EEEKKKKK!

I can hardly believe that the start of school is nearly here!!!! I've got so much to do and so little time to do it in. I know that it will all work out but since Parent Orientation is next Tuesday and Wednesday nights, I need to have a good chunk of things done by then. None the least of which is getting my room ready. The carpets are getting cleaned Friday, then Monday we have to move all the furniture back and make it look pretty. :)

With my mom visiting this week, at least nearly all my laundry is done! Looking on the bright side.

Back to normal with a bump in the road

Today was an interesting day at school. The short story is that we had a lockdown. There was a local bank robbery and the armed robber had tried to escape on foot and headed towards the schools. So as a precaution, we locked down the school. There was scary moments when we didn't know why we were locked down or what was going on, but all in all it all worked out okay.

Ahren had choir practice at church after school, so I tried a new adventure - taking both kids downtown on our bikes. I was a bit of a nervous wreck, but they both did well. The three of us biked to church and then Sean and I biked to DQ and he got a milkshake, I got a drink and we picked up a Blizzard for Ahren. Then we biked back to church and chilled while we waited for Ahren to finish up and we all biked home.

Tuesday early evenings are a funny time at church. There are bunches of moms and kids and they have a little potluck-ish thing that they do, someone makes dinner and brings it for everyone and everyone has a little dinner while they are hanging out waiting for the kids and stuff. It's really pretty cool. I'm feeling like I'm going to need to start contributing to the meal stuff, since lately I've been waiting for Ahren while she is in choir.

Yow!

Who knew that being a preschool teacher could be dangerous work? Today I found out. As I was leaning over the head of one student to tell another student something, the first student jumped up and hit me on the chin with his head. Momentarily, I saw stars and feel a jolt of pain (the pain was on the right side of my jaw, but I he hit me on the left side of my jaw). I kept thinking that the pain would go away, but it didn't really. Then when I sat down for circle time, I suddenly felt very foggy. A few minutes later, I ended up getting sick. Carolyn (a co-worker) was worried that I had a concussion, so I ended up going to see the school nurse and she really wanted me to go the walk-in clinic. So another co-worker drove me to the clinic and I had xrays done and such. They are saying that I got a contusion where the jaw bones meet (near the ear) and gave me a script for some anti-inflammatory meds. The freaky thing is how my right arm was tremoring - it was shaking so bad, it kinda freaked me out. And then my teeth started chattering (when I was talking with the school nurse), they were chattering uncontrollably for at least 3 hours. They have finally subsided, which is good because I was really getting a bad headache from it. I'm all clear to go back to school tomorrow and since the tremors and chattering seem to have stopped (I think the anti-inflammatory helped with that), I should be fine.

Can't hardly believe it!

After a week of vacation from school, Monday arrives and becomes a Full Blown True Snow Day - shocking, I know! Then Tuesday arrives and guess what? Apparently, some teenagers vandalized the school buses and we have another day off.

So we've now gotten an extra 2 days off after a vacation week. I'm sure I'll be back at work tomorrow, in the meantime, I'm just enjoying the added vacation.

This and That and The Other

What a week it has been. I've been getting lots done on the kitchen. Ron (and Patty) came down late Sunday evening until Tuesday morning, to work on finishing up some stuff. Ron got the electrical finished along with more sanding, plastering, cutting ceiling moulding and putting in a new door frame. After he left, I continued working on sanding, sanding and more sanding, then a couple coats of primer and then a couple of coats of new paint and pput in the outlet covers. Then I put the new shelves back up and returned things to their fairly normal state - but much prettier now. There is of course, still a whole boatload of stuff to do, the whole rest of the kitchen, but at least there is a part of the kitchen that looks nice.

The most challenging thing was dealing with a major layer of plaster dust all over everything in our house - literally. The curtains will all need to be washed, everything in all the cabinets and drawers will need to be washed. All the spice jars are covered with dust, the tupperware cabinet, the piano in the livingroom, the pictures hanging in the hallway -- EVERYTHING! At least I've got most of it under control, or at least to a semi-livable point.

Last night, Michael and the boys came up for dinner and we got the official word that Lucia and Michael will be moving to Vermont. Lucia got a job as a Senior Pastor at a UCC church there, they are excited, but we are sad. For the past 7? years, they have lived nearby (about a half-hour away) and Ahren and Sean grew up with the boys (Micah - 12 and Asher - 9) being a big part of their lives. Now to have them moving away, it will be hard. They will be about 3 hours away, which will make weekend trips doable. When I told Ahren and Sean today, they took it better than I thought they would. Sean was actually more upset than Ahren was. Ahren kept saying that it will be harder on them, because they will be leaving everyone, we are only losing them. It helped that I told the kids that when we visit we will be able to stay over night, Sean thought that was cool, and wanted me to promise him that we would get a bunk bed for him to sleep at at their house. I told him that I couldn't do that, and he seemed okay with that.

Tomorrow the plan is to get all my plans done for the month of March for school, which would really be a good thing, considering I've been really putting it off all week.

Interesting school week...

This past week has been a really odd one at school. On Monday I had a PPT, so I was out of the AM class for a little over an hour, then that afternoon I had a meeting at Central Office regarding the Early Childhood Initiative that the Board of Ed is working on. Monday night I had a Prudential Board Planning Meeting at church. Then Tuesday was regular day, except that I had to go and pick up Sean when he got sick at school. Tuesday night was the Kindergarten Readiness program at the elementary school (more about that later). Wednesday I had to stay home with Sean, so I miss both classes, then had to take Ahren to theater rehearsal and pick her up later. Today was back to a normal day. Tomorrow will hopefully be another normal day (with a special meeting at church in the evening and theater rehearsal for Ahren again.

The K Readiness program was interesting, and no, I don't have any children who will be attending K this fall. I was there for professional reasons. I want to make sure that the curriculum that we are following will be adequately preparing our students for K in the fall. They did a slide show of what the K day looks like and it was remarkably like our preschool day. We do a morning meeting letter, we do daily journaling, we do centers, and letter work, snack and outdoor play. The turn out of the program was really quite impressive too, and I'd have to say that probably a good half of the people there were from our preschool and almost everyone in my classes came up to me afterward and remarked that they were so happy that their children will have such a smooth transition to K in the fall. I was pretty pleased and it made me feel good having so many parents comment to nicely. Last year one of the other teachers really gave me a hard time, making things difficult and it caused me to doubt my abilities. I think it was more about her own insecurities that it was about me and my teaching skills. In any case, I was glad that I went to the program because it reinforced to me that I'm doing a good job.

Heartbroken :(

Today I made the sad, sad discovery that my red wiggler worms have all died. Rather I think that they may have been murdered. :( First a little history...

I got these worms while attending the La Leche League International Conference in DC (yeah, I know what do worms have to do with breastfeeding??) One of the sessions I went to was for vermicomposting (using worms inside your house to compost) and the woman who did the session said that if anyone wanted to take worms home, they could take some of hers. So me and another guy split the worms (here we were in his hotel room, with a pile of worms separating the dirt from the worms and then dividing them into two piles, while his little 2 year old helped us). So I bring home a baggie of worms and set up my worm bin.

Last year I decided to bring them into my classroom to use with the students talking about the ecology and recycling and life cycles and such. The kids loved them (okay, not all the kids loved them), they would ask, "can we see the worms??" and I would open the bin and they would hold the worms and watch all wiggle around. It was really fun. Towards the end of the year, I had a day when we separated the finished compost from the worms and we were amazed at how many worms we had - it was incredible. It was a great day, for many reasons. :) I offered some worms to any family that wanted to take some home, but only one family decided to try it. Over the summer the worms did really well, considering they were largely neglected although I was still able to toss some scraps into the bin every few weeks.

Fast forward to now: Last week or so, I noticed that there was a lot of liquid in the bottom of the bin (I had two bins nested inside each other with small drain holes in the bottom of the top one), which was odd, but I figured I would dump the excess when I checked on the worms in a day or so. So today, I took the bin outside to air it out (it does get a lot of fruit flies inside the bin) and noticed that there didn't seem to be any worms around the top and there was an apple that was rotting without a worm in site. Huh?? Usually, if there was banana skin or a big chunk of apple, the outside skin would remain for a while and the worms would be swarming inside the fruit (actually it was pretty cool, when you would peel back a banana skin and it was totally packed with worms - like something out of a horror movie - in a good way). Then I dug around in the compost and couldn't find ANY worms - where the hell did they all go??? So I picked up the top bin and checked the liquid in the bottom bin and noticed that there were tons of worms slooshing around in the liquid and they didn't look good. Well, maybe if they got out of the water, they would be okay??? So I dumped them back into the bin, but they were all dead. We are talking hundreds -thousands of worms all dead.

I cannot for the life of me figure out what could have happened to the worms. It seems like it must have been recently because they weren't completely decomposed. These are some possibilities:

• I put something in that had too much pesticide on it? No, because they survived this long and I didn't put anything unusual in it, besides if it were that I think that they would have just died in the main bin and not gone down through the drain holes. (In the past I've found maybe 1-2 worms EVER in the drain bin).
  
• It was too cold in the room over the break? No, because they survived last year when our classroom temp was regularly 55 degrees - this room is warmer than that and we haven't had a terribly cold spell AT ALL anyway.
  
• They didn't have enough food? No, because there was food in there that was decomposing.
  
• One of the kids poured something in the top vent into the bin? No, because I would have noticed it and also the only thing they could have poured would have been juice or water, which wouldn't have really hurt the worms.
  
• Someone added some liquid that was not friendly - cleaner? windex? something toxic to worms.? This is the most possible solution because there was something that made the worms try to get away from their compost-home by going into the drainage bin and there was a lot of extra liquid in the bottom bin. But this also just doesn't make sense because I can't imagine who would have done it? Someone who didn't like worms? Someone who just didn't like me? Of course, that's possible, but a lot of people didn't even really know about the worms.
  

I'm just so baffled and sad. I'll now need to decide if I should try and get some more worms and start over. It won't be the same, these were special worms, I had a special attachment to (I know I sound like a freak - there must be something wrong with me to be this upset over worms).

Today technology is great!

catch me on another day, and I might not thinks so, but after about 45 minutes of tweaking I finally got video up on the class blog. I wanted to run a test video, before I did anything with anyone else, so I put up a little clip of me doing one of the song/poems that we do each day before snack. I completely DREAD being in front of the camera and it will likely be the only time you will see me in a video (I much prefer the behind-the-scenes stuff), so enjoy it while it's there. You can check it out here.

These days I've been starting to think about all the useful things that I can do with the video capabilities in the classroom. I could put together a clip on our coming to school routines (hanging up jacket, signing in with clothespin, washing hands and starting the journaling), so that when we have new students they could watch the videos with their parents to know what to expect.

Speaking of new students, my 3AM class got a new student (first new one all year in that class) and in the interesting thing is that he is from England - that means that in my 3AM class I now have *3* students from England and in my 3PM class I have *3* students who are from India. Weird, huh?

Ah, technology!

So while I was fiddling around with my new camera (which I love!) I found that I can also use it to take video clips. The 1 Gig memory stick can allow upto one hour, but I can't imagine that I would it for anything more than a few minutes at a time. So what to do with digital video capabilities in a preschool classroom??? Well, videoing a few songs sung by the kids would be fun, right? But I figure that before I talk to the parents about this, I'd better see if I can get the technology worked out first. So did a little 10 second test video, rigged it to the computer at school at uploaded it to youtube. It seemed to work, but then when I went back to check it, the school's server blocked me out of the youtube site. ARGH! So I did check it when I got home and it seemed to work well, and the resolution was actually better than I expected. BUT now the challenge will be to figure out how to get the videos uploaded easily. The computer at school is blocking me, and my home computer doesn't have enough upstream capacity to handle uploading files like that. My initial thought is that I might be able to use GoogleVideo as the video server, linked to the class blog. I know that I can use Google search engine, so maybe GoogleVideo would be accessible at school. I will have to check it out tomorrow.

In other news, I wish that it were colder today because we would have had a nice amount of snow, except for the fact that it's tooo damn warm! Instead we just had yucky rain - how boring. Will we get any snow this year, lordie, I hope so!

Okay, so a little the (not so) cold, now a little about the hot: Don't say I didn't warn you, this is one hot video -- the Wicked Game by Chris Isaak. I found it linked from a 43T friends page and my monitor nearly caught on fire.

Oh yeah, and since it seemed that folks liked that picture of me, I thought I would update my profile picture with it. Thanks, Sam and anon ;) ~me

The luckiest teacher on earth!

Right now, I honestly feel that way - like I'm the luckiest teacher on Earth! Every year, at the beginning of December, I send out a note to my students' families that they need not buy me a gift for the holidays, that I'd rather, if they wished to do something, that they purchase something for the classroom - something that the students would all enjoy playing and using - like Kid K'nex pieces, floor puzzles, Ello creation things, etc. This usually works out well and we get a nice assortment of things for our room. Well, this year, one of the mom's brought in a nice gift bag and said that it was from all the families in that class. At circle time, we sat down to open the class gifts and I was brought to tears when I opened the 'big class gift' -- they bought a digital camera! A Sony Cyber-Shot -- 6.0 megapixels (my old, now broken camera was only 1.3!)!! I was simply speechless. I feel so blessed to be able to work with families who care so much! They knew that I used the camera quite a bit in the classroom and was very upset when my broke, but this was beyond generous!