I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone I've had the pleasure of working with this semester. It has been very rewarding to get to know you better, and I am excited to continue this journey together. If I haven't had the opportunity to work with you yet, I hope we can soon. For my building staff, I am available on our workday if you would like to collaborate! Just shoot me an email and we can schedule a time. I hope that everyone has a relaxing and restorative break. Make sure you step away from anything you classify as "work" and take time to enjoy the moment. I am hoping to do the same. Having two small children, navigating a new job, and finishing up grad school (almost there!) has not exactly left me feeling relaxed and in the moment, and so I am going to take advantage of this time off to unplug. That being said, I wouldn't change anything about the last four months. I am wholeheartedly in love with this job and I wouldn't change it for anything. I feel like this is what I was meant to do - serve you, my teachers.
Thank you for your patience as I continue to learn my role and try new things. You are all truly inspiring and I learn so much from all of you every day. I know teaching can feel like a thankless profession, but know that I see you. I see you staying at school until 8:30pm. I see you bending over backwards to help your students. I see the blood, sweat, and tears you put into this vocation. I see the superhero you are. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, Christin
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We all know downtime with students right before break can be chaos. A teacher I used to work with always said, "Busy hands are happy hands." This is especially true when students are itching to be on break. Below are some holiday activities that you can implement quickly and easily with students. Share the individual links with them, or direct them here to this site! 1. Winter Magnetic Poetry 2. Code a Snowflake 3. Code Lab 4. Code Boogie the Elf 5. Holiday Hyperdoc 6. Build a Snowman in Google Slides A huge thank you to Chelsea Artzer, Farley Elementary Instructional Facilitator, for sharing these with me!
*Note to my WRMS staff, I subscribed you guys already, so you don't need to put in your email.
Either way, figuring this out really pushed my limits as a techie. I am more of an educational techie, and figuring this out made me enter the realm of website development techie, something I know very little about {I used MailChimp, BTW, to make the subscription happen}. However, I was bound and determined to make it work because I was driven and passionate about finding a solution. There was a sense of urgency behind it {*cough*...maybe a little bit of obsessing...*cough*} and I was SO EXCITED when I figured it out. Think of a time when you felt this way about learning. Now think of a time when your students felt this way. As educators, seeing students excited about learning and reaching goals is one of the most rewarding things we can experience. Sometimes, though, we get so lost in the day to day grind that it is easy to either ignore the excitement of learning or to even unintentionally squash it. Matt Miller over at Ditch that Textbook wrote this great post on thriving at the end of the semester. Miller talks about objectives, feedback, and effort {hello again, Classroom Instruction that Works}, like having students reflect and see how far they've come. He also talks about breathing new life into your activities. Bored with your end of unit plan? Find ways to spice it up! This time of year, it's easy to keep saying "only two more weeks...only two more weeks...only two more weeks." But I encourage you to light a spark in yourself and your students these last couple of weeks and try to end on a high note. It would make your break that much better!! |
AuthorChristin Barkemeyer Archives
April 2020
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