Current Listening: Crazy in Alabama by Mark Childress
Current Reading: Julie by Jean Craighead George
Recipe of the Day: Recipes from The Dinner Doctor by Anne Byrn

Today was a very busy day. I got to school, put my kids to work, and didn't even plug in my computer until I had planned my lessons for the first part of this week. There's absolutely no use in planning beyond Wednesday, because some sort of nonsense is bound to come up. This week, it's AEB (Afternoon Enrichment Block - where we halt real school early one day a month and organize extra-curricular activities for students to participate in) - Seventh graders are required to stay. I am letting my students come and work on their My Autobiography projects in the computer lab. I am hoping that this will be easy for me, and I won't have to micro-manage them! We also have scoliosis exams for the eighth graders, and a Practice Writing Test to administer between Nov. 6th and Nov. 11th...

I marked the places of the pages that I needed to copy for this week's work. As soon as the bell rang, I headed to the copy room. Lucky for me, the wait was short. Even better, I tried my hand at sorting and stapling multiple copies, and was successful! This is a good thing. I delivered copies of tonight's reading homework to my first period class, since I didn't have copies this morning. I am sure they are grateful!

I also worked on the invitations to the LEP Committee's Latino Parents Night and translated my English layout into Spanish. I made a list of students who will be participating in my AEB activity, and took a hard look at the Wednesday schedule to see just what the glitch was going to be for me. As usual, my 6th period and 7th period classes overlapped, giving me 7th and 8th graders at the same time for about 24 minutes. I solved this by taking my 7th graders to lunch at the end of the period and having my 8th graders meet us and have lunch. Then, I take my 8th graders back to class.

After I got home, my husband and I ran some errands. We dropped off a computer and a printer/scanner/fax machine for repair, went to Costco to stock up on cleaning supplies and flowers and to Petsmart for dog food. Then we went to the Mellow Mushroom for pizza.