Saturday, March 21, 2009

A Bit of My Crazy Life . . .

Ok, so I randomly decided to update you on my life. Now, as of right now, "you" (as far as I know) is Camille and Cody. So I hope you wonderful people enjoy this! If anyone else happens to read this, then I hope you enjoy it as well!

Life in Provo is pretty crazy, so back over Valentine's/President's Day weekend I took a getaway trip up north to Logan. I was fun to be able to spend a couple nights at Merica's apartment, hang out with Kameron and catch up with my B.E.S.T. :). I have the greatest friends!

Camille and I enjoyed the chance to talk and Cody was nice enough to allow us to reminisce on the countless sleepovers that we had growing up. I am so lucky to have such a wonderful best friend and sister! I'm so glad that she married Cody (he makes a great best friend/brother-in-law) and I am so excited for the arrival of Baby Cutler in October! (On a side note -- my brother and sister-in-law are expecting in August, so I get "2" neices/nephews this year! Yay!)


After the weekend, it was back to the real world -- lesson planning, teacher work sample, and my car in the shop. I did finally get my car back the last week of February after having driven my Grandma's car for over three weeks. (Yay!) While I love having the Volvo to drive around P-town, it will be nice to get a new car this summer. Hopefully I'll end up with something a little more reliable ;)

The rest of the craziness deals with the fact that I'm GRADUATING in a month. I love teaching! But working full time (student teaching hours are the same as those of a contract teacher) while still living the college life is a bit exhausting. Correction: it's a lot exhausting. My TEACHER WORK SAMPLE was due at 8:00am (at the school I'm teaching at in West Jordan) on February 25th. I finished it at 6:00am that morning. For those of you who don't know what a teacher work sample is, it's an intensive planning, execution and analysis of an academic unit. Let's just say that it's a good thing I only had 17 students' work to analyze and not the 29 that I have in my class now. Forty pages. Yeah. I'm happy to say that I found out on Friday that I passed it! TWS is now a thing of the pass and I will officially be able to graduate with my teaching licence on April 24th! At that point, hopefully I'll finally have the chance to catch up on sleep! (Gone from 7-5 everyday including 1.5-2 hours of driving and being on my feel all day is nuts. Good thing I love those kids!)

Here are pictures of the wonderful students I've taught. They are the greatest!

Mrs. Burch's 3rd grade class at Sharon Elementary
Winter 2008 -- 4 weeks


Miss Bybee's 4th grade class at Lindon Elementary
Fall 2008 -- 4 weeks


Mrs. Rosskopf's 2nd grade class at Midvale Elementary
1st Block Winter 2009 -- 7 weeks


Mrs. Bodtcher's 5th grade class at Riverside Elementary
2nd Block Winter 2009 -- 7 weeks



Oh, and just to give you an idea of some of the things I've done, at Midvale (with my 2nd graders and a class of 1st graders combined) I read the book THE RAINBOW FISH about the little fish who has beautiful, shiney rainbow scales which he gives away to be a good friend then we talked about what they could do to be a good friend and each student wrote/drew how to be a good friend on a 4.5 diameter circle of bright paper. These friendship scales I then put on a poster I made as the fish's scales. Here's the end result! (and yes, I drew it!)
Even with all the craziness, I still manage to have a good time. Two weekends ago I had a night out with Kelsey and Ashley. We went to the mall and tried on some crazy Chucks! Kelsey's were clear, Ashley's were knee-high, and mine were covered in glitter. I'm not going to lie, there was a part of us that wanted to buy them! We also had an ugly outfit photo shoot at Sears. Yeah. On Saturday I went to the final BYU Men's Basketball game then had a reunion with my Sophomore roommates. Oh -- and Kelsey and I opened the freezer to find the bottle of sparkling cider we'd put in the night before and forgotten about!

Last weekend we went to Kelsey's uncle's cabin for the night -- so much fun! We stopped at Smiths on the way up (in Heber) and the shorter roommates took a turn on the mini merry-go-round! Ash is my favorite -- haha! :)

I also got to go to AIDA at good ol' Viewmont High School last Saturday. Can I just say that my Alma Mater is amazing? Wow. It definitely made me want to go back and do another show. Check out some of the pictures (my friend was the photographer) from it HERE.

This weekend was another roommate reunion -- with the originals! I love my freshman roommates! It's crazy to see how much our lives have changed over the past coming-up-on-four years! It was great to catch up with them and see how close we still are. We were even able to grab Megan for a bit -- that old married woman ;). We missed Alyse though! (She's serving an LDS mission in Belo Horizonte East, Brazil)

Life is grand -- ain't it? :)

4 comments:

Cody and Camille said...

This was a GREAT update! I loved every last word. It was great having you with us last month! Thanks for staying an extra day. We were in Indianapolis the week of the musical and unfortunately missed it! It looks sweet though. You are one BUSY girl. Good luck this last month until graduation. I CAN'T WAIT TO BE DONE!:)

She Loves To Make said...

Congratulations on GRADUATING! That is so great! You'll be such a wonderful teacher. I'm so jealous you got to go to Aida...I'm excited to look at the pictures!

audrey said...

I totally read your blog too! Congrats Jess! You're almost done! Didn't it fly by? Maybe it doesn't feel like it right now, haha. But you have so many exciting things coming up! And I definitely think you guys should have bought those shoes...:)

Devin and Kati said...

you have a blog?? it was so good to hear all the stuff you've been doing! Congratulations Jess!! You're almost there!