Lessons With Dad

When I started to wake up it took a while, to fully become conscious until the medication wore off. When I tried to talk I quickly realized it took a lot of energy and I could not talk normally. I would later find out when they went to intubate me, my jaw locked up and they had to force the breathing tube down my throat. In doing so they scratched my vocal cords. For the next three months, when I would talk, it took a lot of energy and my voice was hoarse. When it finally set in and I realize where I was, my first question was, “Can we go back up north tonight?” Sarah chuckled a little and asked me if I had any idea what day it was. Hmm I went to sleep on Friday, “Saturday” I answered. She proceeded to tell me it was Wednesday! Sh&*$ Do I still have a job?” Being a teacher, not calling in sick and not having sub plans prepared is highly frowned upon! It turned out that Sarah got in touch with a coworker of mine and he informed my principal of what was going on. Thank goodness!

As the night drew to an end and the sun started to rise, unfortunately my family and I would not do the same. My mom was eagerly waiting for her morning coffee partner. 6 o’clock came and went. 7 o’clock, 8 o’clock and finally 9 o’clock. I am usually an early riser, so my mom started to get worried. She walked over to our trailer to make sure things were OK. As she approached the trailer she noticed it was still locked up from the night before. She knocked on the door. Hmm dogs did not even bark, that’s unusual! For some reason, she just so happen to have a key to our trailer in her hand. She unlocked the patio door and opened it up. Everyone was still sleeping! Apparently, I was snoring, which I never do! She opened up and the dog’s cage. They staggered out and were barely able to walk. She immediately knew something was not right! As she approached the bed to check on us, she noticed I was foaming  at the mouth. My mom started to swipe it away with her fingers. Sarah was unresp

It was three year ago today that I had my most terrifying life experience. The day started out like any other day. I woke up, educated the youth of America, and scurried home quickly to beat the weekend traffic to head up north. We had a seasonal trailer in Sturgeon Bay, which we had not been up there since last October. My wife (Sarah) and I were excited to take our son (Carter) camping for the first time that year. He was only 10 months old. After making the exciting three-hour drive up north, with a 10 month old, we needed to get all of our stuff unpacked and organized. I figured we had all weekend to work on things around the trailer, so I wasn’t going to go to crazy that first night. I turned on the water, water heater, electricity, carried the dogs cage in and of course made sure the T.V. worked. My parents and brother had campers right next to ours. The Friday night ritual was once everyone got up north, got unpacked, we would make frozen pizzas, have a few drinks and si

  After a few weeks, and a mouse incident behind us, I was finally starting to settle in as a 2nd grade teacher. It was not my ideal age, but it was a job. Having just finished my student teaching, a job was exactly what I needed. One morning when I arrived at school I noticed there were a bunch of unfamiliar faces walking into the building. I asked a co-worker where everyone was today? She informed me they had a curriculum meeting up at the district office and we may even be short subs today. If that was the case we would need to fill in places throughout the day. Well, adapting, filling and subbing has what I have been doing best the last few weeks and today didn’t seem to be any different from any other day. So on I went to get my day started.      As the day went on and my class had sub after sub. I could start seeing the tide change throughout the day. I was a sub too, but I had already been there a few weeks and pretty much had the routine and expectations established. N

What System I use to Gamify my Elementary Classroom In episode 3 , I share what system I use and how I use it to run my year long gamified math class. If you enjoy Lessons With Dad please like, share, tweet, subscribe or whatever it is you do! Enjoy

The Raging River Welcome to the second episode, " The Raging River! " In this episode, I take you through an end of the unit math review, which incorporated using families (groups) to defeat crossing the raging river. I used the river like a boss, in boss battles, and students had to defeat crossing the river successfully with their families. Enjoy

I am going to try something new! Yes, I know, I know. I am going to try something new again. I am going to add a Video Log A.K.A. a VLog to my website. In my first VLog I introduce myself and give background about the reason behind me starting my Blog/ VLog . I hope you like it and stay tuned for what's to come! If you like it please subscribe to my channel and never miss an episode! Enjoy!

I think the most fun I had when gamifying my year long math class was making the badges. After figuring out what System I was going to use and my Theme the next step is creating or finding Badges that correlate with the concepts expected for mastery. If you have not checked out my earlier blogs about "What System"  to choose or how to pick a "Theme" for your gamified classroom, please check them out. Once I settled on the Theme of my gamified class, I needed to incorporate some motivation for students. One of the easier motivational items you can include are badges. There are a couple of Badges I use to help motivate students in my game. In using the SBG ( Standards Based Grading ) spreadsheet there are Big Badges and there are Mini Badges. Mini Badges Mini Badges I use an SBG spreadsheet that I found and borrowed from Mr. Matera (covered in " What System .") He already had the spreadsheet all formatted and put together so all I needed to d

After refinishing our bed frame the other weekend, we were excited to move on to an old dresser we had. The dresser had just been sitting downstairs and really served no purpose. The only reason we still had it was because my wife kept telling me about how she wanted to refinish it and put it in our bedroom. A couple of weeks ago, we received an email from Ikea saying the dressers we had in our bedroom were being recalled. They were being recalled because of the potential hazard of them falling over on children. We decided to be reimburse for the dressers and this gave us the motivation we had been lacking to finally refinish the dresser. If we didn't refinish it now, we would have a stack of clothes on our bedroom floor until we did! I am a little to OCD for that to happen! Material: Screwdriver Sandpaper Rust-Oleum Chalk paint Rust-Oleum wax Paintbrush or Small Roller Rags or old T-shirt To Do: The first thing we did was take all of the drawers out of

Once I figured out what system I would use, the next step is to settle on a Theme. If you have not chosen a system yet, check out my earlier blog, " What System? " The Theme is a very important part of the gamification process because this is going to be the background or back story that your game follows. Theme can be one of the harder aspects to settle on because of its importance, but it can also be one of the most satisfying. Once you make a decisions on your Theme, other aspects start falling into place. What is Theme The Theme is the background story of what your game is going to be based on. It is the continually running story in the background of your gamified classroom that all the other aspects (badges, gold pieces, XP) are tied in to. Your Theme can change for each unit or it can be a year long Theme. How to choose a Theme Theme can be one of the harder mechanics of gamifying your classroom because of its importance. On the other hand, you may have part

Every year 4th graders take an exciting journey of traveling back in time! They travel back over a hundred years ago, when our little town became an incorporated village in Wisconsin. They get to experience what it was like to go to school in a one room schoolhouse and the responsibilities of students their age back in Pioneer Days! What is Pioneer Days Every year in March, 4th graders get to experience Pioneer days! This is the 39th year students will be participating in Pioneer Days. Each class will have two whole days of experiencing what it was like to be a student back in the "Pioneer Days." One of the coolest things of Pioneer Days is students dress in character. We work with our local historical society to set up times for students to go in and try on different outfits they would like to wear. If they would like to dress in character they are allowed to borrow an outfit at no cost to them. Activities at Pioneer School Day1 When students come in the mor

Ready for the ride! This year for Spring Break we thought it would be a good idea to strap down two toddlers in their car seats and drive to Florida! Yes! You heard right, we are going to TRY to drive to Florida with two toddlers. Now, before you laugh to hard, let me explain a little. My parents are retired and spend most of the winter in Daytona Beach and my wife's brother lives in Miami. Hopefully you don't think I'm that crazy anymore. We are taking a family vacation to visit family. We decided to drive because Mara turns 2 the night we are leaving, so we would have to pay for 4 tickets. With it being Spring Break tickets are not cheap and we figured why pay for the ticket when she would probably spend most of the time on moms lap anyways. Right now we are in the process of trying to get things organized and planned out for the kids. We have been doing research about things to occupy kids on long car rides. I thought, what a better place then to put it on the b

My wife works 12 hour nights, as a nurse at a local hospital. Before you start feeling bad for her, remember I am teacher who gets summers off and she still works less than I do, while making a decent amount more. She just came home from working a 12 hours shift and was headed to bed. I told her she should sleep on a towel in case something were to happen while she was sleeping. She was 39 weeks along and we were anxiously awaiting our sons arrival. While she was sleeping I decided I needed to get some yard work done. I got the lawn mower out of our shed and started to cut our grass. I hooked up my Iphone to Pandora and was all set to jam out while getting some work done. I made my first row around our entire yard, when I saw some movements out of the corner of my eye. I looked up towards the back of our house and there was my wife standing on our patio with a towel between her legs. I didn’t take my headphones off and tried to ask her what was going on? She pointed to her stoma