Yesterday was one of those days!

                               Today I join my fellow bloggers in "serving up a slice" 

to the Tuesday Slice of Life sponsored by Two Writing Teachers.

A long time ago in a meeting I attended, my colleague inquired about a date for a January field trip for our team.  We agreed to the last week in January.  For some reason, our field trip ended up being scheduled for Monday.  Who schedules field trips on Mondays?  My teaching partner, apparently!  It wasn't until last week that I connected the dots and realized that Monday, January 27th, the day the Newbery Awards would be announced, was also the day of our field trip.

Since the ALA midwinter meeting was on the east coast, and we're on the west coast, that meant I got up Monday morning at 4:45 a.m. to listen to the live webcast.  My cat was thrilled that I was actually sitting in a chair so early in the morning.   I took careful notes so I could share the results with both blocks of my students in a quick meeting from 8:30-9:00 before our scheduled 9:15 departure for the field trip.  I was excited to see that the webcast would be available at 11:00 Eastern time, 8:00 Pacific time.  That meant I could fast forward to the Bink and Gollie clip and watch the webcast to the end with my students in the 30 minute time slot available to us.

When I arrived at school, I took my computer to the library, hooked it up to the document camera, and hoped that the stars would align so the webcast would arrive on time.  I took our Mock Newbery books to the library along with the other Newbery possibilities that I've been sharing with my students.  As the winners were announced, I would move them to a special display table.

In between setting up books,  picking up meds, securing a bin for sack lunches, and packing my backpack for the field trip, my colleague popped in and asked if I had picked up the registration form from her room that she had been filling out for the field trip.  After a quick look at my desk, I replied that I hadn't picked it up, but I would help her look for it. You see, I am the queen of lost items and so I have great compassion when others end up in the boat with me.  Unfortunately, we didn't find it before the bell rang at 8:20.  I dashed off to let my students in the classroom and began frantically searching for my list of award winners that I had compiled that morning.

When I didn't find it, I decided that I must have left it in the library when I set up the book display.  I walked my students to the library and found that my students from the other block had already arrived.  Unfortunately, my list of winners wasn't in the library.  A quick look at the computer screen revealed that the promised archived webcast still wasn't available increasing my need for that list of winners.  I left our library clerk with 60 sixth graders, sprinted back to the classroom and found the page.  Thank goodness!

Unfortunately, in another meeting a long time ago, I had committed to reporting to our PAC (Parent Advisory Council) about our Mock Newbery project.  I did realize at the time that the meeting was the day the Newbery awards would be announced.  I thought it would be fun to share the Mock Newbery project with our parent community on the same day that the Newbery award was announced.  Unfortunately, I didn't know that we would have a field trip on the same day.

Fortunately, it was a great field trip!  We arrived back on campus for some of my 6th period planning time.  I managed to snag some former students to help me put up paper for our upcoming "Share the Newbery Love" bulletin board.  Unfortunately, I forgotten all about the PAC committee meeting after school and that I had planned to spend 6th period collecting my thoughts for the presentation.  Fortunately, our co-principal found me to sadly report that the meeting was cancelled because too many of the parents on the committee were unavailable.  He was a bit surprised at my glee over the meeting cancellation!

And I wish that I could report that was the end of my crazy day.  But unfortunately, a student arrived at my door after school asking about her lunch bag from the blue bin.  I checked in with the two teachers I had borrowed bins from (one bin was not big enough), and discovered that only one of those bins had made it back to school.  My colleague had phoned me at the Science Center to say that she had picked up my bin, not knowing that I ended up with two bins.  Fortunately, when I called the Science Center, they found the bin.  And that was the end of my rather exhausting, but extremely active Monday.  Fortunately, I can report that I managed to accrue more than 12,000 steps on my Fitbit, so I didn't need to add walking to the end of my day!