Summer Woes

I wish I could say that I have been enjoying my summer vacation by sitting on my porch swing in the beautiful and breezy 78 degree weather with my ol' standby firefly+ginger ale and a good book but alas I can't. For three reasons:

(1) I live in Virginia, and Virginia summers are NEVER a beautiful and breezy 78 degrees. Instead they are 110 degrees with 4,000% humidity. Okay, I MAY be exaggerating a bit there on the percentage but the severe weather alert on my phone is beeping at me all day every day about the heat index.

(2) I spent this past week working at my county's administration offices re-writing the Language Arts Pacing Guides K-5 with a few other teachers. For the many times this year I wished for a cubicle job, I am truly sorry. If I have to stare at the computer screen all day it better be on Pinterest, NOT on Microsoft Word formatting hell. If I have to type the words phonetic, accuracy, or multisyllabic ever again I may scream. BUT I feel like we really accomplished something. We basically took the old pacing guide (which was USELESS) and a million different curriculum documents and made logical, sense of it all to create something that might actually be useful. Since one of my summer to-do's is to revamp our Long Range Plans, I feel like I've had a head start. I got to keep copies of the documents we created and there is no telling when they will be released to the rest of the county, so at least that is one thing I won't have to worry about come August.

And (3) I am house-sitting a few teenagers this week and weekend too. They are 17 and 15, and their parents went on a cruise and asked me to make sure they didn't burn the house down. They can pretty much take care of themselves, but I am sleeping there and making sure they are feeding themselves regularly so it takes a bit of time away from the porch swing.

I haven't had any genius teacher revelations to blog about  yet, but the summer is still young! My most frustrating task right now is replacing my classroom library baskets. I am very particular about what I want and I can't find it anywhere. I found one basket I liked in a team teacher's room, scoured the internet for them only to find out they stopped making them in 1989. Most people I know get baskets from the Dollar Tree, but I haven't been impressed lately. My students' individual book baskets came from the Dollar Tree, but for my library I want something that will endure the test of time. I think I will look at IKEA since I have been running out of luck everywhere else.

On a last random note, I found these wonderful cloth-covered totes at Target on sale for $6 each! So of course I bought 4. They are Extra Large, and I'm thinking about using two for clip board storage and the other two for reading pillows. I might have to go buy more since they are already out of stock online...