Sunday Smorgasbord on Vacation

Hi, sweet friends!

Currently, I'm enjoying my second cup of coffee with my brand new puppy sitting under my chair, my nephew watching Jake and the Neverland Pirates in the next room and a beautiful Midwestern backyard right out the windows.  (But it's literally 100% humidity outside, so we're definitely doing this blogging inside.  That's a little too much stickiness for me.)  Without any more babbling, I'm here to share my Sunday randoms with you, courtesy of one of my favorite bloggers, Michelle over at Fabulous in First.  You can check out her blog here.  Seriously.  Check it out, if you haven't before.  She's all types of fantastic.

{ONE}

Mr. Spouse and I finally added to our family.  We got this sweet, new puppy earlier this week.  On Tuesday, to be exact.  =)  She's such a little love bug, and she's been so well behaved!  We picked her up from a rescue and then we drove from DC all the way to Indiana on Wednesday.  We've been hanging out at our sibling-in-law's domicile since then, and they have a bigger dog, who has in turn made Sadie believe that she is also bigger than she is.  

These are post-play pictures, after they've tuckered each other out for the moment.  =)  Then they take like a 30 minute break and get going all over again.

{TWO}

I'm working on reading this great book right now called Smarter Charts.  It's a really great book about how to give your instructional charts more bang for their buck.  The authors focus on literacy strategies, but as you read it's easy to see how the same ideas could be using for math or science charts.  I think that the biggest take away for me has been that if you want students to use the charts you have after you've made them you have to teach the charts to kids.  It sounds so simple, and maybe it makes me sound like an idiot for not knowing this before, but that has totally been my biggest light bulb moment while reading this book.

  If you're looking for an easy read before you head back to school this book is definitely it.  It's incredibly easy to read and the layout makes it very useful.  I've read teacher books on occasion that are really dense and you have to put a lot of effort into reading them.  That's totally not this book.  It's really user friendly and there are multiple times during each section that I feel like I could use the idea/strategy/method right away.  I mean, it's summer, so I don't need to use right away, but it's on the docket for back to school charts.  =)

{THREE}

I FINALLY posted something new in my TpT store!  It's been so neglected.  :(  I always have great intentions, and then it's just hard to follow through on them all the time.  But, I just posted a new Fundations sort for unit 6.  If you're not familiar with Fundations, unit 6 is the unit when students are introduced to plurals, and the suffix s.  It aligns really well if you use Fundations, but it is also useful to introduce students to building regular plural words.  As it says in the product description, it DOES NOT include words that are made plural with -es or -ies.    You can check it out here.  So far, I have activities for the first 5 units of Fundations, and I'll continue to add to them.  I'm hoping to have units 7 and 8 up in about a week and a half.

I've been sitting at the island entirely too long now.  I need to get some family time in.  And maybe a third cup of coffee?  Have a great Sunday, friends!

xoxo

Kicking Off the Cobwebs

In real life, I've already started this flippin' flappin' blog post about 100 times, but for a wide variety of reasons it hasn't been finished.  Until today.  This blog post is my Everest!  ;)

First, I'm so excited because I'm really close to putting up a new product in my incredibly neglected TpT store.  I just need to go over it again to make sure that all the formatting is right and there aren't any mistakes, but it's hard to look at it so many times in a row.

Secondly, I was at Target last week to pick up a new planner and I found the CUTEST stickers in the Dollar Spot.  I only got one of each because sometimes the hubs doesn't understand how school literally hemorrhages money from our bank account every summer, but they're so cute I would have bought like 5 of each if I wasn't in a hurry and trying to track the budget.  But seriously.  Check your dollar spot for these.

This pack of stickers says things like "I heart math", "Science rules!", "You+Math=Fun" and other super cute stuff like this.  Totally motivational for kinderbabes, or at least I think that if I was 5 or 6 I'd be really motivated by these ones.

These ones are nice because they share information with parents, like "completed with teacher's help", "please correct and return", or "completed together in class".

And this I just found in the back to school aisle, but it was so funny that I had to take a picture.  I laughed all by myself in the back to school aisle at Target.

I thought this notebook was so hilarious!  It doesn't help that another friend of mine says yolo all the time.  Like "should I call this guy back?"  YOLO!  "Should I eat nachos and wings?"  YOLO!  Oh, man.  I'm laughing even here right now writing this blog post.  This picture just gets me every time.

I promise next time I blog it will be more content, less fluff.  =)  I'm reading Smarter Charts right now and if you haven't read that then I would definitely recommend it before school starts.  It's a really quick read.

Okay, y'all.  Try to enjoy the rest of July.  I know that most of you are probably in various degrees of back to school prep mode.  I'm heading to a new school though, so really, I have no idea what back to school will be like.  It's driving me a little crazy, but I'm trying to be as zen as possible about the entire situation.  Have a great weekend, friends!
xoxo

Currently, it's July.

Y'all.  I am giving myself one big giant pat on the back right now because even though I still haven't gone to the gym or the grocery, I AM linking up with Farley for her July Currently on the actual first of the month!  Whoop, whoop!  We have to celebrate the small victories, right?!

I really can't believe that it's already July.  To be fair, I think that part of the problem is that we were in school until June 23rd, so even it's though it's already July my summer break just started.  I also think that's why I'm having these motivation problems today and decided to blog instead of going to the gym or grocery.  So without anymore rambling, here's my July Currently.

Guys, I have to make a real and honest confession:  when I was writing my Currently I was listening to the Today show, but now it's over.  Now I'm listening to/watching old re-runs of Real Housewives of New Jersey.  I'm so embarrassed to admit it, but not so embarrassed that I'm turning it off.

Y'all.  Are you into the World Cup, too?!  I'm SO JAZZED!  The hubs went into work early this morning, so that he could work a full day and still leave in time to watch the game.  We're heading downtown to watch the game at a bar with a bunch of friends who are also planning to leave work a little early.  I actually was hearing somewhere recently that DC has the highest World Cup viewership, which seems surprising when I think of larger cities, but when I look around at how many people are out during the day and how I know our friends who aren't out are watching at work I think "eh, maybe that's right".

I've had such a hard time getting motivated to work out this week.  I just keep crossing other things off my to-do list and then I realize I'm out of time and I didn't work out.  I guess it's good that I'm getting other things done, but it's sucky that I'm not working out.

I realize in the scheme of life that puppy adoption is not the most important thing, but the hubs and I went to an adoption event at a pet store and these puppies were SO CUTE.  I honestly wanted to just pick one up and take it out with me, but I'm pretty confident that's not how the actual adoption process works.  So we filled out an application and now we're just waiting for them to call us back.  Which I'm sure is taking a little longer because literally EVERYONE leaves DC for the 4th of July.  But if this is how anxious I get about adopting a puppy I don't think I would ever make it adopting an actual baby.

I absolutely LOVE the 4th of July; it's such a fun holiday and DC really makes it a big deal.  One thing that's super cool about DC is the Capitol fireworks, but what's even cooler is that if you can get yourself to a roof deck of some type you can see the Capitol fireworks and then afterwards you can see all sorts of other displays in Maryland and VA at country clubs and stuff like.  It's like almost an hour of panoramic fireworks.  Last year, we watched on our own roof and then went to the pool afterwards.  It was really amazing, but we've moved since then and we don't have access to a roof deck anymore, so I think we're heading over to some friends' house, with our nephew in tow.  We're hosting our nephew for 4th of July; we told him for Christmas we would fly him out to DC for some time over the summer and we thought he might like 4th of July.  I don't even know how many groceries to buy for a growing teenager, so that's going to be interesting.

I hope you all have a great 4th!!
xoxo