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!
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