November 5, 2013

Today was busy and tomorrow will be the same. Slightly overwhelming but I kind of asked for it and it is nice to be doing stuff. I started my day with a little quiet time, cutting some of the stuff out that I laminated yesterday. That lasted for about ten minutes. Then one of the kindergarten teachers stopped in to ask if I could print out more of the small pictures I made for the kids in her class. I was sitting on the floor cutting stuff when she came in and she sat down with me to talk about it. I thought that was kinda cool. And a sign that she works with small children and she is used to getting down on their level. As for the picture thing, I had to remake it because it was one of the things lost when my computer got wiped a couple weeks ago. Thankfully it didn't take too long to recreate.

While I was talking to her, I got paged over the intercom because the librarian needed to ask me something and when she peeked in the lab she didn't see me sitting on the floor. That is the second time I have been paged over the intercom. The last time was last year during one of the MAP tests. Fun fact. The librarian had questions about card art. She was going to start printing out the ones that the sixth grade teacher put together (I finally found out that she was just putting them into Publisher, so what I did last year) but the font she used wasn't coming up. And she had put 'art' instead of 'card art' and the librarian wanted to know if I could fix that. So I went back to the lab and after finishing the picture thing for the kindergarten teacher, found the correct font online and downloaded it. I also sent it to the librarian so she would have it on her computer when she went to print the cards. I also downloaded the font we used last year because we briefly entertained the idea of using that again but decided the sixth grade teacher picked the font she thought worked and we didn't want to step on her toes. So I kept the font and just added 'card' in front of 'art'. And changed it all to capital letters. And centered it on each card because they were slightly off.

Later on in the day the librarian came down to the lab to show me one of the cards she had printed and it wasn't very centered on the paper. The left and bottom borders were a half inch and the top and right borders were about a quarter inch. It was kind of distracting to the librarian and really distracting to me so she asked if I could fix that. So I dug around and found the blank templates I made last year, edited them to work for this year, and then did a bit more tweaking after a few test prints. Then I basically redid everything the sixth grade teacher did. I don't know if the librarian was going to mention it to her or if I was just going to keep doing it. I only did the ones the teacher had already done but that if far less than half of the overall total now, which means there is a lot of work to still be done. And I got an email tonight saying there was more card art to be scanned. It is never-ending.

I also got a stack of storybooks from the other sixth grade teacher. His class has been working on them for a couple of months. The wrote the story, typed it up, illustrated it, and then glued it all together. I believe they originally did this for something to read with their second grade book buddies. The teacher wants me to scan them so he can have a digital copy of them and be able to print out copies. I didn't check but I am hoping the scanner can handle legal sized paper. My fear is that it can't do fourteen inch long paper and that I will have to scan each page twice and then put them together. Originally I thought I could just scan the illustrations and put them into the typed version of the stories but looking through one of the books I saw that several of the illustrations were mixed in with the words so that would be kind of tricky. I'll have to look into that tomorrow. But not actually start scanning because there is still the card art thing. And all the stuff I need to cut out for the resource teacher.

I have mentioned the second grader before who is always complaining about her classmates bothering her, when she is usually the one bothering them to the point of them bothering her. The teacher has come up with a brilliant solution to this problem. She gave the girl a square Kleenex box and a pad of post-it notes. When ever she has a complaint about someone she is supposed to write it down on a post it note and then put it in the box, her complaint box. Then, at the end of the day, she can pick one out and talk to the teacher about it and see if they can resolve the issue. I don't know where the teacher got the idea but it is genius. It saves all the annoying complaining that was probably happening several times every hour throughout the day. It also might show the girl how most of her complaints really aren't that big of a deal when she is looking back over them at the end of the day, most of them she has probably forgotten about. And she will eventually probably get tired of writing down the complaints when she realizes it isn't really something worth complaining about. It is just a really good idea. And she was a lot less annoying during reading groups today.

There was a fourth grade assembly today. They sang songs and there was some choreography and it was pretty great. Not so much the singing because they aren't the best at that, but they were delightfully awkward with the choreography. It was very entertaining. I like any singing assembly when choreography is involved because most kids do not have any sense of rhythm, especially in a large group. And it is fun to watch. Not in a mean way, though. I'm not judging them because I would be even worse at it. I like the effort they put in and it is fun to see most of them just go for it with absolutely no inhibition. I'm a bit envious really.

Tonight I did nothing. Just watched YouTube videos and did a bit of goodie bag farming in Terraria. I built myself a little dirt barrier in a jungle biome next to some water that had plenty of piranha. I read somewhere the mob spawning rate is higher in jungle biomes. I am completely protected in my little dirt fort and I can use my sword which calls down a star from above that will hit enemies. I really wasn't playing the game, just waiting for several bad guys to get on screen and then killing them. I ended getting several goodie bags and by best prizes were the unicorn costume and the robot costume. Not a bad haul.