As I say, or even think this, I am knocking on our hand-me-down, fake-wood IKEA desk, but this year is off to a roaring start. Today was my second full day of school with the children (all half days last week) and it has been great. Our Internet hasn't been working at school, so I can't attach any of my cool new lessons and such, but I'll share a few.

Part of our new charter school model is math workshop, which is great. We have 90 minutes of math each day, and the first forty-five are spent reviewing (and relearning) basic skills like adding, subtracting, and identifying even and odd numbers (today's topic). Then, though, in the second 45 minutes, the fun begins. The children are broken into mixed-ability groups (the same ones each day) and given a multi-step problem. Yesterday, they had to figure out how many M & Ms they would have after a week if they got one the first day, two the second day, etc. The trickiest part of the workshop is getting the kids to write about their answers rather than just putting down a number. Their answers have to include four things: a correct answer, a step-by-step explanation of how they solved the problem, pictures or equations and an interpretation of the answer (i.e. Mrs. Runge got 127 M&Ms for her birthday). Yesterday was our first math workshop and they did fairly well, but today some of them really rocked out. It makes me look forward to continuing with this group as the year goes on.

Whew. I am seriously tired and it's only nine-thirty. Not surprising that newly married + working at least 10 hours a day = exhaustion. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.