Happy New Year!

Grade 1, 2, and 3 students at the building site, co-constructing!

Welcome back to school, everyone.  I hope you all had a wonderful summer.  I enjoyed my summer immensely.  I loved the sunshine.  I got out running in the trails almost every day, I read about thirty murder mysteries, I swam in the ocean and the lakes, I visited the Sunshine Coast, I hung out in Vancouver, I went to Bard on the Beach, and spent a lot of time with my son and daughter, my parents, and my new baby niece, Annabel Violet!  A highlight for me was running the Squamish 50 Miler in August:  15 hours and 41 minutes of pure running enjoyment!

But I missed your children!

Back-to-school time reminds me why I love this profession of teaching and learning.  It is the children's curiosity, their enthusiasm, the energy they have, and their acceptance of each other, quirks and all, that feeds my passion.  Now that I think of it, the above sentence describes the adults in the building, too!

The "New Year" also inspires us to set goals for the next ten months.  I try to set SMART goals:  specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely.  And I encourage students to set SMART goals, too.  Not like, "I want to get straight A's," but more like, "I want to learn all of my timestables by Christmas," or "I want to manage my time on my projects and finish them by the due dates."  So my goals for this year include:

• to learn all new students' names by Christmas
• to get into all classrooms and teach, and release teachers to collaborate
• to talk to my staff every month about how to make learning as engaging for all students as possible

And I'd like to have fun, while doing that!  Learning should be fun, not all the time, but most of the time!  Just like running a marathon:  it can be painful at times, but well worth the outcome and sense of accomplishment.

Have a great 2013 - 2014!