It's almost time for my new class!

I'm officially going to start moving into my new classroom on Tuesday!! I know most teachers get the whole summer off, but my new school does a "July School" and teachers start the last week of June. Then kids start in the first week of July.

Sorry for disappearing for the last few days, but I figured if I only get a week and a half between jobs, I'm going to relax a bit! I disappeared to a spa in Calistoga (yes, like the water). It's a cute little town in wine country so went wine tasting in Napa. It's the first time I've ever taken a vacation alone and I loved it! I met so many great people! I thought for sure I'd be alone in my room or by the pool reading a book for 3 days. Turns out I met so many great people that I only had time to read a chapter or two! Such fun! A mani/pedi with a friend, a relaxing massage, and 3 days away from stress...AMAZING!

Since teacher weeks are mostly meetings and planning, my co-teacher and I are going to start moving our classroom this week. We found out we get the bigger classroom, but it means we have to swap rooms with the teaching team who gets our smaller room. I think there is already furniture and stuff to be moved, so I may have to wait until we move that before I bring in all my teaching junk that currently resides the my hallway of my house!!

I'll take pics of the new room when I have them. My co-teacher knows about my TPT stuff, but she has no idea I'm a blogger. Looks like I'm going to have to tell her! Haha. I figure she needs to know sooner or later before she thinks I'm a crazy person for taking pictures of a bunch of our lessons all the time.

So as of right now my class has 9 kiddos in it. I have no idea what there disabilities are at this point, but they are all high functioning and in the 1st/2nd grade. I'm so excited! I've been told a couple could be tough ones, but honestly, I think my old school takes kids who are WAY rougher than this school. So I'm curious what they consider a "behavior problem," because it may not be as rough as I'm used to. Or at least that's what I'm hoping for ;)

Happy Birthday to Me!

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me, happy birthday dear meee. Happy birthday to me!!

That was just me singing myself the birthday song! Today I got the best birthday present ever! It's the first day of summer break! I got to sleep in, meet a good friend at the gym (I know, I'm weird for enjoying the gym on my bday), I just finished packing my bags for a trip, and soon I'm leaving for birthday dinner with my family!

As a celebration of my birthday and my new job, I booked a trip to wine country! So I'm headed up north near Napa to enjoy a lovely spa. I may be blogging while I'm there... we'll see.

Tootle loo!

Saying Goodbye to the Cottage and Hello to a New Adventure!

Today I  had to say goodbye to my cottage. It was the inspiration for naming my blog, so it's weird to leave it behind. I've made some wonderful friends at this school, and I've learned so much about special education in the time I've been here. Today I handed over the key, the cottage is no longer my home away from home.

I have had mesmerizing students and amazing families to work with. I love them so much that I'm continuing to work with 1 or 2 of my students just because I want to this summer. My new school has less of a focus on autism and I just can't quite give up my autistic boys yet! I believe the plan is to tutor one kid and be a consultant for the other. My little genius boy needs ways to stay busy this summer so he doesn't drive mom crazy. I swear sometimes the smart kids are the most troublesome! It takes more to entertain their mind!

This cottage has been the home of both my laughter and my tears in the last four years. Some tears were those of joy and pride when my kids did something amazing. Others were tears of frustration when I couldn't take just one more tantrum...then another kid screamed. But emotions are part of what makes a person a good teacher. It's those moments you cry, that make you realize how much you care about your students' success. I figure if I didn't care that my kids screamed and never learned anything, then I'd be a bad teacher. Caring is what makes me a good teacher. It's what makes me stay up an extra hour at night writing emails to parents to making one more learning activity for them while sitting on my couch in my PJ's.

I will never forget the amazing teachers I've worked with at this school. While there are about a million things I wish were different here, my teaching team isn't one of them. They are the most helpful, caring, fun bunch of people to work with. They are the people who can make you laugh when you want to cry. They are the people who happily cover your class when suddenly get sick and you can't find a sub.

It's time to say goodbye to the red tower, the stained glass front door, and the once cheerful sign that's now missing quite a few letters. Soon it will be missing the teacher that once called this classroom hers.

So now it is time to say hello to a new adventure!
There is no need to be sad today. There are new and better things to come. There is a 1st/2nd grade classroom waiting for me to move in. There is a bright and cheerful co-teacher named Lauren waiting for me to bring her all sorts of teaching ideas and materials. There is a whole new batch of kiddos waiting to meet their new teacher. 

I will be moving into my new classroom a week from tomorrow. Then my job officially starts the last week of June, followed by my new class the first week of July.

So long little cottage, good luck with your new teacher who moves in. Treat my kids well when I leave. It's time for my new adventures to begin!

School's out for summer!

Did you think I disappeared?! This has been a whirlwind week for me! School ended on Friday, but I still need to go in for our teacher work day tomorrow. Freedom is thisclose!! We technically are supposed to work Monday and Tuesday, but we have an unofficial rule that as long as everything is taken care of on Monday, then we don't have to go back Tuesday. Added bonus, Tuesday is my birthday, so I don't want to work on my birthday if I don't have to! It's extra motivation!

This week included field day, a field trip, awards day, and graduation. Then yesterday I went to a winery with friends for a mini birthday celebration. It was a blast! Although I got a little too much sun. Thank goodness for aloe vera!

Sorry there was no Successful Saturday post yesterday. There was bit of a debacle in the form of my cell phone going swimming thanks to a bouquet of flowers! While swimming is fun for Nemo, it is not so fun for an iPhone. I tried the bag of rice trick, but my phone keeps turning itself on and my screensaver looks like an ocean scene thanks to the water still inside. A very nice parent insisted I take home a bouquet of flowers from the graduation decorations before they just got thrown away. I took them and then at some point driving home in the dark, they fell over and filled my cup holder with water...that just so happened to be where my cell phone was sitting. My phone and I discovered it does not have gills and wasn't meant for swimming!

Sorry no pictures today, they are on the swimming cell phone that somehow works in many ways, but I'm afraid it will zap my computer if I plug it in with water in it!

My classroom is 99% cleared out of my personal belongings. I was tempted to finish on Friday, but I was already the last teacher on campus and we had a very important get together at the bowling alley to get to! All of the teachers went bowling and brought significant others and babies to celebrate the end of a school year. It was baby mania at our school this year! We have 3 babies that are almost exactly the same age, plus a bun in the oven for another teacher.

There are 7 or 8 of us leaving on new adventures next year, so the Head of School is buying the staff lunch tomorrow. Yum! My goal is to be done in my classroom by the time we leave for lunch at noon!

I had to say goodbye to my students and their families on Friday. They are so sweet! The kids got giant hugs from me, and so did the amazing parents I had this year. I'm working with at least one, probably 2 of my kids this summer just because I want to, not because I really need the money. My parents spoiled me rotten!! I got the biggest gift I've ever received as a teacher! It's a gift certificate to one of the nicest spas in San Francisco! There is one near me, and one in the big city, so I can take my pick of locations. I about had a heart attack when I opened the envelope and read the amount! Those parents and their kids are amazing! I honestly don't know if I've ever had a group of parents as amazing as this bunch!!

Is your year over? What's the best end of the year gift you've ever gotten? And I don't mean dollars necessarily, one year I had a parent make me a big coffee mug with all of my students' pictures on it and I used it every morning!

Only 4 more days of school!

Ok, so I wish I could say I was a super amazing teacher today...but it's the last week of school...and I'm changing schools. Amazing isn't quite going to happen. I have a firm rule that I will ALWAYS teach reading, writing and math no matter what happens. My little guys are too "special" to skip the core subjects or break routine too much. I've learned if I do all "H-E-double hockey sticks" breaks loose!

Today we had a "shadow" student checking out our class to possibly join the school next year, which was motivation for me to be a super teacher up through lunch time when he went home. Then my kiddos worked their bottoms off through math.

Then...Mary Poppins happened! My kids are LOVING the movie. At first they were skeptical because it wasn't a cartoon, but within 5 min. they were hooked! I mean come on, they have people talking to CARTOONS!! This hasn't happened in recent movies (the newest one I can think of is Space Jam) so my guys think it's the coolest thing since sliced bread! They normally have the attention span of gnats, but they will happily sit through 45 min or an hour of it at a time. It's a long movie, so it's perfect to stretch out over the last couple of days of school. Today they got to the part where the characters giggled so hard they floated to the ceiling and desperately asked me if they could really happen. Too cute!

Movie = Lisa has time to pack!

Packing is exhausting! I packed/cleaned out the class while the kids watched Mary Poppins. I think I'm actually closer to being done than I thought. It looks like a ton of stuff, but honestly a bunch of it was junk from the other teacher I never got around to getting rid of. She was very much into crafts and playing, so I have a full closet still, but honestly it's not mine. All those toys are staying put! So I'm leaving it as a "present" to the next teacher. Who knows, maybe she'll be crazy into crafts too. Don't get me wrong, I do plenty of cutesy junk with my munchkins, but honestly the amount of supplies is just plain excessive! I haven't bought supplies in 4 years and there is plenty still sitting there!

My kids helped me carry old posters and junk out to the dumpster and thought it was the coolest thing ever. I seriously need to take advantage of their helper skills on Thursday when it's time to give our class the final clean up!

Tomorrow is field day! I am on the brown team...really that's the best color you could give me??

My kids are split into different teams because our school is wacky. We only have 100 kids in K-12, so they make mixed age teams with the idea that the big kids can help the little kids. Having my class go against the 3rd-4th grade class just wouldn't be fair. I get it...but my kids don't. One kid was in tears about not getting to be with his class for the whole day. And my kids don't do well with losing...and they lose a lot. So I expect tears. I like to prepare for the worst and be happy with anything better than that!

Okay, I'm off to move boxes out of my car. Then take some Emergen-C because my throat is killing me! I'm crossing my fingers it's just allergies. I can't lose my voice on field day!

Successful Saturday: Packing + Autism Videos

Happy Successful Saturday! I had a whole post planned, and then I got sucked into clips of Katie Couric's Autism Awareness interviews, so you get to read my babble valuable information about that first!

I tried to pick a favorite, but I couldn't! I tried to get a YouTube version of them so you didn't have to keep clicking links, but I couldn't find these videos there, so click the links below for some great videos about autism and kids who have it.
Temple Grandin
Parenting a kid with autism (article + videos)
Living with Autism (a collection of videos on one page)

I have a confession to make...I had tears welling up in my eyes as I was watching these, but it had nothing to do with their stories of autism. It had everything to do with me! I have been teaching kids with autism for the last 4 years, but now I'm changing schools. I'll still be teaching special education, but the new school focuses more on learning disabilities. There will be very few kids around with autism. Tonight I just realized that makes me really sad! Is it possible to fall in love with a disability?

My kids are quirky! And I love everything that comes along with that! I love seeing the goofy way they look at the world. I love that today I honestly stopped class to let a kid ask a friend to roar like a lion because he's never asked a friend to do anything and this was a breakthrough! I love watching them finally start to make sense of the crazy world around them. I love that today I picked a kid up and twirled him in a circle when he spontaneously told me a story about his home life without prompting (once again, totally new experience!). I've never been so thrilled to hear about a parent going to the airport, Haha!

Now the thought of not working with these kids makes me a little sad. I am secretly THRILLED to be tutoring one of my little guys this summer. His parents asked about where to find a tutor and I said "I'll do it!!" I know some of these parents really need the extra help, so I really want to try and stay in touch with them and their kids. I have a great group this year, and I'll really miss them!

Okay, now on to my original Successful Saturday post...which is suddenly feeling a little boring. Sorry, my tangent on loving autism seems way more interesting than me packing up my classroom now.

I have exactly 5 school days left with the kids, and only 1.5 of those will be spent inside our classroom thanks to field day, a field trip, and the graduation/award ceremony we have to will happily attend on the last day of school. All of this leaves me very little time to pack up my classroom!

There is only 1.5 weeks between jobs and I don't want to sacrifice any of those days for boring packing when my kids won't even be in the room to miss seeing my junk. Besides, I just booked a wine country getaway the week after school gets out to celebrate my b-day and new job!

So this week's success was all the stuff I got done! Here's my "Yay! I did that already!" list:

• report cards
• common core standards progress reports
• HUGE chunk of my packing (all bookshelves, minus the kids' books)
• a TON of stuff is now in my shed and on my living room floor (as in I moved it from school to home)
• social skills assessments (they are 10 pages long for each kid and took me HOURS!)
• last minute parent conference both the parents and I forgot to reschedule after their kid got sick last month, plus planning for me to tutor him this summer
• work samples, end of the year testing, and report cards have all been filed in the appropriate places
• Most importantly...I BOOKED A VACATION! I'm going to spend 3 days at a spa in wine country!

So that's my success! What's yours?

How a BINGO game can save the day... or at least lead to a happy one!

It's amazing how one little thing can make a HUGE difference! For me, all it took was a game of Addition BINGO in my class today. And an added bonus moment thanks to a Robert Munsch book.

If you've ever been a SPED teacher, then you understand what happens when a SPED kid loses a game. It can be a full blown kicking, screaming tantrum that can last for hours! At one point subs were banned from giving the kids board games when I wasn't there to supervise and play social skills coach through every step of the game. I think it all stems from a huge blow to their self confidence when they know they already don't do as well as all the other kids in class. Add in losing at being crummy at yet another thing and the kid feels like a failure and has a fit.

Yesterday my cottage roommate (AKA my super awesome speech teacher friend) worked on "The Destroyer of Fun" who is one of the Social Thinking Unthinkables. He gets in your head and makes you super competitive and you destroy all the fun when you don't win. He got mad when he lost a speech game, but she had him rip The Destroyer of Fun out of his brain and throw it against the wall before he could ruin the fun. I was cracking up laughing at this by the way! Then the kid stopped his fit, and said "good game" and was perfectly fine. This has NEVER happens! We were so proud! I tried to see if it would happen again a few minutes later during BINGO, but he happened to win so there was no real test there.

Here is how BINGO made my day today...

I'm a meanie teacher and manipulated the game to make him lose. He's a kindergarten boy and totally didn't notice he had 5 in a row because it was diagonal and not up and down. I conveniently didn't tell him, then intentionally picked the addition cards that would make another student win.

Little guy did great! He surely wasn't happy but he didn't have a fit because he knows he'll drop levels on our behavior chart instantly. I reminded him of the Destroyer of Fun and without missing a beat he pretends to rip the Destroyer of Fun out of his brain, threw it on the floor, stomped on it, threw it in the trash, then calmly sat in his chair. I've never been so proud! He calmly asked not to play again and I said no, and he went ahead and played again anyway! It was great! Not to mention it was Addition BINGO so he was practicing how to add using counting on which is a 1st grade skill and he's in kindergarten. Whoo hoo!

How BINGO and Robert Munsch Made Me EXTRA Happy...


For storytime we read Roar! by Robert Munsch which is about kids who wake up grouchy then think it's funny to roar like lions all day. It's HYSTERICAL! It's even better if you have the CD like I do with Munsch reading his own book aloud with all the crazy noises he makes!

Anyway... because it was fun and it's the last week of school, I let all the kids give me their best ROAR right before the story began. One munchkin is the definition of autism and doesn't interact with others if he doesn't have to, and he surely doesn't play pretend very often. I got him to roar!! I was thrilled!!

Then it got even better... after the story he asked one of the boys "_____ will you roar again for me please?" The he goes to another boy and asks, "Will you roar for me too please?" I know this is like nothing, but in my world IT'S EVERYTHING! I have waited all year to get this kid to voluntarily talk to a classmate just because he wanted to, not because he was told to. I squealed and rubbed his curly head of hair telling him how proud I was that he talked to friends!

After round 1 of BINGO was a success by getting rid of the fun destroyer, my ROAR boy decided he was done playing. So I made a deal with him that he didn't have to play, but he had to lead the game and pull out the math problem cards and show them to his classmates.

HE DID IT!! He "kept his brain in the group" (not stimming or going off into his own little world) the whole time! Then after he read the problem, he'd prompt my kinder boy! For example, "B 8 + 4, put 8 in your brain and count on 4 more and find it in the B section." Can you tell he not only listens to my directions but can teach it to a classmate without being told to?!?!

I told his mom today and she was in shock that he was able to do those things! Then she laughed that of course my class is suddenly perfect the last week of school! Haha.

Have you had any moments of greatness during board games?