Bloggy Award!

Thanks so much to Jen from Following the Footsteps for giving me the "Over the Top" blog award! I have never met Jen, but I feel like we're friends because of blogging and that is so cool! The rules for accepting this award are to copy and change the answers to suit you and pass it on. Answers can only be one word! Pass the award to 6 of your favorite bloggers and alert them they have been awarded.

1. Where is your cell phone? hotel

2.Your hair? lame

3. Your mother? awesome

4. Your father? handy

5. Your favorite food? peanutbutter

6. Your dream last night? weird

7. Your favorite drink? Diet-Coke

8. Your dream/goal? doctorate

9. What room are you in? office

10. Your hobby? blogging

11. Your fear? frogs

12. Where do you want to be in 6 years? U.S.

13. Where were you last night? hotel

14. Something you aren't? outgoing

15. Muffins? banana

16. Wish list item? clothes

17. Where did you grow up? Connecticut

18. Last thing you did? read

19. What are you wearing? red

20. Your TV? laptop

21. Your pets? none

22. Your friends? far

23. Your life? rockin'

24. Your mood? hungry

25. Missing someone? many

26. Vehicle? traveling

27. Something you're not wearing? earrings

28. Your favorite store? grocery!

29. Your favorite color? green

30. When was the last time you laughed? earlier

31. Last time you cried? Saturday

32. Your best friend? tough

33. One place that I go over and over? gym

34. One person who emails me regularly? mommy

35. Favorite place to eat? LaBarca

I am passing this award to:

Kelly @ She Wears a Red Sox Cap

Mrs. Lipstick @ Organized Chaos

Nicolasa @ Low Expectations

Mrs. Bluebird @ Bluebird's Classroom

Morgan @ Confessions of a Future Teacher

Eager2teach@ My Journey Through Student Teaching

I think there is a theme here....all of these lovely bloggers are teachers!

Yay for teachers!

A Little Fitness==> How much do you drink??

Okay, let's forget the majority of liquid pleasures that are out there and concentrate for a minute on water. How much water do you drink in a given day? The typical rule is that you should drink eight 8 oz. glasses a day, which is 64 ounces. I have also read in various fitness magazines that you should drink the equivalent of half of your body weight in ounces of water daily. So, a 150 pound person, should then drink about 75 ounces of water, which would be more than those 8 glasses. Also, if you drink other beverages with caffeine or alcohol, should drink even more water to compensate. If you are not convinced about needing to drink a lot of water, check out this list of reasons why it is important for your body:

1. Weight loss. Water is one of the best tools for weight loss, first of all because it often replaces high-calorie drinks like soda and juice and alcohol with a drink that doesn't have any calories. But it's also a great appetite suppressant, and often when we think we're hungry, we're actually just thirsty. Water has no fat, no calories, no carbs, no sugar. Drink plenty to help your weight-loss regimen.

2. Heart healthy. Drinking a good amount of water could lower your risks of a heart attack. A six-year study published in the May 1, 2002 American Journal of Epidemiology found that those who drink more than 5 glasses of water a day were 41% less likely to die from a heart attack during the study period than those who drank less than two glasses.

3. Energy. Being dehydrated can sap your energy and make you feel tired -- even mild dehydration of as little as 1 or 2 percent of your body weight. If you're thirsty, you're already dehydrated -- and this can lead to fatigue, muscle weakness, dizziness and other symptoms.

4. Headache cure. Another symptom of dehydration is headaches. In fact, often when we have headaches it's simply a matter of not drinking enough water. There are lots of other causes of headaches of course, but dehydration is a common one.

5. Healthy skin. Drinking water can clear up your skin and people often report a healthy glow after drinking water. It won't happen overnight, of course, but just a week of drinking a healthy amount of water can have good effects on your skin.

6. Digestive problems. Our digestive systems need a good amount of water to digest food properly. Often water can help cure stomach acid problems, and water along with fiber can cure constipation (often a result of dehydration).

7. Cleansing. Water is used by the body to help flush out toxins and waste products from the body.

8. Cancer risk. Related to the digestive system item above, drinking a healthy amount of water has also been found to reduce the risk of colon cancer by 45%. Drinking lots of water can also reduce the risk of bladder cancer by 50% and potentially reduce the risk of breast cancer.

9. Better exercise. Being dehydrated can severely hamper your athletic activities, slowing you down and making it harder to lift weights. Exercise requires additional water, so be sure to hydrate before, during and after exercise.

Are you convinced?

The difficulty with drinking all that water is that it's hard to keep track. I can easily go through a whole day and not have any water at all. What helps me is to buy bottled water in the biggest bottle I can find. I came across some at my local grocery store that are 2 liters which is equivalent to about 68 ounces. I refill the bottle daily and try to make sure it's empty by the end of the day. That way I can keep track of how much water I am drinking and make sure that I am getting enough.

There is one major snag I have encountered with this great water drinking plan....I am peeing like a pregnant woman! I have to use the bathroom all the time. Yesterday my husband and I ran errands for a large part of the day and I think I used the bathroom in almost every store we visited! Coming from someone who is not a particular fan of using public restrooms and who went an entire 10 hour international flight without going once because I refuse to pee on a plane....it is ridiculous to have to pee that much!

I know that drinking that much water is good for my body, but it's definitely challenging and annoying to manage all the restroom pit stops in between periods at school and while out in the world taking care of errands.

Do you drink enough water? Any tips to make sure you stay hydrated?

Know Thy Students

I have blogged before about the very quiet girl in one of the classes I work with who is Chinese. I will call her Lucy. At first, both her teacher and I thought Lucy was really struggling because she is still acquiring English and she doesn't talk much at all. As I started to work with her, I realized that she is quite bright, she is just quiet, which makes it hard to gauge whether or not she is completely understanding or would like more help.

I made the comment that some teachers that I have worked with in the past would automatically assume that Lucy is a "slow learner" because of her quiet demeanor. Meanwhile, she speaks and reads fluently in Chinese and is also learning English and German at the same time which is quite a feat.

Today, the teacher I work with asked me to pull a few kids to work with them on adding three 2-3 digit numbers with borrowing. She told me which children needed help and included Lucy in this group. Before the kids came to me, the teacher reviewed their math homework and gave them a quiz containing 4 multi-digit addition problems with regrouping.

Lucy was the first to finish the quiz, it took her less than a minute, and she got a 100%

Why is it, then, that her teacher identified her as someone who would need my assistance? I think it is really important to recognize that just because a child is acquiring English does not mean that they will struggle in all subject areas. Math especially, is an area where they may shine because numbers are more universal. Sure, when it comes to reading and writing in English, she may need extra help, but obviously, Lucy does not need additional support for addition because she proved herself to be a rock star!!!! For the sake of her self esteem and confidence as a learner, I think it is very important to differentiate between the times when she truly does need support and times when she can succeed on her own. I was a little disappointed that her teacher continuously puts her in my group (because she needs extra help), when clearly, there are times when she doesn't.

She.is.not.slow!

She.gets.it!

Now that I am in a world where most people speak a language that I do not understand at all, I can totally relate to other people assuming that I am dumb because I do not have certain skills and understanding in their language. This does not, however, mean that I lack those skills and understanding entirely. I am just not able to communicate what I know because there is a language barrier. I always want to keep this in mind when it comes to my teaching and ELL students.

It is easy to make assumptions about students who are new to a language and to consider them in need of extra help. Yes, we do need to teach them with certain strategies to help foster their language acquisition as well as growth in their content area knowledge, but why are they always considered as students who are lacking something when, in fact, they are so far ahead of the game in the sense that they speak not one, but two languages. As far as I am concerned they are at an advantage and will be so much better off in the future because they will have the ability to communicate and share understanding with more people than monolingual individuals.

On behalf of all the Lucy's out there, I would like to say You go girl!

Downsizing

Since we moved to Germany, I feel like a lot of aspects of life have gotten smaller and simpler. I will start with our living space. We left a beautiful, recently partially renovated (basement & kitchen), house in OR that was about 2,300 square feet and have signed a lease on a 91 square meter apartment here, which is roughly 1,000 square feet. Because our space is limited, we had to be very selective in deciding what to bring with us and I have this vision that everything will be super organized since we were able to leave some of our things (**ahem, crap**) behind in storage.

We went from a brand new large stainless refrigerator with a huge freezer drawer, to a dorm sized fridge. Granted, our "real" kitchen will not be installed until October, so right now we are still living in the hotel where things are obviously on a smaller scale, but seriously people, the appliances in Germany are tiny. Many people do have dorm sized fridges in their homes. They shop more frequently so they do not need to stuff every crevice of the fridge with food for the entire week or more. The strange thing is, although I was so devastated to leave my newly renovated kitchen, I am not finding the small fridge situation to be that bad. I am not wasting as much food because I shop more carefully, planning only for a few days at a time. The ovens are pretty tiny as well, but we have not had one in our hotel, so I have not yet experienced the pleasures of the elf sized oven...

In OR I was driving a Saturn VUE which is a mid size SUV. I loved that car and was so sad to have to sell it, but that is beside the point. Since moving to Germany, I rely on two things to get me from point A to point B. Those two things would be foot #1 and foot #2. I do not have a car here. We are staying (and will live) close enough to my school that I can walk easily everyday. We also live in close proximity to the gym and the grocery store, so I actually went an entire month here without driving once. This past weekend I broke that streak because my husband enjoyed Oktoberfest and I needed to be the D.D. I absolutely LOVE walking everywhere. Not only is it good exercise, but it allows me to be more observant of the people and things I see that I would otherwise neglect if I were driving in a car. It is a great to start my day with a little time outside and I hope I feel the same way when the winter weather comes. Luckily our new apartment is only 3 minutes from my school, so even if it's really cold, the walk is not that long.

Another funny thing that has changed is the size of my purse. I had to include some photos to illustrate this. In the U.S. I happily toted this beauty...

It was a Christmas gift from my husband last year and I loved how its spatiousness allowed me to put my wallet, sunglasses, lip glosses, gum, and other various items inside. I also loved that it was so roomy, I could secretly carry snacks for just in case situations that merited some emergency noshing. In the U.S., when it comes to purses, it seems like the bigger, the better, right?

Now, onto my new "purse." Before we left for Germany, I went outlet shopping with my mom and I got this.

I intended to use it for holding all of my coins because in Germany, there are no single bills, there are 1 Euro and 2 Euro coins instead. Needless to say, I knew I was going to have to cart around a lot of coins, so I wanted a separate little change purse for that purpose. This little baby was $29.99 at the Coach outlet and I loved that it (somewhat) matched with my big Mama coach bag. Well, this has become my purse. It has room for my coins, my cards, and my keys and there is no reason to carry anything larger...especially at Oktoberfest because there are so many people having a huge bag just means you get bumped by every passing person and that makes me really crabby. Again, it's more simple, but it works.

I am finding that a lot of things that I thought I "had to have" or that seemed to be great because of their "larger than life-ness" are really not the best and the greatest. Or at the very least, I am finding that I can adapt to a new situation and find things that work. I never thought I could live without a dryer, and we are not planning to, but I have jumped on the bandwagon of hanging some clothes to dry. Some Germans do not own dryers at all and hang everything to dry. EVERYTHING. I have started with some of my nicer work tops and undergarments, but I am really starting to like it. I feel like I am taking better care of my clothes and that is a good thing.

I would have to say for certain things, I would probably tend to stay bigger is still better, but I am happy with my downsized life so far and am relishing in the simplicity of how we are now taking care of business in our daily lives. :0)

Mixing it Up

One of the first grade teachers was absent today, so the principal came and asked me if I could help out in that classroom during their math period. Come to find out, my school does not get substitute teachers??!! I guess if the classroom has an assistant, then the assistant takes over for the day. Works out well if the assistant is also a trained teacher like today, however I imagine that would be tough in some circumstances. It seems like the other teachers just rally to help the classroom with the absent teacher. They did not call me in to be in charge, but just to help out the assistant who is a trained high school teacher. She was teaching math to 23 kids and being that they are all at different levels and always wave their hands in the air for help, they thought it would be good to give her an extra set of hands!

It was really fun to be back with that age group and I had a really good time working with a few of the kiddos. They were working on finding the missing addends by counting on their fingers, yet that became quite tricky when the sum increased to 20 and they no longer had enough fingers! We used the number lines on their desk and I told them to pretend their finger was a little frog and we counted how many times the frog had to jump to get from the addend that we knew to the sum of 20.

At one point when she was first introducing the lesson, the TA allowed 6 kids to leave for the bathroom at once. I thought to myself, is she kidding....those kids are going to be gone at least 10 minutes! I sat there somewhat smugly thinking that I just knew first graders better than her and allowing that many kids at once was a recipe for disaster. Color me surprised when a few minutes (a completely reasonable amount of time later) the kids trickled back in one at a time and sat back down. That never would have happened with my group last year. One at a time was it or else there were parties in the bathroom including soap fights, shared stalls, and wall climbing (seriously kids got caught doing all of those things last year). I was so proud of those little kiddos for doing the right thing and not abusing the privilege.

After a 45 minute period with the first graders, I went back to third grade and taught two small groups about regrouping. The teachers had used a really great color coded strategy to demonstrate for the kids and I was in charge of helping 8 who did not do their homework correctly. It can be a bit of a challenge to teach something on the spot without any mental or material preparation, but I think it went really well. The kids seemed to get it and completed their problems correctly.

I had to stay a little longer today because I was out yesterday spending the entire day at my new apartment with the Ikea delivery men. They arrived around 9 am and my husband and I did not get back to our hotel until almost 9 pm because it took them that long to assemble our two new wardrobes and my new desk. It was a long day, but thankfully our internet got installed in the morning so we could check email and I could read some blogs during the long wait.

On the job front, I emailed the director of the school about the position because the application deadline was yesterday. His response was that they will do interviews next week once they get some logistics figured out. I have no idea if there are other candidates, but I am so anxious to at least have an interview so I can tell them how excited I would be to get the job and what a great match it is for my background (ya gotta toot your own horn in situations like that)!

Bloggy Award!

Thanks to Chrissy at Bitter Sweet Moments for bestowing upon me the "Your Blog is Fabulous" award! The rules of receiving this award are to list 5 of your obsessions and pass the award to 5 other bloggers. I am so honored every time someone thinks my blog is worthy of an award! The tough part is choosing people to pass the award to because I read and love SO many blogs.

So, I will start with my 5 obsessions and then get to the other blogs.

1. I would have to say I am pretty obsessed with blogging. The first thing I do when I get up in the morning is check to see if I have gotten any comments. Since Germany is so far ahead of the US, I usually get comments while I am sleeping, so it's fun to wake up and receive some love <3.>

2. Sweets. I absolutely love anything sweet, chocolately, peanutbuttery, or sugary. I really enjoy baking and think that in another life I would love to own a cookie/cupcake/cake shop and spend my days decorating delicious treats!!

3.Being a student. I am a perpetual student and continuously choose to enrolled in classes to improve my skills as a teacher and absorb more knowledge. I truly love learning and have taken it to the next level by starting my doctoral work. Yes, I know BIG dork :0)

4. BOOKS. I love browsing books, buying books, owning books, sorting books, and most of all reading books. I have quite the collection of "teacher" books going and despite my husband's protests that I really did not need to bring all of my books with us to Germany, I am anxiously awaiting their arrival and cannot wait to organize them in my new desk that has a nice set of bookshelves on top!

5. Organizing. I love love love the container store and other such places that sell organizational bins and products. My stuff is not always super neat, but I love to really get into it every once in awhile and go nuts on making everything super tidy! Give me some plastic bins and a label maker and I am a happy camper!

Now onto some Fabulous Blogs. Instead of 5, I am choosing one really good, really funny blog to pass this award to (I can break the rules a little can't I?)

Mimi at It's Not all Flowers and Sausages

This blog is written by a hysterical teacher who actually just got her first book published which was a result of the popularity of her blog. She cracks me up with her witty writing style and funny commentaries on teaching. Check out her book here. Mimi your blog rocks!