Short and Sweet

Welcome to the new year. I'm very far behind because I have missed the first two days of school due to the illness of my youngest son. He seems to have asthma or something based on the three episodes of breathing problems in the last three months. But I didn't want to lose any momentum either so I figured I'd blog for a minute or two and then get back to work. On a personal note, Nick seems to be better and the new house is really nice - love the location.

On a professional note - I need to get some grammar review activities together. The semester vocab and notes reviews are already posted. The last part of the final will be OMAM and I already have a lot of stuff for that as well. So I'm not in too much trouble in terms of gathering resources for the final. I just want to have enough time in class to do some review. Today we just reviewed main events from the story so far - fairly easy. We're more or less on schedule. The big weight is grading. I need to update grades with projects and finish the pattern stories in the next few days. I suppose I'll have to give a lot of in-class reading time in order to catch up, but that saves them a bit of homework anyway.

That said, let's see what else is up - I need to help launch Vision school wide, but there is an update scheduled for the software which could put things back a week or two. I haven't written any of the grant, etc., stuff that I wanted and I need to put a proposal together for the state Tech Expo within a week or so. Also, I need to chase Edutek down again to get the CD of that PuzzleView thing and the installation disk for Illinois State Standards. That's the tech news.

For this semester, I can only hope to find time to create and tag a lot of grammar practice so that I can see how students are doing on different skills. For next semester, I'd love to pretest and posttest everything that I'm going to do and tag the data for it all, but this is the first year, after all. Imagine next year - tagging a pretest, following the data all semester and then tagging the post-test. I know I could kick butt first semester and maybe I'll do that this summer and so be very ready for the fall this year. Exciting possibility, anyway.

Oops, my friend is in trouble. Certificate problems. Anyway, it's Nick's birthday so I'll run out of here and get back in the swing tomorrow (I hope!). Happy New Year.