Teaching Mrs. Ryan

Summer is in full gear and I am in slow motion here lately.  I had surgery earlier this month and am still doing recovery so I'm spending a lot of time in the house.  One of the things I wanted to do was make my lessons more discovery based this year, find creative uses for our technology, and get out of the textbook.  I've been scouring blogs, websites, twitter, and everywhere for inspiration and I've found some pretty cool things that I'm going to incorporate into class this year.  One thing I want to do is make my own pdf's that I can download into my Good Reader account for students to use in class so that they can email me work instead of the LOADS of paper I ended up with last year.  But they can't just be normal Word documents converted to pdf because that would be too easy, and I want something with a bit of pizazz.  So I started scouring more websites, viewing YouTube tutorials to create the elements of things I've seen that I like and during this

I'm a bit late posting this since I've been out of school since the 24th of May, but what can I say, I've been enjoying myself!  I have officially survived my first year teaching middle school and have come away with a wealth of information. Here is a shortlist of what is needed: 1) Great classroom management skills. 2) A sense of humor 3) the ability to adapt to LOTS of changes 4) Organization! 5) Lots of Pre-Planning Changes for next year: 1) Start with my end of the year classroom management at the beginning of the year. 2) Units instead of textbook utilization 3) Biblical emphasis within the curriculum 4) More hands on projects and activities 5) Standards Based Tracking and Dare I say grading?! 6) Common Core Implementation 7) Writing For Now: I'm revamping my lessons this summer.  I'm implementing more hands on projects and discovery based lessons and I'm even looking at working a flipped classroom.  I noticed one thing I di