Thursday, October 31, 2013

October 31, 2013

When I got to work I finished up the paper die I was working on yesterday and started on a new project, cutting out a bunch of game pieces for a fluency Checkers game. Then I put velcro on the back of each piece and on the squares on the boards. After that I started working on typing up a bunch of fluency sentence fragments that will be put on labels and then stuck to note cards. There are supposed to be three sets of a hundred fragments but the first two have both fallen short of a hundred. It's a little weird. The hardest part of this project was getting the label template. There were several in Word but the first few I tried had strange formatting and it was frustrating me. I briefly looked online but the Avery website wanted me to register to download their template so I went back to Word and figured that out. As long as we have labels and note cards I should be able to finish everything up tomorrow. I also scanned several pictures for one of the kindergarten teachers.

October has been anti-bullying month at school and today was dress up like a superhero day to fight bullying. It was also a clever ploy (intentional or unintentional) to get around students not being able to wear costumes to school for Halloween. I did not participate, not because I am pro-bullying, but because I have a very limited wardrobe and I'm not really into dressing up in general. The SPED teachers (who are in charge of the paras) made all the paras little capes to wear, and many of the other staff and teachers dressed up, too. It was pretty cool. After school I had most of them meet in the library so I could take their picture. One of the third grade teachers thought it would be good for the beginning of the year slideshow during the district-wide meeting. I also think it would be good for the yearbook.

We had a physics assembly today put on by several college students. They were all in Halloween costumes and they made their presentation Halloween-themed. It was actually a pretty cool assembly and all the kids really liked it. My favorite parts were the methane bubbles because they floated up to the ceiling of the gym and were incredibly flammable, and the hydrogen-filled balloons that had different types of metal dust in them so when they were touched with a match they exploded with a big bang and different colored flames.

On my way home I stopped at Target because I needed bread. I also bought raspberries because I have never actually had them on their own. Turns out they're not really my thing. The outside is kind of hairy and feels really strange in your mouth before you bite into it. The flavor after biting into it was alright but I don't know if I can get past the weird texture.

Tonight I didn't have a visit with the new volunteer kid. Not because he had Halloween plans but because he had a football game. I asked him how the possible hernia turned out but he said he never got to go to the doctors appointment because his foster dad had a heart attack. That was a surprising revelation. I asked him how his foster dad was doing and the kid said he got back home yesterday and that he was doing alright. That was good to hear.


Tonight I watched SNL, several Goosebumps episodes, and I messed around in Minecraft. With a brief bit of Terraria to see if I could get any Halloween drops. And I couldn't. In Minecraft I decorated my house a little bit for Halloween and then loaded in the shaders mod and took some screenshots. I also messed around with game capture software and my video editing software. I think I discovered a way to get my graphics card involved in the rendering process to speed things up. The first time I rendered the video it took fourteen minutes. The second time, with the graphics card being utilized, it took five. I don't know if it was faster the second time because the project had already been rendered and maybe the computer saved some information (although I wasn't rendering the already rendered video). But if it was just the addition of the graphics card that is pretty impressive.

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