T-5 days...

So...I have five days until I have to go back to my classroom.  At this point, I'm starting to freak out a bit.  I spent a lot of time on the couch during the past week and a half; I hate being sick during vacation.  I accomplished a big, fat nothing as far as lesson plans go. 

So here it is, five days before I have to step foot into my classroom.  Right away I have to give my third nine weeks' pre-assessment which is part of our new teacher evaluations.  I have a new curriculum I'm teaching from; a combination of last year being a buying year, so I have new materials (yay!) and we're moving into teaching Common Core Standards (also, a yay!).  I'm just concerned because I haven't ironed out the details of what I'm going to teach, and now I'm at the moment where I have to. 

Sorry if I'm rambling, it's 10:30 at night and I probably shouldn't be posting...que sera, sera.  Is that even spelled correctly?  Luckily for me it's only my teacher friends who read this anyways--thanks guys.  The purpose is for me  to sort my thoughts and rationalize things....maybe I shouldn't do this publicly...?  Oh well.

So here's the big issue. I need a book.  Simple, right?  NO.  I need a fantasy book, at the sixth grade level, that I have a classroom set of.  I'll save you the trouble; I have The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe  and The Castle in the Attic.  I know you're probably shouting at me right now that I must teach The Lion...but I don't want to.  I teach in a very conservative town, and I have very religious students, and they won't agree.  I'm not comfortable teaching religion; and I know that teaching in a public school, I legally can't.  I'm so worried about teaching that book with all of the religious themes and tones, that I've made myself sick and have refused to (re)read past where Lucy goes to have tea with Mr. Tumnus. 

So...teach Castle, right?  Again, not that easy.  It's a lower reading level; 5th grade to be exact.  Lion is 6th.  I would so much rather teach Castle, but I think I hated that when it was read to me in 5th grade. I've been told that I really MUST dislike it because usually books that are read to you are ones you love.  Furthermore, I can't figure that out right now because the book isn't available on my nook, and Barnes and Noble closes in 20 minutes and I'm too far away. 

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Okay, so now that I've had a gushing session, it's time to make a plan. 

1.  I think I probably will teach Castle.  I have enough copies of it, and I think my students will really enjoy it.  Furthermore, it seems as if many of them have read the Narnia tales, so I'd like to expose them to something else/another writer.  Even better, I've found some great resources for Castle.

2.  My centers...oh how I love them!  They are fabulous.  I'll need to sit down and plan those soon. 

3.  We're still reading The Great Fire by Jim Murphy right now.  We'll be finishing that up and testing on it towards the end of January.  I'm hoping to put together a Facebook-ish type project where the students have to interact with one another, check-in, update their statues, and give their demographic/biographic information.  It will be done on paper, but I think it will be a great way for them to culminate their learning on such a historic event which happened realitively close to us.

4.  While we're reading The Castle in the Attic, I'm going to throw in some fantasy writing.  Last year, I did a really fun writing project with my kids that was very well received.  We read The Secret Knowledge of Grown-Ups Volumes and The Secret Knowledge of Grown-Ups: The Second File by David Wisniewski.  Great books if you can get your hands on them--they were very hard to find.  The synopsis of each book is that we have boring reasons for doing things; for instance, we eat our vegetables because we think they make us healhty.  The truth is that we have to eat vegetables to "keep them down"; otherwise they will rise up and defeat us because they're really huge, angry monsters.  Like I said, fabulous books and the kids LOVE to read them!  Anyways, my students made up their own fantasy stories about things they know as middle schoolers.  There were some pretty far-fetched ideas, but that was exactly what I wanted.