'What's Next?' photo (c) 2008, Crystal - license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

I’ve still got plenty to do over the last four weeks of school, including working with students to finalize their Theory of Knowledge Oral Presentations (I’ll be posting videos of a few here); preparing some of what I hope to be engaging lessons for all my classes (which I’ll also share here); and setting-up a virtual summer school classroom for students since, once again, our District doesn’t have the money for summer school (back in the day when it did, we had well over one thousand students attending — over half of our student body. Not because they had failed any classes, but because they wanted to come).

And I also have a busy summer planned. In additional spending time with family and playing basketball, I will be:

* Updating my United States History class blog for English Language Learners, since it looks like I’ll be teaching it next year.

* Creating a World History class blog for English Language Learners, since it also looks like I’ll be teaching that class in the fall.

* Finishing and submitting a manuscript for the third volume in my “trilogy” on student motivation, tentatively titled Building a Community of Self-Motivated Learners: Strategies for Teaching Resilience, Respect, and Responsibility (you can see the first two books here).  Look for it to be published by Routledge in the Spring of 2015.

* Begin working with my co-author, Katie Hull Sypnieski, on a sequel to our The ESL/ELL Teacher’s Survival Guide: Ready-to-Use Strategies, Tools, and Activities for Teaching English Language Learners of All Levels book. The manuscript for that one, however, won’t be due until late summer of 2015, so we’ll just do a little preliminary work on it.

* Though I won’t be publishing any new question/answers at my Education Week Teacher column after mid-June, over the summer I will be posting a number of interviews with authors that I think educators will find useful/interesting. I’ll also be preparing for next year’s new posts.

* I won’t be recording any new BAM! Radio shows over the summer, but there will be over twenty there (by the time I stop in mid-June) for you to listen to at your convenience. I’ll start new ones up again in the fall.

* I’ll be posting regularly here and at my Engaging Parents In School blog, though the number each day may decrease slightly.

I’ll be keeping busy with a few other projects, too, along with making time for some fun.

However, all that is still a month away. In addition to the end-of-year projects I listed at the beginning of this post, there’s also the biggest one of all — taking over one-hundred students on our annual nineteen-hour field trip to San Francisco. May God help us all on that one 🙂