Zach and Sarah go to the Zoo

Zach and I love the zoo. We've been to many zoos together, each time collecting a pressed penny with some adorable animal on it. We have quite the collection.

Two weekends ago, when march weather was being nice to us, we went on an adventure! The adventures started off with a walk through Prospect Park and led us to the Prospect Park Zoo! It was larger than the Central Park Zoo, but smaller than the Bronx Zoo- and it was cheap! We were there for about 2-3 hours and saw all that it had to offer.

Our first stop was at the Barn- we saw turtles, llamas (they may have been alpachas), sheep, goats, ponies and a cow. We bought some animal food from a vending machine and were able to feed them too!

Next on our list were the sea-lions. We timed our trip well and were able to watch them perform! They are quite the little swimmers!

Did you know that sea lions have ears and seals do not?!

who woulda thought...

Who woulda thought that low-calorie food could be so delicious! As I've mentioned we've started to cook and eat much healthier! We have 3 'diet' cookbooks that have great recopies all under 500 calories. So far it's going great! I have found that the recipes are for food we love, and aren't difficult to make at all! The issue with staying below the calorie mark isn't finding yummy low calorie items, it's serving size.

interesting facts about servings:

1 serving of fish or chicken is about the size of a deck of cards.

1 serving of pasta should fit in the palm of your hand

1 serving of fruit or veggies is a baseball

1 serving of cheese is a domino

1 serving of bread is ... haha who are we kidding?! eating bread!?


Think about it, the last time you were having a healthy meal of broiled chicken and steamed veggies, did you eat 1/3 of a chicken breast? Did you only have less than a handfull of veggies?? Actual servings sizes are TINY.

Although we having been making very yummy, low calorie food, most of the times I eat about 1.25 servings. Which isn't too bad considering we are making meals that have about 300 calories in one serving.



To the right is a Chicken Caprese Salad. We used 1 serving of broiled chicken, 1/2 large tomato, 2.5 slices of low-fat, part skim, fresh mozzarella, chopped basil on top of romaine lettuce with a calorie free (YUP ZERO CALORIES!) balsamic vinaigrette. Yumm Yumm Yumm- total: about 270 calories.

Something to think about...

I found this little shpeel while wandering around the internet... Definately puts the argument into perspective:

Are you sick of high paid teachers?

Teachers’ hefty salaries are driving up taxes, and they only work 9 or 10 months a year! It’s time we put things in perspective and pay them for what they do – baby sit!

We can get that for less than minimum wage. That’s right. Let’s give them $3.00 an hour and only the hours they worked; not any of that silly planning time, or any time they spend before or after school.

That would be $19.50 a day (7:45to 3:00 PM with 45 min. off for lunch and plan — that equals 6 1/2 hours). Each parent should pay $19.50 a day for these teachers to baby-sit their children.

Now how many do they teach in day…maybe 30? So that’s $19.50 x 30 = $585.00 a day. However, remember they only work 180 days a year!!! I am not going to pay them for any vacations.
LET’S SEE…. That’s $585 X 180= $105,300 per year. (Hold on! My calculator needs new batteries).

What about those special education teachers and the ones with Master’s degrees? Well, we could pay them minimum wage ($7.75), and just to be fair, round it off to $8.00 an hour. That would be $8 X 6 1/2 hours X 30 children X 180 days = $280,800 per year.

Wait a minute — there’s something wrong here!

There sure is! The average teacher’s salary (nation wide) is $50,000. $50,000/180 days = $277.77/per day/30 students=$9.25/6.5 hours = $1.42 per hour per student –a very inexpensive baby-sitter and they even EDUCATE your kids!) Then they even have to pay taxes on that buck-fourty-two!

WHAT A DEAL….

Pi Day- every math nerd's favorite day of the year!

My first Pi Day as a math teacher has come and gone. And oh what a day it was! As my overly nerdy, math-dork, bubbly self, I became the 'pi day committee' at my school and organized quite the event!

For those of you who do not know Pi Day is always March 14th (3 -14) for the amazing mathematical number that is π = 3.1415926535... And the joke to the right plays on the fact that π is not a rational number and i is not a real number. In my opinion, it's the most classic math joke and I love it.

Many schools do a digits of Pi memorization contest. Considering π has infinitely many digits the opportunity for kids to compete to memorize the most is endless! I took our pi day celebration to the next level! Not only did we do a digits contest, but we also did a pi- joke or comic contest. And to top it all off I organized a fundraiser to raise money for St. Jude's Cancer Research Hospital's Math-a-thon. Students could buy tickets for $1 from their advisory, they wrote their names on the tickets and entered them into a pool. The two advisories that raised the most money won a pizza party and the students who bought tickets were entered into a drawing to win the opportunity to PIE A TEACHER IN THE FACE! :)




We had about 150 students (half of the student body) show up to the celebration, which was after school on March 14th. About 15 students participated in the memorization contest- the winner had over 100 digits memorized! Wowzers! And the winning joke is above... pretty funny huh?! The winner of the digit contest won a large pie, the top 3 along with the writer of the joke won a medium pie and anyone who memorized at least 15 digits won a little pie. We ended up having a lot of the mini pies left over (maybe because I made a million of them!) and we raffled them off at the end. Yummm... Pie....


Our students ended up raising over $320 and pie-ing all 13 teachers who participated in the face with whip cream pies! We even pied the principal! I made an iSchool smock and brought in a shower cap to protest ourselves, but it was to no avail, the whip cream got EVERYWHERE. The two pictures below are of me getting pied in the face by one of my students, Kevin...




















I had whip cream in my ears, in my hair and even after rinsing off at school, when I got home Zach kissed me on the check and told me i tasted sweet! Overall it was extremely fun and successful!!