Going to Hawaii…Virtually

So Squid, Wormy, and the Husband are all on spring break this week. I am not. Since this is an awfully long stretch of time for them to be left to their own devices, I have planned some virtual vacations for them. I am going to share them all with you in case you are in need of some resources to make it through a long break.

Today, we are traveling to Hawaii. My husband and I went in 2009, so we are more than happy to share our vacation photos with the girls. When we got up this morning, we put on our Hawaiian shirts, leis, and bright colors. This helped our mood since this was the view outside:

For breakfast, we had the ever-popular SPAM and Eggs. We went to the Spam museum in Minnesota last summer, so we have a case of the variety pack of Spam. What better time to bust that out than self-quarantine?!?

yum, yum

After we finished breakfast, my husband showed the girls our vacation pictures while I did some video conferencing. After that, it was time to enter the world of Virtual Touring. I had a 30 minute “Travel to Hawaii” video that the girls watched, and a video from a helicopter tour we took on Kauai. However, even if you are not owners of this awesomeness, we quickly moved on to more general resources you can access. We visited these two virtual tours of Volcanoes National Park in Hawaii:

https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2013/06/take-virtual-tour-hawaii-volcanoes-national-park-video23427 – this is a very cool video of images from the tops of the volcanoes set to some music that Wormy really got excited about. I think the movie was about 3 minutes.

https://artsandculture.withgoogle.com/en-us/national-parks-service/hawaii-volcanoes/nahuku-lava-tube-tour – This was a really neat virtual tour done by a Park Ranger of some of the features of the park. You can click and drag to change your view and click other features to get supplemental materials. We were watching on it from our living room tv while screen mirroring from my ipad. The only reason I mention this is because I was using Google Chrome, and the interactive components did not work until I switched to Safari. Be sure to try it out in a few different browsers if you have trouble. Our favorite part of this was the fly over of the volcano!

After this, we explored two free apps on our Apple TV. The Trip USA app was a favorite, as there was a special on the Spam Jam festival in Hawaii. We also watched a virtual tour of Pearl Harbor. The apps both contain short little videos of different parts of the island, the US, and the world. If Hawaii isn’t your chosen virtual destination, be sure to check out somewhere else!

Squid had gotten a Sea Monsters kit for Christmas a few years ago, and we just hadn’t gotten to growing the little guys yet, so we also started that. I’m scrared…very scared! Haha

Hope this doesn’t eat me in the middle of the night!

By this time, after all of the Virtual travels, we needed to get up and bounce around. It was time to learn to Hula. We watched this YouTube video to learn some basics. We were being a little goofy, as in one of the Apple TV programs we watched, they said the Hula actually began as a way for men to prepare themselves for battle. Squid and I kept joking about getting ready to attack…

We were pretty good at the Kaholo, but I still need help with my Kawelu!!!

Next up the girls had the option of watching “Lilo and Stitch” or “Moana.” The girls chose “Lilo and Stitch,” and I went back to work.

After the movie, we worked on learning some Hawaiian words, through the help of: https://www.trafalgar.com/real-word/hawaiian-words-and-phrases/ There are a few other websites that offer audio files of the pronunciations, but some of them had a big long list of words. We only wanted a few.

Finally, we ended with dinner. My husband made Kalua Pork while I was working. It’s the recipe from the local Hawaiian store in Wauwatosa – Ono Kine Grindz. Basically you take a pork roast, cover it in Hawaiian salt and Wright’s liquid smoke, wrap it in banana leaves and let it do it’s thing in the oven. I’m sure you could just make your favorite pork recipe if you were looking for a meal idea. We served it with canned pineapple chunks to get the Hawaiian feel. Before the girls could eat, we watched performances from a Hawaiian luau through this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4Z1pqts5N0&feature=youtu.be

During dinner we listened to music by Israel “IZ” Kamakawiwoʻole, as he is one of our favorite musicians.

It wasn’t quite the same as going to Hawaii, but I got more work done and the girls didn’t seem to get bored. 🙂

Lisa WernerLeave a comment

How to Have a Weekend In When You’re Used to Being on the Run!

Today was weird in that it was hard to make a ‘weekend’ happen when you’ve already been home all week. We obviously were taking a break from schoolwork, since it is a weekend. But how do you make it seem different when our weekends are usually so busy?

We normally have dance class on Saturday mornings, so I attempted to recreate that for my girls. Squid absolutely LOVES dance class, so much so that she says she wants to be a dance teacher when she grows up. She was getting a little teary-eyed thinking of not having class. I asked the girls to get into their tutus, and meet me in the living room. I had Squid lead us in work on the barre (aka the back of the couch!) and Wormy led the stretches (and boy, is she bendy!!!). Then we practiced their dance class recital songs through the YouTube videos that their teachers have uploaded. I even wore a tutu, which made them laugh.

In the afternoon, we set up a FaceTime with my brother and sister-in-law. We usually do Game Nights with them, and we tried to set up a virtual game afternoon. We had two different versions of Apples to Apples and played that for almost 2 hours. It worked out really well to have different versions, as we couldn’t end up playing duplicate cards then, though I am sure that probability is pretty low with the quantity of cards in the game! It was a lot of fun, and we definitely had as many laughs as we usually do. My favorite part was when my bro & sis needed a snack, so they brought in some chips and salsa. I went to our pantry and did the same! Hahaha. I couldn’t just watch them eat chips & salsa!

After the gaming fun, we went for a short walk. It was cold and breezy out, but it was sunny, so we needed to get out anyway. It started off way colder than we wanted, but by the time we returned, we had worked up enough heat to feel a bit better.

The day actually went pretty quickly. We ended up watching some shows about Log Cabins before bed. We haven’t done much TV watching, so it was nice to cuddle and relax together. How did everyone else do today?

Lisa WernerLeave a comment

Alex Shapiro’s Resource offerings!

I am so excited to share that composer Alex Shapiro has offered up help for online band directors. Here’s what she had to say on the Middle School Band Director facebook page:

Hello to my band director friends!

Everyone’s been scrambling to find ways to engage with their ensemble members online, and many of us have been actively sharing resources, ideas, and… more than a few gripes about how technology wasn’t quite ready yet for what we really need: realtime online ensemble playing! It’ll be here soon. But not yet.

One of the workarounds a lot of us have discussed is getting students to practice and record their own part of a piece, against a click running in their earbud to keep them in time. Each student can then upload their recording, and the many parts could then be assembled into a less-than-perfect, but possibly still-worth-doing complete pass through a piece.

Among the challenges here is keeping everyone in tune, so a backing track can be a useful guide. This is where your friendly, wacky, electroacoustic band music composer e-friend Alex might be able to help: if any of you would like to use one of my pieces for this purpose, it would be my pleasure to send you, at no charge, the link to the score, parts and audio accompaniment track. Just message me, or leave a note here, or email me through my website, and I’ll get you the perusal link to all my pieces, from grade 2-5. Select whatever you want, email me with your choice, and I’ll email you back with the private link with which you can distribute the materials to your students (giving you a great opportunity to also teach them the basics about copyright! Ha!). Here’s to helping each other get through the rest of this semester, whether in person, in pixels, or in soundbites!

If you are not on facebook, you could undoubtedly email her at:

Lisa WernerLeave a comment

Top 5 Things to Keep in Mind for Online Teaching

I know so many of us as teachers were not prepared to move our entire face-to-face curriculum to an online one immediately. I was so shocked by how quickly things escalated that it took me 3 full days to remember that I had even completed the necessary requirements for our state to be a licensed online teacher (in my defense, I did this work 5 years ago through a local college and haven’t been lucky enough to use my skills at all yet!). I went back and reviewed my class notes, texts, and projects and have come up with these 5 things that will help as teachers work to modify their curriculum for online learning.

  1. Keep your original learning objectives in place. When you were teaching your students face-to-face, you had a pretty good idea of what you wanted your students to be able to do for the rest of this week, month, quarter, school year, etc. Don’t let all of the overwhelming quantity of free online resources distract you from what it was you planned to do. Make your goals and objectives FIRST and then search for the appropriate resources to assist your students with this. Not only will this give your newly-formed online curriculum direction, but it will make more sense for your overwhelmed students who are trying to make sense of everything as well.

2. Remember that the majority of your students are new to this as well, despite being “Digital Natives”. Yes, parents are always bragging about how their son or daughter knows more about their phone than the parent does. Yes, your students may have all the info on how to fix your classroom projector because they’ve seen other teachers in the building do something similar. However, the students only know the technology they have been shown or used themselves. They will still need clear instructions on how to submit a video using the platform you have chosen. They will need help navigating the time necessary for each task they are assigned. They will encounter technical difficulties along the way. Keep in mind we are all learning together. A great example of this all is my own classroom. We officially rolled out our online teaching yesterday. I am a band teacher, and I assigned one of my band classes 2 assignments – a music theory assignment involving the student going to musictheory.net and completing a note name quiz. They then had to take a screenshot of the page when they had accumulated 30 correct answers. For the second assignment, students had to make a video of themselves playing their instrument along with an audio clip I created of one of our concert band songs. I thought I was taking it easy on them as far as first assignments go. Boy, was I wrong! The school chrome books had apparently locked the students out of musictheory.net, and their cameras were also turned off by our watch dog company. How frustrating for all of us!

3. Some of our students have limited technology resources. It’s great if your school is 1:1 with technology all the way through. However, for the younger students who may not be, this is going to be more difficult than you may expect. Some families may only have one or two computers or devices that will enable work for school on them. If the parents are also trying to work from home, they will be using those devices to continue making a living. Additionally, siblings may have to share devices as well. In my online teaching classes, we were discouraged from making students check in with us all at a specific time. This can be very stressful for families who don’t have a way for that to happen due to the parents’ work schedules, or siblings’ online coursework. I’m not saying don’t try to check in with your students in person at all; I’m just saying that perhaps offering it as optional may be more manageable.

4. Most students’ favorite part of school is the social and emotional components. This was one of the most eye-opening moments for me in my online teaching coursework. It is important not to lose sight of the comaraderie that physically being in school entails. I use Google Classroom for my online teaching. In my stream, I posted a picture of my cat sitting above my head on the couch while I worked and said “Post a picture of your pet ‘helping’ you do your homework.” I also told my students it was “Crazy Hat Day,” and asked them to wear a crazy hat in their video recordings of the assignment for the day. Anything to give them a little release and enjoyment within their assignments will help! Also, think about their emotional health – I started off a little lighter on my assignments at first, and will build as we all get more comfortable. I made a video for my students reminding them that their online assignments might look intimidating at first. They should remember that they are normally in school for 8 hours a day. Their assignments are normally spread out over that time period. Now, they are logging in and seeing a full days’ worth of work waiting for them. Students who normally have a hard time focusing for an hour in your class are going to have to self-motivate to do a full days’ worth of work on their own timeline. I’m definitely not advising you to take a step back and demand less from your students – I’m just reminding you that they may need to ease into it at first.

5. Remember, you are doing your best in a tough situation! You did not ask for this. Your students did not ask for this. No one anticipated this at the beginning of this school year. You are doing the best that you can, and parents & students will see that. It is very much like when you took your first teaching job. You had grand ideas of how things would work in your classroom. As you got teaching, you realized you had to adapt your ideas/beliefs/methods, as you learned what your students needed and what your school expected. The same is happening now. Unfortunately, when you had your first job, you probably had more than a few days’ notice on what you would be doing. That may not have been the case for you in your jump to online teaching. Keep in mind what your big picture goals are for your students, take a deep breath, and don’t be afraid to experiment. You can adjust as you go. You do not have to be perfect. This is one of those moments where you get points for the effort you are putting in. Hang in there, everyone! With any luck, we will get to see our students in person again at some point! If not, at least we still can see them online.

Lisa WernerLeave a comment

Coronavirus Break, First Wednesday

We didn’t do a whole lot new today, but we did start a new stress relief idea. We set up a puzzle we had gotten for Christmas on our coffee table in our living room. When we need a break from things, or from each other, we head towards the puzzle table.

For a little while, we thought we might actually finish the 400-piece puzzle. Luckily, it looks like it will last one day longer.

Tomorrow, my girls start their online learning through school. I’m curious how this will all work with my husband and I doing our online teaching….4 of us all trying to do this all at the same time.

Lisa Werner1 Comment

Original Cheesehead Factory of Foamation

My family loves to travel. It doesn’t matter whether it’s traveling to the next town over, to a new state, or out of the country. We like to experience new things. One of the interesting things we did recently was tour the Original Cheesehead Factory. Squid’s Girl Scout troop needed an outing, so I recommended this.

It is located pretty close to the Allen-Bradley clock tower in Milwaukee, and street parking was easy to find out front. Thanks to my husband’s love of Apple maps, we were the last ones to arrive, as Apple apparently thought we were interested in going to St. Francis instead. Is there some sort of rule that the organizer of these type of events ends up being the last to arrive?

Anyway, once we got in, we had the choice of taking the tour and creating our own cheesy creation, or just touring. We were in it for the long haul, so cheesy creation was a must-do (in my opinion).

We got to wear beautiful cheddar-colored aprons, and sat down to hear the history of the Cheesehead. Since I am not THAT old, it didn’t actually occur to me that the Cheesehead was actually invented in my lifetime. It’s one of those things I’ve seen for as long as I can remember…which apparently is the late ’90s, as that’s when they first started making the Cheesehead.

We got to see the very first Cheesehead, made out of the foam from a couch. We were sure to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ appropriately.

The first Cheesehead – in the building’s vault

After the history of the Cheesehead, and the building itself, we moved on to the station with all of the variations of foam headpieces that have come since the original.

I really want a pizza hat…

After naming off more food hats than you could possibly imagine (our guide actually challenged these 4th graders to name off something that they thought the company had NOT made as a hat yet…), we went on to the foam making stations. First, we got to fill our cups with the proper mixture of foam-making materials. The amount is different for each of the things we made, as some cheese items need to be flexible (the hats), and others need to be a bit more stiff (my cheesy star Christmas tree topper).

Not a beverage station – the materials that are mixed to create my foam

After that, it was into the molds for our foam to expand into. The mold is then clamped down and we wait. It certainly wasn’t a long process, but it was very fun to watch as everyone’s projects finished.

That’s my star!

After it came out of the molds, we all went to a room with a table and trimmed off the extra foam. After that, we thanked our tour guide, checked out the gift shop, and ended by taking some ‘cheesy’ photos in the front. They had samples of some of their goofy hats, ties, and other cheesy things out to model with.

All in all, it was a very fun time. It was crazy to see how small the actual area where the foam products are made, as you see so many of the Cheesehead hats around! Definitely check this place out if you are lucky for something uniquely Wisconsin. You can find more information here.

Lisa WernerLeave a comment

Coronavirus Break, The First Tuesday

Today I was lucky enough to be home, as I don’t usually work on Tuesdays. This meant I was running the household school today! *insert evil laugh*

We started out with a nice, leisurely cleaning project. Only there wasn’t anything leisurely about it. I was on a mission. You know how children seem to grow faster than the new clothes can come in? Well, I decided it was time to go through their entire clothes collection. We actually started with the dreaded mound of clothes on top of the dresser this weekend. Today, I convinced them to tackle two drawers’ worth. We dumped the drawers out in the middle of the living room (eek!), and then worked our way back to putting it all away. It actually wasn’t as terrible as any of us were expecting! Woohoo!

Next up, it was time for ‘writing class.’ Wormy (my kindergartner) traced letters, and Squid (my 4th grader) had a project in Book Creator she had not yet finished for school. No time like the present.

We then moved on to math, which doesn’t feature overly exciting plans from me – both girls just did flashcards (addition for Wormy and multiplication 15s for Squid).

Continuing onward, we worked again on our Junior Ranger packet for the Everglades. Today we learned all about conservation of the ocean. Wormy was having trouble understanding how coral needs clear water in order to continue to live. I demonstrated using super complicated and fancy materials – I plopped an outlet safety plug into a clear bowl of water, used my phone’s flashlight as the sun, and blocked it with my hand. I then asked her if the coral could get my sunlight, and then she understood. It’s days like this that I feel pretty good about my ability to think on my feet. We will see if I am as confident by day 21.

Not gonna lie – it looks nothing like coral!

Next up – time for a little geography. I tested the girls’ knowledge on their state locations by making them color on a blank map the states that we have visited together. We’ve got a little work to do on this, but maybe by next week, they’ll have a better idea of which half of the country they can find Kansas….

Time for some family reading – I read them some chapters from the Humphrey book we started. That hamster is so stinkin’ fun….if you are looking for a book that appeals to a 4-year age gap, check out any of the Humphrey books by Betty G. Birney.

OK, by now they were looking like we needed to get some energy out. Since the rest of the week looks a little…well, less than ideal weather-wise, we needed to get out. Squid led us in her dance class stretches, and Wormy proceeded to show us she probably doesn’t actually have bones in her body (ah, to be flexible again….or even just to move without creaking…). We then took a nice 2 mile walk out in the sun. It felt good. We were goofy of course – butt kicks to the next driveway….jumping jacks in the middle of the road (no cars were out – I was the lookout while Daddy led the workout)…race to the next mailbox. You get the idea.

We got back inside and decided it was time to cook. The girls have a kid subscription box to America’s Test Kitchen that they got for Christmas, and they hadn’t made Goldfish crackers yet. You can easily google a recipe – it was super easy. We only needed butter, cheese, flour, cornstarch, water, and salt. You could easily just cut them in squares (we got a fancy fish cutout with our subscription box).

The fish go marching three by…um…yeah, you get the idea

By that time, I decided school was out for the day, as this all took us from about 9 am until 4 pm. I had a few other things on our list, but we got a little wild and daring cleaning for an hour, so I’ll save them for tomorrow. The word on the street is that I still need to go in to my school to work, but we will see. Seems like things are changing by the minute these days. How’s everyone holding up?

Lisa WernerLeave a comment

Coronavirus Break, The First Monday

So, it’s the first official day of no school, and I have to work. Add to that the fact my husband has online meetings all day for his school, and I found that I had to ‘lesson plan’ for my children today. For those of you looking for ideas, here’s what they are (hopefully) doing:

I have the girls playing school today. Added bonus, they may not even notice they are learning. I left them a list of tasks, and I’m letting them pick which order they do them in. Here are their tasks:

Math: my oldest must go through her math flashcards 3 times, and my kindergartener has a math game to do. (If you don’t already have math flashcards, you can have your kid make their own!) My kindergartener’s math game is a bunch of number papers, with operation signs. She got them from her teacher, but they would be super easy to make.

Just some cardstock…

Social studies: my girls love doing the National Parks Junior Ranger programs, so I asked them to do at least 2 pages in the booklet I printed off for the park we are (hopefully) going to in June. You can find a list of ones you can mail in at this lady’s blog page: http://craftknife.blogspot.com/2018/06/heres-every-national-park-junior-ranger.html

Gym: Both of my girls are dancers, and have been wanting to do the splits for a long time, so I asked my oldest to lead stretches for both of them.

Music/Writing: I asked my oldest to practice piano, and my youngest to practice tracing letters (I have a laminated book of upper and lower case letters for her to trace – I’ll post it in the craft section at a later date).

Chores: My youngest has a massive clothes pile to tackle, so she’ll work on folding those. I asked my youngest to pick one area of her bedroom to clean. I of course gave her some lovely suggestions. I asked them to clean for 30 minutes

Reading: My oldest was asked to read one book to her younger sister, and my youngest gets to read one Superkids book to her older sister.

Lunch: if they get hungry before their Dad gets out of his meetings, I left a jar of peanut butter and some tortillas on the counter. They get to make tortilla roll ups and can play restaurant (“You can order anything you like, as long as it’s a peanut butter roll up!”)

Art: both girls have gotten some craft sets from Christmas that we had been saving for use during spring break, so I’ve got those all set for them.

Recess: Play with your favorite toys!

So, there you have it. I have no idea how it’s going at home, but my husband would have texted by now if the house wasn’t still standing. Stay tuned to find out!

Lisa WernerLeave a comment

New Orleans Gumbo Pizza

Here’s the first thing you’ll need to know about my first few recipes: I am usually too busy eating what I cook to remember to take a picture of it. Don’t be surprised if you don’t see amazing pictures of every step of my cooking journey. I’m the type of person who gets irritated by that anyway – I just scroll down to where the actual recipe is in most blogs.

My first recipe I am posting for you is a pizza recipe. There is a pizza restaurant in my hometown that has an unbelievable collection of specialty pizzas. It has really opened my eyes on what can be done with a pizza!

I am always craving New Orleans flavors. As a Midwesterner, we don’t get those flavors very often. Using the crazy collection of specialty pizzas the local restaurant had as inspiration, my husband and I decided we would do a little experimenting and create a pizza based on Gumbo. It turned out really well, and I can’t wait to make it again.

Here’s the recipe:

New Orleans gumbo pizza

1 1/2 T. Butter4 t. Flour

1/4 c. Chicken broth

1 T. Ketchup

1/4 t. Garlic powder

1/4 t. Thyme leaves

1/4 t. Creole seasoning

Cayenne, to taste 

2 andouille sausages, sliced

1 Cajun chicken breast, diced (or cheat a little and use the Southwest cooked chicken from Aldi)

1/4 onion

1/4 green pepper

Mozzarella and Colby Jack shredded cheeses

1 frozen bread dough

Create a roux in a small saucepan by melting the butter, then adding the flour. Add the ketchup, broth, and spices, mixing until blended and smooth. Grease pizza pan and roll out bread dough. Top with gumbo sauce, then cheeses, and finally the sausage, chicken, onion, and green peppers. Cook at 350 degrees for 25 minutes and enjoy!

Lisa WernerLeave a comment