Little of This, Little of That

Today was our first day back after Spring Break. Needless to say, quite a few people (kids AND staff members) were having a little trouble getting back into the groove.

Several of us are doing DIBELS testing for the next couple of days. DIBELS is an acronym for The Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills. DIBELS consists of a small series of short (one minute) tests given to students individually three times a year to check fluency and to monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills. We're doing kindergarten, first, and second grades. The second grade is very simple...each child spends one minute reading a short passage, then one minute to retell it. They have three different passages to read. First graders also do that, but they additionally have to spend one minute saying individual sounds of various words AND another minute trying to read nonsense words. Kindergarten has different things to do, but someone else does that grade level, so I don't worry about it. The thing with DIBELS is that it's done three times throughout the year to measure growth. Technically it's to be done two weeks after a major event, in order to be most accurate. We did it two weeks after school started, then about a week and a half after we came back from Christmas Break, BUT we started today, the FIRST day back from Spring Break. I told our curriculum director that I have a concern about the validity of today's sessions because probably 90% of these kids did NOT read over Spring Break. He more or less blew me off. He said if we waited two weeks, we'd be a week out from our OATs (Ohio Achievement Tests). I mentioned just waiting until the end of this week, but he wasn't listening.

Oh well...I'll just do what I'm told.

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Wednesday afternoon I'll be leaving from school to head to a professional conference a couple hours away. I am NOT taking my laptop and will not be online until either Friday night or Saturday morning, all depending on when we decide to get home. Yes, Ted is taking a couple of days off to go along with me. I did not want to go to this conference, but I was told that I HAD to go, so off I will go. I do NOT like to drive very far anymore, so he said he'd come along to do the driving. He's got his ipod loaded up (that's the next tidbit) and a new book, so he's ready to go. Now don't get me wrong...I'm perfectly capable of driving that far, and have done it many times in the past. I would do it again in an emergency without any trouble, but I just don't like to. I'm very lucky to be married to a man who will help me out with things like this!

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Ted was getting his ipod ready for this little excursion, by loading up more songs. He thought that he had downloaded a bunch, then went off to the bedroom to relax in the recliner in peace and quiet and listen to his newest songs.

All of a sudden I heard him getting upset. He came out to the living room and told me that everything on his ipod had disappeared!! He said it was completely empty! He was NOT a happy camper.

I asked him if they were still in the itunes library on the computer and he checked and said they were. Then I told him to do what any sensible person would do: call someone from a younger generation to help! He called our niece, because Alex wasn't around. At first she sort of chuckled, then said that it had happened to her once and she just had to download them all again.

And that's what he did. He was just relieved that it could all be easily done. Then he found some other things to download from itunes. He got a couple of episodes from the cartoon "Huckleberry Hound," and another couple of episodes of "Jonny Quest." He was like a kid in a candy store after that. Last night I was trying to do a sudoku puzzle and he was laying on the bed, just laughing away at "Huckleberry Hound."

Neither one of us knew that those kinds of things were available at itunes.

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I'm planning on a special post tomorrow since I won't be here on Wednesday. I probably won't get it posted until sometime tomorrow evening. It will most likely be one of the last things I do before I go to bed.

It has to do with a special day in my son's life. I'm just not going to tell you which son....yet!

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It's time to DE-LURK everyone!

I would just LOVE it if everyone who is a lurker at this site would leave a short message in the comment section, telling me where they're from and if you don't know me in "real life" how you came across "Another Day in the Life."

You don't need to give me your life story...unless you WANT to!

If you don't have a blogger/google account, you can click on "Anonymous" and just include your name at the end of your comment

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That's it for now....Happy Monday everyone!