Online Meetings

 Our school's competitive robotics teams have been meeting after school online.  We have access to a great online simulator and IDE.  The students have created their own project folders, and have access to their own simulator log in to practice running the code they have written with their online robot.

This sounds amazing, right?  

The first few meetings went really well.  The students, for the most part, were able to log into the simulator where they could write, compile, and run their code.  The IDE folder application was giving us fits, but we worked around it.

Our district later removed the IDE website block, so I thought we would be cooking with gas last week.  The students would just log in and be coding masters!

Oh. My. Goodness!  A few of the students were not able to log into their folders and this just spiraled out of control!  A LOT of talking over one another, and frustration, and tears.....

Eventually, we all took a breath and did whatever we could on the websites.  However, this meeting felt like such an epic fail!

Have you ever had those meetings where you wished you could push the re-do button.  Just start again?

Oh the joys of online meetings!

A positive take away, though, we are working through the bugs and getting closer each week to having them all worked out!

Really looking forward to meeting after school face to face. 

Stay strong educators.

Hidden Talent

 This week in the elementary engineering classroom we have been celebrating Computer Science Week by logging onto code.org and coding different projects.  The Hour of Code project this year is a Minecraft Education Edition challenge.  

Many of my classes this week have been fortunate to be able to Skype with Computer Science Engineers from a local tech company.  The kiddos have loved coding along with the CS Engineers! 

It has been fun learning to code on the Hour of Code 2020 Minecraft program along with my students.  They have taught me so much this week about Minecraft!  To be clear, I am definitely NOT a gammer! 

The code.org Minecraft projects, however, are a lot of fun, and the 1st - 3rd grade students have been coding each level along with me.  I laughed out loud this afternoon when a 1st grader yells out in class, "Mrs. Kwid how did you get so good at Minecraft?"  I just winked and told him, "It's a hidden talent!"

Starting Over

It is time to start blogging again!

It has been WAY TOO LONG since I wrote on my blog!

I miss this creative writing outlet, to reflect and find joy in each day.

So here we start again!

2020......what a year this has been.  Let's look back.  

The 2019-2020 school year started off AMAZING.  The second week of school, September 3, 2019, 798 students, grades K-8, gathered in our gym as ten previously selected students spoke with an astronaut on the International Space Station.  I was finding my groove in the engineering classroom, our Botball and Jr. Botball robotics students were doing amazing, we added an amateur radio after school club, life was great!  I foolishly thought this was going to be the best year ever!  

Then Friday, March 13, 2020 arrived.  This was the last school day of the 2019-2020 school year on campus.  The students never returned to their classrooms.  This is still so sad to write. Teachers were immersed into an online world.  It was difficult, but the end of the year came and everyone let out a deep breath that summer break finally arrived.  We would all return in August and things would get back to normal...........

With the slight possibility that things could still be sketchy when school returned, the majority of teachers I know spent the entire summer taking classes online, signing up for every webinar they could find about online teaching, joined teaching online forums, read blogs, articles, books, and spoke with anyone they could that had knowledge about remote teaching.  TRUST ME, teachers worked their behinds off this summer prepping for what might happen in the 2020 school year!  

As summer progressed, the Covid-19 virus numbers continued to rise.  Truth, I was really surprised when we were told that school would start back remotely.   

Our school has been remote, hybrid, all students on campus daily grades K-4th, and now back to hybrid.  Teaching STEM in a hybrid model and remotely is a new challenge.  Finding engaging activities while not sharing materials and working independently is difficult.  But nothing worthwhile ever come easy!  The teachers I work with, respect, and admire are all digging deep and thinking way out of the box to keep kids learning and growing! If you are a teacher, are married to a teacher, have a sibling that's a teacher, an adult child that's a teacher, or a friend that's a teacher, you know that they are working harder right now than they ever have before.  

PLEASE have grace with us teachers.  We miss our students, we miss daily student hugs, we miss our school family connections, we miss our routines, we miss our normal.  

Finding the joy today..... this afternoon a 1st grade boy was so excited about what we were doing in engineering that he gave me a quick side hug as I walked by him.  It caught me off guard, but it was such a nice surprise.  I didn't even care that he was closer than 6 feet! 

I Love You

A lot has happened since my last blog post.  I took a leap of faith this year and began teaching in the K-5 elementary engineering lab.  The teacher before me created an amazing classroom, so it was very exciting to accept this new challenge!  The students and I are both learning a lot this year!

Every week I teach over 500 students, grades Kindergarten through 5th grade, science, technology, engineering and math.  It is a joy to watch these students learn in a project based environment.

The kindergarten students are quite a challenge, though.  We only have 30 minutes together and that is a very short amount of time to create a Lego masterpiece, or code the Bee Bots, or play the Code and Go Mouse game, or code a project on Scratch Jr.

Today a kindergarten boy came to his 3:00 PM to 3:30 PM class.  It was the end of the day, so I was a little tired and looking forward to the end of the day.  I was quickly shuffling the rest of his class in when he very gently touches my arm, stops, looks at me and says, "I love you."  It was so sincere and so precious!

I swear, it is moments like this that makes teachers come back each morning!

Fibbing and the Elf on the Shelf

What a gift it is to work with second graders (7 and 8 years old) during the month of December! Yes, it is chaotic, exhausting, loud, messy and crazy, but at the end of the day, to see how excited the kids are for the holidays, it really is what the season is all about!

Today is December 1st!  The buzz in my classroom was infectious!  We do hot chocolate Fridays every Friday from the first Friday following Thanksgiving Break, to the Friday before Spring Break.  Today was our First Hot Chocolate Friday.  The kids were beyond excited about this!

Also, our Elf on the Shelf arrived today.  If you are not familiar with the Elf on the Shelf, he/she observes the kids all day then flies back to the North Pole, each night, to report to Santa on how the children are doing.  Yes, this is a great behavior management tool!

So.....earlier this week I received an email from a mom telling me that she has been dealing with her son lying.  He lied on his nightly reading log about how many minutes he has been reading.  She told me this so he would not be rewarded with a monthly pizza certificate for filling out his reading log.  The mom told me she actually threw his log away so he would not be rewarded for lying. 

In class, the same day I received mom's email, this boy told me his little sister threw his reading log away.  I asked him twice if this was really what happened.  He stood by his story and did not waiver. 

His mom just happened to email me that afternoon, so I told her about his response to me as to what happened to his reading log. 

Long story short, I received this note today from him!  It reads, "Dear Miss Kwid, sorry that I had fibbed to you.  I fibbed to my mom about my reading log so she throo it away.  I can't fib any more."
This made me laugh and smile all day!

This was the perfect teachable moment!  It was so seamless to discuss how our Elf, the students named her Cookie, reports to Santa each night letting him know that the children have been kind, tried their best, did not cheat or FIB! This little guy turned white when we talked about Santa finding out about kids that fib.   I think he learned his lesson!  I do not think he will be lying any more (this month)!

The Ham Dad

Somehow I am always reminded of this story when we have our second grade Thanksgiving Feast at school.

Eleven year ago, the year our school opened, I taught this darling little girl.  Her mom was beautiful and her dad was a very attractive man.  The kind of attractive that you know during parent teacher conferences you sound like an idiot because you are looking at this attractive man and have no idea what is coming out of your mouth!

This family graciously offered to bring a Honey Baked Ham for our Thanksgiving Feast at school that year.

The big day arrived, all the students had a fun morning filled with making yarn dolls, butter, a spinning top, and playing pilgrim games. 

As my room filled to the max with moms and grandmas setting up the food buffet and arranging the tables for the children to eat, this dad arrived with the ham. I am not sure if it was how wonderful the ham smelled, or how handsome this dad was, but EVERY lady in my room stopped talking and stared, mouth wide opened at him, while he walked the ham to the buffet table.  I Literally said them, "ladies, close your mouths!"  Everyone laughed so hard when they realized what they were all doing!

My co-workers and I still giggle about this every year during our feast! 

I hope you all have a blessed, peaceful and joyful Thanksgiving!

Moss

This conversation today made me crack up, and maybe throw up (a little)!

Our story this week has been about animals making homes.  While back at my reading table, my students read about different kinds of animal homes. 

One of the vocabulary words that came up today was Moss.  My students gave me different definitions of what moss is.

Some said is was soft, others said green, others said a plant.

One little boy thought about this word, moss, for a while, then shouted out, "We have moss in our refrigerator!" 

A Typical Friday

This post is from my amazing teaching partner!  We both have an easy laugh and on Fridays this really serves us well!  

Some background for you.....one of the standards we teach in second grade is currency.  We have found when the children earn classroom money, pay bills each Friday, open businesses for 2nd grade "store" in order to be a producer or consumer, this really drives home the concept of money.  And let's face it, it's a lot of fun! 

However, fitting everything in on Fridays can prove to be pretty crazy.

Thank you for sharing this with me Mrs. Janicek.  

Enjoy reading about a typical Friday in 2nd grade.

Dear Families,

Goodness we were busy today.  I am so very thankful to all of you that helped me today! So much learning happened. 😍 This is a long email... it was a long, but productive day.  After reading, you will understand why store is on a Friday.  I need Saturday to recover.  ha ha

Here's a synopsis:

We started our day by answering tons of questions and me repeating it is not time to set up store.  😉

After our Friday morning work test and Scholastic News, students were told they could stay in at recess and make their sign if they needed too.  Again several reminders that it wasn't time to set up for store.😁

After recess we took our spelling tests (in your child's backpack) and filled out the top half of our Producer Sheet.  I will show you these and how they tie into the business license at conferences.

Students had to:

1.  Write their name and number (responsibility)
2. Write how much money is currently in their wallet (accountablity)
3. Circle what their store was: Selling items/Service/Game/Raffle (understanding different ways to produce income)
4. Write down their total projected profit (goal)
5. List the things they are selling at store in the bar graph (organization)
6. List the prices of the things they are selling in the bar graph (inventory)
7. Learn that they had to make a tally mark in the appropriate column for each thing they sell, every time they sell one (accountability)
8. Be reminded that it is not time to set up store😳(listening)

After all the spelling tests were given (thank you spelling moms!!!), it was finally time to set up store.

Students had to:

1. Move desks into a large horseshoe shape,like a mall (organization and communication)
2. Tape their sign to the front of their desk (advertisement)
3. Set up their store items (organization)
4. Have their Producer sheet and a pencil on their desk to tally mark sales (accountability)
5. Have their wallet on their desk to give change if necessary (math and integrity)
6. Be reminded that they may not shop from each other's stores until after the regular store closes😜(self-control)

After lunch recess, students ran their stores! 😊(communication, organization, and math) They made change and tally marked their sales. They were allowed to shop from our class stores after the main store time was over.

The last part of the Producer Sheet: (This went so smoothly thanks to all the wonderful parents that were here!!!)

1. Count up the tally marks and times them by the price for a total (patience waiting for help)
2. Add up the totals for each thing offered for a grand total (math and profit)
3. Answer the questions at the bottom of their Producer Sheet (reflection)

Students must put leftover inventory, signs, and any items bought into their backpack after store.

After P.E., the bank was open for the following items:

1. Paying rent, or buying desk, and bills (understanding our economy)
2. Deciding if money should be put into savings (delayed gratification)
3. Exchanging money for different denominations (counting by 1's, 5's, 10's, 20's, 50's)
4. Sorting money into denominations and placing back in wallet

Then we had centers and handed back Spelling Tests.  Writing Center - if students draw an illustration, write a proper paragraph and sign their name, they earn a PRIDE ticket.  If students get 15/15 on their Spelling Test, they earn a PRIDE ticket.

We ended the day by cleaning our desks.

Whew, long email...  I'm going home.  Have a wonderful weekend with your little entrepreneurs and thank you again for all of your help!!!

Sincerely,

Mrs. Janicek

Oh Snap!

This story happened outside of the classroom today.

Being a teacher in a small(er) town, I am very conscious of going into the market to purchase any kind of alcohol.  The only time of year I go into the local liquor store is at Christmas to pick up whatever my dessert recipes call for.  And don't you know it, I ALWAYS see a parent from school!

So today I picked up a bottle of wine at Winco.  I literally have my baseball cap on and sunglasses!  As I am checking out and putting it into a brown paper bag, I dropped it.  SMASH.... oh snap, that bottle of wine went everywhere!  A very nice Winco employee came right over with a huge cart to clean it up.  I thought things couldn't get worse..... but they did!  The checker announced over the loud speaker, "Register 3 needs a new bottle of New Age wine to replace the one that broke."  Second announcement over the loud speaker, "The clear one."  THIRD announcement over the loud speaker....."It's wine."

I seriously wanted to crawl under a rock!  And of course, the person straight across from me, at the bagging station, was a parent from school!

Lockdown

Every year we practice a lock down drill at school with the Ada County Sheriff's Department.  This always makes me sick to my stomach and the whole day is a mess.

This year, the Sheriff's Department told us to have our kids stand in a designated area instead of hiding in their cubbies.

While we are practicing the new procedures, I shut my curtains, made sure my door was locked, closed the blinds to the outside window and grabbed my district issued T Ball Bat.

While the kids and I were standing in a corner of the room, one little girl started laughing and asked, "Mrs. Kwid, what do you think you are going to do with that T Ball Bat?  I, too, started laughing after looking at all five feet and a little over 100 pounds of their teacher!  Then we were all laughing at this ridiculous scene!

The laughter really did take the edge off of an ugly drill.

I do know that if a real danger was to occur, I would do anything to protect my kiddos.  I may be small, but this girl is strong!

SeeSaw

My classroom is blessed with several pieces of technology.  In addition to an Interactive Whiteboard, Lego Bricks, Bee Bot Robots, and a document camera, we have 6 i pads, 6 laptops and two desk top computers.  One app we use on the i pads and laptops is called See Saw.  This app allows parents to register their phone or i pad and their child can take pictures and videos of projects and different activities during the day and send them to their parents.  I find this to be a great way for students to communicate with their parents what we do in the classroom during the day!

I recently introduced the See Saw app to my students.  I partnered up my students and asked each child to make a short video for their parents and post it to their account.

While walking around the classroom and monitoring my students, I saw one student watching his video he was about to send to his parents.  He looked at his partner and told him, "I really need to brush my teeth!"

Who knew the See Saw app would promote good dental health!