Getting Ready for School!

I will start off by saying that I have been having an enjoyable summer. Even after spraining both my ankles and being laid out (sprained one and healed it enough to go to the WA state Zombie Run where I sprained the other one on a night run – at least I made it through the day run!), I’ve had a nice summer with my family.

I started off with that because I feel like I’ve been preparing for the start of the new year quite a lot so far and I’ve barely scratched the surface!

I started by reading a Star Trek novel and a graphic novel series to get ideas to add a story-line to my gamified Science course. I was not willing to undertake writing my own story but taking an already made story was doable! I’ve made it so that students will get parts of the story whenever they see new QR codes suddenly appear around the classroom. Some of them will be a choose your adventure type while others will be continuation story line. I worked on that for quite some time after reading the books.
Then I had to complete two grant reports for the two grants I got last year.
July 14 – 17 I attended an awesome BER conference on a Train the Trainer Differentiation to Meet the Common Core. Now the teacher I went with and I will be training the rest of our staff on what we learned during that conference. We are starting with a 3-hr session on Wednesday, August 26!
After that I took and completed an online course on Standards-Based Grading and Formative Assessment from Marzano Labs.
July 30 and 31 I participated in a bunch of awesome Gamification webinars! Good stuff.
Then I worked on making sure the WoWinSchool curriculum was ready and that I could follow along for the 6th grade exploratory class I’ll be teaching 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarter. I got the course on 3D GameLab from Lucas Gillespie and Peggy Sheehy, legends in the WoW and Minecraft in schools arena, and I just can’t wait until 2nd quarter to start working on it! 🙂
I put together a presentation yesterday for our August 14 tech planning session. Our district tech committee is putting together an all district staff tech training for the last week of August to start off the new year and kick off our new three year Tech Plan.
Today I just finished putting together a Cispus slideshow for our Cispus Orientation sessions when parents come to register their kids on Thursday, August 28.

The above tasks seem to consume quite a bit of my time and attention. Thanks goodness I had fun working on all of the above! I usually do a lot of prep over summer and catching up on reading but this summer I feel like I’ve done more than usual. And I still the following left to do:

Have to make the Camp Cispus schedule and make sure the roads to Mt Saint Helens will be open when we’re there.
Attend a Peace4Kids training on Monday, August 18, because I’ll be teaching that to 6th graders for the 1st quarter of the year for the first time ever. We’ll also be using theÂ Peace4Kids curriculum with our advisory classes.
Attend a summer institute for some awesome classes on Tuesday and Wednesday, August 19 and 20.
We will have our building and district staff days on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, August 25 – 27 (where I’ll be co-leading the district tech training and our building differentiation training).
Attend a Standards-Based Grading (SBG) meeting to prepare for our SBG pilot (I’m one of the four teachers this who will be piloting SBG for our building).
Prepare our professional development plan and begin training our staff for our new PD model this this year (soon I’ll be able to write about the grant we got to do that).
Find time to read The Restorative Practices Handbook and Restorative Circles in School in preparation for our PBIS initiative.
And I still have to start preparing for my classes and reorganizing some of theÂ 3D GameLab quests that didn’t quite work out last year! That in itself will take some time.
The prep for the start of school, Sept 2, includes prepping the new Peace4Kids course. I would like to either use 3D GameLab or try out ClassCraft and see how that one works.

Yeah, I think I’ve bitten off way more than I can chew. I’ll just do what I can and try not to stress. At least with two sprained ankles I can’t go off running so I can sit and get some of the above work done. But then again, I can’t go running and release the stress!