Report Cards

 Today we did not have school because it was our grading day. We are allowed to sign out and access our report cards online from home, but I opted to go into school since all of my assessments and materials are there. I got to sleep in a little bit, which was really nice, and I got a lot done while I was at school. Today was one of the rare times that I wished I only had one class instead of two. I love all of my students and I would never be able to choose one class over the other, but 42 report cards is a lot. I particularly have a hard time with the subjective behavior parts because I want to be realistic so parents are well informed about what their children are doing at school, yet I always tend to give kids the benefit of the doubt and I have a hard time deciding whether to be tough on them or go a little bit easy on them...they are only five, yet at the same time, it doesn't benefit me to indicate that their behavior is better than it truly is.

I spent probably about 4 hours doing reports and then I organized and cleaned my classroom. I rearranged table groups and reassigned table spots. I know the kiddos will be excited when they get to school on Monday and see the froggy name tags that mark their new spots. I like to move groups around about every 6-8 weeks and a term quarter seemed like the perfect time. The groups they were in were not that great and I had a few really really chatty groups in each class. I tried to separate kids the best I could so that the talkative kids are spread out, the kids that don't focus are spread out, the kids that distract each other are spread out, the kids who go to ELD are spread out, the kids who don't get along are spread out, and the kids who get along too well are spread out, but that is really tough. We'll see how the new groups work out on Monday. It's funny how sometimes a group will seem okay on paper and then when the kids are actually together it becomes glaringly apparent that they do not mix well.

It felt so good to have an entire day in the classroom without kids just to get organized and get things accomplished. It would be awesome to have a day like that once a month, but that's not likely, so I will just enjoy the fact that I had the opportunity today. I didn't think that I would stay all day, but I ended up doing one thing after another and before I knew it, it was 4:00. I met up with some friends for dinner and then came home to begin my long to do list of homework. I already got a lot of reading done, so I am congratulating myself with a little bit of Catching Fire before I go to bed. Since I am reading it for book club, it's actually officially on the to do list, which means I am being productive by getting it done and I will have one more thing to cross off.

Oh, how I love the feeling of sliding my black Sharpie over something on the list.

Feels.Good.

Tomorrow Jilly and I are going to see Legally Blonde on stage and I am excited! I am trying to do one fun thing each weekend in addition to running and then focusing the rest of my time on getting work done. I need to do an hour long interview this weekend, record it, then transcribe it, which is pretty time consuming according to my classmates who already got it done. I consider myself an overachiever, so it's definitely crazy that people in class are ahead of me on assignments. At least the crisis of thinking I lost my calendars where I mapped out all of my big assignments in order to know what my time lines are is over because I found them and avoided the heart attack that would go along with actually losing said calendars. I have so many things to keep track of that I would have been a very unhappy camper to have to re-create them.

Happy Friday (almost Saturday at this point!)