Our Happy Little Family

In my Education class this semester our teacher was telling us a few tricks she had up her sleeve of easy yet very interesting ways to learn information about your students within the first week. Instead of waiting until you have trouble with the child, requesting a parent/teacher conference, pulling information out of the parent as to why the student is so disruptful/unwilling/etc, and then adapting your teaching for that child based on the issues. You can gather information from the exercise she told us to use to skip the middle part and go straight to the adapting.

One thing she suggested was asking them to draw a family portrait. This may not sound like much but it can be very telling about the child's home life. For example, if they draw the parents far apart from each other this could mean that the parents are divorced or they don't spend time together or aren't loving towards each other in front of the kids. If they draw the Dad sitting in a chair and the Mom standing it could mean that the mom is always on the go and their Dad watches TV. If they draw a picture of themselves with their grandparents it could mean their parents are absent and that can create a whole bag of issues. All of these can be very traumatic to a child which in turn affects their performance at school.

On a happier note if they draw the parents standing together with the kids and hearts and flowers and rainbows and kittens this probably means they have a wonderful home life. Dr. Hale (my prof) said that one year she had a little girl that drew a picture full of those things and when she had her first parent/teacher conference with her parents she said she was pretty sure she saw hearts and flowers and rainbows floating around their heads because she could "feel" their love for each other and their daughter during the conference. So sweet!

This is exercise seems like it is a little more geared for elementary kids (which I do NOT want to teach) but I think I might try it out and see what I can get out of the junior high kids. If it doesn't work it's OK, it would be good to try though.

Our homework assignment was to draw our family portrait and bring it to class the next week. Here is my family portrait* (you can click on it to make it bigger):

I originally thought I would draw my whole family (mom, dad, brother, sisters) since we're not married yet but 1. My family tree is too complex and 2. Chris and I ARE our own family now even though we haven't been hitched. We have a house and a puppy baby together, I mean how much more of a family can you get? Haha.

Do you think my teacher will see hearts floating around my head from this picture? It was funny because after she assigned us the homework she said "Now I know everyone is going to go home and draw hearts, flowers, rainbows, and kittens on their family portrait so that I don't try to analyze your pictures for any disfunction." Everyone laughed and agreed. 

*This was Chris pre-haircut. His 5 o'clock shadow is pretty funny. Chris made fun of me because we don't any noses. I've never been able to draw stick figure noses. Do like Max' occupation? Cutest puppy Ever! He kind of looks like a fox in this portrait. 

made it through

1. The first week back to school.

2. Getting back into the swing of juggling work and school.

3. The 1.5 mile run that we had to complete as part of a fitness assessment in my Kickboxing class. 

There were some crunches and push ups in there too. 

I wanted to have Chris take a First Day of School picture of me just for fun but I completely forgot. I had a case of the Mondays in a big way. I had to go straight to school on Monday after work and wait in line for an hour and a half longer than expected to see a counselor so I had to rush home, eat some dinner, and pick up my school supplies then rush back to class.  

My Intro to Education (my first teaching class [yay]!) teacher is awesome. We have to complete a 16 hour internship for the class which I am pretty excited about. I am going to observe a friend from elementary school (also one of my bridesmaids, Casey) teach her junior high math class for a few hours which should be pretty fun. She warned me it could get interesting though. She teaches some rough kids and at I have heard the stories. I think it will be helpful for me to see how she handles those situations though.

I love my kickboxing instructor. She is a little asian lady with enough energy to keep up with the energizer bunny. It is going to be a fun semester. When she was demonstrating how NOT to do a push up she had her hands behind her neck and was lifting her neck only instead of pulling her whole body up with her abs and she said "if you do it this way you will have a skinny neck, not a flat stomach." It was pretty funny.

I am going to track my weight and measurements to see how much I lose during the semester. I am excited to see the progress! 

I'm taking a pretty light semester since we are trying to plan a wedding at the same time. I don't want to turn into a bridezilla...