Well, I guess I'm not doing a great job of staying on top of a regular blog.  I really don't expect many people are reading this, but my apologies to anyone who was eagerly awaiting my next post.  I can probably recommend several, more diligent education bloggers!

I'm surviving my first year as a middle school 5th through 8th grade social studies teacher, but it's been very busy.  Here's a sort of bullet list in no particular order of things I've learned or re-learned:

• Being creative and able to design curriculum is great, but it is really helpful to have a curriculum with a scope and sequence that you can adapt, rather than just sort of winging it every day!
• First Trimester using Expeditionary Learning I blithely thought I could just "take the social studies lesson content and let the ELA teacher do the rest".  Yeah, it's not so easy - especially when your partner is having to cope with the challenges of being a newly single mom of 5!  Yikes!  Going forward I am taking the historical time period of our EL modules, and using a timeline as an overarching sequence structure with a few exceptions like pulling out specific topics and looking at their own timeline - for example voting rights in the US while studying the Civil Rights Movement.
• When designing your own curriculum, start with the end in mind, backwards design is your friend.
• Yes, I learned this when I got my Masters in curriculum at St. Michael's.  The fabulous Aostre Johnson did a great job teaching me to think carefully when designing curriculum.  However, in the day to day, when you haven't been doing it a lot it is easy to lose sight of that.
• 5th Graders are a lot different developmentally than 8th graders.  Or 7th graders.  Or even 6th graders. I enjoy them just as much but I'm more comfortable teaching the older kids.  I admit a tinge of trepidation if we stay with our current plan which is to have me loop so I'm the advisory teacher for the incoming 5th graders.  But we'll see, a lot can happen between now and next fall, especially at a non profit charter school.
• Using a Responsive Classroom approach takes commitment and a lot of time.  I knew this, but I'm reminded daily of it as we try to encourage our students to be kind to each other, to take care of materials and to just generally be engaged in their learning.
• I apparently have a very limited patience with pencils being broken intentionally.  I tend to be very patient but for some reason this flagrant disregard for materials bugs the HECK out of me.  Which is why I got to reinforce our Middle School Team Value of "Keep our Space Clean" (which I enlarged to mean "Take care of our space and materials")

I'm taking a short break from solidifying my Trimester 2 curriculum so I'll get back to that.  I hope you are having a good year full of inspiration and the joys of learning and mentoring - whether you are a teacher or not!