Time to go back to work......

Well, it's been a nice two week break from work but tomorrow it's time to go back to work. The kids don't come back until Tuesday but tomorrow we have a "workday" that consists of a three hour training, ugh. On the bright side(positive attitude at work here) we leave for Washington on Thursday morning.

Between preparing the kids for FCAT in March and 5th grade Exhibition, the next two months are going to be brutal! Each fifth grade class in my school participates in Exhibition projects. The Exhibition projects consists of groups of students that are studying a global issue in depth. Each group had to come up with 8 key questions about their topic. The questions serve the purpose of driving their inquiry. Each student is responsible for researching the answer to 2 of the key questions. Their answers are about 1 page typed (double spaced). They were due before the break but some kids needed some more time so I changed the due date to the 10th. What I'm getting at is that I have 50 pages of reading/editing ahead of me and two weeks to get it back to the kids so they can type their final copy.

Then there's FCAT related stuff like test prep, assessments and achievement meetings. We're going to attempt covering the entire Science textbook in 2 months. My kids and I are in for an intense couple of months. Lucky for me(positive attitude) I have a great class of well behaved and motivated students, my challenge will be to keep them from freaking out and cracking under the pressure. From my point of view whatever will be, will be. That doesn't mean I'm not putting any extra effort into my teaching, but I'm not going to completely stress myself out either.

Being back at school also means family life will be kicked into high gear. My daughter is on her high school softball team so that means practices and games 5 days a week. My son is in the Boy Scouts and they're in the middle of their biggest fundraiser-the Spaghetti Dinner. That involves meetings, ticket sales and a lot of prep work. I have a feeling I'm going to blink it it will be the end of February!

Well, it's getting late and I still have a set of papers to grade. I got a lot of that done over the break but there are still some piles lingering here and there. If I want to get to bed at a decent hour I'd better wrap things up.