Is it bed time yet?

Well ladies and gentlemen I am officially fried. I spent all of this weekend attempting to be productive. I went grocery shopping, did some laundry (not that much because I still have a lot on my floor right now), and working on my portfolio and lesson plans. I attempted to get a lot of my portfolio done, but lets be honest I kept getting distracted and did not want to work on it for that long. I did get a fair amount done and I still have some more time to work on it. I spent most of Saturday working on that and then finally decided to start planning on Sunday. I had some basic things to work on, like figuring out the spelling lessons and the basic stuff, but I had no idea what to do for my unit on America. The kids are doing the United States for Multicultural Week so I am attempting to teach them about it. I had no idea what I wanted to do, but after having a conversation with my mom (I think) I got some kind of an idea. I spend some of Sunday night working on it and then I assumed that I would have time to work on it during Staff Development Day on Monday, but I was definitely wrong about that.

Monday was Staff Development Day at work. We had a quick staff meeting then Phonics training. It was really really long, but interesting I guess. Some of the stuff I feel like I have already gone over and some of it was just pointless information that really didn't need to be discussed. Some of the staff thought it was just as long and sometimes unnecessary as I did so it was ok. I got home a little later than usual on Monday and spent all of the evening working on my lesson. Lets just say I only got about 5 hours of sleep last night.

Today was a long day! I got to work really early because we had a staff meeting and I wanted to try and finish some things up before the kids got there. I got some of it done but with everyone trying to use the computers and printers I did not have enough time to finish. This morning we had Yoga first thing. Yoga is new for the term and of course we had to be the first class going. It was really difficult because we did not have time to got to the classroom after morning lines so I didn't really get a chance to talk to them. They were very loud and no matter what I did I could not get them to quiet down. It was just so difficult and I felt awful, but there was nothing I could do. These kids are very talkative in the first place, let alone the first thing, first day back from a two week break. We went back to the classroom and had a little talk about how they did not have a good start to the week and were very disrespectful to the yoga teachers. We spent time sharing what we did over the holiday and then had time to write about it in their journals. We were supposed to have maths groups, but those ended up being cancelled. We spent some time doing our spelling pretest and then got an opportunity for the casual to show some sites on the internet about some of the places in America we would be studying about. I of course spent more of my afternoon tea break working on my lesson and finishing some printing and copying. For the last hour of class we got started with our American road trip. The kids were broken into 5 groups and had some questions to answer, stories to read, and activities to do. I thought we could get done with one state in 15 minutes, but I was definitely wrong. It took us about 45 minutes and we were lucky if the kids actually finished two states.

I love teaching, but it wears me out. I am so exhausted and all I want to do is take a nap. Of course a nap or early bed time really won't happen. I have more planning to do, most of my portfolio to work on, and laundry to do.