Changing my job, a little.

For the past year I have been teaching second grade in Ogden. The district chose my school to start a Dual Immersion program. I am moving to first grade to teach the English portion of the program. I will share two classes with a teacher who will teach only in Spanish. She will teach math, science, and Spanish, and I will teach math vocabulary and language arts for the first half of the day, and then switch and teach the same thing to the other class. It's an awesome program! The kids will become fluent in both languages before they leave elementary school, and since they are so young they won't have an accent in either language. This year, only first grade will have Dual Immersion classes because that is when they have to start in order to get enough Spanish vocabulary to be successful in later grades.

The last few months...

Matt's Graduation

PS - He usually ties his tie like a normal person - this was just a special occasion. :)

Matt graduated from high school in May. Congrats Matt! Matt, you really have a way of making me feel old! I didn't know I was old enough to have my little brother graduate. (I also remember when I was the tallest Largent ;) )

BYU Football

Trudy, Garrett, and I had season tickets to BYU football. It was a blast. This is Garrett on the field after the awesome Utah game. We tried to upgrade out tickets for next year, but just found out today that we had no luck so we'll be sitting in the same place again for this season. Maybe next year we'll have better luck...

Las Vegas Bowl

The wind was blowing so hard they had a hard time keeping the flag from blowing away. The teams' bands and mascot had to run over to help hold on to it.

Jennie, Trudy, and I went to the Las Vegas Bowl. BYU creamed Oregon State. It was a blast. It was also FREEZING and BLOWING! This was the fifth year in a row we've been to the bowl game, and by far the coldest. The parking lot we had the privilege of parking in was not paved so the dust was blowing everywhere. We got to the game plenty early to do the pre-game festivities, but wound up sitting in the car for over half an hour because we didn't want to go outside.

President Monson

In April our family got to meet President Monson and President Uchtdorf. President Monson received an honorary degree from Weber State, and my mom was his official host for the morning of commencement. Jennie had to be there for work, and the boys and I just "walked in" hoping no one would notice. It worked!

Busy, Busy, Busy

I'm getting the hang of teaching and loving it! It keeps me really busy. There is so much to do all the time! I love it, though. I will have to get around to posting the "after" picture of my classroom one day. I posted the "before" picture from before it was ready for the kids, now it's functioning and houses a bunch of little kids everyday.

This weekend Mom, Jennie, and I are going to St. George for the Utah High School Football Quarterfinals. Morgan is playing Hurricane. That means girls weekend in St. George! Matt broke his hand in the last game of the season , so he can't play quarterback. It's weird for him because he's been the quarterback for three years. He still gets to play. He has been starting on defense all year, and he can still play there; they are also using him as a running back and receiver. The doctor said he can play any position but quarterback. I have to hand it to the kid; he broke his throwing hand and pulled all the ligaments in his thumb in the first quarter of the last game of the season, and played the whole rest of the game without complaint. His hand was so swollen at the end of the game he couldn't close it enough to hold a football, but he made passes and took snaps the whole game. (I take credit for teaching him how to be tough. ;))

A few weeks ago when Morgan played Ben Lomond, Garrett got in the varsity game long enough to take a hand-off from Matt. It was a lot of fun to see a Largent-to-Largent. That was the first time they had ever been in a game together.

It's beehttp://2.bp.blogspot.com/_aCHbHToe3Ik/SouGvDpMuJI/AAAAAAAAABo/dj3DG8zTK4I/s320/DSCF0181.JPGn a while...

So, a while ago a friend pointed out that it's been a while since my last post. Here's what I did this summer (sorry, this is going to be a long post.)

After graduation I watched a little 18 month old boy three days a week. It was fun :) He's a cute little guy. For a week in July, I was a counselor for a session of EFY in Ogden. That was an awesome experience. It was very time consuming, but definitely worth it!

Then my family and I went to Washington, D.C. for a week. We got to go because Intermountain Donor Services selected our family to represent Utah at the National Donor Family Conference held annually. It was great honor Dad's memory in such a positive way. Abby and Cathy (my aunt and cousin from Nebraska) and Trudy went with my mom, Jennie, Matt, Garrett, and me.

We arrived on Friday, and while we were checking into our hotel - the Omni Shorham - the fire alarm went off, so we had to evacuate to the sidewalk. That was kind of funny, all of us out there with our suitcases. It turned out to be a false alarm, but it was a great way to start the trip!

Here's the Largent crew with the fire trucks outside the hotel.

This is us by our quilt piece. Part of the Donor Family Recognition is a quilt pinning ceremony. Each family is invited to make a bring a quilt square representing their loved one who was an organ/tissue donor, and then they get to say a few words about the person and pin the square to be added to the National Donor Quilt that travels the United States and Europe. Our square is from the t-shirts we had made for the 5-K we run every year for Dad's birthday. It says "Wish Big Live Large" with Dad's name and birthday and death date on it. It is in between mine and my mom's heads in the picture if you can see it.

Here we are in front of the capital. (Matt enjoyed not being normal in the pictures - he's warming up here because it's just the first day still.) The capital is such a beautiful building! I absolutely loved it!

Jennie and me at the World War II Memorial with the Lincoln Memorial in the background.

We saw a lot of cool things in Washington DC, walked ourselves to death, but it was an awesome trip! I definitely recommend it to anyone! It was so cool to be in our nation's capital and see incredible things, places, and memorials for w

hat makes our country great.

(By the way - there would be a lot more pictures of DC but I am annoyed at how long it takes to put them in, so maybe more later.)

A couple of weeks after we returned from Washington, I was offered a job to teach second grade at T.O. Smith Elementary in Ogden. For those of you who don't know where it is, it's on 32nd St. and Grammercy (just southwest of Ogden High School.) The principal and the other teachers I will be working with seem great, and second was my first choice for grades so I am very excited. (http://www.toes.ogdensd.org/ here's the school's website) Lucky for me the teacher whose spot I took left me a lot of great materials and other things I'll need for my class. The bad new is that the room was left in a disaster with more stuff than I knew what to do with. I have spent the last week and a half trying to clean it out and get it ready for Monday Aug. 24 when the kids come back. This is the before picture of my room. The after will be taken in a few days.

The second weekend of August was the Intermountain Donor Services 5K was the second weekend in August. We run every year to celebrate Dad's birthday. (August 15) This year the course was really tough - I got my worst time ever and I was bustin my butt. However, there is only so much you can do when the whole thing is one steep hill after another. Oh well, it's for fun. :)

Last, but not least, football season is upon us. Trudy, Garrett, and I have season tickets for BYU football. I had to get tickets because I just can't see myself not going to all the games, and Garrett has wanted season tickets for a long time, but never had a way to get down there for all the games. Now that I'm back home, he can go with me, and Trudy loves BYU football too, so the three of us will make the trek to Provo six times this football season. I can't wait! I got a Cougar Club membership with graduation, and we are going to a football kickoff event this coming Saturday. I am stoked!

The other football team I am excited about is good old Morgan High. Matt is a senior this year, and it will be his third year as the varsity quarterback. He is excited, and knowing how much work he has put in since the day last season ended, he will have a great season! Garrett will also be seeing time on varsity this year. He is a sophomore. He plays running back and outside linebacker. However, he broke his hand in practice last week and it's in a big cast, so he'll only play defense for a couple weeks.

Check out these articles about the team from the Deseret News. http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705323311/Morgan-Trojans-football-preview.html

(Matt is #15 - you'll see him on the front page of the article)

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705321554/High-school-football-Tough-as-ever-in-Region-11.html

Graduation!

I graduated from BYU this week! Honestly, sometimes it felt like the day would never come, but now that it did, it feels like the time flew by. My aunt, Cathy, and cousin, Abby, came out from Nebraska to attend with us; that was fun to hang out with them for a few days and have them be here. Commencement was on Thursday April 23. President Uchtdorf was given an honorary doctorate degree, and he and Elder Nelson were the speakers. They sat outside the Marriott Center along with President Samuelson and the rest of the administration to wave to all of us graduates as we walked by during the procession. That was fun!

The McKay School of Education's Convocation was one of the first ones of the day. It started at 8 AM, I had to be there at 7, so we left Morgan at 5:20. Needless to say, we all had a very early morning. Both Thursday and Friday were beautiful days with perfect weather.

Doing all the graduation festivities really made being done seem official. It is weird to think I'm done with school (except unless I get a master's in a couple years.) I'm going to really miss Provo, and being part of the BYU student body, but I can't stay in school forever. It's time for the next part of my life. (Oh, and yes, you can graduate from BYU single!)

Job Search

I finished student teaching last Friday, then came home for Easter and stayed to start looking for jobs. I've visited a few schools in the area; hopefully it will turn into job opportunities :)