My Summer To-Do List Takes Me to the Beach!

At the beginning of summer time...well honestly, after FCAT, a "New School Year Prep To Do List" was created....WARNING...not for the faint of heart....

And that is only the first page (but notice the one checkmerk!!!)! It is coded as either summer projects or beginning of the school year projects. When I sit down with this list, I all of a sudden have these mixed emotions...one of being overwhelmed, but then I have this super relaxed realization....due to the nature of the beast of being a traveling teacher dependent upon schedules of others...I am not sure what subjects I am teaching, who I am teaching, or what grade levels I am teaching...so much of this list is not even possible....so...I go to the beach!

Some highlights I can acheive on this list (when not surfing) include...

• Create a Wikispace for the other traveling Special Education Teachers at my school like me (there will be three of us this year!) to share data on our students that we work together with. (CHECK!!!)
• Redo my lesson plan outline to better match the Framework For Teaching that will be implemented as our teacher evaluation system this year (CHECK!!!)....more to come on that....
• Create a collaboration binder. This is to help document meetings with the general education teachers I work with. We are still working on this move to having students with special needs in the general education classrooms. In the past, sometimes our collaborative conversations were not productive, but rather attacking against these students. I hope that with collaboration meeting agendas and notes, we can ensure a more positive expwerience for ALL involved.
• Make a "Poloroid" snapshot for the students with special needs in the gen. ed. setting. In the poloroid, specific reading levels and accomodations will be included. The teachers can then place these "snapshots" in their lesson plans binder.

Since I cannot acheive many of those satisfying checkmarks on this list, I have decided instead to do 2 book studies. The first being Enhancing Professional Practice: A Framework for Teaching by Charlotte Danielson because our school district is using this as our evaluation system. I also am going to read The Book Whisperer by Donalyn Miller because I have read such great things about it on many blogs!