52 days and counting....

Let's just skip over the part where I give all my excuses for not blogging lately, shall we? ;)

52 days until I have my master's degree! I just counted them and, while it actually sounds like a rather large number, I can totally see the light at the end of my tunnel. In fact, I feel like I'm aboard a freight train traveling at startling speeds through that tunnel because there's so much to do!

I feel rather liberated from homework since my winter intersession class finally wrapped up in early February. It was rather time consuming work (writing curriculum plans and creating a lot of lessons), but I was able to "kill two birds with one stone" and use some of those lessons for my practicum hours. Speaking of which, practicum has kept me pretty busy. I started a pretty intense collaboration project with our 5th grade Social Studies class, but due to many uncontrollable events (snow days, state testing days, etc.) we still haven't finished it. I was feeling like the project should be on the Fail Blog so I decided to start up another one! So now, I am helping first graders write and illustrate stories for a young author's contest while trying to get the 5th grade project done. I think one of the main lessons I have learned in my practicum hours is "it will always take longer than you think" and/or, "there are never enough hours in a day." Of course, what mom doesn't already know the latter?

In addition to my collaboration projects, my regular job (library aide), and my homework (from my "Techniques of Research" class--ugh.), I also have been trying to put together my portfolio. Right now I am thanking the heavens that one of the teachers during summer school had us set up the "skeleton" of our online portfolio using Google sites. Now, all I have to do is plus in the artifacts and reflections. I'm sure I have some "spiffing up" to do, but the biggest chunk of work is already out of the way, and for that I am very thankful.

So....we're all caught up for now. I promise to do better...especially since there's only 52 days and counting before I leave the title of "University Mama" behind!