Merry Christmas!

On this, the third day of Christmas my children all have their faces in screens. At least three of them are playing a video game together, and the fourth is watching a movie with Dad. I guess I'm no better, with my own face in my computer.

The run up to Christmas at a Catholic school is very busy. Not only do all the teachers want to finish up units and projects to get to tests and presentations before the break even when snow days cut into our time, but the season of Advent makes for a very chopped up schedule. We have weekly prayer services for the four weeks of Advent, and a school wide Christmas music pageant that has us rearranging our schedules for extra music practices, tech rehearsal, and dress rehearsal. Somehow my class also always ends up hosting the Mass of the Immaculate Conception (not to be confused with the birth of Christ - the Immaculate Conception refers to Mary's conception and birth without the stain of Original Sin) which occurs during the season of Advent, making it even harder for many people to overcome the aforementioned confusion, and requiring me to adjust my schedule even more to allow time for students to practice their readings and songs for mass.

This year I was able to close out my units or at least come to a reasonable stopping point with a bit of time to spare. My partner teacher worked on a craft with half of the fifth graders at a time while I showed A Charlie Brown Christmas and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas and ate popcorn and candy canes with the other half. I think I got the better deal.

Energy was high on the night of the Christmas music pageant, with my students all decked out in their finest clothes. They did much better than I expected at keeping quiet while walking to and from the church for their performance, and the finale (with Silent Night sung in English and German) was beautiful. Videos can be seen via the school's Facebook page.

The last day before the break, I left a little gift on my student's desks before they arrived at school: mugs from the dollar store. The staff sang carols to the parents and students at morning drop off (in sub freezing temperatures) and students were offered cookies and hot chocolate. Fifth graders who had hot chocolate left over when they got to my room, promptly poured them into their new mugs. 












My principal knows the kids and teachers are all focused much more on the break than on anything academic on the last day of school for the calendar year. It has become a Saint Luke tradition to have a school wide caroling competition. This is the first year a trophy was awarded, and I am pleased to share that my "house" won!  The caroling was followed by three indoor snowball fights, separated by grade levels. Hands down, Saint Luke has the most fun on the last day before a break.

On the home front, this was our first Christmas with four kids and we kept it low key intentionally. We visited my husband's family in Oregon before Christmas and spent Christmas day at home, just the six of us. We almost met our goal of no tears on Christmas, but were foiled when Christmas dinner was served. My son loves the turkey legs, which we love about him, but something we said made him feel like we were mocking him. I liken his reaction to Marty McFly being called "chicken" in the Back to the Future movies. Whenever he perceives mockery directed at him, his reaction is immediate and HUGE. But he eventually regrouped, and we ate off of our fine china and drank out of our crystal glasses. I went to bed feeling incredibly blessed and told my husband that it was probably the best Christmas I have had as an adult.

I opened my school bag this morning, intending to grade all the assignments I didn't get to before the break began. I was able to grade everything I brought home... but since I forgot to bring home the book reports and the writing grade sheets that have student prewrites on the back at school, I still have two assignments left to score, and will need to make a trip to school today. Disappointing, but since I didn't wait until the last couple of days before school starts again, easily recoverable.

Snow Day!

From the time I started teaching until two years ago there were always snow days impacting teaching and learning in December and January. Then, just when I switched schools, the snow just barely dusted the yard, and on a weekend. Last night I saw the snow built up on the top of the car when I was up in the middle of the night, but was still convinced it would start raining and melt all the snow long before school busses took to the roads. Happily I was wrong. There is still plenty of snow all around the area this morning, so my kids and I all have the day off. We slept in and had a post-breakfast snowball fight Perhaps we'll actually get decorations on the tree today.

The fall open house event was very fun this year. I had parents emailing the afternoon of the event asking if it was too late for their fifth grader to join the list of presenters. In fact, so many students wanted to come to present their learning that my partner teacher and I had more students than guests while the middle school students were taking visiting families on tours of the school. Students were so excited to present their learning that they made and posted signs in the hallway to entice visitors to stop in and see their presentations. I didn't snap a picture of my favorite one, but they wrote on the frosted glass outside of the classroom with a dry erase marker, "Awesome presentations inside!"

When an unsuspecting prospective parent did stop to listen to a student present on the geographical regions of the United States or the process of fossilization, they invariably got pulled to watch several other presentations by a line up of fifth graders who were all eager to showcase their learning. It was really amazing and heartwarming to watch my students tweak their presentations in the moment - asking for samples of certain rocks or help quickly finding just the right picture to answer questions from the "real" audience who had come to open house. In all my years of teaching I can't remember a time when so many of my students were so passionate to share something they learned in my classroom.

I was able to follow it up with some fun hands on investigations as we begin our unit on Properties of Matter. The unit begins with eight quick observations that attempt to show one or more properties of matter we will investigate in the rest of the unit. Although it was stressful for many students to have a very short time at each station before moving to the next investigation, by the end most of them had some fun, and understood that they were going to get to dive deeper into each type of inquiry later in the unit. There were giggles as students blew into water and limewater, and at the end of it all, with water, sand, shaving cream, and oil in little puddles near each station, one student even thanked me for letting them do the messy activities.

Advent is always a busy time of year. There are prayer services every Monday morning and extra music practices for the annual Christmas concert. Sweet treats are handed out on Saint Nicholas' Day, adding to the pre-two week break crazy. In addition, fifth graders were tapped to host the mass in honor of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (not to be confused with the Virgin Birth of Christ) which adds even more rehearsals into the schedule. Adding a snow day into the mix decreases the teaching time this year, but it was very welcome as we are settling in with two new kids in our family. An extra day at home together was just what we needed.

Conferences, Report Cards, and Open House, oh my!

This week was a very busy week full of preparation. A teacher trifecta if you will. Conferences are next week, and in the week after Thanksgiving report cards will be handed out, and we will have our first open house of the year. Conferences + report cards + open house... and what do I do on the eve of all of this busy in my professional life? Injure my leg of course. It was actually a three week old injury last weekend, one that I thought was mostly healed, when I went to a friend's wedding and proceeded to dance the night away, in heels. Oops. It hurt so much the next evening, with a visible bruise from ankle to knee and a goose egg swelling out of my mid-shin, that I decided to make time on Monday to go to the doctor. But first I sent a message to Nuat Thai Healing Arts, my massage guy. The one who helped me regain functionality in my wrist after the medical professionals couldn't. The one who studies Thai massage and natural healing. The one who has a tendency to disagree with my doctors and get better results than them. And *he* told me to go to the doctor.

So instead of pulling the typical teacher, yes I know I should go, but really how do I make time for that shtick, as soon as my students went to their Monday morning PE class, I called my doctor, who got me an afternoon appointment. I spent the day mostly seated, with my leg on a chair, and an ice pack stuck in my boot. I went to the doctor, who sent me for an x-ray down the hall and told me to come back afterwards. Although the walk was painful, I was grinning at the irony of sending someone with a suspected broken leg on a walk down the hall and back to get confirmation of the break. After that little bit of crazy, I was called back into the exam room, where the doctor kept repeating, "I just can't believe it's not broken!" Which I have since taken up as my mantra: whenever anyone asks about my leg, I say, "It's not broken!" I keep saying it because for most of the week it was the only positive thing I had to say about it. It HURT! But my aforementioned massage guy came to my rescue on Wednesday evening. He worked on and around the injury site for about 20 minutes and gave me a bone blend of Essential Oils which has markedly decreased my need for ibuprofen and icing. Tonight I am happy to report that the visible bruise has shrunk by at least half and the goose egg is not nearly as prominent. 

Anyway, next week is conference "week" - conferences are scheduled for Monday, Tuesday, and half of Wednesday, and then we have the rest of Wednesday and Thursday and Friday off for Thanksgiving. Students who have their conferences scheduled for Monday morning effectively have an entire week off of school. There are enough teachers posting through my Facebook feed about being on their Thanksgiving Break, that I am a teeny bit jealous that I don't have the entire week off too. But as long as I remind myself that this is the closest thing I've ever had to a Thanksgiving Break, and that's exactly why conferences were scheduled for now (and that Thanksgiving Break was only Thursday and Friday until quite recently), I'm okay with it.

Our conferences are student led, so my students spent a good portion of this week preparing for them. They filled out a worksheet of academic talking points and another one of IB Learner Profile Attributes to use in leading their conferences, and then had "rehearsal time" where they pretended they were leading their conference to a group of classmates. That last part didn't go as well as I would have liked - the kids were squirrely by the end of the day on the last day before there was no school for a week - but I think they are all prepared to spend twenty minutes telling their parents about their progress thus far in fifth grade and to set some goals for the remainder of the school year.

Friday also marked the end of the first trimester, with report cards being handed out on the first Friday in December. That meant that students had to finish projects in both social studies and science, and take a math test to close out the term. The science projects were presented in class, which meant no take home grading for me - a total bonus of the presentation format. That left me with not much grading for the weekend (my partner teacher teaches social studies and math), which means that everything that is going into my first trimester report cards has already been entered into our online grading system except for any late assignments that students hand in during their conferences (my hard deadline for the last opportunity for kids to turn in work), and their religion journals which I forgot to bring home to score. I'm hopeful that I'll be able to use the gaps in my conference schedule, and Wednesday afternoon to write report card comments and plan for the first week of the new term so that Thanksgiving can just be Thanksgiving... especially since my family is having foster kids move in with us on Wednesday.

In the midst of all of this, we are also planning for an open house on November 30. Cue the science presentations! Another benefit of having the kids present their final projects is that three trifold boards and a diorama came in, as well as a ton of Google Slide presentations that I can project during the event. More prep will have to happen prior to open house, but hopefully not too much.

We also snuck in an inside lesson with our Master Gardner from Seattle Tilth this week. She brought in several different kinds of seeds and talked to the kids about how the shape and size of each seed has adapted for maximum dispersal. It was the perfect teaser lesson to our second trimester science unit on properties of matter where our focus will primarily be on how form and function are interrelated. It was awesome because I hadn't told her what our next science unit will be but I was able to use her lesson to make the connection for the kids in the middle of her lesson.

It was also awesome because I could sit behind my desk and let her teach. For me, a teacher who is normally crazy like a kangaroo on steroids, it's been incredibly difficult to sit and be still during class. I've set a personal step goal of under 5,000 while I heal, but I've been consistently between 6,000-8,000. Oops. One benefit of the injury has been that I've seen my students adopt a caring, protective attitude toward me. Most of them are volunteering to help whenever they perceive a need.  "Can I get you another ice pack, Mrs. Conrow?" "Do you want me to carry your coffee for you, Mrs. Conrow?" "Mrs. Conrow, I'll get that for you!" They truly are an amazing bunch of kids!

Science Weekend

I spent last weekend at the regional NSTA conference in Portland, Oregon. It was a little strange to be in the area and not visiting family, but there was very little time for anything other than stuffing my head full of educator science lingo and playing with scientific concepts before rushing home again. I didn't get a three day weekend, but that meant I only had to write sub plans for one day, which I count as a net benefit of the timing of the conference. Staying in a hotel in the thick of some of the most violent protests over the election, not so much. After spending all day learning, I needed sleep much more than I needed to hear shots, bangs, skidding cars, and helicopters hovering.

The conference itself was my first professional development focused specifically on one subject. I feel like I finally started to wrap my brain around the Next Generation Science Standards and their three dimensions of Cross Cutting Concepts, Science and Engineering Practices, and Disciplinary Core Ideas - all of which got abbreviated more often than not for an alphabet soup that was nearly incomprehensible to me at the beginning of the conference. Thankfully the NGSS are new enough that I was not the only one feeling this way. By the end of the three days, I can safely say I still have a lot of learning left to do on the new standards, but I am excited about the way they seem to be lining up neatly with of the International Baccalaureate philosophy that I have been learning about over the past year. The NGSS best practices modeled for me at the NSTA conference correspond to the inquiry based, hands-on, student centered philosophy of the IB. 

Working with other science teachers to learn about these new ideas in mostly engaging and hands on activities was an amazing way to spend a weekend. I got to simulate the digestive system, making (a very sweet smelling) poop in one session and gaining a free trial to an online treasure trove of videos for science instruction. I played with center of balance and saw creations out of plasticized milk. I worked with others to engineer a dirigible to transport pennies across a fishing line. I created a colorful chemical reaction and learned how to use Microsoft and Google applications to engage students in modeling tasks.

Collaborating with the middle school science teacher in my building and meeting new colleagues (some with connections to former co-workers!) was the highlight of the trip. I learned a lot from a woman I ended up sitting next to during two different sessions, and I loved running into the new classroom neighbor of a teacher who used to work across the hall from me. Sharing a hotel room with the middle school science teacher in my building and getting to debrief with her in the evenings was invaluable. I feel more confident and competent in my abilities to teach science well after spending the weekend at NSTA.

November Blah Blah Blah

This came through my Facebook feed at the right time this year.

Lots of good learning can happen in post-Camp Seymour October and during the start of November. Lots of good learning does happen in post-OEE October and in the beginning of November. But somehow, every year, I have to try harder when Camp Seymour is in the rear-view mirror and daylight savings is upon us. I feel bogged down by all the day to day aspects of being a teacher (lesson planning, parent communication, materials preparation, meetings...the list goes on and on, but I digress) and I feel like my family must think I am MIA.

The Friday before Halloween

But the truth is, it's probably all attributable to the change of the weather and the end of the "honeymoon phase" of the school year. I need to start taking vitamin D again and remind myself that it's a good thing the kids are feeling comfortable around me and in my classroom.  And remember to take time for myself and my family somewhere in the mix after the run up to Camp Seymour.

This year the family stuff was impossible to ignore, starting the very week I returned from Camp Seymour. Last year about this time my husband I started a journey to become licensed foster parents with the end goal of adopting kids in need. The Friday after I returned from Camp Seymour we took our first placement. Six days went by in a blur, and then as fast as the new kids came, they went. I mention this piece of my life mostly to explain the lack of a post last weekend, but also to remind anyone who may have forgotten that teaching is just a slice of my overall life.

Writing Pen Pal Letters

At school, the past two weeks shifted from post-OEE reflections toward moving forward with completing units in progress before our big trip. Students "fossilized" plastic dinosaurs in sand, pebbles, and plaster of paris before excavating them again. They researched survival and worked to synthesize ideas from their research with ideas from in-class reading with transitional statements. And we finally found time to begin drafting responses to our pen pals in Virginia. (Sorry it took so long, Mr. Jackson!) With Halloween thrown in the mix, complete with my class' annual viewing of It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, I am happy to report we are on track to end the first trimester right where we should be. Is it Thanksgiving yet?

Excavation Time!

My Favorite Week of the School Year

This week started with me donning my rainbow alpaca sweatshirt, Donald Duck hat, and argyle glasses to head to Camp Seymour with my students. It was a crazy run up to the trip, with different challenges to overcome than I had dealt with before and the promise of very wet weather.

But as always, it was an amazing trip.

Camp Seymour naturalists have been working hard in the off season to refine their Outdoor Environmental Education classes to better align with both the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards. It was awesome to see the same classes I have seen taught at least ten times cover the same material but with a much more hands on, student driven inquiry bent to them.  Since this is exactly what I will need to do with my own lessons, it was perfect modeling for me to see how to tweak lessons to keep the content the same but allow student questions to guide the instruction. Nearly every class began with an object or item and student time in a small group or pair to develop "I wonder" statements.  Students were then asked to state what they noticed or observed, which can be tricky when they want to state what they know from prior learning. Finally, they are asked to make claims supported by evidence. I saw the intentional use of standards in each activity. Every class was more collaborative and more hands on than before - and they were already all fairly high on the collaboration and hands on metrics. The student driven inquiry and necessity for cooperation was so high that I actually had a cabin leader ask if Camp Seymour was working to align their curricula with the International Baccalaureate framework!

During our time there I watched kids stretch themselves beyond where they thought they could in big and small ways. For one student, just being there was beyond what she had thought she could do.  And she ended up loving it. For others it was getting on a canoe or dissecting a squid or holding a snake. For some, it was dealing with their cabin mates for two nights. Every student accomplished something he or she thought was not going to be possible at the outset. They all learned that they are tougher than they thought.

Relationships evolved too. At our closing prayer ceremony, one student stated she learned that you can get through a fight with your friends just by continuing to be around them, and even if you get really mad, it does not have to end the friendship.

I know that teachers build classroom community all around the world, every year without an experience like this one in the fall. But I also know there is no way to build relationship with your class faster than to take them slightly outside of their comfort zone and prove to them that they could do everything you said they could all along. Welcome to fifth grade!

Camp Prep Week

This week was the week before our grand Outdoor Environmental Educational adventure at Camp Seymour. OEE Week is my favorite week of the school year, but I'm a little apprehensive about the weather forecast for next week: wind, rain, and thunderstorms. I had said a few years back that I might be ready for a wet OEE week, but theorizing about it and preparing a group of kids for a wet week feel very different.

My partner teacher and I gave over class time on three different days this week for cabin groups to get together to bond, create a cabin cheer, and come up with and rehearse a skit. As it always does, it started out rocky, with tears among the boys this year. One boy was so upset his first choice pick for a cabin mate was in the other boys' cabin that he didn't even see his other two choices were in his cabin. Another boy was rightfully upset when he did not know what had been decided on by his cabin group, and when he asked for clarification, they all started talking at once and he still had no idea what was going on. Overall, the cabin dynamics seemed to come together fairly well by the third day, but as usual, each group had its own challenges to overcome to get there.

The biggest challenges, the ones that made this year's prep harder than any prior year, were in getting enough parent volunteers who had completed the required training and could take the time off of their normal lives in order to make the trip happen. I found my final cabin leader on Wednesday night, and he won't even be able to come with us on Monday morning. He will arrive about dinner time on the first day and then stay with us for the duration of the trip. Once I had my final cabin leader locked in, I was ready to put together carpool lists. But when I sat down to figure out my carpool lists, I realized I was short eight seats for students to get to and from Camp Seymour. So it was Thursday before I had recruited enough extra drivers to ensure a seat for every student in a carpool. As I told a good friend of mine, I'm tired already and I haven't even been to Camp Seymour yet!

It was a busy week, but we also found time to model the rock cycle using crayons and hot water. Here are a few pictures of students turning their sedimentary crayon rocks into metamorphic crayon rocks.