And Two Years Later...

How sad that it has been two years since I have added to my blog. Life has been busy.

This is the part of my life that is still the same:
*Still teaching Sophomore English, Speech, Drama, Forensics, and sometimes Stagecraft
*Directing one play a year (for the last two years it has been the musical)
*Coaching the Forensics team
*Still arranging and rearranging desks
*Still using Standards Based Grading
*Still spending quite a bit of my summer working on curriculum

These are the changes:
*Taking 10 minutes for reading at the beginning of class every day (or almost every day)
*Reading Clubs or Reading Circles so students have some choice in the books they read
*English at each level has been separated into Regular and Advanced (this will be new in the coming year)
*Experimenting with flexible seating
*Hosting our own Forensics Tournament
*Combining my lesson plan book and grade book into one book and having a different book for each semester
*Forcing myself to take a couple of weeks of summer and not do a thing that is school related (Oh, the junk I have read!)

The end of June is always a good wakeup call. Summer is about half over for me. I will gradually start working on curriculum and planning again; however, it won't be all work. We still plan to squeeze in a vacation, and I am babysitting grandkids for a couple of days. Hopefully, there will be a lake trip, an art museum visit or two, and several nights at the movies.

When the custodians finish with my classroom, I plan to reclaim my dining room table. (It is full of books, notebooks, and folders I hauled home so I could work this summer.)

And guess what? School supplies will be hitting the stores soon. That really is the wakeup call: School will be starting again soon. Let the fun begin.