Summer Goals

I already have a lot planned for this summer. I don't do well with unstructured time and summer is really the time to find new resources to support the upcoming school year.

Professional Commitments
So far this summer I have a lot of professional commitments including:

Algebra for All Initiative - Two weeks of paid training
Curriculum Development - Three days of paid time to write my own curriculum (yessss)
Hopefully at some point training with the Hudson River Snapshot Day folks because I already signed up to participate in that!

and most importantly...

The Watershed Institute which I am very excited about since it means basically going adult camping.

Another great part of this institute is that is means opportunities for grants. This year I applied for the Watershed Bus Tour grant through the same organization but I did not get it. It basically pays for the charter buses needed to go on an overnight or day trip. Having gone to this institute though I will be able to apply for the Trees for Tribs (tributaries) grant that lets your students go up by the reservoir and plant young trees to protect our watershed. A major goal is to get a day trip established as a regular part of my 6th grade year.

Goals
SO, on top of these things I already committed to (and <3) here are my actual goals for the summer.

1. Take the gifted and talented certification exam.
I took all the coursework (12 credits) last year and then took a long vacation from dealing with it. No one has seemed to cared, but a year is long enough. It should be easy since I am already coming to it with experience teaching gifted kids, but who is excited about a 3 hour exam??

2. Become a Google Certified Education (level 1)
I use Google Education apps and love them so why not be certified. I started the online tutorials and study guide and already learned a lot of things that are very inspiring and some that were kinda obvious things I should have known, like I can auto post an assignment to both my classes without having to duplicate the post.

3. Streamline my student and parent communication for the fall.
I started a website for my class, which is really geared to parents since they can't see the inner workings of Google Classroom. I am going to use this to post photos of labs and field trips to create more community with family. I also want to set up better list serves for myself and clear resource folders for students so from day one everything is transparent.

4. THIS BLOG. I want to document the work I am doing as a teacher to help me reflect and possibly connect to the void out there. This is a theme overall. I went to a mixer for Big Apple Award Finalists (cause I was one) and the Teach to Lead summit and both were really about making contacts. This is something that has never been a big thing at schools I work at. I know especially that for me communication tends to be a one way street. My former admin told me years ago that I give amazing advice but I don't take advice from others enough. Firstly, this is true but also (and what I told her) I am not offered good advice very often because when you are just standing next to someone and they need to come up with advice for you on the fly, it isn't very good. You need good connections to get meaningful advice and help. The people that I trust give me great advice and they really spend time thinking about my problem, my resources and who I am. So I guess having more people like that in your life doesn't hurt.

5. What I am not looking forward to, but I want to work on my assessments and write all my interim assessments for the year (ick.) We will see, it is last on the list.