why I know I will be a teacher blogger again...one day

Teachers are busy people.  I will argue until the end of time that we are some of the hardest working people on the planet.  I can't tell you how many dedicated teachers I am lucky enough to know that understand that your "teacher brain" never stops.  Waking up in the middle of the night with a new idea for the classroom is something that really does happen.  However, being so busy also means we don't always have time to get out into other classrooms.  Wouldn't it be awesome to have time to really see into other classrooms?  Well, teacher blogging is one way that us busy teachers do just this.  And even though I do not have the time it takes to be a dedicated teacher, mom, and teacher blogger, I do need to share one thing, something that made me realize that it will be my goal to get back on this space more in the near future. 

I was looking through the stats on this blog and realized I was getting insane traffic from a site I did not recognize.  So I decided to click on over to see what it was, and to my surprise, I got to see this...

Yep, that is my Martin Luther King Jr. project from my 5th grade classroom three years ago.  This continues to be my biggest "pinned" classroom art project, and getting to see it as the inspiration for a Bulgarian teacher was awesome.  The blog is Moments in the Classroom by Antoinette Milanova and she used my project as the inspiration to create a similar project for a Bulgarian revolutionist, Levski.

I love knowing that something that I created with my students and enjoyed inside the walls of my little classroom have now spread to students across the planet.  On a funny side note, I decided to take a break from my history pacing this year and enjoy this project with my current 6th grade students.  The only problem was I forgot that I shared this project with my great friend who I co-wrote my thesis with.  That wouldn't normally be an issue, except I moved into a position this year where her 5th grade students from a different school fed into the IBMY programme at the middle school I work at.  So I was all excited to share this project with my students, only for many of them to kindly raise their hand with the phrase no teacher wants to hear, "um, Mrs. Lewis, we did this project last year".  At first, I'm thinking "HOW?", this was something I created out of thin air, it isn't from any teaching manual.  And then it hit me, oh geez, I shared it with my friends, never thinking I would get their students the next year.  Oh well, my kids were great sports about it and made their Martin again, and thankfully I had decided to change the written piece, or we would have really been in trouble.  

With that being said, my goal this week will be to take some pictures of our Martins this year, and share the updated written piece [that really knocked my socks off].  

See Antoinette's blog in it's untranslated version here - and thank you Antoinette for loving my project enough to bring it into your own classroom!