16 Cups = 1 Gallon?

I promise I have a life outside of work... it's just not that interesting.

I don't know if you all learned this little memorization picture in elementary school. (I sure didn't!) I actually was taught it in a teacher training a few years back. My students never will forget how many cups there are in a gallon. ...and now you won't either!



The other way I teach customary capacities is this guy...

Meet Gallon Man (or Woman depending on who you talk to...)

Gallon Man w/ Bad Hair Day

Gallon Frog?


Gallon Cat?

Wall Outside Classroom

Cookies in Class!

We made cookies in class today as part of our unit on customary measurement. It was lots of fun and we got cookies afterwards. My photographer was a fourth grader so we got like 2 good pictures out of 50. They're all blurry which is admittedly disappointing, but here are some of the pictures so you can see all of the fun we had!

Add 2 cups of butter crisco!

Don't forget the sugar!

Watching the cookies mix!

Add the eggs.

Put them on the cookie sheets!

For those of you that would like to try this recipe, it is AMAZING! They are the same ones my mom used to make, if you grew up with me.

Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe:

Ingredients:
- 2 c Butter Shortening
- 1 ½ c White Sugar
- 1 ½ c Brown Sugar
- 4 Eggs
- 2 tsp Vanilla Extract
- 5 c White Flour
- 2 tsp Baking Soda
- 2 tsp Salt
- 1 bag Chocolate Chips

Procedure:
1. Open the two packages of shortening and dump into mixer
2. Put in white sugar and brown sugar
3. Crème together
4. Beat in the eggs and vanilla extract
5. Blend in the salt and baking soda
6. Add flour slowly one cup at a time until the dough is thick
7. Open the bag of chocolate chips and dump in
8. Mix all together
9. Place the cookie dough in small balls on cookie sheets
10. Bake at 375° for 10-12 min

I'm Still Alive...

I know I haven't posted in a while. Life is busy, blah blah blah...

First off, Doug is enjoying his new job and I am enjoying his newfound satifaction with work. The commute isn't too bad. Traffic is nonexistant and the speed limit is actually higher so it doesn't take too much longer, timewise, than his previous commute. The major negative aspect is the sheer length that he needs to drive. It may last about the same time but he is going much much further, so it's more gasoline and such. It frustrates him sometimes.

My work, well... I continue to love teaching. The other stuff is pretty yuck. I'm coming up on my yearly evaluation with the principal, so hopefully that goes well. I feel like I'm doing everything I should be so I shouldn't have anything to worry about, right?

I am asking if it would be possible next year to NOT be an inclusion teacher. The last two years I have been an inclusion teacher have been full of DRAMA and there's really nothing that I hate more. Inclusion is a classroom where some students that recieve special education services are included with regular education students. I don't mind the students with IEP's at all, it's the extra stuff. Like the fact that people are constantly in your classroom while you're teaching and scheduling is a nightmare. Also, there are all kind of legal accommodations in IEP's (Individualized Education Plans) and you can get in serious trouble for not following them. Anyways, I won't bore you with more teacher talk...

Spring break is coming up! I'm getting in the doctor's appointment I need, meeting with drywall people to fix nail pops, and finally painting some of the white walls in my house. I'm having a rather difficult time picking colors because I'm artistically challenged and well Doug is colorblind with an opinion. (The opinion being the problematic part!) I found out that the art teacher in my school just built a house right down the street. I'm hoping to enlist her expertise, but I haven't told her that yet. I might post some pictures of rooms sometime if I get the chance because I seriously need help and I don't want it to be ugly.

Clap On! Clap Off! Part Deuce

Darwin was out of commission for quite some time after his surgery so I had given up on having him turn off the lights since he couldn't really jump. He's all healed up now, so I had started dangling the string and training him again. The other night Doug and I were playing with the lazer pointer toy with him before bed when I got a BRILLIANT idea... use the lazer pointer on the light switch!

Here are the results:


It was funny because I had been training Darwin all of this time and Lucky was the one that actually turned off the lights in the movie. It's nice because now we don't have to train anymore, and even better I don't need to get out of bed to turn off the light.

MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!

Crouton Fish

I found this neat little movie on my digital camera and I thought I would share it. Its not very good quality and its a bit fuzzy, but you can see the neat fish.

Doug started the hobby of keeping salt water aquariums a while back. We were at a fish store several months ago when we saw these guys. They call them "Croutons" when they are little babies. They look like bright yellow cubes! When they get older, they get to be like a foot long and are really poisonous, so they weren't an option for our 75 gallon tank.

Much Better!

Sorry for the rant yesterday... I really had lost it. I don't usually cry at all and that little thing for some reason totally pushed me off the edge. Today fourth grade had their planning day (we get one a year). The principal hired subs for all of 4th grade's classroom and gave us the conference room to review benchmark scores, plan new assessments, choose skills to highlight as a team, and do some planning as well.

I was really nervous about having a sub in my room, especially with today being my new student's first day. If any of you all remember school, you know that "sub days" are when kids goof off. I wanted to have a good example for my new student to be able to set the expectations at day 1. Well, I got an EXCELLENT sub who kept my room under control, completed all of my plans, and even made sure the room was nice and neat when I came back. I only spent 5 minutes cleaning! :)

The principal came down to my room at the end of the day to chat with me and see how my new student was doing. I casually joked that the only "issue" that I had with having the new student was having a desk that didn't match all of my other ones. She went and immediately got the custodian to find me a desk. He first time brought down another one that didn't match again. (I felt so bad!) I think they finally yanked one out of another classroom because they came in and tore a name tag off of a desk and gave it to me. I didn't even push it or say anything to her about how it had upset me so much.

All is right with the world, once again!

I'm not sure what I did to get in such good graces with my principal, but I'll take it. It actually really made my day to know that she cared that much. I keep on thinking that the walls of the conference room where we met today might be a little thinner than I anticipated. Her office is next door and I only told my team about my crying over the "desk incident."

Update on our little buggy situation... As soon as I got home from work on Monday, I was ready to have Doug vacuum the box elder bugs off the house. I went outside to check on the situtation to see if it had worsened and I only found like 10 bugs left on the house. There were some pretty strong wind gusts on Monday that might've done most of the job for us. That is very good because I don't think I have it in me to vacuum up more bugs.

WANTED: A freak'n break!

For any of you that have a teacher friend, you may know that getting a new student is a stressful thing. You need to relabel everything in the classroom, quickly level the student in all of the subject areas, catch them up to where you are in the curriculum, help them make new friends, and make sure they learn all of the stuff that you taught the previous 5 months so they are ready for the end of the year tests. OH, and if they fail, it's YOUR fault. It's another paper to grade, another kid to make them feel special, another parent to please, etc... I could go on and on.

I'm not sure what's been happening lately in my community, but the fourth grade has gotten 4 new students in the last month. We got like 4 TOTAL last year. Earlier this week, I heard that fourth grade was getting ANOTHER student this week. I figured, "Oh, it won't be me, I just got a new student the week before last... and there are 5 teachers on our team."

WELL... I'm sitting in the "Teacher's Lounge" (which is really only dividers in the middle of a hallway) today during lunch and the PE teacher comes over to my table and exclaims, "I just met YOUR new student and BOY is he INTERESTING!"

Umm, MY new student???

So I'm up to number 26... in a special education classroom... where several of my 4th graders are reading on a 1st/2nd grade level...

OKAY, I won't freak out. Adding my last student wasn't too bad, although the thought of doing it all over again just a week later made me sick to my stomach. We had a specialty class at the end of the day, so I busily walked around the room relabeling everything. I picked up new textbooks, claimed the LAST desk from the hallway, and was feeling pretty good about myself.

One thing that you need to know about me if you don't already know about me is that I seriously have OCD issues. I can't leave my classroom at the end of the day until the room is immaculate. I'm usually here cleaning for the first 15-20 minutes after the last bell rings. My classroom is the ONLY one in the fourth grade (probably in the whole school) where all of the desks are at the same height and are matching. I just can't handle it if they aren't. I really can't.

No worries though, the desk in the hallway (that matches) was just a little too short.. the custodian can make it taller, right? I try to explain to the custodian, who unfortunately is still learning English, my situation. He tries to heighten the desk. It is BROKEN. He canNOT make it taller. He goes to the other end of the school to get another desk. He says to me, "ALL is left. No more."

It doesn't match.

I broke into tears right there.

I can't handle this right now.

...the cause of my anguish

EWW!

In the fall before winter hit, I saw one of these little bugs outside my house. It seemed harmless enough, so I let it be.


Fast forward to this Sunday… It is a beautiful spring-like day, so I decide to go out and walk around the neighborhood. In our house, we very rarely go out the front door because the garage is on the back of our house and we usually leave that way. I decided to leave the house through the front door for a change. As soon as I opened it a few of these little bugs started crawling into the house. I shut the door quickly and tried to figure out a way to get rid of these terrible little bugs crawling around on my floor. I was going to get a dust pan, but then I had a great idea and ran to get my trusty Black & Decker hand vac that Doug got me for Christmas. I sucked up the few unlucky critters that had wandered into my house.

I then got a little zealous and decided that since it worked so well I would go for the rest that were on my front door. I quickly jumped outside and shut the door behind me with vacuum in hand. Focusing on the little section of my door, I unmercifully went to work sucking up about 15-20 of the little bugs. The noise of the vacuum cleaner had startled many of them and they started flying away. I was being swarmed by these bugs so I jumped back off the stoop and stared in horror at my home. There were hundreds, THOUSANDS of these little bugs stuck to the front of the house. I gave up on my little endeavor to exterminate them because I was so overwhelmed.

I called Doug up right away and he told me to (1) CALM DOWN (2) Exterminators are really expensive and we should try to do something ourselves before resorting to that. (I’ll let him use my hand vac.) And (3) Do the neighbors have them on their houses?

I walked down the sidewalk and the next four newly built houses on the block have the same issue that our house does. Our neighbors on the other side that have been there for almost 2 years now and they didn’t have any bugs on their house. I’m going to ask them if they had similar issues and what they did about them.

I had to empty out the vacuum cleaner in the front yard because many of them had survived the initial suck. Once again, EWWW! I usually don’t get all freaked out with bugs, but the sheer amount of them and the fact that they were on my house was the thing that freaked me out.

Starting far away from the house and zooming in...

Notice the 2 bushes on the right that they've taken out!

They're everywhere!

Eww!

Trying to look at the positive side... Um, at least they’re not on the inside.

My visiting teaching companion lives on the other side of our neighborhood and she hired an exterminator for something else a while back. They required her to get a year long contract. She told me they barely did anything and getting rid of the services is as bad as trying to get rid of a cell phone plan.

If anyone knows what these beetle-like creatures are and how to eradicate them from my home, PLEASE let me know.

Divert Your Eyes!

I've been babysitting Doug's tank while he's been out of town with his dad. I normally don't go into the basement because it's not finished, but I've needed to get water for Doug's tank. (His special water making station is down there.)

Everything above the basement is basically my territory (besides Doug's Office) for organizing. We always joke about when I clean/organize stuff I hide it on purpose to further Doug's dependence on me for finding things. (Totally not true, but not a bad idea either.) We have unofficially divided the basement into 2 halves... HIS half and MY half. I normally don't go down to the basement, but when I do, I do my best to divert my eyes from Doug's side. What you are about to see is pretty terrifying! (for me at least)

DIVERT YOUR EYES!

GASP!

Doug's Idea of Organization

My Idea of Organization

Now you're probably wondering how two people have this much stuff...

Well, over 70% of the rubbermaid containers on my side are filled up with girl baby stuff from my oldest sister who can't wait for me to have kids. The other ones are holiday decorations. We like to be festive and also like to catch things when they are 75% off after holidays. All of the boxes on the side are from appliances and such that we have purchased over the years and not gotten rid of the boxes because we've moved so much.

Doug's side is mostly computer stuff/electronic gizmos that he has collected over the years. At one point in time when we were living in Provo, I found over 11 computers hidden in our TINY apartment. Only 3 were in use at the time! Even if something is not running, he likes to take it apart and see what he can use or learn from it. He needs a special room with a lock and no windows to do this in. Something detached from the house would be preferable.

I'm not saying that Doug is a total slob because he's not. He just likes to have things readily available to him. His office is better and will be a lot better once he finds the time to put in the build in bookshelf/cabinets in the room.

Do you think Doug will notice if this pile is mysteriously missing when he returns?

Darwin Recovery

Darwin has almost recovered fully from his operation and is jumping into laundry baskets again. Here are some attempt to photograph the kitten that NEVER stops moving!

Empty House = Loneliness

So Doug and his dad are gone this weekend spending time at grandma's house while his dad is in town. I'm sad I can't be there and I'm even sadder that I'm stuck home alone. Well, actually I haven't really gone home much. I worked until late last night and came right home to go to bed.

Doug will be moving into his place in Annapolis starting the weekend of March 14th. I will miss him terribly, but at least I will see him on the weekends and we can talk on the phone every night. A luxury my navy wife sister was not allowed while her husband was out to sea and she was at home pregnant.

With Doug gone, it will be different at home. Coming from such a large family, I'm uncomfortable with silence. Maybe I'll have time to try to do that list of things that I have always said I would do. On that list is sewing, cooking extravagant meals, digital scrapbooking, taking beautiful pictures, and decorating the bare white walls of my house. I have quite a few roadblocks before I actually can start doing these things. I don't have a sewing machine yet because I'm not ready to make an investment on something that I don't actually do yet. I like to cook, but I have no one to cook for. I need a better computer to do my scrapbooking and actual scrapbooking doesn't have a Ctrl Z(undo). I'm working on the taking pictures thing, but it's a little frustrating right now because I don't have anyone to photograph. I'm not sure if I should decorate my house right now if we are potentially moving. It's just extra stuff to pack up and nail holes to fill in when we leave. All excuses, I know! Maybe I should just make my goal to ramble on my blog. I'm good at that!

I keep on thinking that I need to make some more friends. All of the women at church close to my age have kids and I don't fit into that group right now. My visiting teaching companion is great, but once again I think we are at different stages in our lives. I am friends with the teachers at school, but it's kind of awkward going to hang out with them at bars when I don't actually drink. Doug is my best friend and I love hanging out with my family, but I'd still like to branch out some. I worry some days that I have forgotten how to make lasting friendships with how often I have moved lately.

Blogging makes me feel connected to people even though in reality I'm not sure if that's really accurate. (One reason being that only like 3 people read my blog!) Hopefully this will keep me from burning out while I work like a crazy woman for the next 5 months to fill the void.

I'll stop complaining now and get to work! :)

Future Writer?

I assign my students topics to write about on a weekly basis in their journals. Usually one day of the week, I give them a "Free Choice." I really do HATE grading journals with a passion, but I have one student that I can't wait to read their journal. He definitely could have a future in writing... if only I could get him to capitalize his I's on a regular basis.

Here are two of my favorite entries. The first is a free choice written earlier in the year. In the second one he was supposed to write about what he thought it would be like to be one of the original Jamestown settlers.





Can you see some improvement in his writing?

Possible Natural Aversion to Taxes?

Before I taught the Constitutional Convention in class, we were studying reasons for colonies wanting independence from the British. We read in the Social Studies textbook about taxation issues and then I invited the students to write or draw what taxation without representation means to them.

Here are some of my results:




I think today's children might possibly have a natural aversion to taxes. I'm not sure if they'll want to pay for this spendulus bill. Maybe their children's children will like taxes more...

Nail Pops and Blue Tape

It has officially been a year since we closed on our home. We went to settlement on February 29th last year. (Leap Year) Part of the home warranty is a dry wall inspection where they come and fix all of your nail pops. Nail pops are inevitable with any new construction, so its nice that they come and fix it for you. Doug picked up some blue tape and we went around the house marking little spots the other day. I tend be a little OCD, so this was quite the adventure for me.

I took a picture of the worst section in the stairwell next to the big window. The rest of the house doesn't have this much tape. I thought I might be going a little overboard, so I joked with Doug that we should put tons of little pieces of tape in the front room to freak them out when they come in so they won't think the rest of the house is that bad.

We will be paying on this house till we're in our 50's. I'm just getting my money's worth... right?

Close up of a GENUINE nail pop!

Darwin making sure the tape doesn't go anywhere.

More nail pops!

Apartment Hunting

This weekend, Doug and I went to go check out a prospective apartment for him to stay at during his training. He had posted a want ad on craigslist saying that he was looking for temporary housing for the next 5 months. Over 100 people responded offering places in the area. (One of which was from a Dawn. When he responded to her, he accidentally typed her name as Damn. OOPS! He didn't get that apartment...)

We picked the one that looked the nicest and visited it first. The lady renting the apartment wanted to meet both Doug and I. She actually didn't post the apartment, she was just looking for people that she might want to have stay there. She asked for a picture, so Doug sent her one of our wedding photos.

It's a 2 bedroom 1 bath furnished apartment that he would have completely to himself above a detached garage for $500 a month. We've never paid less than $800 for 1 bedroom apartments in the area, so this is a SUPER deal. So, being in Annapolis, we were a little worried about the neighborhood that he would be living in. Well, this apartment is actually detached from a 1.9 million dollar home! They already have 2 garages on the other side of the house, so they barely even use the one he'll be staying above. Just about everyone in the neighborhood owns a boat and has private docks. It's less than a mile away from private beaches that he will have access to all summer.

When we arrived at the house, we hadn't even had the chance to get out of the car when she was on the front porch excitedly greeting us in an apron with a White House Seal. She is super nice and animated. She chatted with is for a little while and introduced us to her husband. Her husband has worked with the last 3 Republican presidents in the White House (explains the apron). She took us on a tour of the apartment that Doug will be staying in and even invited us to go boating with them this summer. The apartment is not incredibly fancy like the house, but for $500 it is excellent. It also just so happens that her next door neighbors are high up in the company where Doug just got his new job. She told us that she's SO excited to introduce us to them.

This place is kind of unbelievably good for the price so I'm actually a little hesitant. The whole time we were there, I was looking around trying to figure out if these people were some kind of ax murderers luring us into a trap, but I found no reason to actually be suspicious. We haven't figured out any reason that he shouldn't stay there. It's super close to where he'll be getting trained and she isn't even requiring a deposit.

So I guess it's meant to be?

History Alive!

I try not to bore everyone with the stuff from my classroom, but we just did this really fun re-enactment of the Constitutional Convention. This is not an original idea of mine, a teacher a few years back at my school started it and we've done it ever since.

We make custom fitted wigs for students to wear to their convention. We assign the students different roles of historical figures that were at the Constitutional Convention, they do some research on their person's views, and then we give them some topics to discuss/debate. It turned out to be a lot of fun! Here are some pictures from the craziness!

Students giving their speeches during the Convention.

Listening to speeches.

Benjamin Franklin sleeping during the Convention.

Signing the Constitution, quills and all!

My favorite... notice the pink and green nails in the background signing the Constitution!

Group Picture

The ALWAYS requested "silly picture!"