Even more pictures of me skydiving! Just somewhat more...abstract.

Yes, the green area of both drawings represents me.

I brought my skydiving DVD to school to show my students. My second period kids like their routine. And they perseverate. So we might be watching my skydiving DVD at the end of second period every day for the rest of the school year. Excuse me, the music video. Because this is how it has come to be known. I am the Courtney Cox of middle school special ed teachers. Or something.

Below, we see my birthday haul and my very own No Run-Ons poster. The student who created it not only grabbed onto not writing run-on sentences as a personal mantra, but he is also fascinated by In School Suspension, or ISS. He's a good kid, so he's never earned ISS, but his teacher did send him for an hour to try to remove the mystique. Nevertheless, when he made me a No Run-Ons poster, he included ISS as well.

I like how it implies that students can be suspended for writing run-ons. If only there were real world punishments for grammar crimes!

Finally, we will see the results of a little group project that my third and eighth period reading classes completed last week. A book that we read included step-by-step instructions for how beavers build their lodges. Following instructions in procedural text is one of our standards, so I could totally justify having the kids build beaver lodges. I thought on it for a while and settled on pretzel rods and sticks for the logs and branches. After dismissing peanut butter as way too messy, I decided on Play Doh for the mud. And for our river beds, paper plates.

Here you will see the vast difference between my third and eighth period classes. My third period students struggle more with reading. My eighth period students struggle more with impulse control. A visiting college student gingerly asked whether I would say there was some ADHD. To which I delicately responded, "YOU THINK?"

All of that to say, third period beaver lodges:

Our groups were girls and boys. The lavender and blue being the girls' creation, yellow and orange the boys'. They are structurally sound(ish), fully enclosed, and leave an entrance for the beaver. The boys even decorated their roof with a B. For beaver.

On to eighth period:

These were coed groups, selected on the basis of who would least likely kill each other. I said to the group working in purple Play Doh, "You should really figure out how you're going to do this before you start." When I returned from helping the other group and saw this final product, I said only, "Your beaver will be killed almost instantly."

Thus concludes our gallery tour. We hope you enjoyed today's pieces. Sadly, none are available for purchase at this time.