September 30, 2013

I meant to mail my friend's letter this morning but I remembered right after I passed both mailboxes on the way to work. And I am doing better at getting to work close to eight o'clock so I didn't want to ruin that and kept on going to work.

I spent my morning downloaded MAP reports and then printing all of them off. The process went a lot faster than last year because I recently learned that the printer can do the duplex thing. Last year I would have to print off the one student report, load it in the bypass tray, and hope no one else decided to print before I could walk back to my computer and print the other student report. It was a bit of a process. Knowing about the duplex option sped everything up and made it less of a chore.

I got to help out with second grade reading centers this morning, for the first time since MAP testing started. I was in the listening group but we still don't have the headphone hookup thing for the CD player so they can't really listen to anything, so I just had them go around and each read a page in the story. The story today was about not giving up. It had a little girl playing soccer, quitting when she wasn't winning, wanting to play the next day but others not wanting her because she was a quitter, and then learning to be a better loser and winner and not quitting. That is a poor summation but you get the point. The main character was named Mia and it turned out that the story was written by Mia Hamm. The kids had no idea who Mia Hamm was but I thought that was kind of cool. After they read the story they were supposed to fill out a sheet about the characters, the setting, and then write a summary of what happened in the story. Some of the kids finished that pretty fast so on the back I asked them to tell me what happened after the story. Some of the kids got it and others didn't. One girl was incredibly confused because the story ended, so nothing else could happen. I tried to explain imagination and pretend to her. We ended up running out of time before I got to see what she could come up with.

Most of the rest of my day was spent working on my MAP spreadsheets. And figuring out a printer and email thing for one of the resource teachers. It was a productive/slow/fast kind of day. After work I stopped by the post office to mail my friend's letter and then headed back across town to get my haircut. It was weeks overdue and I feel much better about finally getting it cut.

While I was at work today the city got around to replacing the curb next to the driveway by the mailbox. They've been working on the nearby streets for months and recently started on curbs. And I figured it would be limited to that, but when I got home they had torn up and put new concrete down in front of the entire driveway. It would have been nice if they had redone the entire driveway because it is kind of falling apart but whatever. As long as a neighbor doesn't back into my car while I'm parked in the street for the next day or two then I'll be happy.

For dinner I had my fried rice and it still doesn't really taste like fried rice but it tastes alright. After dinner I caught up with my DVR and then watched YouTube videos. It is one of those nights where I have been ready for bed since four o'clock. So I have been useless. Kind of like every night but I'm using the tired thing as my excuse tonight.