Teaching is Hazardous

Now follow me here. It's the second day of school. I've had a child screaming her head off all morning. She manages to get out of the PE building onto the playground with her brother and is fine. Mean teacher (me) comes to get her and makes her go inside with our class. Up the steep staircase. She's going along complacently, still screaming, but moving. Her brother calls her name from the playground. Midway up the stairs she turns and starts moving back down. I take a step backwards to block her. Backwards--on a steep stair case. My foot hits air. I quickly shift my weight forward to the other foot. Another child is standing still on the stairs in front of me. I shift sideways and back to aviod stepping on him. Again, my foot meets air. There is no saving me now. I'm going down. Sideways and down. I see the railing below me and have time to think, "Well, that was stupid! Oh this is going to really hurt!"

I was right. I have badly bruised ribs, my left arm has deep bruises from underarm to elbow and I have some torn cartilage in my chest. But nothing's broken.

So I returned to school the next day and have gritted my teeth and am making it through most of my normal activites.

The bright side...

The little girl hasn't tried to run away from me since then.

My classroom

My daughter was with me at Meet the Teacher and took a couple of shots of part of my classroom. As you can see, even with all the storage, my big stuff has to stack on top of the lockers. Here's the magnets that I made with my Cricut as well. I cut the butterflies from DCWV Nana's Kids pack papers and then added the info on each, laminated them and stuck a magnet on the back. Then the parents could take them and put them on their fridges at home. Most parents seemed to love the idea.

Back to school

I've spent the last week with my daughter (and occasionally my son and husband) fixing up my room for the coming school year. Friday was our first "offical" day back as teachers. We had a "welcome back" meeting in the morning and then in the afternoon we worked in our rooms. My teaching partner and I mapped out our first three weeks of lessons and set our schedule for the year.

My room is nearly finished. I have a couple of little things to finish and I'll be ready for Meet the Teacher Night next Friday.

I do need to get out my Cricut and cut some shapes for magnets. My teaching partner had the best idea. Make magnets to match your room theme and put your name, school phone, e-mail address and conference times on it for parents to keep handy all year long. I have "Goin' Buggy" theme this year, so I need to look for something in my Cricut carts to go with that. Butterflies, maybe?

I'll take pics and post them of the finished room soon.

Altered tins

These are three tins I whipped together. The round one is an old Altoid's tin. It will hold my DH's headphones to keep them from getting tangled up in the computer carry case. The other two are alterable tins from Oriental Trading Scrapbook. The one in the middle uses rub-ons and the other one is stamped and hand colored with watercolor markers.

Board Book Cover and all over view

The front of the book has two tags with the kids intials hanging from the ribbon. I added the year '09 on the binding and a quote from Billy Graham on the front. Dad was pleased with the whole thing.

Board Book

Each year I try to make my dad something that has the kids' pictures from the previous year on it. This year I made him a board book. Each set of pics has a quote that fits the pictures since he loves it when I do that.

The paper I used is from My Mind's Eye. I added ink and stickers along with some chipboard (basic grey and something else from my stash) and some rub-ons.

Altered items Clipboards

These are two altered clipboards I made last week. The first is a schedule board that I plan to use to keep track of who has to be where when this year. The second is a Farkle rules board for my sister. It lists all of the ways to score points in Farkle. They are both made with scrap papers, Making Memories glazes and dye inks. I used rub-ons on the schedule and thin chipboard pieces on the Farkle board.