Celebrate 16:

My friend Ruth Ayres has created a wonderful spot for sharing moments from your week. She even has  a page to give you all the details you need to know about sharing your own celebrations. So head  on over and see what everyone else is celebrating. 

What a crazy week. Contest last Saturday. Two cold days. Trying to figure out just where all my classes are at......

But there is a lot to celebrate today!

1. SPEECH KIDS!

Here's a few of them, waiting on the last results of the day. The day didn't go quite as well as I had hoped, but we are taking four groups to state competition next Saturday and that is something to cheer about. But what I really celebrate is this. In this picture are a football player, a couple of cheerleaders, some 4-H kids, choir kids, band kids, weird kids and popular kids. What do they all have in common? They are SPEECH KIDS!  I love that this activity brings them all together as a team. They are all so supportive of each other. And the older kids show the younger kids what it means to be a SPEECH KID. We even had a couple of alumni show up during the afternoon just to say hi!  

Tradition continues.

2.  A LITTLE RECOGNITION When we finally got back to school on Wednesday this week, we found out that a "local" TV station (from sixty miles away) was coming to interview my "flippingfamily" group about our classrooms. They were supposed to come last week, but weather got in the way of that. I wished I had thought about the possibility of them coming. If I had, I might have worn something a little more professional. But here I am wearing my new speech shirt in celebration of Saturday :)  

Anyway, there was a lot of talk amongst us about this interview. There was a general feeling of uncomfortableness. You know how teachers are. They don't like when the center of attention is on them. What we do is for and about the kids, not us. But what I kept in mind was this: for years our high school and it's teachers didn't have a great reputation, even with the district staff. And at times, that reputation was deserved. But it isn't now. With new leadership, great things are happening. In order to change our reputation, we have to put ourselves out there. We have to share what's good.

3. Romeo and Juliet Time to share with my freshmen. I have always taught Romeo and Juliet at the end of the year, but the last couple of years I just felt like I was really rushing through it, so I decided to move it up this year and really spend time with it. Of course, Mother Nature is trying to disrupt us as much as possible, but we are finally starting to read. Yesterday we made paper swords and read through scene 1. All I can say is--it's a good thing we used PAPER swords! I definitely practiced living Aloha during these classes :)

So there you have it. A few of my celebrations this week. 

Until next week