The Two-Step Plan to Becoming One of My Favorite People!

So, Bing is doing a promotion right now where they are giving away $3 giving cards for public school projects. If you go to this website and put in your email they will send you a $3 gift card for a site called Donorschoose.

Then, if you go to the Donorschoose website and find my project , you can give $3 towards helping me get some awesome new books for my students. You just put in the donation code that Bing sent you in the checkout. Thanks for your support!

Summa, Summa, Summatime

So,we've come to about the midway point of summer break now, and I am starting to FREAK OUT! I am going to be a "real" teacher in just two months--what!?! Fortunately or unfortunately, we have a lot going on to keep me distracted and make the time fly by.

First, I am volunteering with the migrant summer school program at Springville Junior High. It has been a blast! I felt totally intimidated the first couple days, but now I am getting into the hang of it and I have been learning a lot about teaching literacy and language development. For the first few weeks we have been learning about mummies. I have actually learned a lot... probably more than I want to know about the subject. In relation to that, we have also been teaching the kids about how to make inferences and use evidence to come to conclusions. I am going to be posting more specific things about my summer school lessons on my teacher blog. After the mummy unit, I have to plan a 5 day unit and I am getting pretty excited about it...

Mike is enjoying his internship at Eli Kirk. It has been fun for him to work for a company with "real" clients instead of just the in-house work he was doing at BYU Viscom for the conferences and workshops. It has also been keeping him busy at work--which is a very good thing.

Whenever Mike isn't at work, he has been spending his time watching the World Cup. He is pretty obsessed. We don't have cable, and he was considering ordering it just for a month so he could watch all the games. However, he found out that he can get most of the games through Spanish channels like Univision for free. Unfortunately, the signal doesn't come through very clear for us, so he has gone crazy buying all sorts of digital antennas and trying to find which ones work best... then taking them back to the store and exchanging them for new in a never-ending cycle. Our TV room/office has cords going everywhere right now. It is driving me nuts, but luckily it will all be over in a month. :) I will admit it is kind of fun watching some of the games, go USA!

Well, that's all for now--Happy Father's Day weekend to everyone!

P.S. Mike never actually went out in public with the mustache from our last post, for anyone who may have been concerned. Of course, he did put it as his profile picture on facebook which is pretty much just as bad. SIGH! :)

Leave it or shave it...

For some weird reason my wife doesn't like my facial hair. Well, I decided not to shave for 5 weeks to see what happens. The result was a constant (about 1000000x a day) reminder to shave. So, pretty much the only reason I ended up shaving was because I have to go to BYU tomorrow (for some weird reason they don't like facial hair either).

I wanted to go back in time and remember the couple of months after my mission that I grew a goatee.

Fear the mustache! Now the question is: leave it or shave it... we'll see! (for some weirder reason BYU does like mustaches)

The power of positive thinking

I love this video! It makes me smile every time I watch it.

Spring Break

I have a little bit of a break this month since winter semester is over and I don't start my TESOL practicum until the beginning of June. So, for right now I am just working a few hours and finishing up an independent study class while I try to get the rest of my life in order. It's great to have some time to relax and do all of the little things that I have been putting off during the school year, like blogging for example!
The biggest news for us right now is that Mike just got hired for an internship over the summer. It will be nice because it is right in Provo. He was thinking he might have to commute to SLC to find graphic design work, but luckily he won't have to--yay! He will be starting his new job either on Friday or Monday.
Well, we don't have much else to report but hopefully we will have a few new adventures this summer.

Vote for me! (please)

Dearest blog followers -

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I entered the "Innovative Instruction Competition" at BYU and my team was chosen as one of the finalists. They are now holding a people's choice contest and the members of the team with the most votes all get an iPad. Anyone with a facebook account can vote for us by following this link http://poll.fm/f/1sn79 Vote for #5 "Persuasive Essays (Canar, Burr & Buchanan)" If you really love me, you can also spread the words to your friends! :) Thanks so much to everyone who helped; it really means so much to me!
P.S. The voting ends on Wednesday, April 14.

Sincerely -
Alison

Third Place

This is just a quick follow-up to my last post. My group and I were chosen as finalists in the Innovative Instruction Competition and had to/got to (depending on your perspective) present in front of the panel of judges with six other teams. It was pretty scary, but in the end we won 3rd place! Even though there were only about 14 teams total that entered, I feel so excited that our hard work paid off. They are also going to have a people's choice contest where people can vote for one of the finalists and the team with the most votes gets iPads. So... I'll let you all know when it starts so you can vote for us. :) I'm not sure if the voting is going to be open to anyone, just BYU students, or just students in the school of education. But once I find out I will definitely be publicizing it!

Innovative Instruction Competition

Much of my time this week has been consumed by working on an entry for this new competition at BYU. This semester I am taking a class about teaching with technology, so I had to create a project anyway, but this added a little incentive: There is a $4,000 grand prize, and $2,000 and $1,000 prizes for runners-up. This week we put together our video pitch and we thought it would just take a few hours. Boy, were we wrong. It ended up taking us over 12 hours to film and edit our 3 and a half minute video! Anyway, technology is fun and interesting but it can definitely be time consuming! I don't know what our chances are in the competition because a lot of the teams came up with some great stuff. However, I learned a lot and I think our video turned out pretty sweet (even though I look like a weirdo in the clips of me talking--just ignore that!)

Making plans

Dear blogging world:

I definitely kept you in suspense with that last post, huh? Well, pretty much I have just been trying to keep my head above water this semester in school. Luckily, this is sort of my last semester. It is my last full-load-on-campus semester, anyway. I will probably need to wrap up a couple classes over the summer and then in the fall I will be spending my days at... (drumroll...) ...Mapleton Junior High, teaching seventh grade English. I am super excited. I am doing an internship, which is awesome for two reasons. Reason # 1: I don't have to do regular student teaching (hooray!!!!) Although I have had good experiences with my practicum teaching, it's just difficult to teach in someone else's classroom to someone else's students. Which brings me to Reason # 2: I finally get to have my own classroom. Throughout all of my education classes I have been really anxious to put everything into practice, design my own units, etc. For this first year there is a framework already set up, but I will be the one deciding how to tweak it. Anyway, this is very exciting for me. I asked my ninth grade brother for advice about teaching seventh grade and he told me, "Just remember that they're crazy and they're sevies." (Sevies is the junior high equivalent of squashmores, I'm pretty sure it's a new invention since when I was in junior high.) Anyway, from what I have seen so far, I think he is pretty much right. Luckily I like craziness so I think this next year will be a BLAST!

In other news, Michael just got back from a week in New York City. He went with the other Graphic Design BFA students to see how the business is in NYC. It is a little bit funny because before the trip he was 99% sure he wanted to find a job in NYC after he graduates, but now he is having second thoughts. He decided that the simple life is not so bad after all! Still, he had a good time and it is definitely still a possibility for us sometime in the future.... we are just really not sure right now. But, I am excited to at least have this next year planned (finally.) After that, who knows!

I'm back!

I have been inspired to update my blog, but the only problem is I don't know what to say. I think blogging is usually more effective when there is something exciting or humorous to share with the world. All I've got right now is that if you haven't seen this video yet, you should definitely check it out:



More to come later... this is just a little teaser to foreshadow my return to the blogging world!