Answer Me This... Did I sleep in?

1. What is your favorite picture book?
Growing up it was definitely Panda Cake... even though as I got older and reflected on it some of the decisions our supposed hero is making aren't exactly correct. (It's a Peter Rabbit scenario.) But the beat is delightful and the pictures charming. 

My favorite picture books in my classroom are the Pete the Cat books by James Dean and I think my kiddos would agree! Pete is helpful, energetic, and a good friend. Even when he is nervous, gloomy, or a little scared. 

Even when he has the blues and is grumpy, he still talks to his friends and treats them in a kind manner, totally cool! 

2. Are you a boycotter?
Not really. Unless I know that money from a product is going directly to something I have moral qualms with, than I much don't care. I do think that even CEOs and company owners are entitled to have their opinions and those opinions are allowed to be different than mine. I do however tend to choose companies whose company objectives I find admirable. It doesn't mean I'm boycotting the others, just playing favorites I guess.

3. How do you feel about cheese?
Cheese is one of the major food groups right? There have been occasions where I made an entire meal of cheese. Especially in college when the cheese cubes left over from an event were just given to the desk worker on duty at the time. Cheese is amazing, and it took up a good third of my cooler flying to Barter Island this year.

4. How many pairs of sunglasses do you own?
Zero. They pinch my head and give me a headache. I can't wear glasses, goggles, headbands, tight ponytails, or constricting hats because any sort of pressure on my head results in a headache. And I've paid the price by getting one of my eyes sunburned. Fun fact, that never really goes away, it fades and then comes back at the drop of a hat to make it appear you have pink eye.

5. How long has it been since you went to the dentist?
An embarrassingly long time. I've not lived in the same state as my dentist for five (going on six) years. I keep missing my appointment or failing to schedule one when I'm in town. It's been at least two-and-a-half years.

6. If you could visit any religious site in the world, where would you go?
Hmmm... my first instinct is to say Vatican City but.... I've got a big trip with my mother 'planned' to go to the Camino de Santiago. So probably that. :)

I had plans for today but slept much longer than expected, so I'll likely write another post this afternoon.

Answer Me This

I promise that more is coming soon! Summer, new grade, new classroom arrangement, etc! For now please enjoy this answer me this post.

1. What is your favorite room in the house?

Hmmm... I'm not sure if I have a favorite room in my house. I suppose my bedroom because I can:
a) watch movies that I like.
b) read with almost zero interruptions.
c) sleep. I really, really love a good sleep. Especially the transition from wakefulness to sleep, but not the other way around! Even if I'm staying up late I honestly cannot wait for those few minutes of falling into a blissful slumber.
I might honestly say that I prefer my classroom. And why not, it is a pretty swanky place that doubles as ninety percent of my social life. I spend a loooooot of time at work, like 60+ hours each week, so I see more of my classroom anyway, considering a fair chunk of time in my room is spent on the aforementioned sleep. Plus, the internet is faster.

2. Do you subscribe to any magazines or other periodicals?
Hehe, I love reading and get a few magazines. National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Smithsonian, Family Fun, Family Circle, Fitness, Good Housekeeping, and Instructor.

3. How do you feel about the sign of peace in Mass? Enriching? Awkward? Overdone? Just right? Some combination of the above?
I love ye olde sign of peace. It gives me an excuse to look at someone I may never see again and wish peace upon them. I'm going to be honest, I didn't know that this was even an issue until it was resolved (go figure). I also didn't realize until this week just how big of a deal hand-holding during the Our Father is to people.... (I like holding hands, go ahead and decry me in the comments)

4. What is your least favorite sound?
I hate the sound of squeaky hinges, wheels, gears, etc. The metallic squeak cuts right through me.

5. What was your favorite TV show (or shows) growing up?
Let us talk, I will assume for this we are talking under age 13 and watching on TV.  I also watched a lot of TV during the summers from 3rd - 10th grade because my parents both worked and I didn't have a babysitter. Basically I was a nerdy child. I liked Arthur, Kratts' Kreatures, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Street, Bill Nye, Magic School Bus, Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Nature, The Lawrence Welk Show, and Barney. YES, Barney, I didn't get the hate then, and I don't get it now. You may notice that the common denominator on these shows is good old PBS. I watched PBS like no one's business until high school because my parents did not (and do not) have cable/ satellite/ whatever they are calling it now. I had cable in college which was cool. I don't have now (actually currently running on zero channels) and don't really miss it that much thanks to.... Netflix!

6. What are your favorite TV shows now?
So, I don't really watch TV on TV anymore so this list is not based on currency in any way, shape, or form. Looking at my Netflix queue and DVD shelf...
Doctor Who - I have a cat named Sonic Screwdriver, if you don't understand then you just don't understand, if you do understand then you are awesome!
Psych - Just ended and, honestly, I think I'm okay with that now. It was a little difficult there at the end since after slipping for a couple seasons it picked way, way up at the end.
Avatar: The Last Airbender - This is a show that just worked. Spot-on characters, overarching story (love those), moral discussion, and a bomb-tastic conclusion.
CSI:NY - My go-to gritty crime drama... not sure why.
MASH - Fun and serious... funious. Okay apparently that is a real-word... who knew?
Gilligan's Island - I love the silliness with pretty much zero ramifications.
Ahhhhh! Getting late quick fire - Merlin, Life, Blue Planet, Planet Earth and basically any other nerdy thing put out by BBC... (But I've yet to see Downton Abbey so, there's that.)


Follow the link to the original poster!

Ptarmigan and Mother's Day and Promotion... Oh My!

Hello everyone! This week has been super busy because we are almost at the end of the year!!! As my first year of teaching draws to a close I feel all the same excitement for summer as I did growing up. It probably doesn't help that in about a month I'll be off to Disney World (dying of heat stroke no doubt). I've been planning a trip to Disney since I was probably five. It is time. Anyway let's get this blog party started, haha. I give you the cat pictures first, blow right on by them if you wish.

This photo sums up my social life on a weekend night eerily well...

I got Sonic a feathered toy as a peace offering after his vet visit, he loves it immensely and jumps three or four feet in his efforts to bring it down. I also won a fish at a cakewalk. Because the cakewalks here don't necessarily include cakes... or walking really.

Those were my personal pics... time for some Alaska! Everyone in the village seems to be going up in the mountains to a lake for hunting and fishing. I would love to go camping but am not really a hunter or fisher. Anyway our language teacher brought back this massive fish:

Inside was a smaller fish it had eaten:

And inside that fish was a tracking number:

 She also showed us how to butcher a ptarmigan, much to the delight of my kiddos... 

until the smell of the guts got to them!

After removing the stomach she blew it up and hung it to dry.

 Several middle schoolers were helping pluck and butcher the many ptarmigan.

Here it is all laid out. She also cut off the foot, you pull on the tendon and the toes move! 

My kids thought that was awesome.

Alrighty, we aren't butchering things over in my room, but we are doing some fun stuff. I had to create a unit for my school district integrating the local learning framework. Here is a tiny sample of things I made; the one on the left is a listening activity where they identify animals and colors based on a story I read, the one on the right is a page from a book they made that worked on number recognition.

It is finally warm enough for outdoor recess! We hit 32 degrees and took the chance to flock outside. Sledding seems to be the favorite activity.

 And of course our weekly art project! Though really this one was more of a craft... Mother's Day Cards!!! I actually had everything out and ready to go when I realized I forgot to make a sample! I made one quick as a wink, I think that the kids liked the sticky foam, we hadn't used it before.

But of course those were only the beginnings of the week... Friday night contained the big event.

Graduation

Technically the Kinders get promoted I guess, I'd never heard it that way until this week though... also the eighth graders and seniors graduated but I work with the little kids so they are the ones I took lots of pictures of!

CATCH-UP

AHHHHHH!!!!!!!!
Maybe I need to set myself a schedule on this blog too! Hmmm... How about Saturdays? With June and July being optional? Sounds good too me.

Notes for everyone:
I will be returning to teach in Kaktovik next year! I will be teaching the preschoolers once again but instead of interventions I will be teaching Kindergarten as well! I'm really excited about this because I'll have the exact same students (one of them is on the cusp of reading!!!), but I'm also nervous because Kindergarten!  I've always been wary of the K-2 grades because if you mess up there the poor kids have to play catch-up through graduation.

My cat just keeps growing! I was looking at pictures and he definitely doesn't have the adorable baby-face he had just a few months ago!

I am getting better at dealing with a classroom crises. This week one kiddo had a meltdown, but I didn't freak out, even though it seemed like the entire school played witness. In the past I would've been nervous to have all those adults around. I've gotten so much more comfortable in dealing with it.

We can go outside for recess again! Ahhhhhh... those glorious 20 minutes of outdoor time. Preceded and anteceded by ten minutes of dressing and undressing but I digress...

Now some fun stuff:
Way, way, way back in January I spent a couple days in Anchorage and Fairbanks. Here are some pictures from that:

Meet monstro. The birds up here are twice the size of any Southern birds!

YES!!! Thank you for the savings!

It took me forever to figure out how to start my rental (first one ever).

Tourism. Dining. Combined.

A mountain view from our hotel room!

Went for dinner with the other teachers at Ivory Jack's... and this is the only picture I managed to take.

Here is a photo of myself with the magnificent snowpile that inhabited the school 'lot' for most of the winter. I think that it was just a few days later that they moved it. It was a bit shocking to go out the door and not see it there!

One of the other teachers got a SMART board for her classroom. I saw the custodians hauling it out to the trash and KNEW I needed to save it for a couple of weeks. It served as a theatre/store. But undoubtedly the best part of the entire experience was painting it! Haha, clean-up was actually easier that day because no one took out any other toys. They were all terribly disappointed when I finally had to throw it away, but something else was coming. Something that was probably the most exciting thing to happen in class all year...

Caterpillars! I decided to gamble $40 on the odds that caterpillars could survive being mailed to the ends of the earth... they were five days late but ALL the caterpillars lived! (There was one fatality in the chrysalis stage, but that is common.) The kids loved the caterpillars and had to bring them to gym and snack-time. My favorite though was that they read the caterpillars books about butterflies to inspire them. So cute!

 This is my very cohesive bulletin board. I was so proud of it that I had to take pictures for you... then realize that part of the alphabet had fallen down.










We also did some of our first comparing and contrasting work to talk about the changes the caterpillars went through to become butterflies.

The students made baby pictures for the caterpillars. As you can see Frozen dominated the naming process! I was just going to name mine Eric but one of my girls pointed out that it sounds better with the whole name. Later the students helped me feed the butterflies fruit supplied by our wonderful cook.

Lots of other things have been happening of course. Including our pajama party where the class watched Frozen (they all love Frozen and the soundtrack I bought could easily be the best $20 worth of classroom money I have spent all year.) We also have begun being story writers... to varying degrees of hilarity. I end up getting eaten by monsters or blowing away in a blizzard in a fair number of stories.

Plenty has been going on outside of school as well. But all you want is cat pictures right???

Sonic loves the sun. He went a little bit insane when the sun finally started coming in the windows of our house. He rolls in sunny spots and pounces at sunny spots on the wall.

He also loves my laptop. He will chase the cursor from here to kingdom come! Earlier in the year I ordered cat food and cat litter. I ended up with almost exactly the right amount of food... but due to a series of mishaps I ended up with around 150 lbs. of cat litter! Unfortunately I never took a picture showing the full mountain of kitty litter. However, I've got this shot of Sonic sneaking a feast from the storage bucket. Alright, enough of my cat ;)

How about a walk on the lagoon?

We set out across the lagoon (don't worry the ice was plenty thick), our destination? The Vampire Boat!

Let's compare... August vs April

Now, to close out this super-post,

 I'll leave you with this beautiful picture of the sun dogs I caught at sunset the other day.