Are you Spring Bored? Spring Scared? Spring Exhausted?

If you have been told you are going to use SpringBoard as your English Language Arts curriculum, you probably have a plethora of emotions racing through you: curiosity, excitement, anger, frustration, confusion, hope, doubt, and maybe even just apathy... "tell me what you want me to do, and I'll do it."

I am in my second year using SpringBoard as my curriculum and I felt all of those things last year, still have flurries of them this year, but overall feel like I have become a MUCH BETTER teacher because of this curriculum.

My counterparts at school have a little less enthusiasm over it and miss their own lessons (from the time known as "Before SpringBoard") more than I do, and frankly, I think it must mean they were better teachers than I was pre-SpringBoard.

I wanted to start a blog to help inspire those of you who have been "voluntold" that on top of all the other NEW things you must learn (technology, common core, best practices, etc.) that you will be implementing this new curriculum.

First of all, please let me dispel the the belief that this is a "canned curriculum" - if your are  GOOD TEACHER (and the fact that you are reading this, tells me you are) - you will quickly learn that it is NOT a canned curriculum.  And, if I'm being honest, I was sorta hopin it would be!  I guess if you want to risk looking like you clearly don't know what you are doing, you can show up and teach from the teacher's guide while the students follow along in their nice, ready-made consumable workbooks.  But I learned within the first week, that was not going to work for me.

So this blog will include my tips and advice on how to make SpringBoard something that your students will LOVE (because it is really good stuff!), something you will feel proud and confident to teach, and how to get the best results using it.

I have a board on Pinterest that shows several of the PowerPoints I created to supplement each SpringBoard lesson I teach.

Please feel good about using SpringBoard!  I promise you can love it and get your enthusiasm back!  Hang in there and please follow my blog.  I will post classroom pictures and student exemplars for projects as well. 

You can also follow me on Twitter @ClarkUCLA for my daily Dictionary Word of the Day if you are interested in SAT Vocabulary prep for your students.