the new file… this makes me fly through the weeks that I am working on.
I ended up eating lunch with my librarian BFF Becki. We really enjoyed our time together and she talked my head off. After I managed to make my way to school, I had a little over an hour before I had to leave to get my oil changed and I kept working on my groups. It is very time-consuming to do this all right now, but I’ll be glad when I have them all done and printed as it is one less thing to think about.
All in all, my day was super productive and I am very glad that almost no one was in the building as I got to have some peace and quiet to work. It was almost as peaceful as those days where I worked in the summer, but I definitely appreciated the climate control I had today. I hate that they turn the air off during the summer. Sure makes my time working on iPads right miserable.