Crazy Week and a Resolution Accomplished!

*Phew* What a week I just had. The first full week back at school after Christmas break was sooo long. Thank the Lord for a 3 day weekend to follow it!

On top of teaching we had Appreciation Dinners for the parents of our school (K-12th). What a marvelous idea to show the parents how we are thankful for them and to also get them to re-enroll early (there were computers set up at the even to re-enroll on and many did!). The hard part was that the teachers were the servers for the evening. This was pleasant and I enjoyed serving food but boy was it exhausting. The dinners were on Thursday night and Friday night. So I got to school at 7:15am both mornings and didn't get home until 9:15pm. Long days of teaching and long nights of standing, serving, and take down/set up. But it was fun to see all my parents and get to know some of the other teachers better through standing at a table all night serving food with them. :-)

Needless to say I have slept in late every day this weekend....

But in other exciting news....I accomplished one of my goals for this year! I posted at the beginning of 2012 a little list of "things I hope to do" and I did one of them this week. We started centers in my class! My students had never even heard of a center before but they picked up on it right away and many said, "This is fun!" We had centers on Tuesday and Thursday for 30 minutes with 5 stations to rotate through. Tuesday I had 10 min. of explanation, and two 10 minute rotations. On Thursday we finished out the last 3 center stations through 10 minute time periods.

I had a Reading Center with me, a Multiplication Fact Center, a Spelling Word center, a Martin Luther King Jr. Center, and a Map Skills Center. I plan on keeping these up every Tuesday and Thursday. Yes, it does take a lot of time right now as I am setting it all up, but it was definitely worth it.

Here is a picture of what our board looked like the first day. It looks a little complex, but I wanted to lay it all out for my students so they could see the big picture which helps them I believe. Each piece of paper is on a magnet so I can easily take off, put on, and re-arrange as needed.