Wildlife and Work

Today as usual, I stopped and got my mail and then drove very, VERY slowly up my long, LONG driveway and read my mail while going 5mph-ish.  So you can imagine my surprise when I looked up from scanning my new Clean Eating magazine to see a little buck staring at me through my driver's side window.  I screamed.  He looked like he screamed and then he ran away.  I will most likely pay more attention when putting up my driveway in the future to spare the poor wildlife from having heart attacks and seeing their life flash before their eyes. 

On another note.  I asked my friend and co-worker Michelle for help teaching the social skill of conversational turn-taking and balance to my group of high school students. Specifically a visual to keep from having what we affectionately call "vomit mouth" or "diarrhea mouth".  A "vomit/diarrhea mouth" would be seen in the student who had a hard time condensing information into easily mentally digestible segments and not monopolizing the conversation (being a 'One-sided Sid' as they say in the Superflex Curriculum by Michelle Garcia Winner).    She came up with a genius idea for using balls of yarn.  Each student receives a different color of yarn.  The yarn is placed in a card board box with small holes cut out of one side, large enough for the yarn to slide through.  On the outside of the box I put a cartoon picture of people dancing with yarn under a giant red circle with slash through it (NO symbol) and wrote in big red letters "NO SPINNING YARNS". (Doesn't hurt to work on figurative language at the same time as social skills.)  The teacher then slowly pulls on the strings of yarn, lengthening them in correlation with the length of the student's verbal comments.  For example.  If a student who is practicing Small Talk initiates a conversation with "How was your weekend?"  Their piece of yarn is pulled about 1/4 of an inch to 1/2 an inch out of the box.  If the student initiates a conversation with "I stayed home this weekend and read my book. I am reading the 4th Chronicles of Narnia book and have almost finished it.  I love reading the Chronicles of Narnia book.  My favorite one is the one with the talking horse and the boy but I can't remember exactly what the title is right now.  It's such a good book though and I love the part where..."  you get the idea.  In this situation the piece of yarn gets pulled out slowly until the student stops talking - possibly up to 4-5 inches.   This was a great visual for the students.  My students who have the highest tendencies to "vomit" information were very aware of the length of their utterance throughout the session.  I did allow for about 5 minutes of "vomit" time at the end of the session where everyone could vent all their pent up stories and details at the same time to each other.  Worked great and will definitely keep using in the future. 

And finally. . .although she has a perfectly functional dog bed on the floor, Princess Nadia tries SO HARD to blend into the bedding so I won't make her move. Unfortunately for her she doesn't realize that she stretches almost the whole length and width of my bed so she's not hard to notice.  A for effort but Fails every time.