Copada Amor

Copada. I love this tangle! It is offered to us by Margaret Bremner, CZT—one of my Zentangle heroes! Her Enthusiastic Artist blog (click on the title to connect to the home page) is a treasure trove of design and inspiration...she is one of the first of a growing number of "Canadian Wonders of the Zentangle World"  (CWZW), along with Laura Harms, the Diva who provides the weekly challenges that you see me respond to in many of my blog posts. So this week their powers are combined in the UMT (Use My Tangle!) monthly challenge (Click here to connect to Weekly Challenge #85: UMT v. VIII: Copada).

Copada. Margaret chose this cool tangle name from a collected list of random, computer-generated nonsensical words--you know, "those strange 'words' that proved I wasn't a robot, before the 'words' became seriously peculiar," as she put it.

So here's my first-in-a-long-while entry to the Diva's Weekly Challenge....

So I should probably address why I haven't posted anything since mid-July. For those of you who are not teachers who started back to work in early August.

I am one of those teachers. After having a lovely summer off, I officially started the new school year back in early August, though my preparations began even before that. And the start of the new year is always intense...both as a teacher and a mom. My C-gal started high school this year (really?! yes. really.) My son "Poseidon" (pictured in this post) is in his middle year of middle school. So back-to-school means lots of exhausting changes to our family schedule. But it's all good! The year is off to a great start, and frankly, it is indeed nice to be back in the classroom teaching again. I am fortunate to have one of the best jobs in education today: I teach art to students ranging from Kindergarten to 5th grade. It has its challenges, of course, but I can't imagine a job I'd rather have. Those kids bring such smiles to my face, such joy to my heart! And I work with an amazing range of colleagues. I am truly blessed by my job as well as my family.

This past week I began with the the beginning Zentangle lesson for a few of my 5th grade classes. YAY! I can't wait to teach more. (I have a total of four 5th-grade classes, but only get to see two or three of them a week due to the funky Encore class schedule combined with my job-share arrangement.) But before I introduced Zentangle to those 5th grade classes, I introduced it to about 100 art teachers in my district at a county-wide art teacher meeting. I couldn't give them a full intro lesson, as I only had 30 minutes, but fortunately I will have more opportunities to share Zentangle with my art education peeps throughout the school year. My next opportunity with them will be September 21st. I'll get to teach this session in my own classroom! No, I can't fit 100+ in there all at the same time, but I'll be teaching them in smaller groups, about 25 at a time...similar to my usual class sizes. Should be fun!

I'd better get going--time is short these days, but I'll try not to neglect my blog for weeks on end anymore! I can't tell you how many times I wrote posts in my head--posts that simply never made it to the keyboard to end up in the blogosphere.

I'd be thrilled to get some comments...about my Copada tile, about how much you've missed me, about how you wish you could be one of my art students, etc. ;-) Really, it's just nice to read that someone notices what I do and has a reaction to it, whether it's a compliment or a question or a suggestion.