Catching Up

One of my favorite things about summer break? Having time to sit down and work on this year's Project Life album.

I've got lots and lots of journaling to catch up on over the last few months. I'm pretty sad that the first half of this pregnancy has passed with very little being written down. Hopefully, I'll be able to do a better job of jotting down all these thoughts this summer.

With the new Project Life app, it's very easy to get bits and pieces of bunches of kits, but I seem to always return to the Midnight/Seafoam kits in the end. They just work for me. I made some new cards to showcase what's going on "at the moment." Everyone seems to have "currently" cards (myself included), and I wanted to try something different. I made the word art using the Adobe Draw app for ipad. Adobe has a nice new feature where you can send designs from the app straight into Photoshop; I saved it as a PNG for future use and made up the 4x6 card for these layouts.

As you can see, the baby is growing nice and big! I'm starting to really feel it when I'm trying to fall asleep, trying to sit on the floor, trying to sit cross legged, and pretty much trying to make any sort of movement at all these days. We hit 20 weeks on Wednesday, and I cannot even imagine what 40 weeks will feel like!

Wrapping up the school year

Sigh. I loved my 8th graders this year. Like, really, really loved them. I would keep them all again for next year. In fact, I wish they would never grow up and I could always teach them things.

They seriously are a rad, fun bunch.

And as much as I'm looking forward to summer, I am so seriously sad to see them go. Luckily, there's a good chunk of them this year going on to our high school, so I'll see them occasionally. But many are going on to other schools in the area, and it's likely I'll never see about a third of them again. So sad with this group.

The Monday of graduation week is always the worst. It's at the ceremony practice that I always start tearing up, looking around at all of them, and just wishing I could keep them in my class forever.




On Tuesday, we all go to Knott's Berry Farm. This year I got a group full of boys! Turns out, though, that the boys are way less drama than the girl groups. ;) And I got a pretty great group of friends and sweeties all around. They were so good to me all day, making sure I had a chair when we sat down for snacks and lunch, taking turns carrying things for me. Love those kids so much!




They were in line for the river rafting ride for a long time, and I waited in the shade of one of the nearby bridges to get some shots of the group coming down. They are such goofballs; I loved catching all their giddy fun.




And then Wednesday was graduation.



And, yes, I totally cried.



Have I mentioned how much I'll miss these kids?! They have truly made this an amazing year.

Thursday was "clean yo' room day."



I had to work especially hard this year, because I'm moving out of my amazing brand new (of two years) classroom! :(  We got our assignments for next year, and I'm part of a new program to help struggling students catch up. Don't know what that entails exactly; we're (myself and another teacher) waiting to hear the details. But man oh man was it hard packing up my room. I had moved a lot of stuff in there and had all my decoration just right. Now they're packed away in a bunch of bins in the back room storage area of the special ed classrooms.

Friday was staff luncheon.



We ate and chatted, awards were given out, pictures were taken, and then our principal sent us off for the summer. The picture above isn't actually at the end of year luncheon. It's from our end of year teacher-appreciation lunch a couple weeks before. This is the math team, 6th-12th grade. We're pretty much the best team. ;)


And that's it! Another school year done. This one went by so fast, but it was fun and jam-packed and I know the kids have tons of great memories from math class. I wish I was better at jotting down all the fun antics as they happen, so I'll always remember those goofballs and their funny stories. That's definitely something I want to work on next year.

Good-bye, school year of 2014-2015!