#NCCATNews: Learning to Survive and Thrive Day .5 and 2!

Heyyyy!

Since ISTE, I've been on an interview committee, ran a lot, celebrated the Fourth of July, got told to run elsewhere by some people on a golf course (whatevs... I can get hit by a golf ball or a truck, I'm choosing golf ball...), and SLEPT! And now, after a RIDICULOUS day of travelling, I'm at NCCAT's Ocracoke Campus for Success from the Start: How to Survive and Thrive your First Three Years in the Classroom workshop with Deb Teitelbaum (@DebTeitelbaum) and a bunch of awesome NC teachers.

Someone stole some ice cream...

Sketchy grocery that took 10
 hours to find

For the first time ever, I (with two of my colleagues) was an hour early to a thing (our ferry to Ocracoke), however, the ferry was broken, so we had 3.5 hours to explore the bustling metropolis of Swan Quarter, NC and then a 2.5 hour ferry ride to the island. We were very late to the seminar, but jumped right in to some powerful carousel discussions on socioeconomics and the classroom - with an emphasis on working with students from poverty.

Is this bus floating?? WHAT?

FERRY! FINALLY!

Feather game (I really want a student
to say, "Ms. Nickel, I'm oxygenating.")

Today, I got up and ran to the beach and then walked with some other teachers. We spent the day learning about classroom discipline, effective procedures and transitions, communicating with parents, primacy and recency, kinesthetic learning activities, and "brain break" activities. My favorite mini-take aways were blowing feathers in the air to get oxygen to your brain and a twister/sorting game that I'd use in Earth and Envi Sci to show processes. We also played tag with word parts that rhymed (ex. Or). I was terrible at it because I thought this picture was cereal which didn't rhyme with anything but...because it was a picture of "pour"...

Rhyming, dizzy, spinny tag...

We are going to have time to set goals for our classroom and work on them, but I'm totally all over the place about what I want to work on:

Envelope for sorting (#marzanoshighyield)
And! My improved INB.

• Work on gamifying a UbD unit for differentiation
• Scripting transitions
• Scripting what 100% compliance will look like in my classroom

 Overall reflection:

• NCCAT is AMAZING. I fully plan on transporting ALL of LEC here. And getting married here. 
• I will cry if anyone stops funding NCCAT.
• I will buy ALL the NCCAT stuff.
• Ocracoke is beautiful.
• I have never felt so pampered EVER. THANK YOU NCCAT!

NCCAT china and GREAT food!