My Morning Warm Up

As I alluded to yesterday, I'm not the greatest morning person. In fact, I hate mornings. My brain needs until about 10 am to wake up- which is a major buzz kill when you are a teacher and have to be "on" as soon as the kids walk in. To help my brain wake up, I've had a very similar routine for the past four years upon arrival to my classroom that I thought I'd share.

The first thing I do when I walk in the door is to do a quick temperature check. My room is used after school by the homework club, and has a fire door that leads to the outside. Because of this, my room is often freezing or boiling, depending upon the whims of the teachers using the room or how many people have snuck in and out of my door to avoid being caught by our principal.

Next, I fill my gigantic water bottle. As a result of my Game On! diet days, I have become extremely concerned with making sure I get 100 ounces of water over the course of the day. My "suitcase of water" as my friends on staff have dubbed it, is a giant hot pink water bottle with a straw from Target that holds 50 ounces, which I try to drink over the course of a school day.

After that, I go for some brain candy and skim the headlines of People.com I'm a sucker for anything royal wedding related, or related to the gals from Teen Mom. I also have a strange love for the Kardashians and Bethenny from Real Housewives of something. Don't know why. Can't explain it. But somehow, this morning dose of brain candy helps me to get my ideas flowing and my mind in order.

Following my brain candy, I go to swagbucks.com. This site is totally rad. For doing simple searches, they reward you randomly with "swagbucks" totally FREE dollars that you can spend on different things. Although my heart belongs to google for searching, I try to do a few searches a day on this site to earn my bucks. Typically I earn one buck a day for voting in the daily poll, one buck a day for checking the surveys, and a few for searching. I tend to save mine for $5 Amazon gift cards or for free magazine subscriptions. Score!



All of this takes about ten minutes. The rest of my morning (typically about an hour before the students arrive) is spent in a frenzy of coping morning routine or assignment papers:

and trying to find my happy place. If it's a Friday, we have a staff provided breakfast in the lounge, where I go try to get a few minutes of grown up time in before the kiddos come. If I have extra time, I'll browse a blog or two on my Google reader before the kiddos come in. (Let me know if you want to know what I'm reading on the interwebs.) It's funny, but having the routine I do lets my body go on autopilot for a few extra minutes while my mind wakes up. Often, I find myself subconsciously brainstorming activities and tweaking the plans I've made to get things done.

Am I weird? What websites do you visit first thing? What routines at work could you not function without?