Rainy Day Fun

I had lunch on Friday at my old school with my teacher friends and principal. It was great to see them again and to catch up. It seems that my district is having major cutbacks and they are doing away with 20:1 ( 20 students to 1 teacher in grades 1-3), laying off many teachers and possibly doing away with our schools program which is the TLC model ( teaming for the learning of all children). I admit the TLC model does have its flaws but overall I think it is a great program and it allows almost all children to get their needs met ( hence the flaws). It allowed for children to be in homogeneous groupings for Math and Reading and heterogeneous groupings for the remainder of the day. All ( and I mean all) special ed. students were fully included during the entire day.We constantly assessed kids and grouped them according to the assessments. This way kids were able to always be taught at their instructional level and were never "stuck" in one group. It took a lot of teamwork and communication between teachers, but this is one of the things I loved about my school. As one of the special ed teachers on campus it was part of my job to help coordinate the assessments and groupings. I got a chance to work with just about every teacher in our school. It was a pretty easy job the first year the school was open but became more difficult as our numbers kept doubling. Anyway, it was great to see everyone, show off Aidan, and have some adult conversation. I hate that the morale is so low there right now and happy that I am at home with Aidan.

It has been raining off and on this weekend and Clinton is in San Diego teaching. Aidan and I have been hanging around the house playing and I have been watching movies. I bought this basketball goal for Aidan at Target the other day. It has crowds cheering and saying "YEEAHH" when you pull down on the net. Aidan has been having a great time playing with it. His dad can't wait until he gets bigger so he can teach him to play basketball for real, but I think this is a good start!

"Mama, you know I got skillz!"

I love how he is totally cracking up in this picture.

"Are you lookin at me?"

"Hey, don't I know you?"