Limbo

“Limbo” is an accurate summary of my last few months. We started the official house hunt in mid-March, and after one failed house closing, one lost offer, and now an offer on a third we’re waiting on pins and needles. We’ve tried for a lake house with 2 acres, a hidden country property on ten acres with plenty of moles and farm cats to go around, and now a 1/4 acre house only a few houses away from our rental with a lovely yard for a suburban garden and plenty of space for some chickens.

We’ve spent the last two months, and even the months before that, being entirely unsure of our summer plans. We agonized all Christmas over how much to plant this year – do we risk losing a garden when we move, or just plant them all in planters (a more expensive and far less sustainable method for us)? The difficulty and frustration we had over the home meant so much more time finding comforts to solve our unhappiness rather than actually keeping up the garden and seedlings (read: we watched too much Netflix rather than having the discussions we needed to about what to do with the seedlings and start a fertilizing schedule). The stress sucks. But hey, if you’ve bought a house, then you know my pain. So what to do? Succumb to the stress and barely do house chores because you might be moving, so it can wait until a deep clean during the move? (So the spiders start building bigger webs in my basement…) Start thinking about moving boxes but get so depressed after perusing Realtor.com for 15 minutes and find nothing even close to being worth it? (Those boxes are empty…)

Being in limbo is a horrible feeling. Every decision about my home and my finances (can I buy a new work shirt this week for my new summer restaurant job, or should I save it for a new security system potentially in my future?) are tied to this homestead dream. Sometimes – no, most of the time – chasing this dream feels like dating as a teenager all over again – dragged around in the misery of puppy love, flirtations, the crushing denial of being distant and cool, flightiness, and unplanned, spontaneous meetings. So tonight, contemplating what to do if yet another house lets us down, I’ve decided to make a few decisions that keep my mind more rooted and to lower my anxiety throughout this process.

First, I’m going to make sure that I’m maintaining my house as best as I can despite the potential moving process. I have patches of spackling all around the house – time to actually touch up with paint and move on. The kitchen and bathroom deep cleaning? Still need to regularly happen. My cobweb-infested basement? Yup, time to unleash the vacuum. For me, a clean home keeps a clean mind – when we have gone to see homes and they are messy and cluttered, I totally feel the resulting anxiety from viewing cramped and unkempt spaces. Why should I continue to invite anxiety into my safe space at home simply by neglecting my work?

Secondly, time to tackle the projects I’ve been putting off that don’t depend on a house structure. Our bar cabinet has crooked hinges on one side, I have a pile of teacher to-do’s regarding long-range planning and concept plans, and I haven’t had a sewing project in ages. I have a stack of coupons ready for fabric purchases – time to attack Pinterest! We’ve been half-trying to introduce our cats to my mother-in-law’s cat, and without much success – time to hunker down and start positive associations and psychology work.

Third, I want to use the time I have to work on building my creativity and options for stress outlets. I’ve been meaning to write more on my blog, to start new sewing projects, and to find new ways to organize my small office creatively. Our library has a summer reading challenge and the reward is coupons for local businesses and a wealth of additional knowledge. My day times are now free for yoga, walks, or work in the backyard – or, better yet, time spent reading or sun-bathing in a new above-ground pool we splurged on this weekend from Target.

The point is that the house frustrations can’t be the reason for my summer grinding to a halt, my stress to be through the roof, or my home and possessions to be a jumbled mess. Life continues on, with or without a new 30-year loan, and it’s time to keep going along with it.

 

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Eco-Friendly Classroom Ideas

We’ve done so much in our home to be eco-friendly – we installed a bidet, use washcloths in our kitchen rather than paper towels, cut down on our mini fridges (sorry, hubby, the one in the basement for band practice had to go!), bought more natural products and invested in ones that have less packaging, bought more items in bulk, use handkerchiefs more than tissues (not as gross as you would think) – the list goes on. But I suddenly realized that my paper product – and plastic product – consumption at school was nothing like what I was attempting to do at home. My room was filled with plastic storage, hundreds of copies were made – and thrown away – each week, I had filing cabinets stuffed with papers I don’t use… the guilt set in. Every other part of my life was filled with trying to do the sustainable, green, and healthy thing, yet why couldn’t I do it at work?

A lot of it comes down to standards – it’s standard and okay to make copies every day, to use color ink on your bulletin boards, to have filing cabinets bursting with lesson plans, ideas, projects, student files, and more. But I want to challenge that standard.

Just because it’s always been done that way doesn’t make it right, or what YOU have to do.

This being said, we all have to approach our journey towards earth-happy practices in our own time and at our own pace and scope. If you don’t do these things in your room, that doesn’t make you a bad or evil person. If the progress you make today is to just be more aware of it when you walk into your classroom on Monday, then that’s progress that shouldn’t be ignored or belittled. If you are inspired to dump your filing cabinets in the recycling bins this summer and switch to Google Forms for tests and lesson plans, then all the power to you!

Here are some of my goals and accomplishments, so far, at achieving a more earth-thoughtful classroom:

1. Make fewer copies.

I have 420-some students, and that makes for a LOT of copies. And if we do a semi-school wide activity, like program evaluations or end of the year summaries, that means so much paper and ink consumption. And let’s be honest, where do those copies end up after they get used? While I’d love to think these worksheets get cherished, we all know they end up trashed at home.

Therefore, a lot of this comes down to a more critical examination of my lessons – do I need to have ten worksheets where my 3rd graders practiced writing sixteenth notes, or do I just need them to practice writing sixteenth notes? As much as I can, I’m going to make one set of 25 copies and place them in plastic sleeves for use with dry erase markers. The students still do the worksheet practice, but I don’t have 75 copies of these being made for 3 classes every year. Now, I have a clean, class set that gets filed every year.

I recently purchased these sheet protectors from Amazon – we used them for a write-the-room activity before break where my 2nd-5th graders had to find flashcards that a little leprechaun friend hid around the room. Each grade level practiced their own rhythm sets – but for my 300 students using this activity, I only had 25 copies made.

 

2. Reuse as much as possible.

When I make manipulatives, I try to make them sturdy and long-lasting to get as much out of them as possible. I believe firmly in the power of the laminator and the use of cardstock – the heavier paper and lamination helps turn my projects into long-lasting and strong work. Beat charts and card games that I printed and laminated my first month of teaching are still going strong three years in. Write-the-room cards, scavenger hunt pages, exit tickets, you name it – make one set, laminate, and reuse!

3. Plan smarter and slimmer.

There are some times in your career when scripting lessons is important – first year of teaching, observations, new lessons. But do you need to write your script out for every lesson every day? If you’re like me, you go through 7 lessons a day, 1-2 times a week. If I printed each lesson on it’s own piece of paper, that’s close to 420 pages per year. Let’s round that to 500, allowing for extra paper for your program prep. With 500 sheets of paper in a ream, that 6% of a tree. Multiply that over 5 years, and you’ve used 30% of a tree. Over a 25-year career? One and a half trees of paper. No, thank you!

I threw together a simpler lesson plan for myself with smaller boxes to abbreviate my lessons and had them printed so that 4 grade levels would be on one sheet – 2 on the front, 2 on the back. What used to take 7 pages of print now takes 1.5 – cutting my paper consumption down by nearly 80%. Teachers Pay Teachers has piles of lesson plan templates – go explore!

Alternatively, you could go all digital – I investigated the idea of an online lesson planning software or even just using Google Docs to type my lessons and transfer them to my iPad’s Google Drive. Explore, and see what’s best for you – I’m still a tactile person that wants to write my lessons by hand, so the smaller lesson plan is working best for me right now.

4. Go digital as often as possible.

In addition to the idea of digital lessons, what about switching your tests and quizzes to a digital version? If you’re not feeling super tech-savvy with using Google Forms to take musical tests with adding pictures of melodic or rhythmic patterns, you can at least start with a performance evaluation that is digital. I made this for my 1st graders, and I was shocked at how easy it was for them to sit down at one of my iPads and take it while we watched our video performance after the program. I set up my 5 classroom iPads at my desk and had five students at a time come over and take the test – they were done within 1-2 minutes and only had to type in their name. This eliminated 450-some performance evaluation copies each year – and each year I read through them and then trash them, so why continue to throw away resources when I can have all the responses digitized, interpreted, and stored on Google?

Visit Google forms to build and experiment, or click here to visit my 1st grade performance assessment.

5. Re-examine student portfolios.

When I first started teaching I wanted to keep track of everything my students did on paper in their very own folders. I had visions of beautiful, crips folders containing their work throughout the year that would awe and wow parents when it was sent home…ha. This dream instead resulted in bulging and overflowing crates of folders that we would forget to keep updated. I didn’t use worksheets as often as I thought I would, so our portfolios weren’t very impressive. So why do I still have them? There’s nothing wrong with sending any of their work immediately home or hanging it in the hallway to show off to their classmates, and it will make the few paper copies they will use that much more special knowing they will be featured.

6. Switch to all natural cleaners and get rid of hand sanitizer.

Not only does the antibacterial sanitizer not truly kill all the germs (why do doctors wash their hands rather than just use sanitizer spray?), they are very bad for the beneficial bacteria in your body. Your body needs certain kinds of bacteria to fight off the bad bacteria (illness, autoimmune diseases, cancer), and antibacterial products don’t discriminate. Encourage your students to wash their hands rather than just rub down with sanitizer.

7. PURGE the unnecessary.

I’ve done so much work to clean and purge every single year I’ve been teaching. Early on, I was making the mistake of printing everything I thought looked fun or interesting…only to have it stack up in my file cabinets. I spent some time during conferences going through and sorting my cabinets, pulling them apart and recycling everything I hadn’t touched in at least two years. While the damage has already been done by having printed the copies, I can start to eliminate the practice to print automatically and second-guess where and how I’m going to store the random worksheet or newest poster I found.

By taking time to purge your classroom of unnecessary supplies, broken instruments, old and outdated curriculum, resources that are falling apart, missing game pieces, broken CDs, and more, you can also start to take away the need to buy more plastic storage containers or sorting bins. Use only what you need – it declutters your classroom and your mind, keeps your dollars in your pocket, and reduces the amount of petroleum products that are living and breathing in your room. There’s nothing that says your desk can’t still be untidy time to time, but you’d be surprised at how calm you’ll feel knowing what’s truly inside your deepest cabinets and hiding under your shelves and knowing that those items are there for a reason and that they have a purpose.

Garden Journaling

Gardening can bring such joy and satisfaction in any scale, from a window sill of flowers to hundreds and hundreds of square feet of vegetables and legumes on a farm. The tricky part is how long gardeners go in between seeing their crops again – by the time I’ve harvested the last of my bell peppers in September and transferring seedlings to the garden in the following May, I’ve gone nearly eight months without active handling and care of the peppers. How often did I fertilize them last year? Which variety died in a surprise frost? What were last year’s growing patterns season changes? Or, for that matter, what if I wanted to resurrect a crop from several years ago – how do I keep track of when we planted and began to harvest?

Last year I created an excel file for the end of the season, and we did our best to sit down and try to remember when things sprouted, how many we planted, what varieties performed and how… What frustrated me was that I didn’t actively journal and keep track of our fertilizing patterns and season changes to know how everything performed and how early we saw harvests. However, I am too lazy to journal pages of detailed accounts of every day and it’s important to me to have a quick and easy reference point for last year’s accounts. This season, it was important to find something quick, convenient, and light.

My in-laws purchased this beautiful calendar for us for Christmas – it’s made by the Farmer’s Almanac company and is illustrated with beautiful plants and gardening tips, as well as the moon cycles. I decided to hang it on my fridge – and then I realized that my new journal was staring me in the face! Why not document – and even plan – our gardening work in a calendar that is always in arm’s reach and is easy to store for next year?

In February I sat down with our seed packets and counted out the number of weeks we wanted them to have inside under our growing light before transferring outside in the beginning of May (our last frost tends to hit mid-April). Counting back from our estimated transfer date, I wrote in when we should anticipate planting each of our plants – tomatoes and peppers early, followed by cucumbers and squash at the end of March to give everything a solid foundation. I also used this calendar to record how often I was fertilizing plants inside as well as outside – I try to keep a regular schedule with our feedings, but it’s hard to remember when we fertilize months apart!

 

 

It’s also important for us to note when there are big seasonal changes that might impact how things are progressing outside. We had a sudden snow mid-March after a bunch of the plants had begun to bud, including our potted blueberry, which made us nervous about their success. We have also seen record high temperatures and early warmth, which has sped up growth and blooming – it was only a week before our mid-April wedding that plants actually began to shift towards green last year, while this year our lilacs are already budding and the pear trees cloaked in white flowers.

 

I’m convinced that this calendar will be a great way to easily and quickly document yields, harvest times, season changes, transplant dates, and all within a slim and streamlined medium – not to mention the lovely illustrations.