I Love Museums!

 

     On one of our recent choir tours we had the privilege of visiting the Corning Glass Museum in Corning, NY, and it was amazingly fabulous.  While I did skip the glass fusion class I wanted to take, I did get to see some beautiful works of art and got lots of ideas.   

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     These were from the area around the Mediterranean area, and they are both estimated to be dated around 500 B.C.  Wow.  

Honeymoon: 31 Years of OCDing Beach Finds

Jeff and I just spent a delightful three days at the beach in Delaware to celebrate our 31st anniversary.  Yay for summer time.  Along with some good seafood and Mexican food (where we took the butterfly picture),  I gathered some sea glass and sea pottery, as well as some crab shells and other ocean stuff for our school science collection. 

We went to the beach on our real honeymoon (Jeff calls every anniversary trip a honeymoon), and I found stuff on the beach there, too--and on every other trip to the beach we've ever made.  Science stuff is just great to find.  

 It rained, just as it did on our wedding day, and we saved over twenty horseshoe crabs which were stranded when the tide went out.  Here are some pictures of my finds.  

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pieces of a shipwreck and a snake-shaped piece of driftwood  

oysters, angel wing shells, sea slippers, barnacles (on shells), and a vertebrae from something 

I love all the different colors and sizes of crab shells.  The tiny one is my favorite.  

Related Posts:

Shells, Students, and the Sea  

Crabs Look Like Aliens 

30th Anniversary Beach Science 

Things Teachers Should Do on Holiday Breaks

What Teachers Do in Summer 2022

 My teacher friend Heather and I went to pick up a mattress set, and I still had the mannequin from our medical-themed Bible school the night before in the car.  So, we took a picture. 

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Week #1:  Virginia Shenandoah Christian Music Camp was great. 

Week #2:  Mary and I made a quick trip to Texas to see all the family.  

This was painted on a wall in my sister's hometown of Tatum, Texas, and I want to paint one somewhere around here now.  

Week #3:  The Ohio Shenandoah Christian Music Camp was great too!   Jeff declared Thursday as "Pink Shirt Day," and so it was.  

We always find our way to Sugarcreek to see the world's largest cuckoo clock.  

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The women's bathrooms at the Performing Arts Center where the concert was held have sweet signs.  

And Mary found another neat painted wall in Ohio.  

Summer is Here!

This post was originally written for and posted (without the photo :-) on The Dock for Learning.

     It's May! Summer is Coming!

While I do love teaching and enjoy my job greatly, it is stressful being responsible for little humans all day, and one of the perks of being a teacher is having the summer “off.”  (In many ways, it’s not really “off,” because we usually find ourselves preparing, planning, and participating in teacher enrichment types of activities.)  

    So, May is here and summer is coming.  What will you do with your time off?  Here are several options and suggestions for ways you can spend those precious three months. 

1.  Relax.  We are responsible for our students about seven hours a day, and that can be stressful even if we really enjoy what we do.  If you’ve ever been a secretary, cashier, or builder, you know the difference.  Take a few days or a week to just relax and spend time doing things you love to do but don’t always have time for during the school year. 

2.  Set some educational goals for next year.  I usually find the area I’m weakest in and work on that.  One year it was teaching science, another year it was art, and this year I think it’s going to be organization.  Read books, research and get ideas, ask other teachers questions, and work on improving that area. 

3.  Plan some teacher enrichment activities.  This is always one of my favorites.  I plan to go to seminars, camps, and museums.  I usually try to travel to at least one new place.  I want to have more knowledge and experience next year than I did this year.  I want to have more interesting stories to tell my students, and I want to model for them what it’s like to be a lifelong learner.  

4.  At the beginning of August (or earlier if you’re ready and in the mood), go into your classroom and gather any new books you’ll be using.  Plan to take them home where you can look them over at your leisure.  Sit at your teacher’s desk for a while and look around, visualizing where you might move desks, furniture, or a bookshelf.  

5.  Gather materials.  Go through the science book and gather everything you will need for every experiment and put it in a bin to take to your classroom later.  I also try to find brain games, interesting books and puzzles, or science or history items to add to my classroom.  

6.  Plan and prep.  About two weeks before school starts, I like to make sure I have my ducks in a row.  I double-check all the books, tests, etc. and make sure I have everything I need.  I like to figure out how many pages I would need to cover in a day in order to finish the books by the end of the year.  I’m not a “book finisher,” and I will gladly stop, slow down, or back up if my students are not comprehending what I’m teaching them, but I have found that usually we can indeed finish our books on time if we stay on track and focused all year round, and don’t get sidetracked with all kinds of bunny trails and waste time in class.  

The summer months fly by, but if we have a plan, set some goals, and use our time wisely, we can make the most of them.  We can feel relaxed, refreshed, organized, and ready to go in August if we spend our summer months well.  Happy summer!  

Curriculum, Planning, and Thrift Stores

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So, after I visited my father in Texas, my mother-in-love in Florida, and celebrated our 30th wedding anniversary with Jeff in Rhode Island, I decided I needed some "teacher time."  

1.  I ordered curriculum.  

2.  I ordered some books for myself.  These are GREAT books and I'm getting some wonderful new ideas for next year.  

3.  I organized lots of books, art supplies, etc.  I'm really excited about this one.  I love baskets and collect too many of them, but they do come in handy.  I made a math basket, a language basket, an art basket, a history/science basket, and a brain game basket.  I can just grab which one I need, and then put it back up on the top of the bookshelves when I'm done.  Yay. 

4.  I'm working on presentations for Teachers Week at Faithbuilders.  This is honestly one of my absolute favorite weeks of the year.  I get to also attend classes (history, anyone?) and get all kinds of great ideas from other teachers during all the fantastic sessions and conversations that happen everywhere all week long.  I love it. 

5.  I've been shopping at thrift stores.  I've found some incredible finds including this amazing ammonite for cheap, more brain games (these make learning so enjoyable), and lots of books.  

 

THESE BOOKS ARE NOT FOR ME -- They are for an acquaintance who is starting a school in Africa.  She homeschooled her own children, and is now opening up her home to other children whose parents would like them to receive a Christian education.  And, she's even using Anabaptist curriculum.  Oh, yay.  

WE ARE SOOOOO BLESSED; LET'S SHARE!  If you would like to send some educational books to this start-up school, email me using that nifty little contact box up on the right side there and I'll make sure to get you the correct address so that more books can be on their way to an Anabaptist school in Africa.  

Rhode Island Art

We also encountered and appreciated some great art while we were in Rhode Island for our anniversary.  Creative people are great!  This is a delightful combination -- an old door, painted bicycle wheels, and sea shells.  The fence below was right next to the door of the bicycle rental place.

This metal sculpture was along one of our bike trails. 

And all three types of this creative fencing were at the same cottage which was being renovated.  Its backyard was the Atlantic Ocean.  

30th Anniversary Science

We just returned from celebrating our 30th wedding anniversary in Rhode Island.  We spent two lovely days doing history and science and art stuff.  We did eat a lot of seafood and ice cream, and we biked a lot, too.  From Narraganset, we took a ferry to Block Island and found a really deserted beach.  There, we found a bunch of stinky, interesting stuff like dead sharks, stingrays (and their egg cases), and crabs.  Jeff wanted to dissect the shark, but we didn't have a knife.  

While Jeff was finding dead stuff, I found some moon snail, oyster, and sea slipper shells, along with these sting ray egg cases.  The long spiny arms catch on seed weed and anchor the cases until the eggs hatch.

I also found a few pieces of sea glass, and the inside spiral of a sea shell never ceases to amaze me and remind me how great our Creator is.  

And I don't normally don't collect pebbles, but there were a lot of rocks on all of the Rhode Island beaches we visited, and the vibrant colors were gorgeous.  I tried to get one in every color.